An Excerpt from a WIP: "The Morning Star"
This one's been floating around my head for several years now. It's been unfinished for the same amount of time. The idea of the Devil coming topside is not a new concept by any means, and plenty of people have done really interesting takes on it, but I figured I'd give it a whirl and see what I could come up with. For now, this is all I have, but I'm hoping to come across a unique take on the story soon.
…And there finally came a day when The Morning Star sat upon his earthly throne, full of ennui, bathed in malaise. For weeks he’d shuffled around his dark kingdom, every imaginable pleasure at his fingertips, but something was amiss. There was a hole within him darker than the corners of the kingdom’s deepest basement and he was at a loss as to how it should be filled.
The days and nights passed like normal; great feasts of rich foods spread out along tables that stretched for miles during the day. His minions and their guests sat at every place, some even daring to eat while sitting atop the table, consuming and imbibing to their heart’s content. Wine spilled, food fell to the floor, scraps and droplets hung from every chin and strip of clothing. And it pleased him to see them glory in the never-ending gluttony, their bellies full and their thirsts slaked upon command.
Long, languid orgies of the foulest order came about after the meals and lasted well into the next day (if they even stopped at all). The writhing of sweat-soaked bodies in firelight, limbs wrapped around limbs as the moans and screams of desire and pain echoed out through the chambers of the kingdom. It was not the limbs he liked watching most (though he enjoyed their serpentine-like movements in the dark), but the way the lips moved as pleasure escaped through elongated throats and died in the echoes of the air. It was the sound he drank in, the sound of flesh against flesh, the sound of teeth on skin, the wave of wetness that permeated the very nature of the room and made all things damp. And it pleased him to hear their darkest desires nurtured to bloom before him, but not nearly enough.
Was he not swaddled in perfect comfort, sitting on his oversized throne, a thing large enough to fit a man and a woman both on either side of him? Had the dark velour seat beneath him not conformed to fit his aged body in perfect harmony? Was the back not pillowed and indented with precision to his every whim? Had its golden gilding, inscribed along the arm rests and up along the backing, not been artistically rendered to show humanity’s greatest perversions in every minute detail?
He sighed, a pathetic sound that mingled strangely with the moaning of the writhing mass before him. With a gentle flick of his wrist, the copulating bodies disappeared, leaving the fire-lit room awash in dark and silence. They wouldn’t realize they had been moved to another chamber on the far side of the kingdom. And what would they care anyway, so wrapped up in the moment of tongue on skin on taste on sweat? To be immersed so deeply in the moment with one or several people…such a delight, a delicious taste of truth that so ensnared the mind and body fully.
So how could he, someone that could grant his own wishes and desires, feel the need for something…more than?
He sprawled out along his throne, laid his head against the pillows beside the armrest and snapped his fingers out into the dark. A black harp appeared in the center of the room, its strings plucked by invisible fingers. The notes of a slow dirge swelled within the room, filled the space with perfect solitude and mirrored his every passing thought.
A knock came on the chamber door. He smiled as Cassius entered, striding with purpose across the stone floor. Cassius, as close to a true friend and advisor as one can have down here, if one were to be honest about it. Strangely and fearlessly loyal with no worry of speaking bluntly to the Morning Star.
“Cassius.”
“Milord,” Cassius replied, nodding his head. “I see you have brought the harp out again.”
“Perceptive as always, dear Cassius. Will you be advising me again to put it away and focus on the more primal desires happening elsewhere in the kingdom? Or perhaps I should walk these vast halls, deep in thought, and find myself purposefully lost in their labyrinthine passages as if the answer to my troubled mind lay somewhere deep within?”
Cassius approached the throne and smiled. “Whatever seems to work for you.”
He rose from the throne, black silk pants billowing as he descended the steps onto the chamber floor. “And yet, nothing is working, Cassius. Therein is the problem. I can make a woman give in to the darkest desires that she would never allow herself to act upon of her own volition. I can will a man to break every conviction in a second those convictions it took him a lifetime to build up like so much brick and concrete within himself. I am Fate and Luck and Circumstance in one deity.”
“And…?”
The Morning Star raised his arms and spun slow in the middle of the room. “And I am unsatisfied, Cassius. I am wide awake eyes and wandering mind when the time for dreams arrives.
