Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  The boxes come and come, and Amunai secretly discards their contents—although once or twice, she sins by taking a bite. The cursed, tantalizing fruits inspire a kind of longing and bliss that women fed on lemon water, grain, and a forkful of meat each day couldn’t even imagine.

  Then one season, the single irregularity in her routine of rule, worship, and duty is broken. No box comes. Ankha is angry about this change, though she only gradually acknowledges her disappointment. Messages are sent via bird and silver pod to Aesorath. When she receives only cold, nondescript, dismissive replies, Ankha feels a skipped beat in her heart—a pang of abandonment. Her parents are dust now, and she can’t seem to remember their faces or names. Her sister’s gifts, these forbidden fruits, are the only things in her life that speak of any emotional connection. Suddenly, she is weak and small; she realizes what she and her sister have lived through.

  She takes a Divine Seed to the City of Wind and is chewed by the rats of her anxiety the whole time. The dazzle of sunlight over golden towers alarms her as if it were a consuming fire, and the music of the City of Wind sounds like the screams of her and her sister in the dungeons of Intomitath. That dreaded Keeper Superior, Isith. She was a monster, Ankha now remembers.

  She exits the seed, ignoring the splendor of this most splendiferous city—a place that would awe her with songs, grandeur, and life were she paying heed, or capable of feeling awe. However, all that she needs, all that she yearns for, is her sister, that embrace that she denied Amunai decades ago. The Keeper of Aesorath is informed of Ankha’s coming by her bird-like men, who clatter from the metal feathers adorning their breastplates, and peer through helms shaped as hooked screeching beaks. One of the men gazes at her, brazenly, with a confidence that makes her uncomfortable. She’s further disturbed when it is he that receives a mind-whisper from his mistress—and not she.

  He leads her through an arch and into a whistling open tower that is encircled by cloisters and lets in sunny air from its opened roof. All seems in a state of disrepair—the tumbled rocks, the green runners, the rambling flowerbeds that grow where they want. To honor the Green Mother. And there sits her humble worshiper—no longer the desperate child and woman Ankha once knew but a smiling, radiant nymph.

  Amunai welcomes her sister to the dais where she sits and watches birds. Amunai looks slightly rounder around her hips and breasts. Perhaps she’s gotten fat from the fruits of apple trees that surround the dais and the garden; the fruit trees, too, grow wild. She munches on an apple as her sister comes to her.

  “I am glad that you came,” she mind-whispers. “I did not think that my gifts were welcome.”

  “Is that why you stopped sending them?” Ankha asks and kicks an apple. There are apples everywhere. “These sinful things.”

  Amunai smiles with her eyes, enjoying the apple. “They’re fruits, Sister. Nothing more.”

  “What of all this kingly magnificence with which you have surrounded yourself?” Ankha asks, having recovered her guard and retreated behind her battlements a bit. The changes in her sister are rather alarming. The Keeper of Aesorath even wears jewelry. A primitive fetish, jarringly crude—Ankha sees something of leather twine and a lump that hangs between her sister’s breasts. She continues, “We are not to live in indulgence. We are not to fatten ourselves on the riches of our nation. We are to contemplate. To honor.”

  “I honor those duties, Sister,” replies Amunai. “But I also understand that one cannot preach love if one does not know love.” In that speck, she casts a look somewhere behind Ankha. The guard with the fierce gaze—his aura beats with the red pulse of love. Another smaller star throbs in Amunai’s stomach; Morigan sees she is with child. Before Amunai speaks further, she dismisses her and her sister’s legionnaires. All save for one leave. She stands, slowly approaches, and then holds her sister, who doesn’t spurn the advance. It’s that surrender to intimacy—for Ankha does not recoil as she did when last they touched—that makes Amunai feel she can be honest with her sister. Amunai continues, “The Keeper Superior is ailing and will soon be gone, Sister. One of four women will take her place. Of that number, two possess the strongest arts. Two have made their nations more prosperous and glorious than at any other time in our history. I speak of you and I and our achievements. The balance of power is shifting. I am told, on fair authority, that the pole of our world will move East or West. It will not remain in the North, in Intomitath, after the Keeper Superior’s death.”

  The impact of the news causes Ankha to stumble a bit, and her sister helps her to sit. Thoughts rail in Ankha’s head. The Keeper Superior is ill? A new leader of all cities will come from East or West, from Aesorath or Eatoth. How does her sister know all of this?

  “The Green Mother has spoken to me,” says Amunai, as if reading her mind. “Each day, I feel her more and more. Whispers on the winds. Songs when a child laughs with his mother. A beat in my—” Belly, thinks Morigan. This, though, Amunai does not confess when she continues: “Do not think this heresy, my sister, but the voices we hear, the Wills our society follows, are made by man and woman. We listen to ourselves. We listen to our egos. I am not some Amakri shaman preaching rebellion against the cities. I do not see us as forsaken. However, we are in need of saving. We have fattened ourselves on pride. We must change ourselves and listen once more to the one true voice.”

  “One true voice? This is Amakri heresy!” exclaims Ankha, her face a twist of terror. Yet she doesn’t rise or call for her guards, as a Keeper should. She trembles, and her sister tightens an arm about her. The warmth of flesh on flesh is unforgettable. Ankha has missed it more than anything. Into that heat, Ankha surrenders and fades. She and her sister sit; they bask in Nature’s golden heat, and in the heat of each other. They watch the sand moths—their transparent husks turned crimson in the day—that flutter about like living cinders. The sisters’ heads fill with Geadhain’s grand, earthy odor. Their ears tickle from the rustle of countless green swords of grass, each movement a whisper. Amunai has never been more right. Geadhain lives, speaks, and can so easily be heard; the Green Mother’s message is one of peace. Not since she was a child and the stones first spoke to her has Ankha heard the Green Mother’s voice so true. She begins to weep, slowly and with joy. After the spell over her lightens, and the voice fades to a tremble of tranquility, Ankha asks, “How have you done this?”

  “I learned to listen, Sister. I cast out false verses. I searched for who I had been before. I found her, that girl. Then I became a woman, and—”

  This time, Ankha senses the secret. “What? You became what?” Whatever has transformed her sister, she desires it, too.

  Touched, but still with a mother’s protective instinct, Amunai does not confess to her pregnancy. “I cannot tell you,” she says. “Not yet. I need you to think about what I have said. Stay in Aesorath for a day, a week, or however long you choose. We have been apart for too long. I have missed my sister. See how much of the Green Mother’s voice returns to you. Then I shall tell you my secret.”

  Amunai stands; her legionnaire takes her hand and escorts her down the stairs of the dais. This impropriety—a protector should not touch a holy woman—plants a different seed in Ankha. A seed of righteous anger or jealousy? wonders Morigan, at the flash of indignation. For Morigan sees beyond the pinched scowl on the woman’s face to her desire to have all that her sister has: freedom, certainty, the power to touch another at will, and a fearlessness of reproach. Alas, Ankha is blind to her motivations. As she continues to stare—at her voluptuous sister, at the man escorting her, at this beautiful garden, at all the things she’s too cowardly to claim—the darkness grows like a barnacle around her heart. Ankha’s mind fills with postulations, and few are far off the mark. The emotion flourishes so quickly; such a powerful sense of hate and betrayal. If Ankha has not already deciphered the source of her sister’s reawakened wisdom and exultation, she will soon.

  Dream’s waters blur, swirl, and wash Morigan onto another beach
of time. Amunai and her sister walk through grand spaces. The light gives towers, fortifications, and bridges the look of solid gold. There’s so much light in Aesorath that Morigan wonders whether it was misnamed. Men and women chant and hum with the wind and the music brought by the Green Mother. Here, there are no spirit-crushing sounds like the tolling of the bells of Eatoth. These people make art with nature’s melodies because they feel Her presence. Amunai has brought this enlightenment to her city. Already, she works against the old order of stone, rule, and worship. There are no separate buildings for the Faithful, for those who have not ascended—no Amakri encampments for those allowed to serve as serfs. Instead, all roam freely from lower courtyard onto skyships, which are built like Aesorath’s waterborne vessels but have no sails: the air’s currents are their bobbing sea. These ships and their happy passengers sail over the arched bridges between towers of gold and song.

  Much of Amunai and her sister’s walk passes in a gleeful stillness. Not since their youth can they remember having smiled or laughed so much with each other, though they do so noiselessly and behind their hands. Some things cannot change, not yet. If it weren’t for that man who was following them—the favored guard of Aesorath’s Keeper, the one who possesses the hard stare—Ankha would be having an inexpressibly wonderful day with her sister. She has no words for how she feels, for happiness was discarded somewhere in the fire, blood, and sweat of Intomitath. But whatever she feels has her tingling and light-headed. Some shade cools her excitement, and she and her sister find themselves in an alcove: a bench hidden behind a rustling wall of leaves in one of the lower regions of the city, a place a Keeper should never go. But today, Ankha has eschewed the harshest teachings that chains and penance taught her. Ankha needs to know how this glorious impurity in the fabric of Pandemonia’s rule has come to be.

  “How is it that a Keeper walks down in the valley of sin?” she mind-whispers.

  Amunai squeezes her sister’s hands as she replies: “Are we not mortal? Have we not sinned ourselves? Why should a Keeper not walk amongst her flock? A great leader does not seek to be great: she inspires others to greatness. I have opened the gates between Purgatorium and Paradisum. In this city, you will see no difference between holy man and sinner, between those seeking light and those stumbling through darkness. We have all taken journeys in the dark before, Sister. You and I know this.”

  Ankha shakes her head and forces the memories of Intomitath back down to the depths; she has become quite talented at burying her pains. “But this is wrong. This is not what we were taught,” she protests, without conviction.

  “Is it? Who is speaking, Sister? You, or Isith? You, or the specter of Teskatekmet?” Amunai snarls, though her face softens in a speck. “I would speak to my sister. I would ask her what she thinks of what she has seen in my realm. As I have said, the Keeper Superior is dying. The arkstone will no longer sustain her flesh. It is time. You and I can be the future. But you must want it. You must remember who we were.”

  Ankha bows her head. “You are brave. You were always so brave. I could never do this.”

  “Bravery does not come from one being,” Amunai insists as she kisses her sister’s hands, and the gesture is not resisted; she further tests the limits by leaving her lips on their skin as she mind-speaks. “Like a chain, each link makes us stronger. That is why we cannot be whole as a nation unless we break down the barriers between us. I am glad you have come to me, rather than force me to seek you out; it says that you are ready to fight this fight with me. For we are stronger as individuals, and as a nation, when exposed to the passions of others.”

  “Passions?” Ankha gasps and pulls away; the kissing now makes her uncomfortable. She sits on her hands. “We are never to speak of passions; they are gateways to sin. We must be pure. We must—”

  Amunai silences her with a raised hand. She stands and forces another kiss upon the crown of her sister’s head. As she bends over, the necklace hidden in her tunic falls out—a swinging pendulum of raw black stone tied in leather. Amunai straightens, the legionnaire standing outside their alcove pulls aside the greenery for his mistress, and she is washed and illumed in sunlight, children’s laughter, and songs like a spirit of joy. Ankha is cowed by such beauty. Amunai counters, “Passion is not wicked. Punishing people for wanting love is what is wicked, Sister.”

  After this final admonishment, the leaves rustle closed, and Ankha is left in shadow, left to ponder in the dark. She sits for hourglasses and tries to see her way through the imbroglio. It is dimming outside and purple shade leaks into the sanctuary when Ankha at last stands. She leaves the alcove and goes to find her sister. She feels bright and light with her answer, her choice. She feels brave…

  A quick plunge into and resurfacing from the waters of Dream, and Morigan goes deeper into this timeline. She arrives somewhere else in Aesorath—somewhere dark. A night sky with chalked-on, muted stars grants cover to the woman hiding behind the cloister surrounding a broad, seemingly abandoned courtyard. It is Ankha, hunched and skulking like a murderer in the night. She’s found her sister. Out in the courtyard, beneath the silver shadow of a gnarled and moonlit tree, are two almost indistinguishable figures. Ankha watches them, and the darkness in her heart is like a smaller Black Star. She seethes with the Black Queen’s envy of life and happiness.

  Ankha has forgotten all of the bravery she’d only just discovered. She darkly ponders the touching between man and woman, between her sister and the legionnaire that always guards her. Voices of the Green Mother have come to Ankha, tried to soothe her with words and kisses of wind, but she wants none of them. After her sister told her that everything she knew of the world was wrong, after their first reunion since the dark days at Intomitath, Ankha expected more. More answers, more reasons for what happened in the garden. However, what Ankha discovered has merely enflamed her hate and frustration. For her sister indulges in sacrilege after sacrilege while speaking out of the side of her mouth about holiness and true voices. What rubbish.

  All Ankha can hear with her Keeper-tuned senses is the wet lick of their kisses, the pulsing of their ardent lust. She cannot see them very well, for the shadows and night offer them concealment. Nonetheless, her mind fabricates what her eyes fail to perceive. The whispers of the snake-tongued monster that has seduced her sister bridge any gaps in her imagination. Quite wantonly, he speaks of Amunai’s breasts, her lips, and the valley between her legs while navigating his hands to these places. A flush that is not hate, a sweat that is not fear, covers Ankha as she listens to this forbidden seduction; his husky, tempter’s voice—the sound of a man of snake and rock and fire, a demon of which the Keeper Superior preached. But not everything the tempter says is carnal. Now and again, he whispers words that Ankha simply cannot believe, words that pummel the hate from her gut and leave her stunned and reeling. “Child. Our child,” he says. Then the hate returns as the legionnaire, the pride of Pandemonia, pulls out an Amakri talisman that is twin to the crude thing her sister wears and speaks of that, too.

  “Halves of a stone from the Cradle of Life,” he murmurs. “Like those traded in the days before all the tribes of Pandemonia fell from grace. Although I must leave you tonight, my half will remain close to your heart, where it belongs.”

  As the man of snake, rock, and fire is leaving, Ankha also creeps away. The farther into the darkness she wanders, the further her spirit sinks. Two halves? Where is she in this equation? What of the sister who held her at night? How can she compete with a man’s promises, kisses, and lust? What does she have to offer that could rival the passion Amunai will soon feel for her abomination of a child? Ankha feels she has been betrayed and usurped in every way. What meaning can her love have for a woman who has a queendom of glory and a new family of her own? Amunai has broken every sacred law of their land. She is no longer a virgin mother, but a queen of whores. She must be punished.

  In that moment, the broken girl, the lost girl that had come to Aesorath to find her sister, cha
nges. Morigan can feel the flagellation, the suffering, and the grief hardening the woman into a deadly diamond knife. The Dream begins to shake. Its host does not wish to visit the worst parts of itself, these dusty, lightless prisons in which it has kept its great wickedness.

  Who among you is truly the sinner? wonders Morigan, as the Dream shatters apart like a house of crystal and the shards of reality scatter over a dark room thick with a miasma of torment. The keeper of this Dream has not been to this memory in years. It is hazy, and parts of what Morigan perceives are muffled, skip frames, or have people without shape—men of smoke like her father. A few of these phantom men stand around the walls of an odd, square belfry. The neglect of this Dream obscures architectural details, but Morigan can sense windy rafters and a sad cry to the night—they are still in Aesorath.

  Some parts of the Dream are cruelly vivid. Darkness has possessed Ankha. To Morigan, the Keeper’s eyes are now the cold black of a shark’s. She stands in the center of the chamber near a kneeling, ravaged man in chains. Close by sways a gagged woman held by two phantom men. Amunai.

  Ankha has usurped her sister’s claim to the throne of Pandemonia. Isolation and abandonment have bred not longing in her heart, but jealousy and malice. Right or wrong, for her there is only the honor of her station. Thus, she has decided she must do what is necessary to maintain the integrity of their nations. She will make the brave choices her sister cannot.

  First among those tasks is meting out punishment to those who broke the laws of their order. Amunai’s judgment came in the form of an apple of proposed peace, its skin painted in toxic gland excretions that brought on extreme hemorrhaging. The poison treat has since done its work. A few hourglasses earlier, Amunai’s mistake—the tempter’s seed—bled from her body.