The Rhevireon Chronicle: The Ascent of the West Read online

  ‘Only that, it’s my arena, know what I mean.’ With haste he replied pissed off,‘I employ, rent and fire people, whoever I want. You, you’re fired. I’ve the last word, yes I am.’

  ‘What, wait, no!’ Matt freaked out, at the very instant was pointed at, thought his career got the death penalty.

  ‘Failed, don’t trust everything editors say, huh huh!’ Yang shot back,‘here’s the thing, from tomorrow on, both of you carry out your assignments as investigative journalists. That’s what you appertain to.’

  ‘And the No.1 mission?’

  ‘I have given it much thought,’ he turned away as he was about to tell them, his vocal range depressed an octave while he talked further into it,‘the Fount of Youth observances are at the gates, the Maidens are to be chosen already, so once a nubile is proclaimed, stalk her, collect anything relevant to her past, occupation, lovers if any, friends, family, interests, health condition, political affiliations, criminal history; then turn the biography into a piece of yellow mellow drama, and bring it to me, voila.’

  ‘You’ve just—’ Matt was about to say something, as if caught him red handed, however reluctant to, he withheld the allegation.

  ‘Whar’ is it?’

  ‘Nothing, hypocrite!’ Matt sighed, with an oppressed expression about his mouth.

  ‘So basically,’the girl put her two cents in, again,‘you want us to blaze the trail before the Archmatron?’

  ‘Bingo bamo!’ exclaimed her boss.

  VIII

  WALTZ IN THE WILDS

  April the 06.

  Dusk got into her pick-up truck, Arenithe’s truck, tuned by years of maltreat due to heavy-handed use from her ex-owner, a banger racer and a mutual friend of Arenithe’s, the current holder of the pinks, financed through a life’s savings. And she’d generously let him have the clunker twice, thrice, exactly fourice a month; those were her days of rest, the Sabbath.

  19:01, his focus tailed behind the slinky movements of his imaginary opponent, discalced, pressurized his avoirdupois against the timber planks, paused for that propitious juncture of time, hardened his hold on the grip, the other hand bracing the locket, he inhaled, exhaled; it’s now, the Shinken out of its saya sheath was pulled, and the edge slit the air; Athanasius Eisbar, was done with his target.

  This is a man, who left the burghers in no doubt about his goal, his intention. Athanasius Eisbar, the nominative high priest of the Ordo, the Order Overseers Ordo, the Baron mastermind behind the Juneauton Weltzentrumpoleis’ branch of the order, the triple Os, domestic security service in the Regnum and the Zentrum, at once. This man, whose neck and jaw had burn scar contractures, who wore a walrus stache, and for the instance a bogu armor; solo training on the iaido techniques of sword wielding, was an experienced practitioner of the adopted martial art of Juneautonuan Defendu; a rigorist husband and father, an unabashed sceptic, compatible fatalist, and pietist martinet undaunted in his dedication to the reincarnation philosophy, convinced of and conceived himself to be the present personification of an Achaemenid Shahanshah, caught in brown studies of imperial grandeur with rational insurrectional aspirations, he was the numero uno enemy, of La Margrave; in secret, the Magistrate; and to a greater degree but lesser prospect, his tamers, the Patriarchs Jurists.

  Conduits of a smelting site in a topsy-torvydom of huge bales of colliding e-scrap, the presumptive mental image Plaza Del diagonal crossing must’d educed through the urban explorers’ imagination. Definitely not them, not Hoyden nor him, who’d a journey in the making, hardly got there after a long drive at breakneck speeds, the jalopy wanted so bad to keep up the drift across sheer volumes of the intense nightlife inundating the conjunction streets at Borough 2, a stretch of the Islands Boulevard, being the thoroughfare which ran from end to end of the coterminous borough-islands, it was kernel of the Zentrum’s intellectual and entertainment industry, museums, theaters, opera houses, and an extravagance of buildings geared with LED billboards.

  Hoyden snuggled herself in a washed-out overcoat, she switched from riding shotgun to the truck bed, before each checkpoint; while Dusk drove that evening towards the farthest part of the megalopolis, no train nor express would take them to. From causeway to causeway, tunnel to tunnel, and thereafter into a network of side roads; they now could receive radio broadcast of few Regal stations off the border towns; and eventually, the Pristine ranges which girdled the Eyak Lake in the scope of their sight, formed the Alexander Archipelago’s northern frontier of natural boundaries between the Weltzentrumpoleis and the Regnum, the previous ice fields which crested the ridges, had since the climate changes levelled off, evolved into a unique ecosystem of mild rainforest, with a relatively diverse fauna and lush flora.

  A quarter hour later, Dusk shifted to the dipped beam, as the truck diverted from the blacktop into a byway trail athwart the woods, and uphill ramps, obtruding upon the debarred; where man’s civilization had staled, tumbled down; they hauled up besides a bunker, the bunker in the oak wood, dating back to the days of war marking its pointless efforts, there were many of these around, overspread with fungi.

  ‘It’s all about mud, weeds and nausea!’ said Hoyden, as she leapt out the truck bed.

  ‘Hush!’ Dusk turned the vehicle off; and so kitted up with flashlights, garbed in ponchos, they carried on the hill climb afoot.

  ‘You go first.’ She said to him, as they plodded from boulder to boulder, they’d muddled themselves through the stilt roots of large reticulate trees, prowling the declivitous wasteland, they’d maps in heads, of its windings and routes.

  Heretofore, they went on for the search of the fireflies, the origin of blood, in search of soil, the old. As they mounted uphill, the woods continuously shrank into holts, and the streams into creeks of the slacking snow; then prior to them getting sight of anything.

  ‘Am I zonked already, you Great Omniscient!’ marveled she, as she tittered, slipped her arm under his, they set aside the torches to see, the holy land of the forefathers that stretched before their eyes, the Occidental Regnum, in stone and steel.

  The nearest village at bottom of the canyon and beyond the chain-wire fence, had fairground lights. The barbed tape, they’d to stay as afar as possible from, retreating back by the shrubland toward the swamps, where the fireflies larvae flourished, of a pine green tincture, budding amidst the limestone.

  22:47, the Baron, wiped the dirt off the coruscant blade, he placed the alloy before him, bowed down to it, stood up, then grasped it upright, and back slid it into its saya; concluding his training session. He turned off lights of the basement, then left, in ceremonial respect.

  Not so away from the bogs, they’d themselves consumed where’s hard to be found, one with soil, the ancient.

  Then, slowly the wilderness opened up to them, her waltz escalating, hence they closed their eyes in acquiescence; the unrestrained gratification of the arcane euphoria, from the wet rocks it emanated, there was a scent in the rocks, in the rotten stumps, there was something about them, and in the decomposing fetid stag, there was something magical about it, not death, but the rebirth, the oomph that ran through the maggot in veins into the fertile atom of dirt. And ceaselessly, the same inscrutable fleeting sounds of nature, reiterated over and over; when, out of the blue and black of the night, there were flickers animating through and through his and her vision, their breath went hyperventilating, tachypnea; her heart beat aberrant with no rhythm blustered her chest before his, tachycardia; and not until they’d commenced to perceive the spurious galvanizing verve of the scent in them, they’d coexisting butterflies in the stomach startling in them somatic anxiety ictuses, heightened sensation of the stimuli, synethesia; prognosticated of the imminent qualia, subjective experiences, rising to altered states of consciousness, blent in with the trance of the waltz in the wild, there was something about them, that felt like, smashing, crashing, clashing, sphinges making out, flushing, flashing, flapping spread-out flaring wings.

  And they meshed hands,
their tongues enmeshed under the acid rain of April; they made each other chaplets from the leaves and twigs, they roamed the woods tripping for the spirits of the mount, amoeba, and all is for the best in the best of all primeval worlds, a Leibnizian theodicy, problem of evil, placebo solved.

  Deeper into time, at the witching hour, they took shelter inside the truck, they used the diaphanous ponchos as a curtain to the windshield, it absorbed the shadow of lightening and the scream of a thunderclap, as the drizzling drops turned heavy rainfall clattering against the glass. Alienated, Dusk languished on his seat, the bite of lechery had disintegrated, as the fireflies sickness struck back, grasping on his detaching head. His utmost repulsive frames of mind were set free to have him back. The schizoid personality forming back in the ineffectual void, in the harrows of lucid dreams of all the ways his life should had gone but didn’t, had gone, gone, they all had gone, so what; sparking the gamma activity off, the neural circuits oscillated in momentary periods in unison, waves electrifying swept his brain from the thalamus structure to the brink of thanathos, turned them into what, shamefaced souls; Dusk and Hoyden locked inside the truck, that rested on the hairpin turn; he craved to drop off, but could get no sleep, on the verge of a dawn ethereal.

  IX

  THE ARCHMATRON PAYS A VISIT

  April the 18.

  As the day progressed ahead of yesterday, incandescent rays from the sun were thrown back off the curtain walls of the megalopolis, as the unusually blistering disk of that day shifted from cardinal east to cardinal west ushered by earth’s rotation. It was like an August evening of New Orleans, but it wasn’t August, and whistles of the grasshoppers at the sunset were heard for the first time in a long while, but nobody could tell of their source, children of the boroughs sought them out but never reached their origin.

  ‘House made smoothie, try it?’ she offered.

  ‘Sure not.’

  ‘How was your day? Tell me.’ Enquired Arenithe.

  ‘The day before? Not so bad! Otherwise, there isn’t much to be told.’

  ‘And you, boy, got any problems, lately?’ Inquired she, while she poured some into her cup,‘you’ve been in the doldrums for weeks in a row, since that midnight when you showed up in my store asking for, uhm, what was it? uhm, never mind.’ She slipped up the pot, spilt the beverage all over her damask table linen, and the linen was marred;‘cussed spring mornings.’ She groaned.

  ‘If you think so. Arenithe.’ He replied to her former query.

  ‘Yeah, even when stuck in deep waters,’ Arenithe returned,‘you never opened up to anyone, including yourself. It’s fine, when at times choices aren’t on tap, for one to fend what’s theirs off, what’s honor, to go right ahead for all they’re worth!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ wondered Hoyden, she quaffed that smoothie mug.

  ‘Common sense, treasure, common sense!’

  Life in its purest forms of ineluctable repetitiousness, Arenithe, Hoyden and Dusk were having their breakfast, when breaking news materialized on TV, preempting the 6 o’clock program, Good Morning Juneauton. The headline read:‘Redoubt Volcano: The catastrophe has come.’ The reporter popped up in the foreground.‘The frequently dormant Mount Redoubt, located to south of the Regnum, has entered a paroxysmal stage, as you can see out there, started with spewing that gigantic plume of steam and sooth today.’ Notified he while pointed out a caldera standing nearly 9200 ft high.

  ‘This is just why I detest the heck of these newsmen! Scaremongers by profession.’ Arenithe gave to yammer, before she’d take on to brash denial; ‘n’ I’m fed up with their hyperbole, mounts snort all the time. Nuff said.’

  ‘Pretty atypical though, all the red smoke it’s spewing should be taken as an alert, old woman.’ Hoyden exclaimed.

  ‘An initial phase of seismic activity,’ went on the reporter,‘with wee earthqaukes, was detected at one to three point five on the richter magnitude scale, back on the 13th of January. While just hours earlier, jack-tars within fifteen miles reported blasts of hot pumice chunks up to four inchs in diameter landing on their boats. Geologists are exhorting the local population to evacuate before the climatic phase of explosive eruption, coinciding pyroclastic surges, whose ramifications are predicted to encroach upon the Zentrum’s air space in less than a dozen months. Now back to you Brenda. Raymond Elsonn, for the Weltzentrumpoleis Cable Channels.’

  ‘Redoubt reminds me of another stratovolcano, from the 1800s.’ Dusk reckoned.

  But isn’t that, far from actually happening on land of the Arkhitekt? Madam Arenithe asked herself.

  ‘Whar‘is it!’ giving their professor a wide berth, there was this fellow who went kvetching about to his boon companion, insistently’d been prodding his back.

  ‘Chink cheated while we gambled on twenty,’ garbled the other student, a hundred pounds of grouchy obesity,‘stole me the prick, he gotta reward it back, doesn’t know me yet, gonna extract mince out of his bowels.’

  Hoyden, whose desk was besides theirs, had a fancy to hit them up both with that chair. While some didn’t give a flying pig, as they engaged behind the book cover in handheld console games, others had devices semi-converged on their knees, exercising protocols of mens rea down pat. It wasn’t long before end of her time slot, so she’d tolerate their nuisance hitherto, while she grappled with a fit of hiccoughs contracting her stomach, she couldn’t help but to burp it; the worst to begin with.

  ‘Whoever heard their names, please step forward.’ All of a sudden, and without exordium, Benn, an academic staff member, whom half of the institute hated while the other half didn’t know of, he entered the classroom, holding a list, he was addressing talk to the students, aerospace engineering curriculum. So he proceeded to call the names out, starting with their nicknames.

  ‘Erwins, Anna Erwins.

  ‘Lumann, Judie Lumann.

  ‘And Vergismeinicht, Hoyden Vergismeinicht.’ At the very instant her last name was mentioned, Hoyden turned into stone, with terror.

  ‘Follow me.’ Benn said, while leaving the classroom, and so obediently they did as they were told, down the hallways Benn escorted them, and they walked till she lost count to Benn’s steps, just another fast running short ass, this guy evidently was. And finally, the lecture room. Three of them stood aside as Benn carefully opened the door, and the clamor got even louder athwart the already occupied place, female students, only allowed in.

  ‘Take your seats. Our guest should be here in a moment.’

  08:36 a.m., noises of heavy footsteps approached down the passageway, challenged the presence of mind in the newly admitted students; all of whom didn’t anticipated it the least, or mayhap it was the contrary, the case. It was a woman who came in, flanked by two Ordo guards, and not any woman this time; she was long-shanked, way than the average norm in the Zentrum, attired in a mourning dress, a muslin veil swaddled her face, while a scarf of fine sarcenet covered her head, her traits were hardly recognizable, adding to her conspicuousness were a pair of high heeled court shoes.

  ‘Good morning damsels.’ She said, but no one dared to reply, in the eyes of whom she could see dubiety, the boding in others, but opportunism in a handful. But for Hoyden, she had the sensation of being familiar with the woman’s high-pitched voice and irritatingly frolic gestures, or that she had met her somewhere she could not recall, it wasn’t a deja vu, she was someone like, the woman from the taxicab. ‘You’re right, it’s quite unnecessary I introduce myself, rather confirm it to you; I’m the Archmatron for this season’s observances, recently elected by the Fount of Youth annual committee to choose the eighteen Maidens who are to represent each of the nine boroughs, so they are espoused to nine enticing Order Overseers Ordo Seniors, during the magisterial weddings, heh heh! We’ve already singled twelve lucky Nubiles out of thirteen colleges, distributed over three boroughs; yours, is the fourth borough on our list, and the most to gain our attention, since the Aletheia has always contributed to the festivals with an ethnic omnium
-gatherum of blossoming pulchritude; your institute allowed me access to the personal profiles of every girl student, thus, you in this room have already secured their place through the initial selection. Now, those of you I’m going to take with me today, our Nubiles, should later be evaluated mentally, probed physically, then sifted through, all at the medical examination centers of the triple Os; so for only three of them to become the Maidens. Okey, let’s begin this, whoever I tap on her shoulder, is approved of. Please stand up in line, and give me that merry cherry smile, heh heh!’ So they obeyed, Benn furled the windows’ roller shutters for some natural lighting, as the Archmatron headed forth.

  ‘Why are you doing this to us,’ on the spur of the moment, one girl spoke out,‘who told you I ever wanted to get married, I have a life and a family who must now be waiting for my return. I’d enough of this farce!’

  ‘Cutie you aren’t leaving anywhere,’ returned the Archmatron, sangfroid,‘who are you to lambaste a hundred-year tradition, shame on you, as a burgher of the Juneauton Weltzentrumpoleis, you’ve rights but also duties. For the sake of your well-being, I’ll pretend I haven’t heard what I’ve just have.’

  ‘Your traditions go to hell and drown with you in Acheron.’ Hysterically exclaimed an other, before they both tried to force their way out.

  ‘Eww, arrest the scum,’ she adjured the guards, who reacted amidst the tumult,‘to the gibbet!’ the Archmatron added haughtily, as they lashed out the two girls, manacled them with the cable tie, they straight off schlepped them outside, which drove the remaining girls in frenzy to sneak a look at their colleagues.

  ‘Back in line every one, argh, crazy slanderers,’ cried the Archmatron, mollifying the rest, ‘I was advised against condoning this sort of acts, but I did, here’s the outcome. But alas, my tender heart can’t endure this much Thespian nonsense, what can I do?!’ she soughed as she drew a circle onto her chest, as a sign of prayer.