The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART NINE

"The darkest of the Beautiful Ones has descended from its kingdom within the Space-Beyond-the-Heavens to walk amongst our kind and it hates us. It has always hated our kind. The Beautiful Ones, who are so cold and so impassive, think we are deserving of the catastrophe that is draining the life from our world. But this One, the Thinker, the Schemer, the One Who Haunts our Dreams, is the one who despises us most of all. Yet of all the Beautiful Ones, it is he who is most like us, he who shares so many of our hungers and most clandestine passions. Of all the Beautiful, he is the ugliest, but he hides his villainy behind a mask of logic and fair-mindedness. He would take from us our history, our accomplishments, our legacy and our hopes for tomorrow. And he would replace those virtues with pain and blood.

Bur'heddam is doomed..."

This was what the Foreknown, the monastic and eremitic psychic prognosticators who dwelled among the inhabitants of Bur'heddam, had told her following one of their cryptic oracular sessions in the Hall of Science. They had a tradition of being tight-lipped and reluctant to share their visions with the city's political and military hierarchy, but were compelled to do so when they felt the threat to the city and its people was undeniable.

Her frustration had reached a level she'd never before experienced, driving her already explosive, aggressive temperament into overdrive.

She was Dame Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of Neza'Tefral, High Scion of the Emperium, and daughter to Mikketh Cleriq Forjhane, Hero of the Uprising. She was educated, she was intelligent, she was a planner and a schemer and she was anything but timid in her ambitions. She usually got whatever it was she wanted however it was she wanted it done. The fact that her plans to shame and humiliate the ambassadorial contingent visiting in faraway Annet Galjeshir, a backwater community of outlaws, merchants, prostitutes and tinkering gadgeteers at the edge of a glorious spaceport like Dre'Zaresch, had completely failed defied belief. Such things did not happen to her.

She thoughtfully examined her reflection in the ornate, gilded full-length mirror in her stateroom.Dressed in a form-fitting, gold sheath gown with a beaded neckline, she was above average height for a woman, possessing a slender but athletic build and possessed of the proud, erect carriage of someone from her class and bloodline. Her unblemished flesh was a subtle pale rose color and still held the bloom of youth despite the fact she'd seen over forty orbital seasons of time pass. Her facial features were aristocratic and aquiline, her nose delicate, but her jawline strong, and her piercing emerald green eyes glittered like electrically-charged jewels under arching gull's wing eyebrows. Her thick, wavy hair was worn long, down past her shoulder blades, and it was a light auburn color streaked with undulating patches of honey-blonde.

Only her mouth, hidden under an artfully-designed, leather and gauze half-face respirator mask that was embroidered with small white jewel stones, marred her undeniable beauty.

She wore such a mask because she'd been born with feathered gills instead of human lungs. The gills, which were nascent, germinal slash-like openings on either side of her throat, didn't actually work, and could not allow her to breathe water. Rather, the gills filtered some more exotic elements in the Oxygen family, called chalcogens -- chemical elements consisting of Sulfur, Selenium, Tellurium, and the radioactive element Polonium -- that her body could not tolerate from the atmosphere of oxygen around her. Chalcogens in small amounts were elements in gaseous suspension that most mammalian humanoids could tolerate in their air. She could not. They were deadly to her. The mask prevented her extreme allergies from activating since her normal human nasal passages did not possess the filtering she needed, causing her mucous membranes to bleed copiously, without ever clotting, on exposure to air.