~The Demon Lord~ Chapter IV Part 2
Posted September 28th, 2011 by sigfig
 | by
Sagar in new jersey |
Adevar and Alex had stepped through an elliptical, rippling Door in space and reappeared in an obscure café, much to the surprise of Jonathan Maya, the shop’s plump owner. The bearded man stared at Adevar’s folded wings. Adevar grinned widely, and Mr. Maya stepped back a few feet.
“Do you happen to have a large basement or other storage area that we can rent?” Adevar spoke in a sugared tone, perhaps rather too sweetly.
Jonathan shook his head promptly and vigorously, like a hound drying itself off. Adevar smiled calmly and pointed to a grey door to the right. Jonathan, crestfallen, strode over, making a point to pout and look as reluctant as possible, and opened the door for them. The duo stepped through and Adevar closed the door from the inside, after making a few hand gestures in the air. Jonathan went back to his counter and acted like nothing had happened.
Alex poked the angel in the shoulder. Adevar continued walking unresponsively. Alex poked him again. The angel spun around, quite annoyed, and said “Will you stop that, it really makes my left pectoral wing muscle quite sore!”
Frustrated, Alex blurted out his question. “Won’t he be telling people that he has an angel in his basement?”
“No, little child, he won’t. I used a calming charm on him when we arrived, a suggestion charm, and then a selective forgetting gesture.”
Alex was intrigued, but he buried his fascination and kept a stone face. “I’m not a child, I’ll be an adult in less than three years!”
Adevar stopped, his eyebrows raised and arched. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“I am four thousand nine hundred and twenty three, and I am still considered an adolescent by many.”
Alex opened his mouth for a retort, but discovered that he was devoid of one, and promptly closed it, setting his jaw and walking forward furiously. Adevar looked at him.
“You’re walking like an ostrich.”
Alex glared at him and continued on.
“Bawk-ba-kawk! Sorry, that’s a chicken. My bad.”
Alex gritted his teeth and came to a halt abruptly when he entered an enormous storage area, about four times as large as the school gym. The sight came so suddenly that he almost tripped over his own feet, and managed to stabilize himself by grabbing hold of one of the many stacks of food – mostly pizzas and flatbreads – that were standing in the room. It seemed to be a large freezer, but Adevar entered shortly after, surveying the room with enthusiasm dripping from lips, and waved off the cooling system.
“Perfect.” He uttered the word slowly, in a whisper, as if he was relishing each individual phoneme. “But first, we’ll have to move these pizza boxes to the side. That’s your job.”
Alex raised his voice in protest, but Adevar waved him off and interrupted. “I never said you had to do it manually.”
This suggestive statement was followed by a much clearer series of gestures by Adevar, and three of the stacks of boxes near the far right of the room slid towards the edges. Alex couldn’t help but smile, a fleeting grin, and attempt it himself.
He waved his hand emphatically, and absolutely nothing happened. Frustrated, he continued making bizarre gestures – with Adevar cringing in the backdrop – and achieving nothing but a rather sore wrist. Frustrated, he set out and moved the boxes by hand, forcing his hungry stomach to ignore the cheesy aromas wafting from the food items. Twenty minutes and 27 beads of sweat later, the room was clear. Adevar grinned at the boy and admonished him.
“Impatience will get you nowhere with your powers, Alex. You must concentrate. Place your entire mental energy on the boxes and use it to your advantage. The mind is a powerful tool.” Adevar made a great show of crinkling his eyebrows and staring intently at the boxes, and such exertion made his eyes pop out, and the startling end result was what looked like a hypnotized angel. Alex chuckled slightly, and attempted once more, focusing his full concentration on one box. To his surprise, the box whipped through the air and swiftly collided with his stomach. Alex’s groaning figure lay slumped on the left wall.
Adevar sighed and spoke again, “‘Magic’ shares four of its five letters with ‘imagination.’ Imagine it, and you can make it happen.” The last words was punctuated with the appearance of a large ice cream cone in Adevar’s hands, which he proceeded to wolf down as Alex bombarded him with glares.
“You know an anagram of ‘magic power?’”
Alex shook his head, and crinkled his eyebrows ever so slightly.
“Epigram cow”
Alex found it difficult to respond to that statement. “What… on earth does that have to do with ‘imagination?’”
“Hmm… nothing I guess… nothing. Carry on.”
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A gradually decaying lectern of coarsely cut elder wood creaked under the weight of the leather-bound book that rested on it, almost as if it were collapsing under the burden of such furtive knowledge. Spatters of black studded its face, specks that outsiders might believe to be spilled ink. Spliceheart, who was caressing his sheared kneecap approximately five feet away, would contest that presumption heatedly. The creature that he was, his body temperature was naturally several degrees Fahrenheit above that of humans, settling at a normal point of about one sixty-five. At the present moment, however, his insides churned in infernal agony, almost breaching the two hundred mark, and he curled his cracked lips as a murky teardrop was restrained to the corner of his eye. He quickly gulped down water from a crude copper cup and returned to his feverish reverie.
Trauma has strange effects on a creature’s mind. People have emerged from high-stress situations with the memories of them burned into their minds. Spliceheart’s mind must have decided that the present moment (sitting in an abandoned town hall lit with Yankee candles and covered in drops of black) was not a particularly interesting time to document, and so it flashed back to a memory that was deeper engraved:
A fledging child stood grinning at the side of a shallow-cut staircase holding up mangled scrap of clay with a contented look on his face. His mother was preoccupied with the pressing job of reading a popular magazine (a certain publication by a war-mongering group, it was titled “Genus electus”) and he was left standing mid-laugh with his marvelous creation held loosely in his hand; still, he persevered.
“Look mommy, it’s a sword!”
The mother frowned at this and her onyx horns perked up.
“You know I don’t like you making those things, Ithril.”
A deeper voice called out from the yard, an impish note garnishing its phrase:
“Oh it’s all your fault Mythil, you’ve really got to stop reading those jingoistic magazines… they’re just getting rich by playing with your emotions.”
The mother, Mythil, responded with a hum of playful indignation and buried her horns in the scribbles of text.
Ithril was somewhat dismayed, but his attention quickly diverted to a band of glowing specks in distance, rising above the horizon with an intensity that even the sun’s bold rays could not overcome. The rising stars burned into Ithril’s eyes until he could look no more and even when he turned away and closed his lepidote eyelids the vision seared his mind, and all he saw in the midst of the great blindness was the empyrean shape of seven points of light, arranged in a perfect polygon, rising in the sky. As the shapes got closer, their piercing glow dulled in intensity just enough to reveal the creatures underneath, great white winged creatures, with divine ferocity in their golden eyes.
At the front of the faction was one such creature that burned brighter than the others. His eyes held a superlative expression, something beyond plain haughty indifference. He held the spear in his hand, white wood fashioned with a tip that burned with silver liquid that radiated the heat of some molten metal, with a strictly business-like attitude, and stared down upon the village as if it was a colony of rather meaningless insects.
An Inyv flew out of his house, flapping his newly acquired leathery wings with the proud gracelessness that only an adolescent could possess; possibly he was showing off his stunning boldness to the Edi family that lived across from him. In either case, his black wings were soon covered with dark soot, and even darker blood, as the flying creature behind and to the right of the leader sent a blinding dart of light at him, a glasslike shard that spun rapidly in the air, as if intending to tear apart the fabric of space itself. The divine weapon, the infernal weapon, slid neatly into the Inyv’s chest, whereupon he assumed a visage of unbridled shock, as is warranted by the next few seconds when the shard of light burst through every orifice in his body, leaving but smoldering remains on the dirt.
A maternal shriek bore through the neighboring house, followed by the low, tense mutterings of communal protest. All the families in the village stepped outside of their dwellings, but cautiously stayed within a few meters of their respective homes.
“Who are you and what have you come for?” A middle-aged male of the Koni class perked up, the authoritative note of his voice demeaned by the audible crack of fear that tore through it “And why did you kill poor Eldún?”
The creature that flew at the helm of the celestial faction announced the following sentences with evident boredom, as if he were reciting a trite and overused statement, “Being demons, you are at home in your own celestial plane. You have no right to interfere in human matters. By bulding this settlement on the obscure island of Carranaught, you have stepped into the jurisdiction of us angels and have defiled this earth. Furthermore, you are demons and, consequently, abominations.”
He savored the next sentence with a predatory passion, “We are here to relieve the world of your obscene existence.”
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Amazing.
I'm so mean, I'm nice~myself
Sagar, you are a wonderful writer! Your stories flow together so well, and I'm very pleased that your characters actually have personality and aren't just... plain like a lot of people's are. The first few conversations made me smile quite a few times, to be honest. You have a very strong and unique voice within your stories, and your description is so creative and well-worded that I can literally see pictures within my mind when I read stuff by you.The words you use are amazing, I seriously added a few new words to my vocabulary just by reading this. I wish more author's were like you when they wrote, and made their descriptions more in-depth and not just like "The boy walked down the street". Don't hate me for this, I really looked all over the place, but I can't find anything to give you CC on. I'm serious! I really wish I could, but it's hard to give CC to people of higher writing statuses than myself. Your grammar, from what I can see, is very good, and everything else... is just awesome. I dunno TT_TT. Sorry for my lack of CC today, I'm kinda failing.
Well anyways, respect man respect! It's people like you that I'm really happy to be able to read stories by!
This is awesome! I love your descriptions!
Come on everyone! Comment on at least five stories every time you go on! WE NEED THEM!!!!
“You know an anagram of ‘magic power?’”
Alex shook his head, and crinkled his eyebrows ever so slightly.
“Epigram cow”
^That's my favorite part. Hilarious. :D Although you forgot the puncuation after "cow".
This story, along with your unique and spectacular writing style, is amazing. I love how the story is so serious, chock full of (calories? :P) vivid descriptions and dialogue, yet you manage to weave humor into it, too. Great job.
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Elementalist or Sorcerer? That's for YOU to decide...:D.
Swap for http://www.kidpub.com/book-page-or-chapter/serenity-part-one-796113168 ?
Elementalist or Sorcerer? That's for YOU to decide...:D.
This is awesome! The conversation between Alex and Adevar sounds realistic, and the description is really detailed and interesting.
Some of the way the sentences are worded, in the first section, is a bit awkward, though. It's good to have sentences with a lot of information, but sometimes it's better to leave a bit out. For example, in "the angel spun around, quite annoyed," you could leave out the 'quite annoyed' part, because it's obvious from what he says that he's annoyed. And sometimes, rather than putting creative ways and describing all a person's expressions, just 'said' is good. It draws more attention to the diologue that should be being focused on.
I really like it :) The end sentence makes you want to read more.
Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge. ~Isaac Friedmann
So I guess I'm commenting on this > two months after it's been posted... meh. KP mainsite should give users the ability to 'follow'/subscribe to stories and have a notification system.
I like this chapter. Two CC notes and then more about how good it is ;p
You missed the first 'i' in the word 'building' in the second sentence (third line) of the second to last paragraph.
If I'm gonna be brutally honest, there are parts in the first segment that seem somewhat forced. [Oddly enough, the "anagram of magic power" part was probably one of the most naturally flowing part to read (in the first segment)] The why of that isn't simple to pinpoint; just stuff like Adevar being completely calm and smiley one second (I know, I know, magic and goodness, but...) and then angered by two pokes from a kid in the next... and making chicken noises. On the whole, it just seems like you're forcing your way through the standard 'and now, young padawan, we shall train you in a conveniently if oddly secure area so that you will be prepared to face the dark side' and of course, that segment isn't disposable since it'd be illogical to have Alex just be all "OK saw you use magic junk for like three seconds, now I'm ready to save the world!" but that doesn't take away from the unnatural flow of the first segment.
That being said, the second segment was a very enjoyable read. I especially like the part before the flashback, it's yet another great interest hook, the writing is excellent, and it flows smoothly. Now I want to read the next chapter not just to find out what happened with Karael but also to read more about this guy. This is a great story; I only included the blunt above paragraph because you've yet to be offended by my opinion. Let me know when the next chapter comes out please! :D
Every person's life is a fairytale written by God's fingers ~ Hans Christian Anderson