Vengeance Of Ekron
- Jay Lawson
- 2 minutes ago
- 8 min read
King Mortepus’s halls stung with a feral and cold aperture seeping through the cracks. Death lurked. Queen Omla sat inside a pit of mortified delusion and blood while the mages covered the body of what was supposed to be her firstborn. The emptiness was poison. A phantom’s seed stalking a vacuum chamber. An appetite for an heir weighed on the kingdom, and heavier on the crown once Mortepus succeeded his father. After years of noble attempts to sire a successful progeny, Mortepus’s first son was born.
The king seasoned a sanguine spirit each sunrise for a century until the child he named Ekron reached physical maturity. He was perfect, only his energetic field called lightning like ignorance hones fear, powering through an astral cloud. A lack of control drove his fragile mind to untethered madness as his soul was lost to the sands. His outrage grew, costing the king an irrecoverable portion of the nearest moon, causing fantastic trauma to Ithcur’s oceans. Neither deep analytics nor the divine powers of persuasion from Queen Omla could harness its volatile nature.
Against his queen’s wishes, Mortepus had one of his agents deliver the naive Ekron off planet, marooning him in the loneliness of the starry sea. The distant salt moon of Tyranus housed nothing except a torturous silence and a failed promise of sunrise. An ancient temple housed him, where he sprouted in awareness while blinded by the dark light and aversion. Boundless contempt froze his empty heart. Zaman’s imprint left the solar system drenched in a plentiful pool of power. One that corrupted him. Ekron cursed the time spent with his father, but the soothing recollection of his learnings breached the barrier of Time. He vowed vengeance.
He swore on the power of the sun and the gravitational drift of space bending around the linear fortitude of the minute grains of sand shifting through the passage of space.
A new light blossomed over the kingdom of Ithca. The suns blessed the land, yet a shadowy creature loomed in the corner of the Ithcan prince’s mind. Lady Mal’va peered into his chamber.
“Come, m’lday,” he said, “It would fair my being well to speak with you.”
“I do not mean to spy,” she whispered, “but there was a pulse. I thought you may be in distress.”
“Your perception is appreciated, m’lady. Father’s recent choices have soured my objectivity, and worse, the future.”
“The ill-timed arrival of the Eloe has cost us preparation against their terrible omen of whose name we do not speak.” Her peach lips curled inward, and a prominent line emphasized the Lady’s brow at his poorly-timed silence.
“I must consult with the Tralaunkas to better judge my approach for Their arrival. As for the Yu’danga survivors…I’m afraid King Mortepus’s housing proceedings with the D’Geri clan have been…unfavorable. If only he would listen to me…” His pause echoed a foreign vibrance. “Please enter, Father.”
King Mortepus rounded the corner, gently stepping aside to accept Lady Malva’s poised exit. “I have always approved of her. Consider her hand. But you wished to release your grievances. Who am I to deny my only son?”
“Father,” he hesitated, “I am not your only son.” Shouting interrupted their blooming revelations. Agatheio’s knowing glance told Mortepus that his secrets would no longer remain buried, but in fact, would remain violently hostile and feverishly angry.
“The true king of Ithca has returned,” Ekron bellowed from the bottom of his soul, “All will bow before the righteous power of the firstborn heir. Whomever shall oppose me, denies the blood of the throne his rightful place!”
Ithcans, the Eloe squadron, Cyrus, and wanderers around the planet trembled under Their arrival, pursuing the dirt before a sight that spoke to the old king with paralyzing disquietness, settled with the pressure. There was his firstborn, transcending from the void, corrupted by a mythically intense darkness that plagued the prodigal son’s soul. Though that hadn’t been nearly as harrowing as a field of time resting in the palm of Ekron’s hand, sealing their panic with despair as the grim visage of the Whirm bled through their skies.
Hundreds of stone stars that encaged their planet, encircling the solar system. Ekron claimed legitimacy, and he was willing to shed blood for it—no matter whose sacrifice needed an audience. Rejecting his father as a false liaison and communion with the source doused what remaining faith Ithcurites held for him. He’d become an empty prophet with a disgraced lineage. His heart caved under the weight of thousands of denizens chanting, not his, nor his favored son’s name, but Ekron’s—bustling through the sands of time.
“Ekron,” Mortepus’s voice carried a debasing shame, peppering disappointment.
“His demands, Father,” Agatheio said, “Relinquish the throne, renounce me as your heir. I will go into exile for the sake of this planet and her people.”
“He is a misguided child. I hid away his darkness, but it only grew twice in size at unbelievable speeds. And now my heir must pay the price? No. He has lost himself in power, and the time has come for him to honor the universe.”
“The only thing unbelievable is your arrogance.” Agatheio braced himself for a heated dialogue on his decision while his warnings fell on deaf ears. The prince met with Ekron in the heart of, despite the king’s pleadings. The prince berated the king’s choices. He’d left the king to reflect on himself. A terse, rough, but enlightening dialogue shifted the prince’s perspective. Agatheio made Ekron swear to release the Whirm in exchange for his departure. His negotiation succeeded in staving off the planet’s destruction, while the Ithcans had already traded their loyalties for the pursuit of survival against the Whirm threat. With a single vow, Ekron was crowned the protector of Ithcur.
Ekron molded the Ithcans into a boiling pot of hatred that festered under the kingdom’s mask. An instituted manhunt for Mortepus while the Whirm were reset to an earlier point in their timeline. The new king sat in paranoia in a dark throne room; loneliness pierced the walls of his chambers. The quietness revealed an atramentous obsession that haunted Ekron’s thoughts.
“Child,” Their voice echoed through a vacant cell.
“Leave me be,” Ekron snapped.
“You promised us, Child.”
“That was only if I was denied my claim!”
“There has been a change.”
“No…you obey me.”
“That was never true, poor Child.”
“What is happening?”
“We now control you. You now obey Us.”
“how have you…This?”
“You will be Our body…
And We—your mind.”
Ekron, reduced to a secretor of bile—
“Until We devour the sands of Ithcur!”
—lay seizing on the floor of his chambers. He quivered a silence of words out of colorless and dehydrated lips.
“he was right,” he stammered, “Jaccobi prophesied it..They are a terrible nightmare made into the flesh of reality!”
His thoughts battled a furious volley that left him spewing bile mixed with hysteria from the corners of his lips. It was either spite or rage that kept him conscious, but it was futile to resist Them, for They had already sunken Their power jaws on the crevices of his mind, plaguing him with the same hopelessness that infected quintillions before: “They’re coming.”
Energy reverberated throughout the galaxy. Agatheio had roamed the Trino lands of Ithcur, the forbidden region his adopted father barred him from. Their primitive survival instincts kept them from integrating with the kingdom. In their minds, it was a cultural genocide. Even from their mineral caves, the Tralaunkas shifted their energetically enhanced ears to the disturbance.
Agatheio made use of his time, learning from the hidden tribe the secrets of the sacred sand. Tales that Shuul either kept from him or was just as impotently unaware. The exiled prince, in turn, showed them the vast applications of the energy, turning their casual experience into an intimate dance of chemical coercion, replicating covalent bonds on a macroscopic level.
Their loyalties for him grew stronger than any Ithurite’s, and their devotion led them to follow Agatheio as the immediate protector of Ithcur, the only one they would recognize. All of the planet bowed, not to any guardian, but the many haunting faces of breathing infernal dreams bearing down on the planet in force. The Whirm had descended from the void. Their arrival drained Ekron, robbing him of the extended lifeforce—a consequence for abusing time, misusing his energy, forever favoring the dark aspects of the negative second—an abomination of life and the natural order of the structure of the spear—betraying Them—all of his infractions that’d come to claim the universal corollaries foretold. But then, They met the fabled Prince.
Agatheio experienced what no other heir had in the thousands of years his lineage reigned: a contentment spread over the planet like a peaceful virus. Where others worshipped in terror, He met Them in the sky, above the fear and into the cosmic void from which the heavenly veil They unforgivingly pierced, but gracefully embraced the unnatural and altruistic kinship. A sensation of pure bliss instead of the countless astral calamities They’d sewn.
“Spare him,” Agatheio said, “spare them all. Please.”
“That is something We simply cannot do. We do not choose. This planet’s energy. We feed. It must be. It is.”
Agatheio refused to abandon the hope instilled in him by his people and accept the same fate as his decaying brother—a vessel of horrific intrusion and cruel mental illusion. His body was broken, and his mind hit a dark path that led into a starry void. They flooded through the solar system with a lingering stench of abstract psychic waves that knotted all sentient life together like a fusion reaction. They were stars tangling worse than thickened plot threads.
“We are here. We. Are. Present. We are nonnegotiable.”
“I wish you would accept a proper outcome.”
“This.”
“There must be salvation for Ithcur.”
“We.”
“I have a duty to the Ithcans…”
“Are.”
“...And to myself..”
“The.”
“...to not succumb…!”
“Only.”
“...to the darkness…!”
“Outcome.”
His lungs consumed the dials of sand, and the moment morphed into a spherical labyrinth of dancing stars. Ithcans rose to their feet, drinking the pride of a forming phoenix. The Whirm drifted backward; a phantom chain of ions eroded Their spiked hides while Their celestial bodies drifted, decayed remnants of an abandoned idea–fading through time, back from where They emerged. Back to the pit of nightmares. Forever intertwined with the shadow realm, a passage to nowhere. Their only sensation had been the discarded fear spanning galaxies, refreshing the final moments of Their victims, trapped forever, craving the fates of countless. The chain linked from Their inception to Their final moments with Him.
Agatheio stressed over the future generations of Ithcurites, but was grateful for what he’d amassed in his youth. The former king found his firstborn clambering for the empty throne with a vacant desperation behind his eyes. Ekron denounced his legacy, bathing his own bloodline in a cursed madness that would leak into the soul beneath the soil. Such a spell had an unforgivable price. Ekron struck down his father. Spilling his blood called lightning–Agatheio’s arrival sent a shockwave of energy throughout the kingdom. He grasped the seconds ever so slightly–borrowing enough precious moments to witness his father’s final words:
“Do not waste this, my son.”
Words that tangled once loosened ions. His elder brother shared and cherished a dose of kinship nestled in their gaze, recognizing regret and latent anguish. It soon escalated to a clash, tame enough only to level a portion of the castle. Strikes intensified to disrupt the moons. Blasts atomized mountains and called down asteroids from the void. Oceans shuffled under the weight of volleys. Agatheio tasted the energy of the Whirm still potent in Ekron’s field. Prideful rage enticed the prince, and the fire of hatred burned through Agatheio’s attacks. Ekron retreated to Tyranus, resting bruised and broken, embracing the honor of defeat before the prince joined him. It was silent before the cursed born, admitted to enjoying the warmth of family before he passed.
Agatheio returned, a hero–while he cherished his people for the survivors they needed to be, the opprobrium swelled his energetic field. The sword of his ascendancy hung a tempestuous omen over the throne. The call of endowment laid its seductive eyes on him from the weight of the crown. He confided in Lady Malva. He never would have desired this outcome had he known sooner. She reminded him it was much beyond his control. They soon married. With a society well on its way to sophisticated integration, Ithcurites embraced Agatheio’s rejection of the title of king. He banished the notion of the people fearing a singular hand. With the aid of Yu’danga scientists, Agatheio vowed to pursue a unified world under the role of Ithcur’s guardian—her champion.
“Agatheio, the protector of Ithca,” the Whirm sounded, “We will meet again…”
End.
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