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Princess Senux and The Half-Sun Leviathan

THE LIBRARY OF FLIGHTS

ARCHANIOL CODEX K, WHITE CHAPTER, PASSAGE 0-1010

-)(-ON THE KINGDOM OF SENUX’S LAST REMAINS-)(-

Cults of worship dedicated to the Half-Sun Leviathan inevitably appear in the settlements and villages of Kolcawtha when the creature’s location becomes a seven day ride from them.

If it wanders away, the cults fall into hysterical dogma before vanishing.

If it lurches closer, they feel the deepest sadness they’ve ever known as their nature becomes reality.

RECORDER: ARCHANIOL WATCHER QY-LIUN

***

“You are a malevolent god,” Princess Senux said under her breath. She gazed to the west from an ice shelf overlooking the frozen wasteland of Kolcawtha’s northern shores. Her figure—topped with a horned helm and clad in black onyx armor—cut a shadowy figure against the inescapably white landscape.

As Princess Senux began her flight, the end of her kingdom felt more gratifying than reflecting on the cause of its downfall.

She held onto her opal trident with both hands. Her weather worn black armor rattled like wind chimes in the sharp, cold, and bitter wind. She struggled along frozen ice sheets. Snowflakes blew across her vision, blessing the flat, white beach and low cliffs with the essence of dream.

Princess Senux rose in her tent and emerged from its flaps. She put out her campfire and struck her tent without giving regard or acknowledgement to the phenomenon on the western horizon.

The sun rose and became a semi-circle on the final edge of land, casting its faint warmth in long streaks of light over the wintery coast. Against the semi-sun’s hazy orange glow a colossal being rose from its slumber. It puffed out its human-shaped torso and stretched its massive arms towards the dark, navy sky above the dawn. The Half-Sun Leviathan held its face in its hands and shook violently, swinging about the many horns protruding vertically from its skull. It stretched its multiple arachnid legs with restless mania. Continuing its daybreak ritual, it slowed its movement and stared at the earth with massive, white, oval eyes. Its shoulders rose and fell with deep, contemplative breaths. Ice curtains descended by mid-morning and howled as the sun rose to a higher altitude. Both these changes removed the distant monstrosity from sight, just as its legs began moving steadily and its form became slightly larger.

With her small camp repacked, Princess Senux again became a nomadic black shadow in the chilling quiet of snowy shores, freezing water, and ice flows blurring the border between the two. She continued walking away from the dawn, hoping she’d reach the fabled end of Kolcawtha and not a continuation back into sunrise. She prayed and pushed such concern from her mind, repeating to herself that she’d soon solve such vexations.

The Half-Sun Leviathan did not rage at the sky or move towards the Princess. It instead raised a fiery fist in the air and made hieroglyphic signs, but the Princess continued on her eastward path. The Leviathan hung its head (crowned with horns) and wept silent, molten tears before returning to the purpose bestowed on it by those who fled its eternal flame.

***

When evening set and plunged the cold shores of northern Kolcawtha into a subzero night, Princess Senux sat a dozen paces away from her campfire, staring into its glow until all else fell away from her sight. She bitterly remembered the feeling of a fire’s warm touch.

She allowed herself−in the cold, dark night−the luxury of removing her helmet and gloves so she might comfortably look upon her bluish, frozen flesh, all covered with patches of black frostbite.

She fell asleep outside her tent and woke the next morning in agony. The fire had died away into black ash, but the sun rose and the faint feeling of its warmth raked her exposed flesh with searing agony. She let out a short shriek before she flipped over and pressed her face and hands into the snow to her immediate relief. With her boot covered feet she pushed herself through the snow towards her discarded armor near the dead fire. When she adorned herself once more with the protection of her black armor she lay on her back and rested, letting the intensity of her breathing diminish. She closed her eyes and imagined once more being a child swaddled in a warm blanket, but such thoughts led her to commit the sin of lamenting the inescapable.

Even with little sleep, she began moving again.

***

Sometimes she felt a heaviness only lifted by a dream purge.

That night, she woke at midnight and stumbled out of her tent. Princess Senux stood under the moonlight on the milky frozen wastes. She removed her helmet while still clinging to the last bits of her dream before she lost them permanently. She pulled a rose crystal talisman from her pack and pressed it to her forehead where it absorbed the mythic elements of her hazy mind.

She convulsed soon after and dropped the talisman. Her dream of a ceremonial sword floating with foreboding in the corner of every room she stood in—a sword visible only to her— tormented her psyche. The memories of it flooded the forefront of her mind before a sharp scratching began burning her esophagus. She tilted her head back and straightened her throat. The sharp tip of a blade emerged from in between her lips, followed by its thin steel body and short, sapphire encrusted handle. It fully rose out of her mouth. It hovered over her head for a moment before it fell to the snowy ground and shattered into mist. Princess Senux hunched over momentarily before turning back to her camp. She returned to her tent.

***

After the next morning’s breakfast, she walked down to where the ice met the restless northern sea. She cut off a slab of ice with the sharp end of her trident, impaled it like a bale of hay and dragged it back to the site of her camp. She carved an image into the tablet of a ruined cathedral. She put an inscription below it. It read as follows:

“Let the sin be not forgotten

While its cause passes from mind.”

The Half-Sun Leviathan stayed perfectly still during its dawn window of visibility. It stared hard towards the Princess’s eastward path with its white, oval eyes pulsating.

***

Princess Senux came across the round top of a tower sticking out of the snow atop an imposing range of seaside cliffs and sheer ice. She realized the tower’s body lay encased within the frozen ice shelf. It once stood on its own, but it had long since been overtaken by the water freezing over and joining the land. She wondered if any undissolved ether parchment scrolls lay inside. The spectral forms of ancient scholars walked in circles on the tower’s round peak with their heads bowed. They took no notice of Princess Senux as she walked through them (they had matters of ether to occupy their ghostly minds) and descended into the tower. Her opal trident glittered and provided her with low light.

Inside the tower she found a spiral staircase running along the wall and twisting towards the tower’s base. Frozen bookshelves containing old volumes locked in solid ice lined the walls. Great booming percussions rang out from the shadowy bottom of the tower and shook the stairs.

Princess Senux—even with the sparkling of her trident—barely saw the large wooden desk on the other side of the bottom floor, behind which sat Wylar, the Last Librarian, his skeletal head hidden under a swarm of unidentifiable insects and his thin arms emerging from the folds of his rector’s robes. He stamped the ether parchment scrolls unrolled in front of him and giggled with a barely contained glee during moments when the Princess stumbled with dizziness each time he shook the tower by bringing the stamp down. She felt the floor beneath her spin. Finding herself thrown off balance and rapidly losing consciousness, she gave up on stealing a length of ether parchment, and slowly climbed back up to the surface.

***

Princess Senux next sought the minstrels of Vaelnyk Valley in the forgotten east (only knowing them from small mentions in old songs) in a last bid for the immortality of her lost kingdom. She hoped the minstrels might preserve the chronicle of her old dominion in a set of ballads that may transcend its material death.

Privately, she also hoped the omnipresence of the music in that valley might block out her memories of how she championed the final faith her people practiced, which rose in influence after the tragedy that transpired during the kingdom’s annual Day of Redemption, where all her high priests left the confessionals of their Cathedral and marched silently into the freezing north sea.

***

The faith Princess Senux championed advocated the construction of prayer towers facing the horizon where the Half-Sun Leviathan appeared during each dawn. The prayer towers became filled all day and night with subjects releasing thoughts from the deepest, most warped parts of themselves, transferring such thoughts to a being of greater immensity, perspective, and age than they were, who somehow survived and thrived alone in the unexplored lands past the western limit of Kolcawtha.

Those who confessed never shared the contents of their released thoughts with each other.

Several threw themselves from the towers, but these suicides were accepted as the inevitable few who could not comprehend The Half-Sun Leviathan, whose existence on the horizon became more real to the populace with each prayer they sent in its direction.

The sky over the kingdom grew inexplicably black during one particularly bright midday.

When it arrived, the Half-Sun Leviathan spoke in the language of the people’s prayers (and they filled their ears with wax to escape its deranged screams). It fulfilled the secret wishes of the Princess’s subjects (who fled into their catacombs as the beast carried out the slaughter each citizen wished on another). However, the tombs where they hid eventually cracked and caved in when the Leviathan manifested their repressed resentment of the sacred.

END