The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

Hunger & Lust

5

Before the edges of her moccasin slipped beneath the next curtain, Dactalla paused. She sensed something on the other side. She slipped the tip of her left moccasin several centimetres beneath the curtain. She could feel it, some preternatural presence. She pushed the curtain open three centimetres with her left index finger and peered in. Nothing appeared to be moving, yet something was there.

She moved her leg slowly, centimetre by centimetre. After several minutes, she was halfway through the curtain, her left moccasin placed very lightly on the floor. The air was permeated by a pale pink light. There was a beast floating somewhere in the air, she could feel it. And yet the air had nothing in it except for a faint pink hue. She concluded that the beast was the room itself.

The derelecta has senses beyond anything we can imagine. She can measure things we think immeasurable, except by finely calibrated instruments. Dactalla wondered, How many applicants to the Black Horde had stepped confidently into that room? How many couldn’t see that the walls were contracting and expanding, two centimetres in and two centimetres out every minute? Whatever it was, it appeared to be breathing.

Looking closer, she saw that the walls of the room weren’t a uniform colour, but rather a slowly shifting translucence of rose and mauve. She made out rivulets of veins within membranes layered on membranes. At first she thought she was in a gigantic lung, but then she wondered if she wasn’t in some cavity of its mouth. Whatever it’s anatomy, the beast appeared to be part of the structure of the Borjes itself.

Beneath her moccasin, Dactalla felt the ground wasn’t quite firm, as if she was stepping on the spine of some primordial beast. Slowly, she leaned forward and then lifted both feet off the ground. Extending her wings from her rib cage to her elbows, she gently lifted herself into the room. She dispersed the currents skillfully, so that the beast wouldn’t know exactly where she was among the swaying currents of air.

It was possible that the beast hadn’t registered the weight of her moccasin on the floor of its cavernous mouth. Lucky for her, the derelecta were small in stature, and rarely weighed more than fifty kilograms. They also moved smoothly and economically. In this they were less like an Amazon and more like Lady Kasuga, although they were more powerful and more ruthless than either.

Dactalla wondered what would have happened to a heavier-footed species in such a situation. She had met several Dalitian horseflies, who were eight feet tall, 100 kilograms, and faster than hummingbirds. They were famous as elite fighters and body-guards all over the cosmos. Yet in this room in the Borjes, all the horsefly would have to do is plant it’s heavy foot and it would be dinner for the Venusian beast.

Dactalla had no way of knowing from where the beast might mount its attack. Or how. Slowly, she maneuvered through the air, in what appeared a random trajectory, toward the sixth veil. Three metres from a faint crimson outline, she dove through the veil and landed softly in the next room.

6

The light was thick and perfumed, as if with a combination of musk, chypre, and fougère. In the middle of the room on a divan that was lost under his enormous bulk, sat Draghignazzo. He looked like a mountain covered in a dark green foothill of robes, and valleys of black velvet.

Draghignazzo was a prude. He was afraid of his own desires, and had never gone out into the trenches and found out for himself. Knowing this, Cagnazzo sent him pictures of derelecta in various locations, positions, and states of undress. He intended to drive his colleague mad with desire. Each time Cagnazzo felt a surge of lust rise within him, he’d doctor another batch of photos using his customized AI algorithms, which added objects, angles, and scenarios. He’d send these photos to Draghignazzo, sit back with popcorn, and watch him squirm.

In his lurid fantasies, Draghignazzo saw the derelecta as a goddess in diaphanous clothing, her body gleaming white beneath the silky folds. Although it would have seemed blasphemous to the other Demon Priests, Draghignazzo couldn’t stop himself from imagining the derelecta in some religious of holy situation. As if he wanted to sanctify that which is very resistant to sanctity. And yet he also knew that he would give his eye fangs, even put his own head on a platter, to see the sex beneath.

Draghignazzo knew that Cagnazzo’s images were dirty concoctions, but he didn’t care. He downloaded them all and kept them in a locked file. Yet they always picked the lock and wandered all over his apartment, turning his waking hours into visionary states in which he didn’t know if he was waking or dreaming. He made love to cabinets, sofas, cleaning ladies. His dreams were also filled with strange women who beckoned him to drink their magic potions and to take meandering journeys to far off isles where he might learn wisdom from the talking dead.

Seeing Dactalla before him in her solid grey silk dress, Draghignazzo wondered more than ever what lay beneath Cagnazzo’s doctored shifts, camisoles, demi-bras, and thongs. Unlike in Cagnazzo’s pornographic pictures, he couldn’t tell what lay beneath the thin yet opaque fabric of her dress. Did she have a pure Vicinese form, like Raphael’s dancing girls of Spring and the Venus of Arles?

As a Fallarian, Draghignazzo was encouraged to worship the beauty of darker and more insectizoid bodies. But as a Demon Priest he wan’t going to be told what to worship. Besides, roughly half the Fallarian population had a Vicinese (or humanoid) form. Was he really a traitor to his State when he lusted after a slim white derelectan body? Did he hate his own race just because he lusted after chalk-white skin and shoulders?

Inevitably, Draghignazzo’s fantasies climaxed in exotic mythic visions — of Salomé dancing before Herod, or Ishtar discarding her clothes as she went down the stairs. She knelt naked in front of Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.

In his wildest imagination, Draghignazzo had imagined what it would be like to be in the presence of a real live derelecta. Yet now he had a slim white derelectan in front of his eyes, all her defences down, in obeisance to her aged lord.

He took it all in, finally admitting to himself what he had always kept a secret: his lust for power wasn’t as great as his lust for sex. He knew this might be the end of him, since it could well turn him from victimizer to victim.

Dactalla’s grey silk dress was held up by a clasp on her right shoulder, like Circe of old. She undid the clasp and let the grey silk slide over her breasts.

Draghignazzo feared, and hoped, that this was the only type of compromise he would ever make. He couldn’t stop himself from staring now. He yearned to be one with the primal swamp magic that had made the derelecta the most feared and desired creature in the universe.

She let her dress fall further, to just below her belly button, long enough for the old geezer to open his mouth in awe. She then pushed her dress down to her knees and then to the floor. Stepping out of its magic circle and holding it to one side, she opened her arms and let the glowing blue stars float and sparkle around his dark green cloak and into his brain.

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What leches these Demon Priests were! Dactalla thought to herself. She pulled up her dress, reclasped it on her right shoulder, and walked through the ash grey of the seventh veil. Draghignazzo saw her grey dress become one with the grey door, his visual cortex stranded in complete suspension between the black and the white.

For the next week, Draghignazzo sat immobile, staring at the stars inside his brain as their light dwindled and his spirit shrivelled into a tiny black dot which floated upward from Fallar Discordia into outer space.

7

At the far end of the room, with his back to the wall, Cagnazzo sat at an olive-coloured desk, looking at his screens. He knew Draghignazzo would buckle at the first scent that emanated from the derelecta’s lower belt. He knew the ingredients of those smells. His lab had worked it out. Thousands of his spies were using the exact same proportions of chemicals, gulling security agents and state ministers, depriving presidents of their will to keep secrets, and paralyzing even the hardest operatives from remembering what they’d let slip. He wasn’t about to be taken in by such a crude display of swamp magic.

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Next: 🎲 The Seventh Veil

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