The Godward Sea

Chapter 1: Kosmos

Part I
EARTH

Chapter 1: Kosmos

Astrian Zend of Aeonika emerged from his carriage, and took in the sight of the Holy Kingdom. The Golden Era, they called this epoch. If true, this place was the era's beacon.
    Kosmos. My sin.
   Numb from the jouncing ride, his legs faltered as he stood, heels tingled under his weight. He stowed a long package underarm, wrapped in brilliant yellow linen. It too had survived the journey, he noted with a half-smile. Behind him the carriage wheels unexpectedly ground to a start. Astrian regarded the old merchant and his mobile supply of market items, then patted the dust from his mantle.
    Majestic ramparts, high and gleaming black, enclosed the Holy Kingdom of Kosmos. Foreseeable from such heights, threats seldom affected the people. Leastwise, not in the twenty winters that Astrian had revered its design. He shielded his eyes from the sky and saw the archers up top--knights of Kosmos that set aside their bows and saluted him, all waves and familiar smiles. With haste they made to wind open the great gate.
    He nigh on blushed; exclusive as Kosmos remained, certainly no lounge arena for nobles or happenstance travelers, he, the Prince of Aeonika, needed no seal of entry or signature to traverse its land. Heavenly Kosmos, it's been too long.
    The gate dragged open, stirring up dust clouds. His heart quickened at the sight of high white marble walls and the profusion of citrus trees and blossoms spilling over them. Ah, the City of Angels.
    The crowds inside were fervent today. Pageants and games, cheers and winner's bells. He patted down his mantle again. Four armored sentinels prostrated on their knees in the dirt and blocked him from immediate entry.
    "Please rise," said Astrian. "The day is holy."
    Brow to the earth, one said, "Welcome to Kosmos, Lord of Priests. His Majesty anticipates your arrival." Another followed with, "Your Majesty Prince Zend, the Midsummer Festival awaits."
    Yes, Prince and Lord of Priests, but not here, not in Kosmos. All haste, he reflected their greetings, accepted another round from the ones high upon the ramparts, and made inside.
    The square teemed with a myriad of dancers and the skirl of pipe music, every walkway impeded by kiosk games or stations of sweet cakes and ale. Taurian Way stretched a good three miles from the rampart gate to the one before Shrine Palace Kosmos. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the walk through the cavernous tunnel of oaks. In spite of the darkness, street lanterns burned constantly for all its brothels, taverns, and mystic merchants. Adventure for the taking was the phrase he liked to use. Adventure was inevitable between the witch-scholar cults and their unscrupulous motives.
    Beneath the hood of his mantle the lanterns lit his eyes, which startled onlookers, especially those who had never seen him in firelight before. He quickened his pace and looked at no one longer than necessary.
    Although he often traveled anonymously to Kosmos by merchant carriage, he always went unescorted, thus Kosmoans whispered and raised brows. Hard to blame them. People of such beauty and affluence seldom had anything better to do than talk. His was simply a famous face, and no other details were needed; he could infiltrate their minds with this if he desired it.
    Children at play recognized him amid the crowd by his white fur mantle. Their shrill voices needled him.
    "Hi ho, Sir Knight!"
    "Look, the black scabbard--he's got the hero blade!"
    "Luccus's brother says normal people can't lift the tip off the ground!"
    "Lord Zend, can I try to lift it later on?"
    "Aye, and me!"
    "Bah, it ain't luck that lifts it, you prigs!" Rain of laughter and jest.
    He dropped his hood and the children collectively gasped. He uttered polite hellos, grasped hand after little hand. A peasant child emerged from the horde, the only one dressed in rags, the only one to prostrate before him.
    "The day is holy, thus none need kneel," he said.
    She rose and extended an arm. There was something cradled in the cup of her palm. She beckoned him to catch. "A gift for my Lord." The smile plumped her ruddy cheeks.
Quite the well-mannered little thing, wasn't she, no older than six or seven winters. Children
unsettled him. They always had. Even as a child he'd loathed others--and his own childish stature--until adolescence. Since, he'd tolerated them with skeptical curiosity, the kind one donned when observing a rodent trapped in a maze.
    He knelt and looked inside her palm.
    She grinned at his gasp.
    "Golden feathers," he said. "Tell me, which Darkland fowl flights on such wings?"
    "They liken too pretty, my Lord, aye? Maybe," she sang the word, "not from this world." She wore a crown of purple blossoms that was luminous compared to her drab clothes. It drooped toward one ear when she bent closer. "I found these outside the Shrine Palace Garden this morning. I saw his Majesty the Moon King through the bushes." She held the flower crown in place. Closer, she whispered, "He was standing with a very pretty boy." She had a lisp. He saw the cause, two teeth amiss from the bottom row.
    He arched a brow. "Did you know him?"
    She shook her head with alacrity. Her auburn tresses dusted her cheeks, and the flower crown slid to the other ear. She adjusted it absently. "Never have I seen such a one as him. His soul stretched to the heavens, and, and!" Her eyes whitened around the brilliant blue irises. "All his hair was wrapped in silver cloth."
    He dropped his gaze to the feathers. They looked fresh plucked from something extraordinary. "A boy, you say."
    "Aye; I know because," she inclined confidentially and whispered, "I saw his dangly man-thing."
    Man-thing. He held his breath against a laugh. How she had seen it, he was not prepared to ask.
    He accepted the feathers, four, each a thumb's length. Upon closer inspection, the soft gold strands appeared oily. Ah--the sheen was not oil, but dust. It already coated the sweaty skin of his palm. They smelled burnt for all they appeared flawless, no fringe blackened or wilted. Burnt. Sulfur and incantation.
    "Put them in this." She proffered a pocket-box lined with indigo cloth. Silver trim made it
elegant. "Grandmee made it. She sees wandering souls--the beings his Majesty the Moon King calls ephemerae?"
    He felt it necessary to nod at her expectant look.
    "Grandmee is a seer. She says whatever goes inside you'll be linked to forever." Her eyes were wide, arm outstretched. The box waited.
    Witch-scholars, thought Astrian. Darkland had boiled over into other countries with them;
perhaps unto the entire world. Certainly, in this region of the island, Aeonikans were rare and afraid amongst Druids. Not him.
    He closed the feathers inside the box and pocketed it with a smile for the child. "You honor me this, milady. Near to my heart I stow it." He winked at her and rose. Her abrupt grin warmed the pit of his stomach.
    He dipped into her thoughts and found nothing of interest. Such was innocence, perhaps. Children oft were; the very young ones anyway. It was useless to lurk among their thoughts when they offered them. You're not scary as Grandmee warned, but kind and beautiful, even if you are from a place as bad as the Empire of Aeonika.
    He phased her out in sad disagreement. He was indeed scary. And Aeonika is not bad so much as doomed.
    Astrian strode onward. Breezes encouraged his hair to lash around him. It was so unusual in color he'd grown used to the comments, especially when he visited Kosmos where his priestly designation earned curious, tactless remarks. His eyes were the same rare metallic hue. Stark and unapproachable, he suspected. He liked that about himself. He was a feared man of God back home. Not that it weighed him down.
    Unlike the witch-scholars of Kosmos, he practiced his faith not for harvests and revelry, but to cultivate stoic discipline, an exertion that detached him from corporeal whims. His youth had revolved around sinners and sufferers, around balancing the ever-wavering scale. Serious life for a child.
    The heels of his ceremonial boots landed in grass as the pave-way came to an end. His gaze settled on the skies, pink and blue with scattered gilded clouds. How he loved the sunset horizon. The true festivities would begin at dusk.
    Kosmoan summers were always perfect, he marveled, time for celebrations. Grass grew tall enough to sway, and orchard heights shaded hidden lakes; there within, village boys rampaged and laughed until sundown, sparring with cedar swords in lieu of daylight chores. Maidens tapped their drums and sang of holy oak groves while the wind carried cherry blossoms.
    Kosmos; his heart whispered it.
    Beneath the arched vaults of Taurian Bridge, children waddled after white swans in the water. Astrian passed over the moss-fettered stone bridge, squeals and splashes beneath him.
    They echoed throughout the fresh canals:
    "You're it, Gowainn, you're the demon now!"
    "No fair, Tarkus, I scraped my knee!"
    Children of the Aeonikan Empire were significantly different, less heard and much less seen. Astrian couldn't remember any childhood companions or heartfelt moments before meeting the God-King of Kosmos.
    A flock of bats churned the lavender skies overhead. Their black silhouettes streaked here and there, faster and more daring than birds. The God-King of Kosmos had once told Astrian that meant weather would continue to be fair. Four more moons until the wintry Solstice, he thought, when the sun transcended the celestial equator and bestowed the sparring hours of night and day fair equilibrium over the skies. The longest night. Kosmoans called it the Sum of All Eves, whereupon merry, gratuitous indiscretions took effect. Hence, the reason harvest festivals were most sensual and high priests in attendance most fervent.
    Astrian celebrated the hiatus in his tutoring, and bid a cheerful farewell to such distractions. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy his tutors. He loved them as individuals and respected their philosophies and theories. His had simply excelled beyond theirs.
    "The bodily remains such a bore." Memorable words to Astrian from the God-King, the man responsible for Astrian's prying onto elevated levels of wisdom, the most seductive creature on the earth. Astrian had personalized the phrase to portray his lust for adventure. That a mere few words could affirm his desire to shove beyond the draperies of Aeonikan priesthood, beyond the bodily and the ordinary--for deep down inside he knew himself to be aught but ordinary--Astrian sinned time and again to visit the man who had spoken them.
    "You can style a righteous soul and still taste the apple and love the woman and seek the glory," so said Nodora Kanaan Kosmos, God-King of Darkland. Known to the world as the Moon King and to witch-scholars as the All-Father, he had invited Astrian to attend the Midsummer Festival.
    He had lectured Astrian that the One God affronted human nature to bid His priests to forswear worldly desires--in particular, the pursuit of wisdom. He implored that Astrian practice with the secret fire at his fingertips, and Astrian had honed it and learned when to apply it. But never did Astrian, Lord of the One God priests, violate his oaths.
    Once, the God-King and Astrian stood in the Shrine Palace's museion before gleaming
astronomy instruments and a miniature system of planets. To Astrian's ceaseless questioning, the God-King had elucidated answers about the trio of planets--Gaia, Yetzirah, and Theia.
    "The study of the cosmos, the Godward Sea some call it, has much to do with the philosophies I share with my Druids. Yetzirah observed Gaia as she formed, before Theia knew of her and before Earthiankind sprouted the foam to walk her sands. Yetzirah observed as one vast Earthian continent divided into many, which was noted as like Yetzirah in her adolescence.
    "Pan and Gaea are Yetziraelite names. They also happen to be Greek names. Combined they describe the solitary mass of Earthian land that emerged from the volcanic chaos, Pan-Gaea: Pan meaning 'all' and Gaea meaning 'lands.' All lands as one."
    "Or all one," Astrian had supplied with a nod.
    "Indeed." A cool shift in his gaze, then the God-King had said, "Yetzirah studied this world to further her own progression. When Earthian men were rare, had no names for themselves, and scrounged about the land on all fours--Yetzirah watched. They did not enter the atmosphere of Gaia the blue star, volatile as she was. They waited; charted zodiacal patterns; made predictions and saw them come true.
    "Here," the God-King said, "see these small phallic stones I've erected like a stonehenge, and these two mirrors and this lantern I've aligned? You see, Gaia's seasons can be predicted by precise equations based upon the phases of her sun and her moon. Circles, it is all about circles. Look here--Yetziraelites call this a watch, as it watches the time for you." He had grinned. "See? It moves in a circle. 'Twas my father's, may he rest in bliss. Will you don it? Yes, on your wrist."
    Astrian had concealed it from his own proteges--Aeonikans, the sect of Theians that
transmigrated to Gaia under Betheia Aeonika's regime.
    "Circles contain magick," the God-King had said, "and magick has bestowed prosperity upon my Druids in a dark land riddled with mist and moss."
    Astrian had said, grimly, "The circles surround about the Empire of Aeonika are disassembled and used for reconstruction, and naught but three things stain our parchment: The Righteous Book of Priests, languages for study, and thousands upon thousands of monetary collections."
    "Well, then; perhaps," the God-King had grinned, "you should study my circles, and with the magick therein, raise your Empire's majority out of poverty."
    Of course the God-King's logic had crossed Astrian's mind before. Dark logic it was; yet logic all the same.

***

A SPECIAL NOTE: Chapter 2 is apparently banned by Wattpad, so you can find it here, on my blog:

https://lipsonthewhistle.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/banned-book-chapter-what-wattpad-does-not-apparently-want-you-to-see/