Die, Chingress, Then Love Again

Die, Chingress, Then Love Again

By

Carl Reader

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Carl Reader

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All characters in this novel are purely fictional. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Enmon

Chapter 1

The Impersator promised to torture me again if I returned to Earth. I had the unfinished business of killing him on my agenda, so I came back anyway. To return to those who did such things as he did to me is pure madness. Yet that is what I was doing, returning to the torture chambers of Earth. I had no fear of the pain I faced, since it would be the currency if his death, but I did fear the pain I remembered. Nothing can be as awful as the memory of pain, if you must forget the pain to come to achieve your aim. I forced my mind to plays tricks on me to make me do what I had to do, and I made light of the excruciating time ahead.

My torturers, the Impersator's men, feared me and invoked me as the Almighty, as well they might. They knew I had given them their immense power, and that I could take it away at will, but the Impersator had not been satisfied with the conquests made possible by my inventions and thus my first torture was necessary. They wanted to twist more of my knowledge out of me to bring about yet more deaths and mutilations. I would not have it. I told them nothing more to enhance their power during that first long agony, and I would say nothing to help them now. After they did their worst to me in that first session I killed them, or at least I killed as many leaders as I saw fit and as many of the inquisitors as I could. It came as quite a surprise to them to die at my hand as I lay bound on the floor of their torture chamber, a God burned nearly to dust, but it was cruel magic I worked. The Impersator, always slippery in his ways, escaped. I had to go back for him.

My first torture was well-deserved, so I permitted it - not for the reason they gave, to extract more knowledge from me to further their defeats of other worlds and other galaxies, but because I caused the unanswered deaths of millions. I should not have helped them when they said they needed assistance defending the human race. I should not have trusted them with the Plasmine that gave them reputation: obtaining all that power corrupted them beyond the bounds of even the old-styled human corruption. They were nothing before they had Plasmine and nothing without it, and nothing without my knowledge, but to watch as they used it to destroy the entire world of Piggsis dictated to me that I warranted the treatment I got at their hands. This was not defending humans: it was wanton mass murder. I am a guilty God, but to punish myself I would not have been able to mistreat myself as they did with such enthusiasm, so I left it to them. It went against my nature as a loving God to harm any good living thing, even myself, and my agonies had been so great they had been just.

Now I had to let them torture me again. It made me uneasy to recall the first time. Strangely, it upset me to recall the things they said to me.

Do you know where we can find our last living Chingress, oh great and grand Ruler of the Universe? was the sarcastic question they repeated to me over and over while they applied small, inert drops of my own invention to my flesh and I burned. Tell us if you've pulled some tricks to make her live again, and we will let you die as we thought she died when we burned her in Plasmine.

It was a question I would never answer, no matter how many holes they burned in me, no matter how far the Plasmine seared into my flesh, into my bones, into the Soul of God. The Chingress had to be protected at all costs, no matter what they did to me. My screams, those bone-shattering screams, were all they heard from me on the matter of the last Chingress, even as they prepared to pour the Plasmine into my eyes and threatened to inject it into my scrotum.

I have transformed worlds and made worlds for creatures of my design by using my knowledge – until none of those worlds or creatures in those worlds is recognizable as human. For that my guilt is infinite and eternal. Plasmine is the worst of my transformative substances ever used, but I have others that would make it seem a child’s toy. This they suspected, as they promised to burn out my eyes and brain if I did not speak of it and the Chingress. My knowledge is what they wanted, the knowledge with which they could immolate other billions of souls and become even more powerful. They wanted that and the death of the Chingress, for they heard rumors I had brought her back to life. It was not enough they could have their way anywhere they went, courtesy of my inventions against nature. It was not enough they had taken ultimate power from the Chingress. They thought Plasmine was the decisive substance of destruction, until the whispers spread from cowering planet to cowering planet that I knew of even more lethal methods to destroy worlds. Then they had to have the substances of those rumors, too, along with the once-again-living Chingress.

They had taken me one night as I slept. I had been resting in a place I knew they would find me, preparing for my first round of suffering. The cave was one of the green and golden caves of Thermopylae, where three hundred had died holding off the hordes of Asia. I awoke bound hand and foot, as I knew I would be when I fell asleep alone in that cold, dreary cave, the souls of dead Persians and Greeks all around me.

As soon as I was clear-headed, they proceeded with their torture.

At first, I begged for them to stop: it did no good. Then all I could do was scream in agony and crack my teeth and plot my revenge. It had been far worse than even I imagined it. On one bloody burned spot of my body after another – my thighs, my stomach, my arms, my shoulders, my ears – they applied the tiny yellow droplets of Plasmine as I writhed in the just pleasure of my agony. Plasmine has the unique ability to reproduce itself chemically from the substances it destroys, the worlds it destroys, unless it is first rendered inert. When the inert form of the substance is applied to the skin, it simply bores down through the flesh like a searing-hot drill until the flesh itself quells it with its own immolation. That is what they, the Impersator’s Guard of Ten Thousand, did to me, with pleasure.

I knew I was fortunate they used the inert substance on me, as I was certain they would. My invention, in its volatile form, destroyed moons, destroyed stars, destroyed worlds, made chaos of black holes, and it could have destroyed me as a candle destroys and insect. When they used it to attack planets it was a yellow fire fed by the substances it consumed, until there was nothing but a giant ball of Plasmine floating in space where once a world had been. Only with a toxic substances collector, another of my inventions, could the chemical be collected safely from the mass, to be used against any other world that resisted. Few others put up the fuss of resistance after the first sixteen worlds were destroyed. Few could resist torture under Plasmine, but I did.

Then, when my preparations for the second round of torment were ready, I returned to them for more. This time, the Impersator himself descended into the torture chamber to oversee my agony. He had unsheathed his disemboweling sword and held it by his side as he approached to threaten me. He was well-known for the joy he received out of disemboweling his victims slowly with the sword, but his joviality and threatening posture hid the great fear he had of me.

Mithrose, I’m surprised to see you after the reception you received here last time. I thought you would have had the sense to stay away. Maybe you've brought us the Chingress this time, as we requested, even though we killed her months ago?

It was more sarcasm than I cared to hear, but he flashed his sword by my neck in a great arc, and the wind from it blew my hair back. He turned with a grin and a high-pitched laugh to his guard for approval, and they responded with the obligatory false laughter. The walleyed Impersator Chad, his teeth as yellow as the Plasmine he so misused, had no choice but to charge in to see me after I requested an audience, after I begged to be tortured again. He suspected I was capable of bringing the Chingress back to life, and had to find out if it was true. The walleye danced as he attempted to focus it on me, his fear feeding his fidgety nature. Then I smelled the odor that followed the Impersator everywhere he went, as his excitement led him to urinate on his gown.

When I had risen from that floor of that first agony, my body pierced by my own folly, I had murdered the Impersator’s executioners, his court and his Guard of Ten Thousand. The Impersator feared that, feared me for what I had done to my previous tormentors, and he changed his name from Caesar Augustus, that of the ancient Roman Emperor, to Chad, hoping it would protect him or shield him.

How nervous I made Impersator Chad now showed in his twitching and blinking, and in his refusal to come too close to me, despite the fact he held the sword and I was bound and shackled. He circled around me, fidgeting, his strange eyes dancing, as though he thought he could avoid it if I wished to destroy him. That fate would come in due course for him. He tapped the point of the sword on the marble floor, which was wet with the evidence of anxiety.

Before the inquisitors applied my first torment to me, they neglected to remove my Robe of Meaningless Colors, doing no more than opening it to expose my flesh. The robe was so shabby they hesitated to touch it, but within it was a great quantity of my power, which they did not know and still did not know, as they left me clothed for my second torture.

My reception was nothing compared to the departing gifts I bestowed on your friends and your guard, I replied, sneering at him. I killed all of them, the simpering fools with whom you surrounded yourself. I wiped out your guard. I’m sure you’ve replaced all of them, since they keep you in place and give your power. I could easily do the same to you as I did to them. I wonder if you’ve learned the lessons they never did?

The Impersator touched my chin with the tip of his sword. It was trembling from the shaking of his hand.

Perhaps I’ll simply slice you up this time, like a nice ham.

I would like that, compared to the Plasmine.

That is idle talk for someone in your position. Or is that some sort of riddle? he asked, questioning my sense when he couldn’t understand my intentions. He backed farther away from me in fear. He simply was so nervous and frightened he could not hear me, could not sense anything but his doom. All the sarcastic humor went out of him when my eyes bored into him and he finally perceived what I said as a real threat. He slumped, his legs nearly falling out from under him, his sword dropping to the floor. His yellowed teeth disappeared behind quivering tight lips and his eyes danced in fear as he looked up at me from his knees.

The Impersator seemed very small, all the arrogance drained from him in his fear of God, for he knew what I could do. He wet himself, a torrent of urine flowing out of him and onto his robe and the floor, as was his habit when under stress. Such was the power of a single one of my looks.

I haven’t come for you, not yet, I said. You’re my creation, too, and I need you for a little while longer to return the Chingress to power. I came back to this place to ask one question, and I want only one answer, and it must be the one true answer, or I will not leave without indulging your worst fears.

He feared me, I knew, but I had another game in mind.

Of course. Yes, of course. Anything you’d like to know, all-powerful One, he said. You know how we feel about you here, how we love our God and are sorry we caused him pain. We know you would never do the same to us.

His walleye looked away and to the left, but I ignored it. I knew he was contemplating how he would torture me this time.

It’s the same question you asked me when you were burning holes in me.

This man was so authentically stupid that he appeared confused. It was not the healthiest reaction he could have given, but he did not realize even that.

I was losing patience.

Oh, you idiot, here is the question: where is the last Chingress?

That awful woman? he blurted, his hatred of her overcoming his fear of me. Then he regained his composure and stammered, T-the Chingress? You know we killed her. I thought you had her. They said you brought her back to life.

Is she here with me? Wouldn’t I have brought her if I was going to kill you? Is that your one answer? I am an impatient God.

He trembled so violently I thought he might shake apart.

No! No! Please! How should I know? You are the only one who could possibly know if somehow she came to life again. You’re the only one with that power, not me. The last Chingress is to the people who remain as you are to us, a God. We love you, as they love her. How could I possibly know where she is? That’s why we tortured you, to find out, and why we killed her, out of love, and why we ...

I stopped listening to his nonsense, my eyes boring into him again. Once more, his disturbed eye wandered and he bit his lip until it bled.

So is that your one answer, your last chance?

His knees locked together as though he was about to wet himself yet more.