The Rhevireon Chronicle: The Ascent of the West Read online

  THE RHEVIREON

  CHRONICLE

  VOLUME: I

  THE ASCENT OF THE WEST

  By

  MAXWELL F.J. KAESER

  Edited by

  Andreas Larsen

  Lyliams. Ltd.

  7101 Lanehalls St

  Chicago, Illinois 31607-9472.

  Copyright © 2014 Maxwell F.J. Kaeser

  First published as an ebook by Amazon.com, Inc. in 2014

  ASIN: B00O75RNDG

  Maxwell F.J. Kaeser has asserted his right under the Copyright Act of 1976, to be identified as the author of this work.

  In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination, or they are used entirely fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  LL. Ltd. edition published 2015

  Printed and bound in the United States by LL. Press.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-692-40978-7

  ISBN-10: 0692409787

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015936811

  www.maxwellkaeser.com

  For God, the supreme

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  Part One

  i. ACHTUNG! JORMUNGAND

  ii. THE CAB 744

  iii. ALETHEIA

  iv. THE ROMANTIK NOIR

  v. THE CRYPTID FROM THE DEVILS THUMB

  vi. LATE NIGHT AT ARENITHE’S STORE

  vii. AT THE MOGUL’S QUARTERS

  viii. WALTZ IN THE WILDS

  ix. THE ARCHMATRON PAYS A VISIT

  x. DAGGER TO DAGGER MENSUR

  xi. THE MAIDENS’ SOJOURN IN THE ABBEY

  xii. THE EBB OF THE VIRAGOS

  Part Two

  xiii. THE SUB-ROSA AUCTION

  xiv. SELF-PORTRAIT OF A DOPPELGANGER

  xv. EXCLUSIVE

  xvi. THE SENTINELS

  xvii. THE DIET OF NINE

  xviii. FAREWELL

  xix. THE GAUCHOS OF AHTENAERBE

  PREFACE

  ENGLISH, in this backronym, I sought to concentrate, the whole concept behind, chief aim, and spirit of this book, in this particular term jibing with the lingual crux of the hybrid work; E.N.G.L.I.S.H. i.e, an Enquiring Notion into the Growing Literary Involvement with Science and the Humanities.

  The Ascent of the West, as a manifestation of literary excellence above all, and yes, science and social progress; is and remains so, no matter how in your eyes its subliminal themes almost purport otherwise.

  It’s been four years, four years of tough work, advancing with burning ardour, drained on research, the distilling of plot after plot, towards the sole objective that somehow gave a kind of sense to my life, that is crafting, perfecting, and so concluding this book, out of a half thesis. And they were especially hard times at first, in light of the circumstances surrounding my initial devotion to the work.

  An epigraph

  Nur jedem das Seine

  Till aurora ceases to—.

  PROLOGUE

  As the years blend into centenaries, and the outer reaches of the mythos into a half-verity, there lies a fact, not spawning off some historical inaccuracy; that it all began with the merchant bankers of medieval age Lombardia, Italy; for they are the ones acclaimed as progenitors of our modern form of the trade, the trade to catalyse a neoteric Western civilization of sorts; the craft that steadily grew in stature, through time and space, only to become monopolized, hundreds of years later, and particularly in Central Europe, by few emerging banking dynasties; unrivalled by the decaying mortmain of the Royal Households, they would proceed to contribute, copiously to the insemination of the Old World as they saw fit; and from there, the seed of their neonate, encapsulated in the transatlantic European man has further propagated overseas, into America. So unto this day, across the globe, their presence still is tangible, albeit, it had greatly diminished.

  It was only a matter of time, for the cosmopolitan tribes, to make their cyclic return.

  With the multipolarization of the international scene; the trias politica in post-informational countries, entered the annals of perennial overlaps, the day the industrial-banking families had arisen out of the cynical reciprocation of degeneracy and renascence, to reclaim what theirs, the power long thought to be lost, on par with the state; the proto-apotheosis of society’s anathema.

  In the Americas; while the American Mountain West was by and large ruralized to nourish the nation; the remnant states, whose carrying capacity was said to no longer be able to support their own people, had campaigned for voluntary programs to curb the exponential growth of the population, in public; ushered in with their noblest embodiment, abstinence, and steadily augmenting in scale and scope to subsume induced abortion, and euthanasia; on the quite however, full rein was given to the front organization, be it the outpatient clinics, gaols, or pharmaceutical corporations, sterilization of the multitude was underway in widespread arrays; drastic measures to no avail, when the inexorable was impreventable, dearth of provisions, epidemics, disorder, deterioration, internal displacement, the human overpopulation had spread its miasma.

  Four American dynasties, arguably overarched by proprietors of the oldest existing monte di pietà patrimony, the Beith Brenhams; then the Rochesterons, the Newarkaus, and the House of Belhavenard; they, through the work of generations; that, of the oldest public policy think tanks in the country, caballed to invoke the Westsiedlung, the Westsiedlung Precedent, they sought the future of conterminous US paved with expansionist ambitions westward, in quest for the far-flung habitats of the Occident. They hence, effectively harnessed the nation to their yoke.

  Failed to veto the bill passed by a gradually subversive congress; the White House was especially overridden by the unlimited dominion of the agrarian states; which later on, would stringently march out as the nonpareil Long Skythes during events of the Divide Et Impera; so they ruled by the natural law, target territory predestined, ultimate end, the disintegration of the least densely populous, Alaska.

  The peaceful territory on the horns of dilemma, declared its secession from the union, which the latter strongly repudiated, demanding its capitulation on basis of a presented ultimatum.

  On September 20, the newly unilaterally proclaimed Republic of Alaska, designated its plenipotentiary Department of the Homeland with a mission.

  The 25th, two groups of the cunning most Alaskan diplomats left the Bethel International Airport.

  The 28th, 1:-- a.m., the Pittsburghois Resort, the Bavarian mounts; on the Q.T, the Republic of Alaska signed its bandwagoning in behalf of the House of Pittsburghois; machinating from exile, and whom only the Beith Brenhams had had adequate an affluence to influence, viz. to match in collateral manos a manos.

  The 28th, 2:-- a.m., the Harbinsons residency, Manchuria; Alaska signed its conditional bandwagoning in behalf of the House of Harbinson, under the counter. The precautious realpolitiks of bowing to the west without mooning the east.

  October 09, the Pittsburghois placed caveat on the inevitable permutation of the last frontier into something else.

  The 11th, upon acquiring the political and military prestige, orchestrated by the Harbinson’s paramilitary organization, unidentified rapid deployment force landed on the Alaskan soil.

  The 12th, the Pitts’ heads of family enquired, what the hell the Chinese were doing? Their private intelligence agency investigated, the foot-in-both-camps gimmick was compromised, and the separatists denied.

  The 13th, the House of Pitts., publicly threatened to re-evaluate its non-interventionism ethos, thus rescinding the covenant w
ith the newborn country altogether.

  The 14th, foreign internal defence unit, of the Pittsburghois’ own security company, grounded on the capital Juneau, under preemptive war tactics, casting their lot with the Alaskan militia, which they supplied with arms; on the dawn of the military campaign, Divide Et Impera, waged by the mainland expansionists. The House of Harbinson, admitted its involvement in the Alaskan crisis.

  Part One

  I

  ACHTUNG! JORMUNGAND

  March the 24.

  Lest it ceases to be. The whisper rumbled inside of him, what then had swept him over into the uncharted turf of a transcendent dream, wasn’t other than, day in and day out, at the heart of land six bloodlines intersect, three sects crossed swords, one cult rips apart the greater north, all we are in the gutter of a world, rotten, Sisyphean. Thoughts surged into his mind; ever fathomed how they sparked introspective of his own, the disequilibrate mergence of his cognitive dissonance into such rigorous traits, chiseled his face. It resembled nothing had seen in the past of his life, that crepuscular horizon buried in those skies of a human creation, intractable, anymore.

  As Hoyden turned cold and hungry for, she clung to his jacket, a grey parka, on her shoulders; reaching into her pocket she produced what remained from a Juneaumunchie, the local speciality, grilled anchovy and hot pepper seasoned corn, rolled in a tortilla wrapped up in wrinkled aluminum foil, she tucked into it.

  Sitting on the edge, they’d climbed the rooftop’s cell site, their vantage point over the Juxtazone; phone lattice constructions made hideouts for scores of moths. At the apex of the skyscraper, they’d subtle injection, euphoric doses. The Juxtazone region, divided by nine boroughs on the whole, linked together via a plexus of causeways stretching over the north, to the south and western premises, distinguishing most of the confluent Panhandle megalopolis; thusly encompassing the Shanty-Precincts, the undecidable figure core of the boroughs, an enclave, the old town, old Juneau. Then eastward, at a distance, the sprawl laid on slopes of the massif, adjoined processing plants with their soaring chimneys, analogous to belfries burning out tens of miles away, from where the Gastineau Channel flowed, after its discharge had waned significantly, due to isostatic rebound defect above all; the channel eventually run across the vicinities in a configuration of streams’ estuary, disjointed it by natural harbors, it fluxed down the urbanized archipelago.

  A retrofitted copy of the city’s polyomino of reinforced concrete tube buildings was, this apartment complex incorporating elements of the Megalith Industrial architectural acclimatization, for salting away the capex, featuring the unleashed tiger economy of Juneauton Weltzentrumpoleis, the Zentrum, from many cities was Juneauton center of the world, Venezia of the north. Indeed, the pro-liberal scientific and technological prowess stance, brainchild of the Assembly of the Theocrats, abbrev. ASTHE, proved effective.

  Today, circa 0115 A.P., Anno Pactum, according to the Occidental Regal Calendar; the theocratic Occidental Regnum, formerly, the short-lived Republic of Alaska, had been sundered betwixt the Americans, Pittsburghois, and the Harbinsons respectively; it became a separate entity, closing the curtains on one of the foremost costly feuds in modern history, the Beith-Pittsburghois’. After a strained period of relative peace, with the Republic dissolving into an international zone reaching unto the five corners of geographic Alaska; Juneau, the beating heart of the Alaska Panhandle, once the financial district of the Republic, with endorsement of the Concession Charter, it did no longer exist, nominally.

  The Charter, a constitutional amendment formulated by the Eight Elders, the honorary representatives from each of the six Alaskan regions, sustaining the last pockets of the natives’ population, and by whom the lease of territory was proposed for a plebiscite in which it had been further confirmed, by the Anglo-Saxon natives’ will to consolidate their presence in the Alaska Interior, and reciprocally for the Pittsburghois, Harbinsons, and the Americans to pull the Troopboers out of the region and thus south further into the Alexander Archipelago; making the international community to believe the agreement was a mutual one, or at least, in the best interest of the natives, while simply it was not; but why? Why would the world be convinced of otherwise, when a mass mobilization of the expeditionary forces did actually occur; the twist was, only a portion of these forces was disengaged, in the main, as military units providing security for the colonists in Juneau, the upper-class colonists, owners of the multi-industry companies. This is while the greater majority of the same expeditionary warfarers, chiefly counts for the press ganged civilians off the mainland US, crimped in the hundreds of thousands to be deployed on the Aleutian Islands, as a processing center into the heart of the last frontier, where under the guise of, naturalization through integration with the local populace, they maintained their occupancy of the territory, not for the sake of war, but to shake the continent off its miasm before the Malthusian catastrophe became a reality; ergo, the Occidental Regnum was founded.

  While Alaska abdicated its sovereign might over Juneau specifically, and more broadly the archipelago, on the flip side of the coin however, it had installed itself as a suzerain fright, with its newfound identity, the Regnum; putting into effect, their plans for what erst was known as, Southeast Alaska; since then, a city-state, Juneauton Weltzentrumpoleis, under the intangible domination of the realm, by name of the Leviathan social contract, was granted an autonomous status and a lingua franca, the Occidento-Juneauton dialect, characterized by its quaintness but harsh sounding, partly due to the Troopboer and their lingo input. The Troopboer, self-designation of the expeditionary forces, the ex-pioneers who had turned farmer-settlers, bringing about a lingual influx of Mandarin and High Franconian, that cropped up well on the fertile grounds of the morphing nation, culminating in a chain shift in the vowel length, and emphasis on stressed alveolar consonants. This dialect, the one forging bulk of lines of this book; a book that chronicles the lives of certain people, in a certain epoch, the people whose attitudes are ours, our concerns are theirs, the people who the anachronistic tie that binds us with, is their humanity; humanity, the dogma whose greatest power lies within principles of the phalanx bone; honor is bound to blood, freedom is bound to merit, order drives progress, equality the bastion of justice, fraternity is universal; five phalanges form the able hand not three; this is the dogma of the people whose consecration is to a life of purpose, the doctrine which underpins these passages, from a book that shall stand the judgment of the third millennium passed down from generation unto the next untouched; this is the manifesto to destroy shackles of the past, to live the present, and build for the future, with every new day the chains will be unfurled, every single day, not in a year, nor a century; no matter how immense the setback of yesterday was; for at the rise of the unconquered dawn looms a new hope, after which humankind as a one consolidated tendon must shrug burden of the wroth past off to pursue; in pursuit of the destiny, that’s as mine as yours.

  And consequently, the Zentrum had incurred not only precipitate urbanization, deforestation to industrialization waves, towards the creation of a melting pot heterogeneous society, a multiethnic, consociational, variegated boarding house; into the bargain was, a mass desensitization toward the objective, implicit; beneath the Zentrum’s cultural hegemony that clouted overseas countermining the global soft powers.

  And the unanswered remained, what had brought the Republic to its premature demise?

  When he’d met the urge to sup last drop of his spirit, Dusk flung the bottle against the wall, glass shattered. Hoyden, gotten too caught by the lilac emergence of that evening, turned to experiment the chemistry of nature.

  ‘Polaris, aka lodestar, makes the lowest magnitude at night,’she nudged him,‘no?’

  ‘No,’ he absently responded, ‘that’s rather planet Venus, Jupiter, or the star Sirius of the winter hexagon.’ Pointing to three spots, though in vain, as the chiaroscuro of photopollution prevailed.

  ‘Aightz, how about that every
man and every woman is a star? Stuff of a legend?’

  ‘Somehow, it is.’

  ‘I’d do anything, just cognize to where in the outer space do I pertain.’

  ‘It’s something to do with magic, and believe me,’ exclaimed he,‘you don’t want to get yourself involved with that magical stuff, it’s a one way ticket!’

  Time elapsed by, and piecemeal they’d the sensation of the typical force, creeping down the afar ridges that tenebrous mist umbraged their feet, the atmosphere grew uncannier, somber’er with scudding murky thunderheads emanating from yawning extensions, clouds akin to stupendous whalebone whales striving to swig the dwindled and crumbled nor’ lights, after they’d gotten lost, dimmed in their chasms. Else, the gusts groaned in gyres ominous manifesting, brewing of the squall.

  Somewhere else, thousands of miles to the east below sea level, on day 6 of a routine underway.

  ‘Precipitation to efficacy in action, that’s total leverage over your rivals.’ Sir Carl Hannigan articulated suggesting.

  ‘Pragmatic, just like that—’said Lauren, during a quickie respite on board the wildold femme fatal; she carried on her platonic dialog with him. ‘Break off the idle chatter and cut to the chase.’She insisted.

  ‘You’re my hypothesis.’

  ‘Since when!’

  ‘Ah, it’s Shteele, the incongruous incredulous, enlighten us, what you got?’

  ‘It’s timing, let’s face it,’ Shteele, extroverted psychology, he went chiming in;‘whoever’s got max mastery of this dimension, has access to success of mass potency, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Of course, time, time’s the jurist,’Sir Hannigan paused contemplating wisps of memory hard-wired in his childhood, he carried on,‘accordingly men are judged, either to the one thing worse than death, posthumous oblivion; or the sole thing surpassing the value of life itself, that immortal legacy ablaze as far as mankind lives on, survives on this earth and beyond, judged upon the criterion of what we’ve accomplished to last, apart from one’s malevolence or benevolence, for the Golden Rule is relative. Bear that in mind, the mind which bore the aura of the Indus man, of Zarathustra, of Hadrian, of Hypatia, of Arminius, of Mithras, of Ozymandias, Leif Erikson.’