The Beauty and the Beast, Chapter 2, Part 1

Written 2006

Revised May 11, 2021

Revised June 09, 2021

 
 

THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, CHAPTER 2, Part 1

A story of Necromantra

By Aladdin

Edited by Christopher Leeson

I was sold slave to King Q’zon. His stronghold was called Krad-Rog and his people were called the Darkur. These beings were engaged in an interminable war against another dominant race, one called the Aerwa. The Darkur were violent and brutish to the extreme, while their foes were less repulsive both in nature and appearance. Of course, the latter’s shape was decidedly more pleasing to the human eye – they looked rather elfin, in fact -- but there seemed to be a rapacious violence, or the threat of violence, behind everything that the Darkur engaged in. Both tribes were able to evoke magical powers, but the Darkur had lately been getting the worse of the conflict, both in sorcerous and physical warfare.   

Apparently, Q’zon must have purchased me to use as a super weapon. They hoped to tap me for mystical and even military insights and thereby turn the battle their way. My problem was that I hated the Darkur whom I served worse than the Aerwa I opposed. My attitude wasn’t personal; just to know the Darkur was enough to make any sane person hate them.

Acting the role of a compliant slave, I did as told. I nonetheless avoided volunteering anything that might help them with their scheming.  This was passive resistance performed in a society where any resistance at all might get a slave killed. But I did my best not to be too obvious about my attitude. They consequently sized me up as dim-witted, which was fine with me.

In truth, however, there was plenty that I knew about waging war. I had specialized in military matters, both overt and covert, for over a very long time. I had learned the use of hundreds of different weapons between the last days of Rome and the start of the Twenty-First Century. If I wanted to, I could have slain thousands of the Aerwan foe, not merely the hundreds that I actually did kill in compliance with Q’zon’s orders. Fortunately, his tribe was a bigotted one, assuming that human intelligence was very low, and so the king made fewer demands than he might have done otherwise. I did my best to follow explicit commands while trying to do only the minimum.

Physically, the Darkurans resembled big-framed humans with exaggerated muscles. They had brutal faces, pointed ears, and came in divers colors. The latter was clearly not indicative of different subspecies or races. A single family could display as many different colors as a bowl of Easter eggs. As far as I could see, the Darkurans considered pigmentation unimportant. Something far more significant about their race was the fact that they had shape-shifting skills.  It allowed them to morph into more combat-effective forms, most of which looked like the denizens of feverish nightmares. 

This power had its limitations, though; as far as I knew, they could not use it to impersonate other beings, not even other Darkurans. I think the skill must have been magical in origin, for it allowed them to more than double their size and, for all I could tell, their mass. Their best fighters were able to create weapons out of their own body – strangling tentacles, organic spears, or jets of acid.  Their own bodies were consequently their favorite weapons, thought they used hand-held energy weapons, also -- most often energy-shooting small arms that I would call “blasters.” They hardly employed war machines or mechanical artillery.

Being sold to the Darkur was like being thrown into into a cage of hungry lions, something which I really have experienced, by the way. Their sports were bloody battle games; the whole society seemed to get off on killing and destroying.  I don’t know how they managed to hold together as a society. The Nazis would have come off as courtly gentlemen by comparison. One of the most disconcerting quirks of their nature was that they liked to feast on the flesh of their enemies, craving especially the meat of the Aerwa race.  

Be that as it may, I would have preferred to be eaten by a Darkur rather than be taken to bed by one – or by a hundred of them, which was would be more in their nature. Fortunately, the Darkur found having sex with other races as odious as humans do about mating with farm animals. Oh, there are perverts in both races, of course, but I never had to square off with any of these. They all knew how lethal I was. I never met a Darkur who had a good nature, but – within limits -- they could be made to respect someone who was proficient at killing them.

So this mad exile had become my way of life and here I had to stay, if I intended to keep Arielle safe from Tradesmen reprisals.

They had let me speak to her after restoring her to life. I had paused at her door, ashamed to show my face to her, considering our last meeting. But I wanted to make sure that the Tradesmen were not pulling a fast one on me. They said that they had recalled her from the dead, and I wanted to be sure that this version of Arielle was the real person and not an impostor.  

She had passed muster on that score; this Arielle could still remembered dying at the hands of the Beast within me. She seemed to be kindly disposed to me, something I was sorry for.  In our last meeting, I told her the brutal truth by about the demon that clung to me, and about the bargain that I’d made to save her.  

I deliberately avoided mentioning that I would miss her, but urged her to go home and forget about me. I also kept it to myself that casting her off felt like casting away a vital organ from my own body. I also tried to conceal any trace of kindness or sympathy I felt toward her; I didn’t want kindness and sympathy in return. And any kindness she gave to me would surely come back to hurt her later, just like it had done following our original meeting.

“Marinna, you shouldn’t have agreed to do such a thing for my sake!” she had exclaimed. “I would not have agreed. You have your own life and shouldn’t be throwing it away for me.”

“You must not forget that it was I who murdered you. I owe you.”

“But wasn’t it the beast inside you that was acting by its own will?”

“Regardless, the devil might come back. I don’t want you anywhere near by if it does.”

She shook her head. “My father is dead. My living relatives that I are strangers far away, except for one cousin. In such days of crisis, I don’t think the aristocracy will allow me to rule in my own right. If I return home, I’ll be treated as a political pawn, expected to marry the strongest warlord available. I’d be better off staying with you. Maybe I can give you the strength you need to keep the monster at bay.”

“It’s just not possible. The beast is determined to kill everyone I love the most.”

She perked up. “So you’re admitting you love me! Let’s work with that. I’m not afraid to believe in you one more time.”

“No, I won’t allow it. It’s safer if you hate and avoid me. You already know so much about what I did wrong, but you still don’t know the half of it. I could tell you things that would make you despise me.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t force it. It will hurt the both of us,” I told her.

“No, tell me. It may not be so terrible as you think. I will try to forgive you.”

“Stop forgiving. Never forgive a wrong! Never look for the best in a person. It’s sometimes not there. If you trust evil, you give evil the advantage it needs to harm you.”

“There is bad in all of us,” she said, “but look at all you’re doing to save me. With your mighty sorceries, you must be able to get away from the Tradesmen. But you’re giving in to them because you have a good heart.”

I shook my head in pity – pity for myself, mostly. Somewhere along the way I had lost the privilege to hear words like that.  “You can’t come with me. I have nowhere to go, except into the darkness.”

“That may change in time,” she said.

“You have to grow up. It’s time to stop loving and trusting.”

She grimaced. “If I did, I would lose any wish I have to stay alive.”

“You will change,” I told her. The brutalities of life will eventually teach you to put your own survival above everything else. The sooner you change, the better your prospects for a long life.”

“Why is it so important to live for very long if it means becoming everything that I most despise?”

“Living amounts to one long series of betrayals. I will tell you this much. I knew all along who killed your father, Lord Tavon.  It was not the horned beast, it was not Lord Pumpkin, and it was not the Tradesmen.”

“You knew?” she asked with astonishment.  “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I had good reasons not to. Selfish reasons,” I said. “There is nothing in me that is not selfish.”

She was now looking at me with incredulity.  Maybe it crossed her mind that I was the last person to see her father alive. Arielle was not a stupid child.   

“Don’t say any more,” she told me.

“Whatever you’re thinking right now,” I said, “it’s probably right.”

I’d never seen her face be so pale. Well, it was for her own good. To save her life I had to slay her illusions. A future queen needs to be hard and cruel. Ruling means  giving up all regard for lives or decency. Knowledge brings pain, but what fails to kill us makes us stronger.

I left her apartment then, anticipating the day when she would hear about my death and it would put a smile on her lips. What parent would not welcome anything that made his child happy?

#

Leaving Arielle’s world put me into my descent into the world of the Darkur.

I had clung to life for some 1570 years. Now I had to ask myself, why? I think I had lost my original love for life shortly after meeting Archimage. It wasn’t my love for life that made me cling to it; it was because I hated death, I despised and I feared it. Who can honestly love life without respecting it? Hundreds of men had been sacrificed to keep me above the ground. That was what I had become. The wizard Archimage had made a whole new man of me.

And for that I will forever curse his memory.

I think most of us knights had lived as if our unnatural existence was something that could go on forever. It ended abruptly. Archimage himself died, and also ten of his twelve knights. Even Boneyard, his enemy, enjoyed his triumph only for a year beyond that, before fate took him out, too. The two wizards had warred for some 1600 years. Had all that carnage made the world a better place?

Most men are indifferent to dying because they believe that death means oblivion. If only that were true. My spirit has visited the Soul Walk hundreds of times, and that place was all the proof I needed to know about the immortality of the soul.  It is a terrible thing to find out that life doesn’t end with death. If the soul is real, who can deny that God is real? If He is the Honest Judge of the Scriptures, it leaves me in the dock as an accessory to hundreds of murders. What possible defense can I offer? A spider clinging to a man’s finger over a crackling fire had better prospects than I did.

I was damned even before the demon took hold of me.

I think I know when and how that happened. Boneyard had captured me.  I had been languishing in Boneyard’s prison for some days, and then I suddenly found myself awake on the Soul Walk. Archimage rescued me, as he always had, by placing my soul into yet another strong, fit human body.

But I was not the same man who Archimage had known before. I made up a story of escaping from Boneyard’s prison by suicide, beating my brain against the stone wall of my prison cell. But that was a lie. In truth., I had accepted a deal from Boneyard, a deal I’d made after I was already possessed. For the first time in my life I had become a traitor. And I was a traitor all the way, with no inner struggle at all. I cared for no one and for nothing. I didn’t even care about Boneyard, except that I was bound to do a job for him in exchange for a reward. A year later, when I finally heard that the dark wizard was himself dead, my heart sang.

I believe that when Boneyard had been unable to corrupt me in any straightforward way, he had bound some monstrous allied spirit to my own. This possessing demon obviously had the ability to follow me from body to body as I was killed and reincarnated time and time again. The thing was, as the Tradesmen’s wizards had said, a “soul-rider.”

The Tradesmen’s wizards had informed me that the Beast was still there, barely holding on to me, but not gone. They told me that they could not entirely dislodge it. That battle was for me and no one else could fight it for me. I would have to choose the ground and fight the fight myself. I ultimately failed, I would become the Necromantra that had I had been before.

I remember her thinking thoughts in my mind and they disgusted me. I didn’t know whether my death without resurrection could separate me from that tormenting spirit, but as a last resort I was willing to give that a try, too.

For the present, though, I still needed to fight just as hard as ever to live. This time I would not fighting for my own life, but for the life of another.

TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 2, PART 2