The Rhevireon Chronicle: The Ascent of the West Read online

  ‘N now the e’en tides guided the forenoon,

  For she never knew what’d she gotten until it was gone;

  Thereat castigat’d Apathana.

  O for the betrothed! Foreordain’d to gallous death ridden.

  Scrambling rocks, haul’d by war pigs goadin’ heriots;

  Athwart ore of dales hollow, were their wheels hard riven,

  Erst ye roads diverged, mount’d they skyth’d chariots,

  Thereat culpable Apathana.

  Kent the mysteries’ ruins ‘n didst stroke ye rosy bells.

  Till forebears of thine aeon, maidens, suckled many a limb

  The horse they sacrificed, sepulchered cremains into wells;

  Bemused! Ledgemen ‘neath, on the arc iridal burin’d thy hymn

  Thereat miscreant Apathana.

  Or Messidor! The month of lore, were there deans in fanciest miens.

  On Nivose! Brotherly folks denizen’d in courts; so ancient ye roots

  Ne’er been touched twice a solstice, by ye all-seeing hand of men,

  Begirt eclipse, son of luna and sol! Inaugurat’d the solemn moot

  Thereat remember’d Apathana.

  Yonder grove inscrib’d trove, lichen’d caverns of arches.

  Maggots ‘n loam, grubb’d carrions foretellers of the fall’n pagan

  Onto mount haggard, sheer crags, stone-stepped marshes;

  Bestride! Initiated ones of yore, o’er thy garden pillars laden,

  LEXAUR 174:91

  ‘Well said.’ The man nodded avouchment.

  ‘Do you believe in our god,’ his response came unanticipated, ‘professor?’

  Their god, and their scripture, the Lex Aurvanthilis, which perpetuated the canonical texts of their faith, Aurvanthilism; once practiced among peasant platoons of the Long Scythes; in the past, a syncretic movement for salvation, the peasants proselytized one another into the dualist Aurvanthil faith, to the mechanical worship of the Arkhitekton; in their own words, the Arkhitekton, chief builder of the universe by and according to laws of science and the occult.

  At present, Aurvanthilism has matured to be, the established religion of the Occidental Regnum, a threat to the ecumenical denominations of the northern hemisphere, and more broadly, secular humanism.

  ‘This is a personal question,’ waffled his professor, under pressure from some thirty students in that lecture hall he grew bound to flesh it out expositing,‘that is to say, I’ve a personal choice to consider responding to it or not, I don’t grasp the idea behind posing such, neither refusing to answer it, hence, to be frank with you, let me put it this way; in doubt of what I teach I want to believe, I’m an agnostic, Mr. Ceiseraef. Indeed, Pascal’s wager had a point.’ Even though he really could tell the reason behind it, that question.

  He bent forward, his hand palm propping his chin; sneaked a glimpse out of the disjointed window, the sun fought to push through the clouds of a rough-hewn sort. Prognosticated he that probably it won’t show up yet, perhaps for a long while; and he slowly gave it up to inertia, loath to focus on the tedious lecture, pretending of being so every now and then, he laid doggo onto his desk in the last row, hardly acted beta with anyone, Dusk flaked out.

  The port, port of the Weltzentrumpoleis, was tinged with a tremendous mantle of heather mixture, that shaped up along the container terminals amidst the mess of maritime trade, there were flocks of seabirds.

  Whenever she casted her sight afar the archipelago’s strand, she’d the impression of it becoming frightener, wilder at the vanishing point. The girl gazed at the ocean liners and cargo ships transpiring from the abating gloom, the skidding wave against wave into the harbor they were ensconced.

  At the other side of the forum, a company of students surrounded two others, at the outset of a duel, something similar to the trading card games, back in the day; this sort of thing was notoriously addictive amongst the Verbindungois, the Greek letter student associations of the Zentrum, boys of the Phi Theta Sigma honor society, were them the creatrix, a game that’s pukka to their extremist identity. Prohibited across the Occidental Regnum, the Phi Theta Sigma for so long had preserved it away from the commercializing grinder of avaricious corporations of the Weltzentrumpoleis. They called it, the Templeztheon, what used interchangeably with and genericized patois spell shift from the Temple’s-Pantheon, its valuable most collectible card was, the Mondfinsternis, the lunar eclipse.

  Dusk was a gamer, though he kept his distance from associating with the Verbindungois. Against the nominative rule that for one to join whichever association unsolicited enquiries were out of consideration; only on occasion, one ought to be introduced by an acquaintance who’s already member of the association in question, Mr. Ceiseraef for whatever reason had received a dispensational invitation to join, to which kindly he never replied. They were men of letters, whilst he was, a fervent anti-intellectual, self-hate.

  The duel intensified, and soon the girl who leaned over the parapet of the forum at the top floor of that setbacked building, got quite interested; so she pulled a hard packet of her blazer, sleeves rolled up. She flipped up the top, sparked up a cig. At a random moment, a whiff from the ever steep shores fondled her cascading curly hair, when a beam flung out of the debilitating mass of haar, reacting to the smoke she exhaled, befalling her tumbles of tresses the sunlight gave them a tint of rust. Nipping at butt of the cigarette, spider bites pierced her lower lip.

  Dusk went smitten with what he’d just seen, she caught a glance of him from across, and briefly they locked eyes.

  10:15 a.m., the bell rang, to the end of recess.

  IV

  THE ROMANTIK NOIR

  March the 25.

  Morning’s languid sun or what’d remained of, rifted back into the evening sky bearing upon it to cherish a widening sullenness.

  18:01 p.m., photocell lampposts standing at shoulders of the street illuminated; and the gears of traffic congested in what appeared to be the inception of the second rush hour.

  For passengers considering Borough 5, please get to platform Line 6. Thank you. Informed the long-line public address.

  Dusk scanned the real-time indications on the passenger information display, the nine boroughs indexed.

  Borough 1: The Shanty-Precincts

  Juxtazone_ Borough 2: Plaza Delta.

  Borough 3: The Northerner.

  Borough 4: The Easterner.

  Borough 5: The Southern.

  Borough 6: The Western.

  Borough 7: The Ports.

  Borough 8: Cardinal

  Borough 9: The Grounds.

  The Arcades Train Station, subject to public transport intermittent twists; rapid transit was at its highest rates. How the nation’s proportion of rail transport ran rings around the automotive; the Greater Juneauton Weltzentrumpoleis area was a dense railway.

  Dusk made it through the din to a nearby vending kiosk, of all the glossies, serials or periodicals, his hand laid on the Zentrum Gonzo, of which he was an avid reader.

  The permanent way down the tunnel transmitted electrical judder, the train running on the purple line was emitting, operating under magnetic levitation it offed by. And the all glass screened from the track platform, had its automatic gates sliding open. No spare seats to be found; so he had but to justle against those straphangers, syncing with the machine’s gradual jolty walk, and following suit to the commuting customs, people held their comic books spread open; even though the Juneautonuans were an arduously laborious folk, they in spite of that, had been known to be great consumers of comics.

  At the fifth borough, the public large-screen TVs mounted on the outer frontals, buzzed and flashed out animated; live broadcasting biased news, movie trailers, et cetera.

  Just another massacre it was, which took place at six p.m. around the Heidentor Grounds venue; from an eyewitness’s statement, probably in her fifties, a female trucker, squashed a bevy of fans who were about to get tickets for the Occidental Venatio Games CXV. Finishi
ng three off, she went on a shooting spree, before being detained by a patrolling unit of the triple Os. However, the suspect insisted on her acquittal, thence she was taken to the gibbet.

  Dusk sniggered at this one in disdain, the preponderance of good over evil?! Thought to himself, threading his way through, he mulling over it, rueful myths.

  Having made it to Borough 5, the downtown Juxtazone, its impecunious ward, less lustrous, way shady; still a vital area to be prototyping the high-tech and low life. There, hapless youth existed, who’d left their home sweet home or had they gotten compelled to? Seeking autonomy, a new beginning or just eking out for a living; once tenants, always squatters; the whole of many condos passed over properties off the record to lodgers/swindlers; thwarting one gentrification plan after the other. They called it hub of the urban tribes, the subterranean lair of the negative stimulus; put sensu stricto, the mavericks over-complacent with the misery of their status quo; rakehells, punters, discharged gaolbirds, the hunter-gatherers, in the jargon of the time, those who hunted the plastic, the silicon, the information, the doxies; a climatic sect of the urban equilibrium; pawns in hands of oligarchs of the Zentrum; they who every once in a while caused in matters to spiral out of control, when the tooth for a tooth’d rule; seeking authenticity to the gospel of their own raison d’être, but doing it their way, the way they exploited the ecological system of this city, at any rate, they never acknowledged the lawless mien of their transgressions over the chthonic loyalties of the oligarchs, they saw in the mirage of their beingness, a chivalrous entity whose obligations and rights intersected at this unarbitrary constellation known to them as, life, of which they’d been set part.

  There were folks, the lordly type, who in diligent pace, went into a building of a back door at a front street. Dusk stopped by, he never had been to this place of restricted interest, though presently that was about to change; it was via some friend of a friend he had been insisted on to attend the outlandish event; that’s why, belike, out of half-curiosity and half-temptation he crashed in, or so, looked after he was let in, without being the least aware of the eye upon him; and right after he proceeded inside, he was offered one, a mask to conceal his identity; from within, unlike the humble condition of the back door at the front street, this place as the epitome of sophistication; had the floor along the hallway draped in Persian rugs, each ran into a door, with ringed knockers and exquisite knobs, but far enthralling was, that which hung from the ceiling, humanoid figurines in crawling posture, mouth and eyes wide open, where light was secreted hazily diffused over the corridor in sprinkles leading into the lounge, where adding to the outré scene was the preposterous behaviour of a number of the guests, who engaged in some form of osculation; while distinctly, they wore the masks and, capes.

  When he stepped into the inner hall, for some reason or the other, the tilework he walked on, with sixty-four squares, matched the set on a chessboard, and there he stood, amongst them, without the cape, of which he wasn’t presented, and he looked something different.

  Had those by whom he was invited a hand in it? he thought to himself.

  And they easily could smell the chariness in him; in the hall that had the guise of a ballroom or else, though it was not, really!

  ‘Kings, queens; rooks, bishops; knights and pawns!’ addressed talk, the master of ceremonies, in a black tie and a plague doctor’s, the beaked mask; standing to the raised dais facing the inaudible audience. ‘What I’ve got here for you on this most singular occasion, is this!’ And he uncovered the veiled, a painting. ‘Nescients,’ he said, ‘let me introduce you, Nebuchadnezzar, from the hubris of a Shahenshah to the ignominy of a semi-animal, this is Nebuchadnezzar, from the superiority of man to the inferiority of the half-beast, nothing lasts, hark to me. A specimen of high art by William Blake, a series of monotype prints whose date of creation said to span over a decade, concluded by late 1805 A.D, with four copies, three of which are known to exist today. The piece we’ve got here for you, dear guest of ravenous addiction unto the anomalous, is the fourth impression, that has been declared missing since 1887 A.D.. Behold at impiety and retribution.’ He paused, then he continued, ‘therefore, I am obliged by the precedent to fess up that necessity acknowledges no law, as here before you I own up to it, as a matter of course our possession of this item is proscribed, but for the sake of the insatiable appetite of yours, we put it forth, offered to bid on!’ And some of them chuckled at the candor of this testimonial.

  That is the naked truth about them all, it was a sub-rosa auction, a swatch of a hundred other ones held each night at pre-agreed on locations. Illicit auctions catered chiefly for and attended largely by aristocrats of the city-state.

  The items arrayed, swung from tawdry value up to six figures apiece; a maneuver black market, movers and shakers of post-national marionettes, quasi-criminal syndicates in corroboration with the authenticated principle of right and wrong, governing this extra-geographic contraband of exotic apparatuses of unknown sources; the uncharted recto of the global market coin, humongous stocks of capital invested incrementing exorbitant riches for those engaged in someway or other. The prohibition on circumvention was sidestepped, away from the agreed to norm of production and exchange, a hole-and-corner fiscal institution of its own, of unreported economy; the circulation of North America’s dominant anchor currency, the hard Zentrum dollar, was unabated; unswerving in allegiance to the monetary policy that had shaped its direct predecessor, the USD.

  ‘Forgery hogwash, fake dreck!’ he muttered, the man to his left.

  Dusk peered at him through the eyes of his horned mask of a krampus’s head, he could recognize the tattoo onto the back of his neck, a Vitruvian figure; he then simply nodded at him, without uttering a single word.

  ‘The auction starts at five thousand grands!’ invoked the auctioneer.

  Somewhere else, Hoyden stole a glance at the dial of her watch, 23:51.

  «The biological miracle, since reproductive cloning; strength, speed, stamina, and olfaction enhancer, the METAPHORMULA; for the first time ever at a sub-rosa auction, your parole: --------- --------- --------- ------.» Someone read the text, the pigpen parole; typed on a black and white leaflet; he enfolded it and kept it for himself, a person of gallant bearing, with a Da Vincian symbol on the back of his neck; that man.

  Some other time at some other place so nearby, Dusk skimmed through the same leaflet,‘olfaction!’ rejecting the notion, he carried on his way.

  A hundred and eighty degree around the city, there was a cabarlour, the Romantik Noir. The cabarlours, an amalgamation of the parlor and cabaret fad, were the hot spots of the Zentrum.

  ‘Look, we’ve got real company, at last.’ Travis was informed, aliased the transvestite by his coterie; a former ranger under the Occidental branch of the triple Os; he’d sham to suspected visitors, while in point of fact, a renegade of the ordo just before end of his term duty, he wasn’t alone; throngs of the Troopboer descendants who refused to get deported back to the older world did so, greased palms for an illegal entry into the Zentrum; the trend on the increase, people cutting across the Eyak Lake, people smuggled from the theocracy of O.R to the democracy of J.W. Likewise, showing a pinchbeck sense of nationality towards his new homeland, Travis secured himself a job as, transvestite bartender in the Noir.

  They were two women, the company he was talking about; due to their stark homogenous outfit, they appeared in the eyes of everybody around them, as a paradigm of the Aletheia ideal.

  After taking few turns at the billiards table, they sat to the counter that drew similarity to those found in bars from the roaring twenties, they’d stools reserved for them.

  ‘So Travis,’ Nesrin, her voice had a husky flavor to it! one of the girls, her arm around her companion, identified as, Hoyden, she cajoled the barman,‘after such long pedagogic day, we deserve something good to drink, or what?!’

  ‘Whatever you want my damsels, I have, just ask.’ Retorted Travis as he filled
a row of steins.

  ‘Huh, we didn’t know you’re the pimp also, Travis, what’s next?’ said Hoyden, and so he then passed them flaming beverages; ‘yeah, I’m better than this, living on pourboires, guess I’ll do me a favor and stay behind the counter in a sulk, that’s me; but, what about you glamour models??’ the transvestite grouched.

  They gave him the two fingers, to which he shot back, ‘that’s a nasty v, you just flicked on my phizog!’

  ‘Yeah and go shove that bottle up your sphincter ani.’

  ‘Bullocks.’ Exclaimed a barfly, slamming her hand onto the table; and so had their attention away from the burlesque performers, the cabarlour patrons, seemed whatever she was to say, mattered to them, a moment of quiescence ensued, except for a jukebox crooning in the background, ‘we here give no more bang for that buck, got it? So what’s the credo again?’ she added, and they chortled, everyone.

  V

  THE CRYPTID FROM THE DEVILS THUMB

  March the 26.

  00:52, Dusk scaled the fence, leading into some alleyway, the burghers used for nothing but fly-tipping from time to time; deep across which, steam vapor vented out of sewer grates, and amidst the sewers in his vision three figures emerged, three of them were familiar to him though he never met them nor seen them before; it was not some kind of telepathic extrasensory perception, he just knew of them, he’d heard of them, he’d read about them in some book or the other; the Priests, in dusty sable cassocks; the Priests, the execrated, the alienated, the punished, the bigots excommunicated from cult of the zeitgeist, the Organon, the instated religious institution of Aurvanthilism. They hummed verses from the book.

  ‘Hey brat, c’mere.’ He was accosted by one of the three who covered ground, choking his tracks, Dusk glared at them,‘haven’t I seen you somewhere, already? Father the sinner!’

  ‘Sire, I’ve heard that one before! How apothegmatic are the words that flow from the heart, away from the mind,’returned he,‘how clever of you to discern that is what, we’d once believed in, the cult that from scratch we contributed to its rising, has turned us into; outsiders, sanguinolents! But let me assure you that we’ve lost not the meaning behind silence’s golden, time’s money, for we still not only talk scant, but also quit waiting alms to seek our palms!’