Silver Millennium Soldier
-4- Parental Pressure
by
Mike Macdonald
(Age: 27)
copyright 02-08-2006
Age Rating: 18 to 127
The realm of primal evil stirred, so faintly that only those with an extraordinary sense of awareness would ever have noticed. A slight tickle in the air like the touch of ice water on bare skin.
It jarred Beryl out of her meditation. She was alone in the throne room, overseeing her operations with her mind’s eye, monitoring the intake of human life force, keeping updated on her enemies’ progression, what little her agents knew of it. She grimaced, sighed bitterly, rose slowly to her feet and approached the black gate separating the two horrid realms from one another, striding ever so eloquently like she'd been programmed to do as a princess. Eons since then and she still didn’t even have to think about it.
She stood before the crystal pane and stared into the endless blackness of limbo beyond, looking for anything in the murky hole that resembled intelligent life.
She waited.
The thing is having another tantrum, she thought.
Even though she expected them, Metallia’s bulging, pussy white eyes still managed to startle the dark queen when they suddenly decided to exist. They grabbed her own and held them at attention while the surrounding shadows pulled together to form a hideous makeshift body for the dreadful pair of glossy spheres to sit in. Its shape emulated that of an old woman whose time had passed centuries ago, so twisted and gangly that were it flesh and bone it would break and collapse under its own weight.
The shape pulsed, adjusted and refined itself, then grew coarse and shriveled again, as is the nature of a being lacking a disciplined tangible form. But the eyes never changed. They never, ever changed.
“You called?” Beryl finally croaked.
The eyes conveyed their thoughts through their abysmal presence. They had no voice of their own, so they borrowed those of the thousands of damned nobles and thanes the being comprised of and spoke in a cacophony of sobs and wails. Each word crawled over Beryl’s chest, up her neck, and into her brain like a family of earwigs. It was heard only by those it wished to hear it.
“Why does my power grow at such a leisurely pace, Child?” it said.
“If I could harvest life force in concentration camps like the old days, I assure you I would,” Beryl said, recovering from its first sentence. She never quite got used to communicating with it. “But we cannot risk announcing our presence this early in our operation. It would jeopardize everything.”
The eyes grew wider. The crooked frame they nested in tensed up and seemed to swell in anxiety.
“I hunger, do you understand?” it bellowed, some of its voices too busy shrieking in agony from the creature’s rage to join in. “I’ve starved for millennia. These table scraps you’ve provided for me are not enough!”
Beryl looked upon the shadowy beast much like a cat owner would her pampered pet. A living plethora of generations of kings and queens, she thought, and yet it gripes just like any prince or princess.
It was now up against the crystal pane, clawing and howling at its prison door like a feral animal. Beryl, suddenly doubting the strength of the ethereal wall between the two of them, leapt back with a start. She quickly regained her composure, and tried to ignore the bullets of sweat forming on her brow. She’d forgotten it could hear her thoughts.
“Don’t lose your temper with me!” she said, tilting her nose up.
“Get me what I crave or I shall tear out that black pit you call a heart!”
“You cannot even touch me through your prison doorway,” Beryl said in a cocky tone, despite what little faith she’d shown in its security only seconds earlier. “If you cannot behave, I shan’t feed you at all.”
The voices were in hysterics.
“Ungrateful sow! I birthed you from the darkest bowels of the abyss! Until recently, you were nothing but one little part of me out of tens of thousands! You are my child and my servant and you shall revel in my presence!”
“As I recall, I hold the power in this relationship. I have freedom. And if you’re going to speak to me like you would a filthy slave girl, I may just let you rot in there!”
She stamped her foot to punctuate her statement. She felt as though she were a princess arguing with her parents about her castle curfew. Indeed, it certainly sounded that way. She wondered if it could be her mother or father speaking to her at that moment, provided either of her parents was conscious in any way as a part of the cursed, sexless demigod now glaring at her.
“You’ll do no such thing,” the shadow beast hissed, “I am the persona of your entire lineage. You are the youngest and the last born of your generation, and of your entire genealogy! You are but an infant! You cannot have anything unless I allow it. Your power is a pitiful, insignificant extension of my own. If I starve, so too shall you. You have no freedom, Beryl, just a body that will soon wither and decay, and when that happens, you shall return to me.”
It paused for a long time, watching the dread wash over Beryl’s face before it finished.
“You should strive to be held in my highest regards by then.”
Beryl swallowed hard as the air in the room quietly left to avoid getting involved in the matter. The creature raked the ethereal glass with black claws.
“Nourish me!”
Beryl straightened up and faced the dead gaze before her as diligently as she could, breathing deeply and holding her response until she was certain her voice wouldn’t quiver or crack in delivering it. She couldn’t do much about the tears welling up in her eyes.
“I am working very hard for our cause,” she managed to say without sobbing, “so at the very least I deserve a little patience on your part. You will get what you want, but at the rate I can provide it. End of discussion. Do not summon me again today.”
She turned to leave. Her muscles were so tense they could tear free of their foundations at any moment. Her face was wet and cold.
Still, too, was her skin; she looked back over her shoulder to find the ghastly eyes watching her, as if they had unfinished business to discuss.
“And do stop staring at me,” she said on her way out the door.
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I am quite impressed with the quality of this series. The word choice you use is quite effective in giving the reader mental images of the action, and you did well with the characters once again. Queen Beryl and Metallia are given (and exhibit) their own personalities in a convincing manner. The grammar and spelling is again excellent, and the flow is well-done, the events moving neither too fast nor too slow. The level of detail is great enough to make for clear mental images yet not enough to bog the flow down in needless trivia.
I cannot say enough good words about this series so far. I appreciate this work and hope you can maintain the level of quality you have exhibited so far. Keep up the great work!
Welcome !
