Erotic Sensation (18+)

Master of Mankind

(Prologue)

The boy who would be king held his father's skull in his hands. He turned it slowly, running his fingertips across the contours of skinless bone. A thumb, still browned with field dirt, traced across the blunt ivory pegs of the gap-toothed death smile.

He lifted his eyes to the stone shelf where the other skulls sat in silent vigil. They stared into the hut's gloomy confines, their eyes replaced by smooth stones, their faces restored with the crude artistry of clay. It was the boy's place to remake his father's face in the same way, sculpting the familiar features with wet mud and slow swipes of a flint knife, then letting the skull bake dry in the high sun. The boy thought he might use sea shells for the eyes, if he could barter with the coastal traders for two that were smooth enough. He would do this soon. Such things were tradition. First he needed answers.

He turned the skull once more, circling his thumb around the ragged hole broken into the bone. He didn't need to close his eyes and meditate to know the truth. He didn't need to pray for his father's spirit to tell him what happened. He simply touched the hole in his father's head, and at once he knew. He saw the fall of the bronze knife from behind; he saw his father fall into the mud; he saw everything that had happened leading to this moment in time.

The boy who would be king rose from the floor of his family's burnt hut and walked out into the settlement, his father's skull clutched in one hand.

Mud-brick huts lined both sides of the river. The wheat-fields to the east were a patchwork sea of dark gold beneath the eye of the setting sun. The village was never truly quiet, even after the day's work was done. Families talked and laughed and fought. Dogs barked for attention and whined for food. The wind set the scrubland trees to singing, with the hiss of leaves and the creak of branches forming their eternal song. A ragged dog growled as the boy passed, yet fled yelping when he gave it no more than a glance. A carrion bird, hunchbacked and evil of eye, cried out above the village. A pack of other ragged children moved aside when he drew near, their ball game fading away and their eyes lowering.

His barefooted walk took him unerringly to the home of his father's brother. The man, darkened and hardened by his years in the fields, was sat outside the mud-brick hut, threading beads onto a string for his youngest daughter.

The boy's uncle uttered the sound that meant the boy's name. In response to this greeting, the boy held up his father's skull.

Decades after these events, citizens of even civilised and advanced cultures would often misunderstand exactly what a myocardial infarction was. The savage, constricting pain in the chest was due to blood no longer flowing cleanly through the heart's passages, causing harm to the myocardium tissue of the heart itself. Put simply, the core of a human being runs dry, trying to function with no oxygenated lubricant.

This happened to the boy's uncle when he set eyes upon the skull of his murdered brother.

The boy who would be king watched with neither remorse nor any particular hostility. He looked on as his uncle slid from his crouch onto the mud, clutching at his treacherous chest. He watched as his uncle's sun-darkened features pinched closed, ugly and tight in supreme agony as the older man shook with the onset of convulsions. He saw the necklace slip from his uncle's grip, the necklace that was being made for his young cousin, and would now never be finished.

Others came running. They shouted. They cried. They made the noises of language that spoke of panic and sorrow in a german tongue that would come to be known as an early precursor to the Civitas dialect.

The boy walked away, heading back towards his family's hut. On the way, he turned to the figure - the giant - clad in gold who walked nearby. Zandium's tattoos curled on the towering warrior's face, curling from his temples to follow the curves of his cheekbones. The serpentine ink-curves, black against his pale flesh, ended upon his chin just beneath his mouth.