RISE

3 - Ceremony and Reception

Author's Note:

Here I've included an illustration I did way at the beginning of starting to write this story. It took me eleven months to write, so this picture is pretty old, I might try to make a better image of her later.

~*~*~

"I apologize for the wait," the Queen said in a calm, regal voice that echoed off the walls and shook Aaron to his core. Aaron recognized her instantly as the monster that had plagued his dreams since he was a child, but seeing her in this clarity left him speechless.

She was extremely tall, with dark red horns spiraling out of the top of her head, a long tail that whipped menacingly behind her, and a pair of enormous batwings protruding from her back. Her irises were a sparkling ruby red, and her skin was a pale grayish pink. Her hair was silvery white, hanging straight around her shoulders like a veil, a few locks lifted by a breeze that showed its length nearly to the floor. Her black lips parted in a smile to reveal a pair of long, white fangs.

"It was a surprisingly difficult choice. I was quite impressed by your cousins. I had to ask my son's opinion. He was quick to choose you. This should please you."

Aaron took a gasping breath, overwhelmed by terror, and tears spilled over his eyes.

The Queen smiled ruefully at him, tilting her head in false sympathy. "It must be quite a shock. No mortal has ever beheld my form. Even to your ancestor, Octavius Knight, I concealed my true form. Not to worry, you'll grow accustomed soon enough. You will be bound to my son this evening. Until then, my attendants will clean and dress you. Mind that you do as you're told. Rebellion will not be tolerated, and you'll find that the punishments here are quite severe."

The Queen took a step backwards and then sat on an enormous marble throne. Aaron was able to realize that he was standing in a cold, dark chamber of stone, with no apparent lights or flames but somehow illuminated except for several corridors that were pitch black. Before he could think too long, he was approached by three creatures that were clearly demons, much shorter than their queen and with variation in color and style of their horns, wings, and tails. They turned him to a side corridor and guided him through it.

Aaron spent the next several hours being cleaned and dressed by these three attendants. He was too distraught to speak and only cried. The attendants spoke to each other in a language he didn't understand, and appeared frustrated by his constant tears that they wiped away with a silky cloth. It was a while before he was even able to form coherent thoughts, and finally started wondering what was going to happen to him. This "binding" ceremony sounded like he might be enslaved, as he'd suspected.

As horrifying as that prospect was, Aaron's greatest fear is that he will be sacrificed in a particular nature. He'd always had an irrational fear of being eaten, but he considered it a silly thing to worry about considering the probability of being cannibalized was negligible, but suddenly it seemed much more of a possibility. He kept having flashes of an imagined scenario of a demon swallowing him whole (better than the alternative) while a crowd of demons screamed and cheered.

Aaron had just been thinking about how torturous it was for them to force him to wait all this time before he learned of his fate, when he was brought in front of a thick velvet curtain, dressed in an elegant but revealing robe that was unfamiliar to Aaron but seemed to be a more formal type of the style that the attendants were wearing. Suddenly, Aaron wished that he was still being dressed up.

The attendants left him and the curtains opened. In front of him was a pantheon made of the same dark stone as the rest of what he had seen so far of - Hell? The Underworld? Wherever he was. It reminded him of concerts he'd been to; rows upon rows of tiered seats filled with thousands of demons, funneling down to a flat center where Aaron could see three much taller demons, one of which was clearly the Queen, recognizable even from this distance. The strangest thing about this was the complete silence. There were no conversations, quiet murmurs, or even the familiar rustling of restless people shifting around. The demons could have been stone statues for all the noise they made. And they all stared directly at him.