The Black Sun Prophecies Excerpt

Tidbit of something I’m working on

-----CHAPTER 1-----
Melancholia sat by the window as rain beat against the glass. She gazed distractedly at her phone and swiped repeatedly, pictures of various, often handsome, generic looking men passed her screen in a blur, each one failing to pique her interest in the slightest. She looked out the window and down into the courtyard of her father’s palatial estate, her beauty occasionally reflected in the shimmering lightning illuminated glass. She glanced towards her laptop perched on a desk, displaying her Farcebook friends feed, automatically updated by the moment, taunting her with the joy and fun times the people a machine insisted she had some relation with were occupied with on this dreary Friday night. The words of her father echoed in her head, "nobody but me, or a man as great as me, is good enough for you, Melancholia, and don’t you forget it! Anything you need, I’ll provide for you, so don’t you go looking for it with the scum!" A tear begged to be released from the corner of her eye, but she just sighed instead.
-
Adam scratched at his neck, and then his leg, and cursed the insect infested prison his birth had condemned him to. He tapped away at a keyboard in a room lit by one bare bulb, his filthy hands dripping with beads of sweat and making his bluetooth keyboard feel like someone had taken a paintbrush covered in bacon grease to it. He got halfway through a sentence and sighed, slammed his hands down on the cardboard box that passed for his desk, and tore open a pack of Manboro cigarettes, quickly lighting one up and exitting another scarcely started short story without saving before opening up Farcebook. He took a long drag of the smoke and then popped open a pill bottle, pulled out two softly colored ovals, and began crushing them up on his box while he mechanically browsed through image after image of other people enjoying their dalliances, parties, celebrations, familial get togethers, and beauty begotten attention, demarcated in the torrent of likes and comments on each of their digital expressions of lived lives. He cursed quietly, glancing towards his ruined car through the wall of his crumbling tenement as if he could see it through the old uninsulated barriers. He mumbled something along the lines of "life, for want of money..." before insufflating a few huge lines of artificial happiness and lighting another cigarette. The first had burned to ashes in his hand with nary a third drag. "No love lost in this house of dolls..."
-
Sojourner sat in a heavily wooded forest near her suburban home, leaned against a tree. An empty bottle of hard alcohol lay in the grass beside her, and tears streamed down her cheeks. In her hand was a phone, flickering and cracked screen still clearly displaying the page of her ex lover’s Farcebook feed. Her lover, drunk and in the throes of revelry, arm wrapped around some blonde fellow reveller, smiles plastered on the faces of both of them, surrounded by faces unrecognized and unimportant. Picture after picture of these two enjoying a party with friends, alcohol, and less important details. Kissing, being kissed, hands intertwined, a game of swill pong, piggy back rides, group photos. Sojourner glanced down at the phone, and then the bottle, and smashed one against the other before weeping wracked her body with death-like spasms for some time, ending only when she blacked out.
-
Melancholia stood up and pressed the tips of her fingers against the cold glass, and leaned her forehead against it, too. Lightning flickered, and in the reflection, she saw that her father had come into her room behind her silently and was appraising her approvingly, his gaze downward at her rear less fatherly than it should have been, same with his sneer. She turned to face him, slowly, trying to hide her sorrow.
"H-hi, daddy..." she managed to whimper.
"Hello, my diamond!" he bellowed, as if the emotional distance between them were a physical gulf that required a shout. "I noticed you were still on Farcebook and active, shouldn’t you be in bed by now? We’ve got a big day tomorrow, you know, daddy’s going to give a speech for the convention, and he needs you looking your best along with the rest of the family to support him! What would the media think if my little glittering goldenhaired angel were to appear on national TV with bags under her eyes, hm?" He snarled as he said the words, the anger of a man who’s very child was nothing but a material prop, a testament to his greatness, a testament to the notion that even his seed and his offspring were gold plated, like his fortune.
"I couldn’t sleep...The storm..."She managed to say, and then, feeling a sudden burst of courage from somewhere, she knew not where, she continued "Daddy, I wish I could go out and have fun, like my friends do, on a night like this, Its so lonely being stuck here, watching them all enjoying themselves..."She stopped, the courage was cut to shreds in the withering gaze of her patriarch.
"Wishes! You WISH!" he laughed mockingly, "Wishes didn’t get ME a presidential nomination! Wishes didn’t get us this beautiful, historic estate! Wishes didn’t get us a position as a household name! Why, honey, if your wishes were as valuable as my words, and as powerful as my will, we would have traded all this" he swept his hands around the room dramatically and continued "for a PONY FARM and a little cabin in the woods, like you wanted when you were younger, and we’d have never had this glorious opportunity to rule this country and return it to the status of glorious empire, like it was in MY father’s days!" He nearly spat the words out, and did his best to look down on her like a worm or some sort of vermin as he did so, and then his tone softened a bit as he noticed how powerfully his words had hit home, his inner world one awash in the ecstacy of this small triumph. "Now, now, there, there darling...sleep, rest, you’ll feel better in the morning, I promise..."
And he stepped towards her, opening his arms, a glint in his eye and a grin across his lips, and then hugged his unresisting daughter tightly, gently caressing her back and sending jolts of fear through her with every touch that she forced herself to suppress.
"Ok, father, y-you’re right, I’ll go to bed now..."She stammered, suppressing every last ounce of emotion she felt. Just as silently as he had entered, he was gone from her room, and she turned back to gazing out the window in longing, and then she shut down her laptop, her phone, and sat on the corner of her bed and tried to sob.
But the tears wouldn’t come, and that hurt even more.
-----CHAPTER 2-----
On the bridge of the Wodin, alarms sounded, and men rushed about in a frantic but coordinated whirlwind of action. The sleek, black and crimson flagship was hugging the dark side of the moon, hovering just above a small anthill of action on the lunar surface, all directional scanners pointed downward and gathering data at all times, in case of any unforeseen occurence.
In the middle of this beehive of activity sat an old, wizened, tired man with shock-white hair, an eye patch, one hand gripping the shaft of a ceremonial looking lance tightly, the other hand delicately gripping a crystal vial over an intricately detailed glass plate on an ancient wooden stand. He tapped out a few small, fluffy crystalline piles of what looked like freshly powdered snow, and then bent down to inhale the crystals through one nostril with a long, thin metal rod. It was the barrel of an old German Luger pistol, customized for such an action with a tight inner sleeve. He inhaled, grimaced, and then exhaled loudly before slumping back into his command chair and momentarily resting his eyes as the rejuvinating energies flowed through him.
He opened his eyes, and glanced at a waiting aide, and then, realizing the gravity his expression conveyed, softened his visage into a warm, humble smile, and spoke. "Approach, mein freund, Kurt, and bring me what news you bear, good or ill. I am sorry to worry you like this, but I cannot let this delicate portion of the operation go unsupervised. Though I have infinite faith in the abilities of every single one of you, might I add. I am simply a selfish old man who wishes to bear witness to the creation of future history. After all, I am an artist first, and a warrior, leader, and spiritual man a very distant second, and there is no art in the universe quite like the art of the writing of the Book of Life, for the writer of this book is none other than God himself, and any artist would be a fool to...to..."He laughed, a soft, echoing, deep, and reassuring sound, and the men on the bridge relaxed noticeably at it. "Any artist would be a fool to think he could put to mere words the scope of life’s Grand Design." He finished with a smile, and held out his hand.
Kurt stepped forward, his black uniform seeming to glow in the dim lights of the bridge under Battle Alert 1, and held out a device similar in appearance to an Earth smartphone. The Old Man held out his own device, intricately detailed and ornamented, and they tapped them together, end to end, sending a burst of terabytes of data from one platform to the other. Kurt holstered his device, called an E.y.e.l., or "yell", as the men were wont to call it, and held his arms forward, forearms grasping eachother, in salute, before bowing and stepping backwards. "The most recent updates on Earth’s battle-ready status, and the status of their secret lunar armada, mein freund, as well as political and media information straight from the planet’s own institutions, plus entropic-extropic balance assessments and overlays for all available data. I’ve taken the liberty of compressing the parts I thought you’d find most important into a small document synch’d straight to your personal archives, the rest are technical, should you need them."
He hesitated and glanced downward, and The Old Man laughed. "You still fear them, don’t you, Kurt? Speak, friend to friend, with me, in private if you wish. I want to hear your opinions. Long gone are the days when we kept our humanity to ourselves and followed orders like the toys and machines we utilize, after all. We are the most important part of this living hive of machinery, electronic impulses, and autoimmune-esque responses we call a ship, after all, and if any of us need guidance or a forum for our emotions, then that is more important than whatever technical or personal task I’m engaging in. After all, without us, what is the ship? The fleet? The movement? The Free Associative Union? Naught but a machine! Something without life or organic, free will driven purpose! So, speak, my old friend. Please."
"Sir, they DO scare me. These readouts, all of our intel suggests that these people are so deeply entrenched in their paradigms and worldview that they would bring ruin to their entire planet for the sake of their institutions and ideologies, even in the face of a better way, a path to true freedom and the stars! That is madness, sir, if I may say so! To die because they wish to avoid being proven wrong, or to have reason to cease their games of empire and unwilling servitude? What is wrong with them, and why do we risk what we’ve gained to save them, when most of them STILL wish to kill their saviours, messengers, and the bearers of uncomfortable news?"
And he spoke with a small, almost imperceptible sparkle in the corner of one eye, and shaking hands, and sweating palms. Not the fear of battle or death like a primitive carries into a fight, but the fear of being forced by circumstance into slaying an enemy, ending a life, wielding the weakness of control over death dealing that savages often mistook for power before ascending to a state of gnosis inspired balance. The fear of his own ability to devalue life with an impulse for preservation of his own, the fear of playing God without the knowledge of The One.