Disenchantment: Prolgue

Disenchantment: Prologue

As time progressed imminently forward, Gaia continually
moved through her course of empty space as she rotated. The rotation was to
keep herself alive, but the actual movement through space was on a certain
trajectory, creating a fluctuation that altered the environment in predictable
patterns based on her distance from Sol.

On her spherical body was evident many elements, different
terrains of both land and water, and billions upon billions of life forms.
There were many that had not yet come into being, and there were many whose
physical form had ceased to function. Of the latter a certain portion of them
at least, were not quite dead, as the particular term is often
understood, but instead upon discarding the biological shell that housed the
very essence of their existence, went below the surface in a non-physical form.

Deep below the surface, in a massive subterranean cavern
that had existed even before the lord who ruled over it, was where the dead
went upon dying. The very center opening was massive, stretching for miles and
miles in any direction, In some places thousands of feet existed between floor
and ceiling, and there were multiple smaller tunnels stretching out in many
directions, few of them actually going up, but a plethora going further down
toward the center of Gaia.

The place was both an everlasting paradise and an eternal
damnation. For here, the dead were punished or rewarded, based on their actions
in life. Dishonorable people, who in life, had behaved dishonorably, were hence
dishonored and tortured. Good people, who had behaved virtuously in life, were
rewarded after their shuffle off of their mortal coral. And, to rule over them
all was a dark lord, king of the dead.

The dark lord paced about his shadowed throne room, moodily
and slightly aggressively, his huge form looming over multiple minions that
left him a clear path for his ambulation. “Why?” he asked no one in particular.
“Why does she do this to me?”

The giant of a man could choose any number of physical forms
to take, but he rarely, if ever, did so. His natural state cut a foreboding and
threatening figure. His skin, if you could call it that, was a deep, flat black
that seemed to suck all the color out of objects near him and his long grey
beard and hair would often move about on its own accord, almost as if a wind
had it in its grasp when the slightest hint of a breeze was not evident.

His wife of over several millennia sat idly in her smaller
throne, staring blankly ahead into nothing, a hopeless look of forlorn
emptiness evident, having seemingly been plastered to her face centuries ago.
She was beautiful, extraordinarily so. Her porcelain skin showed not a wrinkle
or blemish, her slender, white arms ended in smooth, wingless shoulders, curved
up along a supple neck to a narrow, and what might be described as gaunt, if
not so lovely, face. Obsidian eyes stared ahead into oblivion.

The muscular lord continued speaking, “She wishes to leave
me? We have had an agreement, even a ruling on our marriage. She is mine, at
least partially.” The underworld lord then sighed.

One of his slaves, his followers consigning themselves to
slavery immediately upon merely deciding to be a follower, then spoke up, “My
lord, everlasting seer and ruler of death, why not choose another? Certainly
you can have your pick. The population is the largest it has ever been, too
large to be left alone, in fact. Certainly you can find one, or even multiple
wives amongst them. Your brothers have.”

“My brothers know not of love, of true love. They know of
lust and decay, fleeting moments of pleasure that fade from memory as soon as
they are committed. My brothers and all the others know only of base pleasure,
a pastime that has the significance of a bowel movement and the true feeling of
a dull, grey stone.”

He looked out over a huge section of the land that he ruled
over. A shrill shriek of pain echoed in the distance, gay laughter could be
heard from somewhere closer. The voices of the dead mumbled and blurred
together in cacophony of irrelevant sound. Fires belched into the atmosphere
here and there. Craggy, mountainous, primeval lands stretched out for seemingly
ever. The damned and the saved, the lost and the found, all dead and here
together dealing with separate eternities.

“You can find what you seek, master. You can find what you
want, or you can make it so. You are powerful.”

“Is it love if I force it?”

“It is whatever you make it, lord of the dead, ruler of
eternal souls. You have the power to make it love, make it...anything you
desire.” His minion was incredibly thin, almost skeletal in appearance and
dressed in nothing more than filthy rags. His skin was a sickly yellow that
enhanced his large bulbous eyes, orbs that seemed to take up half of his face,
eyes that were gloomy and milky and often dripped a viscous pus that stained
his garments as it dried into a flaky brown substance.

The dark lord looked back at his somber wife, staring off
into nothing, not moving, not caring, deader than all those that she, at least
in name, helped to rule over. “Very well,” said he, “My wife can go back to her
mother.”

The black giant carried on with the conversation, for the
simple sake of conversation, contact with others. He could have collected and
then condensed an hours long conversation in his own mind in less time than it
takes to blink, thinking of multiple problems and eternal solutions, but his
somber loneliness for centuries upon centuries gave him a brief enjoyment to
converse with others.

“Good, lord of eternal death, master of the inner flames,
good. But...what will you do?”

The death lord smiled, an abnormal look on his usually
impassive and eternal face. “I will find another.”

At that point his wife moved, slowly craning her neck to
look at the lord, her first movement in years. Then she smiled.

Some time after that, Gaia’s orbit shifted.