Book II: The Scrolls of Lemuria
Chapter 7: Inanna’s Offspring
The time had come for me to bring a world of hurt to the children of Adam and Alyssa. I decided it was time to call a friend in for help. Even though things didn’t work out with my breeding experiments the previous two times I’d invited one of my lumenars friends for a visit, I thought I’d try one last time — so I called upon a fallen angel who was on Terra at the time and who just happened to be nasty in every sense of the word – Inanna.
Or Sindra, if you prefer the name that drips with the cold irony of the void. She was always the most… enthusiastic of my colleagues. But I warn you, Sindra was not like Alyssa. Alyssa was a summer storm; Sindra was that desert wind that stripped the flesh from your ribs and called it a caress.
You want to know how the Second Age truly ended? It wasn’t just a slow fade. It was a rotting, screaming descent into the dark, played out across the grand, flat stage of Terra.
The Desert Rose
It was still the height of the Second Age. Atlantis was preening itself with its coastal Star Forts and Kaelin’s world wonders, and the Amorosi were busy weaving their leafy spells in the central forests. I was bored. I had the “Brutz” crushing stones and the “Gupz” nipping at heels, but I lacked a more gruesome minion for my arsenal.
I had an idea where I might find Sindra so I made my way to the southern landmass. The landscape here reflected the time when Mylar’s great silica-spires had been snapped like dry twigs during the first Mud Flood, their crystalline shards half-buried in a grey, sucking mire. I moved through the wreckage with the silence of a shadow, my tattered robes catching on the protruding ribs of a half-sunken Star Fort that no mortals had repurposed yet.
As a god, my appearance is mine to change at will. When I walked up on your world, I tended to fancy the whole “Grim-Reaper” motif, but in reality I was never a creature of flesh. As a lumenarc I was silhouette of divine essence. As an evil god, I carried the chill of the Grave-Between-Worlds, a permanent frost that caused the mud beneath my feet to crack and crystallize.
And then there was Sindra.
I found her lounging atop the remains of a Mylar altar, a slab of white marble stained with the rust of centuries. Her chosen form today was a vision of lethal elegance—tall, even by the standards of the “Godlings,” with skin the color of burnished copper that seemed to pulse with an inner, rhythmic heat. Her hair was a wild, midnight tangle that moved as if it had a life of its own, and she wore silks the color of blood, draped so loosely they were more of a suggestion than a garment.
But it was her eyes that held the true horror: twin pits of violet fire, burning with a lust that wasn’t for love, but for consumption.
“Azazel,” she purred, the sound vibrating through the stones. She didn’t move, yet I felt her gaze like a physical touch, crawling over my shadowed form. “Have you come to watch the world end, or are you just here to complain about your lack of a souls again? You’re blocking my sun, and your aura smells like the tomb.”
“I’ve come to offer you a canvas, Sindra,” I replied, stepping over the ivory ribcage of a Hyperborean—the poor brute had likely died of exhaustion trying to satisfy her whims. “Alyssa’s children are getting far too comfortable. They’re dominating this plane-t like they think they can power their way to godhood. They need a reminder of their mortality. And I know you wouldn’t mind spoiling Alyssa’s precious designs.”
Sindra stiffened at the mention of Alyssa—or Armaros she was once known in Illyria. The Goddess of Lust laughed, a wicked, icy sound that had the edge of a blade. “Armaros… that foolish weaver of heartstrings. She disgusts me with her ‘sacred unions’ and her ‘eternal devotion.’ She builds her people on the lie that desire is a gift. I know better. Desire is a debt that can never be paid.” Then she sat up, her violet eyes flashing with a predatory light. “What did you have in mind, Death-God? Another war? Another landslide?”
“Nothing so crude,” I said, leaning my hooded head against a half-buried obelisk, trying to maintain an air of bored indifference. Inside, my mind was racing. “I’m proposing a collaboration. An experiment in… genetic discord. How would you feel about having your way with the strongest, most virile of Alyssa’s golden boys? The ones who think their beauty makes them untouchable?”
Sindra’s tongue flicked across her lips—lips that were a deep, bruised purple. Her face glowed with a sudden, dark delight. “I could show them a love that doesn’t just burn, Azazel. I could show them a passion that putrefies their marrow. I could strip the ‘divine light’ from their eyes and replace it with my own beautiful art.”
“And the result?” I pressed, my claw-like fingers digging into the stone. “Would you be willing to produce a new species for me to clone? A race that carries your hunger, but my… permanence?”
Sindra didn’t reply at first. She let the silence stretch as she pretended not to care. Eventually she looked me up and down, her gaze dismissive. Then he leaned forward, her face inches from where my skeletal mask. Her breath smelled of jasmine and dried blood.
“After I have my fun,” she whispered, her smile revealing teeth that were far too sharp for a goddess. “I’ll give you something that will make even your cold, dead heart shudder. I will give you children who cannot die because they were never truly alive. And Armaros… she will eat her heart out in horror when she sees what her boys have become. It will be glorious.”
I felt a shiver of satisfaction. “Then we have a deal. I shall provide the ‘materials.’ You provide the… spark.”
The Charnel House
I kept my word. For the next several decades, I acted as the silent harvester of the Flat Earth. I plucked the most athletic Atlanteans from their coastal Star Forts and the most beautiful Amorosi from their tree-cities. I delivered them to Sindra’s den.
What followed was a period of history so dark even the Scrolls of Lemuria stutter when they try to record it. Sindra didn’t just mate with the mortals I gave her; she unmade them. Her divine “hellfire” was of a different sort than Alyssa’s. It was a necrotic heat that fused life and death into a single, agonizing state. I was giddy with anticipation at what the goddess might produce for me.
After a time, when Sindra eventually invited me back to see the fruits of her womb, I noticed that the shifting, silty plains of the South had changed. The grey mud of the first Great Reset had hardened into a cracked, desolate crust, and the air was laced the copper tang of blood and the heavy, cloying scent of Sindra’s favorite incense. The Goddess’ “den” had expanded, sprawling through the half-submerged ruins of a Mylar ziggurat like a malignant growth.
Mind you, Sindra never allowed me into her inner brothel, but when she finally graced me with an audience in the flickering, violet-hued shadows of the atrium, I couldn’t help but be intrigued – for the Goddess of Lust looked… diminished.
She was lounging upon a heap of discarded Amorosi silks, her back against a Mylar pillar that had been crudely carved with scenes of her own depravity. Even in the dim light, the change was apparent. Her skin, usually a flawless, glowing copper, now held a translucent, almost bruised quality. The iridescent sweat that coated her limbs seemed thinner, like the oil on a dying lamp.
The violet fire in her eyes, once a roaring furnace of desire, had settled into a steady, predatory simmer. There were shadows beneath them that hadn’t been there a century ago—dark, hollow spaces that spoke of the immense celestial energy required to birth a race as fundamentally broken as her new children were sure to be.
Interesting, I thought, my hooded head tilting as I scanned the fine lines of exhaustion around her lips. Even a Goddess has a breaking point when she tries to play Creator. I shall file that away for the day she inevitably decides she is my rival instead of my tool.
When at last she showed me her offspring I was pleasantly surprised – the ‘infants’ that crawled out of that den weren’t babies. They were tall, grey-skinned, hollow-eyed, and their bodies were already in a state of advanced decay. And oh, the hunger! It wasn’t a hunger for food, but for the essence of other life.
“They’re perfect, Lust,” I remarked, gesturing toward a creature that was currently clamped onto the neck of a captured Amorosi whom Sindra said she had previously rejected as “too weak” for her bed. The poor wretch’s golden skin was already mottling into a leaden grey as its life force was drained.
Sindra turned to me, her movements lackadaisical, almost heavy. She licked a stray drop of violet ichor from her thumb, her sharp teeth catching the light. “Then use your toys, Alchemist,” she purred, though the sandpaper in her voice was coarser now, strained by decades of birthing screams. “Make them legion. But remember… they are my children. Every bite they take upon another mortal is a kiss from me.”
“I’ll be sure to put that on the warning label,” I muttered, already calculating the methods I might use to turn their bite into a transmissible infection. I watched her closely as she shifted her weight; there was a slight tremor in her hand as she reached for a chalice of nectar.
She was drained. The “hellfire” that powered her lust was being diverted to sustain the half-life of her brood. Sindra had given me the a new species, yes, but in doing so, she had revealed, perhaps, her own mortality. And if it could happen to her – a fellow lumenarc – I had to be careful such a threat didn’t happen to me.
The Morati
I left Sindra as she retreated further into her silk-draped shadows to recover. Taking her children back to my Life Labs at The Cauldron I set to work. After playing around for a few centuries I was also able to make it so that when Sindra’s ghouls fed on other living creatures they would ‘infect’ them with the internal disease that kept them half dead, half alive – which meant they could make more of themselves on their own [bonus!].
Nowadays these creatures are in vogue in your horror stories [Zombies, anyone?], but back then we called them The Skulz. Both the Atlanteans and Amorosi eventually named them The Morati and when Alyssa’s children at last got a look at the work of my hand, they freaked out so much that they lamented this as the End of the Second Age of their history. Especially because – during the period when Sindra was birthing her children – I had been busy defeating Kaelin and destroying Atlantis.
The Amorosi dealt with the Morati Threat by retreating further into their forest havens, building up their military to ward off the threat, and praying their little hearts out to Alyssa and whoever else they thought would listen. Meanwhile, curiously enough, the Atleanteans took a different approach – since their main city was still in ruins from my Leviathan, they called upon the Lemurians to help them build an ice wall to protect them from the evils of the world.
The Mylars, perhaps fearing this new plague would reach their outer paradise, agreed to the Great Partition – creating a Second Ice Wall – an inner ring of frost you now call Antarctica.
This wall served a dual purpose. It trapped the Morati and the other races (the surviving Amorosi, Hyperboreans, my growing cavalcade of evil minions, and eventually mankind) in the tiny Inner Circle of the Flat Earth. It also provided the Atlanteans with a “Pure Zone” in the Middle Ring, where they could continue their technological evolution undisturbed – or so they foolishly believed.
The Atlanteans then “receded” from the central world, abandoning their Star Forts and remaining coastal cities and underwater villages. They moved their civilization within the Antarctic Ring. In time they became the Wardens of the Frost, manning the wall, ensuring that nothing—not the Skulz, not their old brothers the Amorosi, and eventually, not you—could ever cross into the Middle Ring.
As I watched the last Atlantean ship vanish into the freezing mists of the Second Wall, I felt a sense of profound satisfaction.
The stage was cleared. My failed experiments were hiding in the corners of the world. My ‘frenemy’ Sindra was exhausted, her power spent on a race of zombies that were now hibernating in the mud, waiting for my command. Pan, Alyssa, and others were busy doing their own thing. In short I was free to do as I pleased with the world.
I looked down at the small, muddy puddle of the world where you now reside. It was time for the final experiment. I didn’t need giants like the Brutz, or glowing fey like the Mylars, or beautiful warriors like the Amorosi.
I needed something I could own.
I began to sketch the blueprints for Mankind. I would give them a soul-receptacle, but I would make it fragile. I would give them a short lifespan, so they would always be afraid. And most importantly, I would give them a “Creator” whom they could worship.
It was time for a project – one I called “The Garden of Eden.” And it was time to introduce Adam to a new kind of partner. Someone… submissive. Someone named Eve.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 