Imperial nobility - The Mistress

 

Whenever she slept, she slept in desperation. Her dreams were filled with broken dreams and shattered hopes and visions of a future taken away from her by destiny. 

To whatever realm she was brought by the minions of her slumber, she could then hear the melodies of her cage, both natural and far more esoteric in origin. The subsonic purr of the surely cursed Gyptian cat he had brought back for her from his countless unholy travels. The quiet whirring of the cruel beauty apparatus that eagerly tortured her form into something pleasing to him every dim and gloomy morning. And the painfully slow, rhythmic dripping of the gilded tap, ticking like a faulty clock that dragged seconds into degrading hours of shame. There were no folly birds singing in the morning light — only moaning gusts of wind, bringing no novelty and no soft relief, their whispering voices broken by the sharp and cruel corners of millennia-old walls.

She also re-smelled the chemically altered sweat of her unwanted lover, the most expensive perfumes exhaled by his seduction-augmentations constantly and the alchemical odour of his rejuvenated skin. On top of this there was always the scent of toxic industrial fumes, of smoking furnaces and unwashed masses way below, desperately creeping through the filters of the air recyclers placed in the highly decorated ceiling.
 
But worst of all was feeling the waning memories of lustful grasps and scratches of passion on her genetically sensitised skin again, the lulling softness of the silken sheets soaked with bodily fluids and the tearing reaction of her body to the ebbing power of her drunkenness and the abating ultra-amphetamines. Reliving those moments of sickly desire and inhuman cravings she had felt when he was with her filled her with hatred and loathing. For him. And for herself.

She remembered her father collapsing to his knees and begging her through tears on the dreadful day the herald of His Highness Chuttrak Mane — Grand Baron of the Western Mega-Watt Clans, Alumni-Seneschal of Ursh Sector Theta-4, and former Lord Commander of the Imperial Contingent at the Dyatlov Pass District — came to her family’s home to court her as a mistress. 

Back then she had been a proud young woman. Many a man had fallen for her charms and good looks and had ruined himself through scandal and debt while pursuing her as a lover or as a wife. None had been good enough for her — no war-crippled hero, no cosmetically perfected suitor, no gem-enriched trader in forbidden goods. And this gluttonous, eccentric hog of a man was none of those things. He was merely a forgotten warlord of the past looking for a new sensation. But he possessed what all the others before him had lacked — something she desired more than lofty titles, lush hydroponic gardens, and jewellery brought from alien worlds: Access.

He resided in an elaborate mansion within the Imperial Palace, got weekly invitations to the highest social gatherings there, and friends in positions so secret they would never even be mentioned to a despicable lower noble such as her father. But all of this – the pleading of her parents, the illustrious society she would get to be a part of, or the standing making her untouchable for almost everyone – would not have been enough. No. Love. True love was the only thing she even had considered worthy to take such a step. 

And there was true love in her life, though she found it so recently back then, that the uncounted arms of fate must have wrestled themselves to make such an occurrence. Just two weeks before the emissary of Lord Mane had arrived, on a quite boring and inappropriate feast to honour one of her long discarded paramours she had met a man who conquered her heart with the first look of his dark and mysterious eyes, broke her will with just a hint of a smile and inflamed her soul so thoroughly that she never recovered. His name was Lord Astrides – or so she thought back then - and he was no regular man at all. He was enormous, as tall as the mountains of Ural, but not so rugged and derelict. His muscles moved under his dark skin like snakes and vipers crawling beneath a blanket made of woven bronze. His fearless eyes were dark as the black hole stars she had read so often about in scholastic books of her childhood, and he towered over her friends and acquaintances like a dark marble statue of the Emperor himself would always tower over the pathetic figures of her ancestors in the dark crypt of the mundane mountain tower she had to dwell in. The mediocre festival hall in all its inexpensive splendour looked like it was illegally built around him, shaming his powerful physique and unsuccessfully trying to diminish his presence. Only the most powerful man of the region had been allowed near him and even those conveyed their unimportant successes and irrelevant achievements only in a faint voice, cracking from respect and fear. Because he was no simple man, he was a son of the Emperor himself, one of a new kind of humanity, an Angel from beyond, a god walking between vermin, an Astartes warrior of the Imperium. 

And then his eyes had met hers for the first time. His eyes pierced into hers like the unworldly darkness of the long-sealed, hand-hewn well shaft deep beneath her ancestral halls — the one her father had shown her when she was just a child. She remembered his wicked smile as he teased her about how easily it could become her final fate if she ever betrayed or dishonoured their House. And though the well had been sealed days after her mother’s mysterious and untimely death, and ordered forgotten by her father, she never did. Instead, she started to use it in her thoughts as a bottomless vault for her unhallowed wishes, her most cancerous thoughts, and her vilest secrets. Secrets she now saw openly displayed in the vast and gloomy expanse lurking behind the black irises that gazed sternly down upon her — a sight shockingly different from the times she had looked into a man’s eyes before, always admiring only her own reflection in them, fascinated by the seductive power she had imprinted upon the poor souls standing before her. None of that was true any more.
 
Even in her dreamscape she kept no tangible memories of the rest of the evening, not of his deep and thought-provoking words spoken beneath the ever-clouded stars of Terra, the gentle touches of hands made for murder and destruction and all those unrememberable secrets whispered in her ear. 
He never left her mind from that night onward, and she met him — though far too scarcely for her taste — in secret during all the time she had been handed over to Lord Mane, living in his mansion amid splendour and riches while enduring his disgusting company through seemingly endless nights of depravity and soulless affection. And so she brought her love the breathed syllables of the old man’s drunken and exhausted sleep, the muttered words of triumph he tried to impress her with while mindlessly abusing her, as he was accustomed to doing with all his possessions — except for the ancient weapons and war machines he prized above everything else.

And through all that time she hoped only for one passionate kiss or one intimate touch, knowing those moments would most likely never come. Her love was forbidden by the highest and most secretive rules of the palace, and so her soul shattered anew every morning when she awoke into the nightmare of her life. Desperately she would touch the tiny symbol of the multi-headed serpent he had carved into her thigh the night before — the only solid thing left, for even the memory of the time she had spent with him was already fading. She must have been closer to him than ever, and so silently she whispered his naming phrase — a sentence he had taught her never to memorise: "I am Alpharius."

Imperial Citizen - Helmuthros Baran, Veteran-scriptorus of the Logisticae

Helmuthros Baran frantically rubbed his hands. The cold he felt never ceased. He was old. Very, very old. Juvenile treatments had brought him to his 177th year of life, but nobody had told him about the side effects. He felt hollow somehow. It was as if every breath he took created a deep, crunching echo in his chest.

A beam of pale artificial light illuminated his desktop. He no longer wrote with the others in Hall Alpha 44 of the Logisticae scriptorium. The heating there was dreadful. So he had obtained special permission to work in his private study, a remuneration for almost 150 years of service. And in all those years he had never told them. Not even the boy. He should have. Karpat was a good child—ambitious, of course, but also true of heart and brave beyond the usual unexciting profession they both shared.

And now it was too late. Too late to share his deepest secrets with the boy he felt for like a son. He had taken Karpat Jaleph under his already brittle wings as soon as he had learned of his exceptionally high administrative intelligence and his quite unusual interest in Terran history.

And a good part of that late history was still alive behind Helmuthros’ eyes. The early years of his service: accompanying dangerous military expeditions of a Warmaster who called himself only the Emperor, serving as an army purser at merely seventeen years of age. He had begun chronicling his experiences soon after joining, as he started seeing things nobody in his family could ever have dreamed of. Faraway lands where indescribable creatures crawled and flew; strange skies with suicidal clouds and rainbowed winds of fear and despair. Yet in the end, all of this paled in comparison to the secrets he had been told and shown in his childhood in South Pacificus.
The old man shivered from head to toe. Once again, he heard the forgotten songs of ancient sand and felt the inverted shadows of cursed rocks upon his skin. And he saw it. A chill ran down his spine, ignoring the thermo-pack they had provided him with after his last treatment.

He stood up, rubbing his shoulders, and stretched his back. A protesting crack followed. Then he slowly strode over to the cogitator they had rolled in a few weeks earlier. It hummed, still unable to harmonise its unwelcome noise with the buzzing of the old dataslate on his desk. Everything was irritating, even here—in his private room.

He walked slowly past the flickering data screen projecting delivery quotas and acquisition datasets to the back of his cell and sat on an elegant stool beside his bed. It was sunny today beneath his section of the climate conservation field, and rays of honey-coloured light fell through the window. Of course, they provided no warmth any more, having been filtered and modified countless times while passing through the force shield of the Imperial Palace.

He knew he should have told everything to his boy. Not just the adventurous parts of his childhood stories, the fables and fairy tales of the Pacific dusts. It was too late now. Karpat Jaleph was gone, drawn towards the forbidden plains no longer covered and suppressed by Terra’s oceans.

Helmuthros stooped down and turned the bed heating up to eleven. Then he took off his fur-lined boots and slid beneath the thick blanket, curling into a foetal position. He stared at the scuffed back of his bookshelf and closed his eyes. He would soon fall asleep, and he knew what he would dream of again: a place so barren and hot that it freezes your soul.