World
of Dusk:
“The
Ring”
Anthony
Greer
© 2015, Anthony Greer. AG Creative Publications
All
rights reserved.
No
portion of this book may be used without sole permission of the copyright
holder except in use of a review.
“World of Dusk:
The Wedding” is one of several origin stories that all tie into “The Raven of
Dusk” and its respective titles. “The Raven of Dusk” is a series that stands on
its own, while the “World of Dusk” is meant to exist as a series of backstories
and pivotal events that occur in the world of Noreis. Some of these stories
will be mentioned in the series, while others will exist only in the “World of
Dusk” origins. I hope you enjoy.
World of Dusk: The Ring
The giggling was what finally brought Marquez back to
consciousness. He woke up to two sets of breasts on each side of his bare chest
while two hands played with his pink nipples. The other hand from both women
slid down his torso and beneath the thin sheets that did little to cover up the
three of them. He laid back in a foreign bed and pretended to remain asleep,
intrigued by how far the two models from his shoot would go while believing him
to be unconscious.
“Oh, someone’s awake,” the blonde one said to the
brunette, her hand firmly on his erection.
The brunette let out a giggle and began to lick the
tip of his nipple as her hair cascaded around her face, tickling his chest. He
kept his eyes shut firmly and focused only on the feel of her tongue sliding
down his stomach, his loins, and then finally around his cock while the blonde
grasped it for her. If either of them glanced up at his face, as they played
with him, they would have noticed how much he struggled not to smile.
He woke up again sometime after with one arm wrapped around
each of them. He would have loved to have gotten the same treatment as before,
but it wasn’t giggles from two bare-skinned women that woke him this time. It
was the emergency ring on his telecom buzzing furiously somewhere in his pants
pocket.
The brunette (whatever her name was) mumbled something
indistinctly, but neither of them was trained to jump at the sound like Marquez
was. He slid one arm out at a time, doing as little as he could to disturb them
in their slumber, then slid like a caterpillar to the foot of the bed before
sitting up and leaping off of it.
Whoever was calling stopped the moment he rifled
through his pants to grab his telecom. He grimaced when he saw that it was a
call from Father. When he noticed the time, his heart nearly sunk from his
chest to his feet. The two women he’d gone home with occupied his time all the
way into the late afternoon. All of the pleasure he just enjoyed was eclipsed
by the shade of disappointment that was certainly on his father’s face.
He slipped his pants on right away and then scoped the
ground for his shirt. His briefs were probably on the bed somewhere, so he
didn’t bother sifting between the sheets and the women for them. One of them
could keep them as a souvenir. Not everyone got bedded by Marquez Donnick.
Granted, that was largely because of the plethora of women in Noreis, but that
was beside the point.
Clothed enough to get by, Marquez cracked open the
loudly creaking door and did his best to slip out through the slivers of light
Hela emitted on the streets of Cardeau. He didn’t think to glance at a mirror
before stepping out into the world, but he was certain he looked just fine. He was Marquez Donnick, after all.
Cardeau’s citizens paid him little attention as they
walked down the sand-dusted streets. Several stands were lined up on the
corners while a few shuttles flew overhead. Hela shined brightly in the cloudless
sky while buildings of wood and stone made up all of the blocks that were
within his sight. None of them were more than three or four stories tall, but
they were all high enough to obscure his view of Cardeau Palace, wherever it was.
He couldn’t even see his air shuttle from where he stood—assuming that they
took his back to one of the women’s homes.
He wandered down a block, hoping to get a view of the
palace at the intersection. A vendor’s display of magazines caught his eye and made
him smile. The week’s issue of “Stunning” was still prominently on the stand,
boasting a shirtless picture of him mid-flex with the words “Sexiest man
alive?” beneath. The magazine was scrutinized all week after the issue was
released, since Marquez was technically still a year off from being considered
a “man.” Despite that, it was the highest selling issue that quarter and, in
the days that followed, he received offers from two other publications and a
newscast. Father didn’t approve, but that was nothing new. Marquez spent
seventeen years being told what he should be doing with his life, and every
time his father droned on about the Donnick family legacy, Marquez’s mind would
wander to other things—almost always women. That got him in trouble a lot, but
probably not to the degree that awaited him at the palace.
His air shuttle was parked a half block further down.
While he still couldn’t see Cardeau Palace, as soon as he hovered above the
other buildings, it would be easy to spot and then he’d be home in no time. He
unlocked it and stepped inside. Marquez checked himself through the reflection
of the glass dome before starting it, abruptly distracted by the cacophonous
buzzing of his emergency line for the second time.
“Ugh, I’ll be right
there, father,” he scoffed without answering the call. He turned the shuttle on
and hovered off of the ground, raising it steadily in case there were other air
shuttles blazing by without paying any attention.
Hela’s gleam pierced the
shuttle’s glass dome and lit up the east side of the enormous Cardeau Palace,
which stood nearly a hundred feet higher than any of the surrounding buildings.
The palace shimmered in cyan and silver, much like nearly half of the
structures in the city-state. The four outer walls of the palace were made of
glass, revealing the first layer of activity within. Several towers emerged
from the edges of the palace, shooting several hundred more feet into the air
and almost kissing the clouds on days when the weather was less desirable.
He sped toward the
palace. As the structure grew larger and swallowed his other surroundings, his
anxiety rose, fully knowing the scrutiny he was about to endure for missing the
final meeting for the charity ball. Father was apprehensive enough about giving
Marquez this type of responsibility. What little trust his father might’ve had
in him may be broken now. As he entered the third floor hangar bay, his anxiety
transformed into guilt.
Marquez parked in his
usual lot and stepped onto the hangar floor, which connected the outside to the
outer halls and the air lifts. He walked to the entrance of the bay as a
familiar face emerged from it. Sir Milo, a knight of the Guard and his best
friend, gave him a wary smile as they crossed paths in the threshold.
“I know,” Marquez said.
“You don’t even have to say it.”
“The captain is livid,”
Milo replied as though Marquez’s father had just yelled at him. “Good luck in
there.”
“When are you off duty?
Want to get drinks after?”
“If you’re more than a
flayed carcass by dinnertime, sure.” Milo kept walking toward his shuttle. His
metal armor clanked on the cold ground and began to shimmer in the light of
Hela peering inside the hangar. The knight had to shield his eyes in order to
find his shuttle, and he didn’t once turn back to his friend.
Milo did nothing to
instill confidence in Marquez. He knew that father was going to be angry, but
if even Milo was scurrying away from him, this must have been bad. Marquez
continued on into the depths of the palace where the silvers and blues covered
everything in sight. He was able to tell which rooms he was in solely based on
the other colors within them, since they were so seldom used inside Cardeau
Palace. He thought about taking the long way toward Father’s quarters, but he
knew that wouldn’t be wise. Father would only get angrier with him the longer
it took for him to receive his punishment for missing the meeting.
“Are you looking for the
captain?” Dame Harraway asked him as he reached the Knight’s Quarters. She had
to move some of the bangs from her bowl cut to see him clearly. She was taller
than most, but at six feet, Marquez matched her in height.
Marquez nodded while
Harraway stood like a statue with her arms crossed over her chest,
single-handedly guarding the corridor that really didn’t need protecting.
“He’s currently with the
Queen.”
That brought some relief
to Marquez’s face. “Oh good, I’ll catch him when he returns.”
“The captain specifically
told me to send you his way when you returned to the palace, even if he’s
meeting with Kallisto.”
“Wonderful.” They can both sneer at me, then.
“Good luck,” Dame
Harraway said as stalely as hardened bread. It was the most emotion he’d ever
seen from her. He really was in deep shit.
Marquez left the knight’s
quarters and walked towards the Queen’s Chambers with his head down. Palace
guests, servants, and knights stepped away from him as though he’d contracted
the worms. Not even his own friends dared to address him. He felt all of the
guilt that was going to be bestowed upon him before even reaching his father,
then as he reached the floor to Kallisto’s chambers, he thought about things in
a different shade.
I
missed a meeting. It’s not like I killed anyone. Why should he be so damned
disappointed with me over something so minor? He knows who I am and what I do.
I’m Marquez Donnick, dammit!
The set of guards between
him and the chambers stepped aside when he approached. Unlike Dame Harraway,
they dwarfed him in size and their biceps threatened to break through their chain
mail confinements. As intimidating as they were, they were nothing compared to
what was on the other side of the opening double-doors.
“Marquez,” Koston shot
him a scathing look from Kallisto’s work table. He sat across from the queen
with a decanter set between them. She was pouring another glass while he kept a
jug of water close by. The blackout curtains lined several windows of her room,
casting half of it in shadow and highlighting the portion where she and Koston
sat.
Koston’s silver vest was
just a shade darker than the tiles of the room. His dirty blonde hair was
highlighted in Hela’s gleam through the unblocked floor-to-ceiling windows that
revealed most of the city beyond them. His lips were tight and his eyes
narrowed on his son so intensely that Marquez could barely bring himself to
look elsewhere in the room.
“Do you wish to talk to
him in private?” Kallisto asked. She swirled the contents of her glass while
sitting on a small throne in a white and black dress and bearing a dark circlet
with white leaves on her head.
Koston didn’t even
acknowledge her as he rose to his feet and drew Marquez closer as if he had
telekinetic eyes. “We’ve been planning tomorrow’s fundraiser for months. I’ve
purposely walked you through every part of the process because this is
something you might actually be passionate about that would do the world some
good. You’ve done nothing to prove that you even give a shit about this event.
You wanted to take the reins on the Donnick Foundation and yet I’m still doing everything! All I asked yesterday was that
you show up to our final meeting with the rest of the staff. You didn’t even
have to say a damn word, because obviously all of the responsibility is going
to fall to me anyway. I ask very little of you, and you can’t even give me
that? What in Noreis is wrong with you?”
“All right, I guess this
is happening right here,” Kallisto said to herself between sips.
Each word father spoke
felt like a paper cut on his body. Marquez half-expected to see blood marks
soak through on his perfectly-fitted tunic. Yet, he could not muster a reply.
“Are you even going to
show up tomorrow? Do you even care?”
“Yes, I care—”
“Then where were you? We
heard nothing from you for nearly a full day,” Koston said. “I was this close
to contacting the Seekers to go looking for you.”
“I was—”
“Ugh, you don’t have to
explain,” Kallisto sneered. “I can smell your shame and regret from over here.”
Marquez felt himself
shrinking on the tiled floor while Koston could only shake his head in dismay.
“And to think,” Koston
said, rotating a ring with an opal stone on his middle finger. “I was going to
give you this today.”
“The family ring?”
Marquez muttered.
Koston nodded and scowled
at the same time.
The Donnick family ring
was quickly becoming engraved in Cardeau’s history. Marquez’s great-great-grandfather,
Baltus, gave it to his great-grandfather, Abraham, upon his graduating from the
Barencos Advisory Academy. Back then, the Donnicks were a poor family, and
Abraham knew that stone with the word ‘Donnick’ engraved in its center likely
cost Baltus half a year’s salary. Abraham wore it as a reminder that anyone can
have valuable things and achieve greatness if they tried hard enough. According
to the story, Baltus told Abraham that the ring was very symbolic of his
character. He had to work much harder than others with known names to get into
the Academy, and then even harder to afford it and graduate at the top of his
class. The tale behind the ring brought Abraham Donnick all the way to the
highest and most prominent seat in the world.
Abraham intended to pass
the ring down to his son, but tragedy struck before the two men ever got to
make the exchange. Instead, Abraham passed it to Koston shortly before Marquez
was born when Koston was having doubts about fatherhood. Abraham told Koston that
he’d become a better man than he ever was, and certainly a much better father.
Abraham died five days later. Having been the last conversation he’d ever had
with his grandfather, Koston kept the ring on at all times and the story very
close to his heart. This was probably why he was so unusually upset with him.
Father wanted to entrust him with a precious family heirloom, and he couldn’t
even show up to the meeting where he was to receive it.
“Father, I—”
“I’m still giving it to
you.”
Marquez blinked with
surprise. “You are?”
“It is a symbol of
responsibility and maturity. You will wear it at all times as a reminder of the
men who have worn it before you and what they’ve achieved. I wanted to give it
to you because I’m proud of you, but now you get it as a lesson. You will
become a great man and someone worthy of the Donnick name whether you like it
or not.”
Abraham
got the ring as a reward. I’m receiving it as a prison sentence.
Koston wrestled the ring
off of his finger and handed it to his son. The stone felt like a boulder on
Marquez’s palm and, when he tried to slip it onto his middle finger, he
discovered that it was too boney to fit properly. The moment he’d start to walk
while swaying his arms, the ring would slip from his hand to the floor. He contemplated
putting it on his thumb, but inside slipped it into his pocket.
“You’re damn right you
will,” Koston replied. “Go to the foundation headquarters. Barbara will fill
you in on what you’ve missed.”
Marquez bowed to his
queen, then scurried out of the room like a rat with a flashlight cast on it.
He didn’t wish to deal with any further scrutiny. Now was the time to pick up
the pieces of the mistakes that he’d made.
Alone in the room, Koston
returned to his seat across from Kallisto, whose expression hadn’t changed
since Marquez stepped inside. She put her glass down and crossed both her arms
and legs. “He will misplace that ring in a matter of minutes and four
generations of familial symbolism will end up buried in some little tart’s
bed.”
Koston shook his head.
The queen was amused by
this and shot him a half-smile. “Oh? You think that giving him a shiny object
will get him to change his tune?”
“Forgive me for saying
this, Your Highness, but what do you know of children?”
“First they shit on your
dreams, and then they shit on everything else,” she replied. “If someone has to
be barren, I’m glad that it’s me. Could you imagine if my ex-husband had gotten
me pregnant? We definitely don’t need another one of him running around
Cardeau.”
“Children change you,”
Koston said with a sullenness in his eyes. “I just wish I didn’t have to do
this alone. Jessa would’ve made an excellent mother. I think he would have
turned out differently.”
His words brought even
the queen to melancholy. She grabbed the decanter and a second glass and said,
“To that, we drink” while pouring the potent liquor into both. The two then
clanked their glasses and sipped in silence while Hela’s setting added a deeper
darkness to the room.
The ring bounced off of
his chest with each step that Marquez took as he left the photoshoot,
threatening to make an engraving between his pecs. He got a chain for it on the
way to the ballroom the day before, then played with it while he and Milo had
drinks in one of the few watering holes that served Marquez despite his age.
All morning, he kept himself constantly aware that he wore his family’s history
around his neck while he helped Barb, Sal, and the others set up the ballroom
for that evening. He wasn’t about to prove everyone right again by falling
short. The only reason he even went to the shoot was because they’d finished
set up a few hours early, and Barb assured him that they could maintain things
in his absence.
At the shoot he placed
the ring in his pocket, knowing that modeling it while bare-chested would not
reach his father’s approval. He put it back on the second he left the camera
and changed into his dress clothes for the evening, which were picked out for
him a few days before by the Queen’s wardrobe designer herself (after he fucked
her).
Marquez stepped outside
as Hela was dimming in the sky and looked across the street for his shuttle,
dressed in a full suit that probably cost as much as the ring itself. He was
surprised that Barb hadn’t called while he was on the shoot. He emphasized that
she needed to contact him and not his father. Whether she would, and if she had
faith in him, was another story. He’d find out when he got there.
He bumped into a man of
about sixty when he took another step. “Sorry!” he exclaimed, and caught a look
at the man’s startled face that birthed wrinkles with expression. The old man
said nothing in reply and kept shuffling forward in his long flowing tan garbs
that resembled a bathrobe. He didn’t realize that he’d bumped into Marquez
Donnick. If he had, he might’ve apologized.
Marquez shrugged it off.
There was no reason for him to make an issue of it. There were bigger things to
achieve that day. He continued towards his shuttle, going over the time schedule
in his head. He didn’t usually take these things so seriously, but Father
looked as though Marquez pushed too far this time. He needed to pull back in
hopes that Koston would give him more leeway.
He reached his shuttle
and played with the necklace again, feeling around for the…
Marquez felt the blood
leave his face faster than it took father to be frustrated with him. The chain
was there, but the ring… the ring was…
He spun around to get a
glance at the old man walking along the pavement. Marquez cocked his head as
the man continued to saunter as if nothing had happened, and then the old man
broke into a sprint and rounded the corner.
“Son of a—” Marquez
bolted after, taking giant strides diagonally across the quiet street. He
rounded the corner quickly and saw the old man jump between two buildings. He
wished he had his gunblade with him, but he should’ve been able to take an old
thief just fine without it. He rushed toward the alley and leapt between the
buildings.
The headlights nearly
blinded him as an air shuttle took off in his direction. Marquez had just
enough time to catch a glimpse of the old thief at the helm before it shot
forward at full speed. It flew so low that his hair blew backwards, nearly
spiked up enough to feel the bottom graze it.
Smarter men would have
ducked, but Marquez reached for the left bottom rail of the shuttle and grasped
the bar with both hands. His body jerked as he was forced off the ground and
his legs dangled in the air as the shuttle took him with it.
The old thief flung
around the corner and Marquez found himself flailing towards one of the stone
walls of the alley. He brought his legs to his chest as fast as he could and
kicked off of the buildings corner before being whipped around again in the
open streets of Cardeau. His grasp on the rail was slipping while blurs of his
surroundings made him queasy quickly. He forced his eyes shut as he clutched
the rails tightly.
The thief flung him
around a second corner, back onto the street where they’d bumped into each other.
Marquez’s body propelled him in the opposite direction. This time the jerk of
the hands on the rail knocked the shuttle free and Marquez tucked and rolled
onto the street. The pavement he hit was more dirt than stone, so his body
didn’t howl with pain like he feared it would. Instead he rolled along the
ground and sprung to this feet with nothing but dust on his clothes to show for
it as the thief’s shuttle sped down the street.
Marquez ran toward his
and unlocked it on the way. The glass dome retracted just fast enough for him
to jump into the driver’s seat and slam on the gas. His shuttle jerked awake
and knocked him forward and back, but he clutched on the square steering wheel
firmly and hovered off the ground just enough to fly over the shuttle in front
of him.
The thief’s shuttle
rounded a corner two blocks away, but Marquez’s vehicle was faster. He thrust
the wheel forward so aggressively that he nearly flipped the shuttle as it
barreled down the street, nearly clipping the signs dangling from buildings to
his right. Several air shuttles flew overhead at a much safer altitude, but he
knew that he needed to stay low and keep level with the buildings around him.
This thief would want to whip around and aside buildings in hopes of losing
him, but that wasn’t about to happen.
Marquez rounded the turn
he saw the thief take just in time to watch him make a left in front of the
Cardeau museum of natural history. He ignored the two-story long posters of
Cardeau Palace, Superior Abraham Donnick, the original throne, and a scepter
that once belonged to one of the first monarchs of the city-state.
A loud honk made him slam
the brakes before he realized that it was well overhead. He kept driving low as
the wind smacked his face and started to make it difficult to see. He should’ve
put the glass frame back up, but even the thought of reaching for the button
felt like a waste of time.
The thief made a sharp
left around the entrance sign for the museum. The shuttle’s rails clipped a
corner of it and forced it to swing from side to side. Marquez spun around it
as the thief hoisted upwards and hovered of the rooftops to the same altitude
that most of the other shuttles were flying. He sped up to further close the
gap and swerved around a pair of shuttles that were taking a wide turn. Hela’s
light gleamed on the glass domes in front of him and the swish of the wind
jolted his body backward and forced him to protract the dome.
He regained his focus a
second later and continued after the thief as he spun out several more shuttles
in the Cardeau skies. Hundreds of shuttles were bolting in all directions and
altitudes, flying above the streets between buildings as a reference point and
minding their surroundings. Marquez kept his focus on the thief’s shuttle,
which now looked just like every other shuttle in the sky. It even slowed to
the same speeds of the other shuttles to further throw him off, but he couldn’t
be fooled. He’d follow the old man across the world if it meant getting that
ring back!
Marquez sped up until he
got right behind the thief’s shuttle and, just as he was about to tap the back
of his shuttle with his own, he noticed the backs of several other heads in the
shuttle. His mouth fell open and he slowed down, giving the vehicle in front of
him more space.
A moment later, another
shuttle honked from behind and brought Marquez out of his sudden daze. He
lowered his shuttle back toward the ground and parked it in an empty lot on the
street. Sometime between the thief flying up to blend in with the other
shuttles and before Marquez put the glass dome up so that the wind wouldn’t
blind him, the old man must have disappeared without him knowing it.
He
took it clear off my chain in less than a second. I didn’t even feel his
fingers slip open the clasp. That wasn’t a thief—that was a magician!
A magician who stole the
symbol of his family’s legacy. Marquez barely had it for a full day…
Father knew the moment he
saw the dread on Marquez’s face as he walked into the empty ball room. He
frowned at him from across the room filled with empty tables and chairs and a
podium where the notes for Marquez’s speech were in order on a series of index
cards. Marquez didn’t even bother to walk across the cerulean and silver
checkered tiles to approach his father and explain what had happened. He knew
the second that he made eye contact with the Captain of Cardeau, who had
managed to hold onto the ring for Marquez’s entire lifetime, that there was no
excuse that he would be open to hearing. Marquez had failed again.
It wasn’t even worth
walking toward him with his head down and a pair of cracking wells in his eyes.
The chain felt cold around the nape of his neck, and his chest bore a hole
where the responsibility of bearing the ring once laid on him. He didn’t have
the courage to open his mouth and say the words that would fall deaf on
father’s ears.
Instead Koston shook his
head, and Marquez turned around and left the ballroom, knowing that there was
nothing else to be said or done.
In the desert south of
Cardeau’s city border was a small wooden house barely large enough for one
person. An air shuttle parked beside it while Hela took one last glimpse at the
world for the day, and an old man with even older eyes stepped out of it and
sauntered into his house of solitude.
He felt the ring clasped
firmly in his callused hand as his rickety door creaked a little louder and a
little longer than usual. His very surroundings were falling apart all around
him. Despite his age, he felt as though he was the youngest thing in the
deteriorating hut he called a home.
He placed the ring on the
table that commonly gave him splinters and inspected it for a moment. It was
probably worth a decent sum if he sold it to the right dealers. He wondered how
the others did in their venture out into Cardeau. They were probably by the
oasis where they planned to rendezvous back upon Hela set. None of them knew of
the second home he’d built here so long ago.
Grains of sand popped up
through the open floorboards and coated the bottoms of his feet as he walked on
them over to his mantle where he inspected some of his other, more personal
possessions: the very first coin he ever stole from a “noble” in Ratone, a
piece of wood from the first house he built, and a crumbled and dampened photo
of him and the family he was torn away from nearly sixty years before…
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