Tentative Title: Echoes of Empire
Prologue:
The Princess Mariss du’Aldra looked coldly at her former advisor cowering on the floor of the dank dungeon that had been his home for the past three weeks. “Did you really think you could get away with this, you pathetic worm?” she hissed. “Did you?” she suddenly screamed and raised the barbed whip in her right hand high above her head. “You think the Heir that much a fool?”
“Please, please, please” babbled the broken shell of a man, tugging uselessly against the iron links chaining him to the cold stone wall, “no more, please!”
“Where did you send it? This, this… sick echo of my magnificence? Tell me where!” demanded the princess, bringing the whip whistling down on his bleeding back once more. “My spies say you were behind this abomination, this other… me! We will crush this conspiracy! We will grind the bones of you all into paste to paint the walls of my throne room” she screamed. The whip lashed out again and again, leaving bloody trails spattered across the walls and floor.
“The Family du’Aldra is feared across the entire world! As We rightfully should be! Fool!”
White bone gleamed in the shoulders and face of the gibbering man as he tried desperately to jerk away from the flailing leather lash. The cruelly hooked metal barbs tore through skin and muscle as the silver-haired woman punctuated each sentence with vicious strength.
“There is only power! Power is all that matters, you fool. Terror is all that you deserve! Goodness? Decency? Are nothing compared to the glory of the empire and We are the empire!” She scarcely noticed the pathetic whimpering from the bloody lump at her feet fade into silence. “We shall never be replaced by some pathetic, sniveling, weak semblance of Us!” Panting from her exertions, she threw the whip at one of the guards standing beside her and whirled upon a slim man clad in black with the deep sapphire accents that marked him as part of the royal household. leaning against edge of the door to the cell. “And what do you have to say for yourself, Inquisitor Yaer?”
“The same as I told you before you came here, my Princess” he replied slowly. “The drugs and machines are not infallible, but they seldom miss anything of consequence.” He slipped his right hand inside the flaring sleeve of the opposite arm and white light spread across the ceiling. “These archaic trappings and methods, on the other hand, are unreliable at best. Which you are well aware of.”
The Princess glared at his expressionless face, blue eyes clashing with black, for a long moment. Then a smile crept across her lips and she motioned for the cell door to be opened. The low hum of the force cage reinforcing the metal bars died away and the door swung soundlessly open. Four members of her elite guard waited outside the door, spreading out around her as she strode easily through the doorway and out into the hall. Inquisitor Yaer fell into step to her right and just behind her but outside the box formed by the four silent Imperial Guardsmen.
“Oh, I got what I wanted, Inquisitor.”
“But he said nothing I had not already told you.”
“So?” she replied, her liquid laughter echoing from the stark walls.
Copyright © 2007, All Rights Reserved.
Author: D. D. Wolf | Category: D. D. Wolf, Sci-Fi | Comments(0) July 2007