“BIRTH OF PHARAOH” CHAPTER 6

“UPON THE MOON CALLED HALIEN-6”

COPYRIGHT 2023. CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The Training of the oldest days of the universe produced the Na’ Halien. Them who served only good and law meant everything to so many trillions of cities in galaxies everywhere.

Then, things fell. I found myself murdered, for real, but then I burst anew in female form and straddled society, attending all the evening-time soirees, meeting all the big names in the interstellar configuration, and not as the prettiest there.

Yes, it’s true how I was once a damsel, for I have lived before. And, as queen, I was actually enjoying myself because I was dictating this particular one special zone upon the moon called Halien-6.

I found it easy to stay alert while caressing each sleeve of my gown.

I was the queen, complete with the frontal crumpet, and everything else that goes along with that.

One understands the frontal crumpet to be the overgrowth of fat, plus decaying or rotting skin, that crumples from the tip of one’s chin and courses all the way past your bellybutton, and there is no way around it due to the unique configuration of esophagus and neck cords, and things I can’t remember.

That’s how things grew back in those days inside our humble Halien-6 abodes. Lots of cleaning devices and things because, of course, arms and lizards go everywhere, spreading bits of things every minute. Little mosses and termites and wings and things grow out of control in certain environments. If the children weren’t regularly cleaned with very harsh chemicals they would sprout. An entire family fell asleep after partying and found themselves awake but confined in strange flowering things from every part of their torsos, extensions of exotic growth from their bodies filled many rooms. They were trapped and died after several weeks together, in agony.

The frontal crumpet is obnoxious in many ways. It can grow big. There are dangling ornaments or frills accompanying any queen’s presentation to exult everything. I had a team putting things together each afternoon. It was simply a part of life that doesn’t exist anymore.

Gets really noisy when one eats one’s food.

There was a long list of sacrificial requirements fulfilled en masse leading up to any national holidays. That’s how things on Halien-6 were put together. Food was huge. And, “Eating one’s food often includes eating one’s friends,” they say regularly. It was not a saying I myself had penned.

Arriving to the bestowed position of Na’ Halien Queen on Halien-6 lacked complete fortitude. For that, I was finding myself mentally forced into training—by my own mind! I have inborn sense of rightness—that sort of thing.

I was not big on partaking of that moon’s gourmet meat dishes, but it’s antisocial not to cannibalize if you have lived there for a while there, or if you were a any part of society. Being the queen, I was meant to participate but I didn’t except for a few times I was forced. For decades and decades, I had nightmares.

“Pardon me if I enjoy my friends’ real-life company,” I had said often, saving lives.

I was queen, raised and bred with the best of them.

Inside my eyes, The Training, with its laws and physical practices, and its codes repeated over and over again, was my superior course of thought. With The Na’ Halien Training, it is not only disrespectful but also disenchanting to engage in cannibalism—or whoever. There’s an entire lesson in The Training and it was brought home to me in those days. It came flooding into my mind every time a man or child’s head was staring at me from a serving tray.

My basic focus is upon it being best to keep one’s friends alive, as well as engaging in the idea alongside them of them living another day. These types of ideas seem crucial. I often tried to spread them around the table.

They said, of the eaten, that computers can regurgitate any persona, but then I don’t like the person anymore.

Time moved forward.

Lies and pestilence took out all of the offbeat Na’ Halien royalty. After those ones were annihilated, by command personnel across various space stations, I declared, “It is savvy to become a vegetarian since the day one is born,” and that was always a little inside joke sure to get a laugh from people who had been born and lived on Halien-6 with me.

And yet, I diverse my situation and return mentally again to that time, in my strange castle. In those years, the queens talked a lot with one another. Our shoulders were shriveled with non-exertion, and they hunched the opposite way than the human shoulder. Our legs didn’t split until slightly before the knees, or whatever they were thought of midway down the legs. We couldn’t get around well.

We kept up socially. We talked, always with each other.

All those glorious days.

Any rate, today I call him Slave because there, up on Halien-6, he made an impression as one for it was the slaves’ homes that erupted in revolution first. I honestly didn’t have the heart to tell them, “No,” but I should have put up a better show than resting on a bipartisan parallel to their rightful angst of being alive only to be hung, slaughtered and eaten, sometimes alive.

I remember the first time The Slave and I bumped paths. Before that night got started, I watched as he and the others were presented to me at my table. The procession that night was god-awful. All the creatures who performed were resentful. Then, the slaves were terrible with their irritation. They snarled. I marked the time with my foot.

Tables stretched in front of me. It was true beauty, flowers and frills, and all.

The night was lit by old-fashioned lamps that were strung by pure magic from vapor spirits who were brought in just for us, though one of them had a real jin inside. He was kept sparking and pranking all night by my staff, and his gold container floated through the halls.

The guards, at meals and parties, followed my law about dietary concerns, but there were also distinguished visitors, off-planet guests from far and wide, and they couldn’t care less. They just hauled in financial contributions of boys and girls to be slaughtered and got started right that night, to the night’s glory, and that was that. I didn’t fight, which was against me, as well as The Training, internally. It’s my fault because I was an idiot who felt it was best to present to our own “company neutrality” concerning human waste and feeding.

How well I remember the frontal crumpet because, when The Slave launched into the morbid shed where the feast was prepared, he was fairly alive. And I felt constricted, to say the very least.

Our meeting happened fairly soon after the well-planned event began. Ever after, I blame that damned physique for my retarded response.

“Look at you,” his voice sneered in the cold night. I remember feeling strange, that I should stand alone and hear such words coming from a man who had been presented to thousands in the hall, minutes ago, as a heady Slave.

Of course, I responded, “Oh, I bet you mess around a lot, don’t you?”

“I tell you something that I do a lot of,” he said.

With his words, he launched. His cold blade found my throat and, in a flash, I was done.

Silence.

Air.

The cold wind blew in from the aftermath of the hurry.

Not that I minded being proven a girl, but he really made a show of calling me lazy, too.

The disgusting show over, it was, in the end, how I remembered everything. In this moment of complete pain, I recalled all the scales and positions and glances that I heeded well during my old Na’ Halien training days. If he hadn’t struck, I might have forgotten. The ordeal helped me in the long run. I don’t mind ever saying so.

Now, this is why The Slave doesn’t talk to me anymore: It had been ages since I’d swung a sword by the time we had our awful get-along that night, much less conjured Emerald Team Green—frankly, a lame sort of name but, still, ETG was my latest mirage of war-time mind and matter. It was sort of my collage. It was based upon significant elements of The Training mixed together with pure living but feminine-style. It was a collection of stardust and sandstorm wizarding shackles chained together for an entire army if I felt besieged enough to say, as they say, “bring it on”.

ETG was fun.

The more The Slave and his friends clamored for blood, and took it everywhere they found it, the more all the pompous speeches about dignity and friendship and honor—everything else I’d learnt so well as poetry in youth—it all returned to me, and so I spoke with all that wondrous nomenclature in mind.

“This fighting spirit I contain, well, with it I spit a cold shower of lightning turds up inside the anal chambers of everything storming my regime,” I said to him, close to the sunset of the White Queen’s reign (a fair damsel we both kept on good terms with but scarcely knew all that much about).

But, in our haste of meeting each other’s end, everything went ka-blamy.

And that, as they often chant in unison in the Ever World, is that.

Oh, life was so awful, then.

I felt so awful.

Everything was gone that I had lived for.

After that, I found out about the Great Lord of All, and I’ve been his man-chump ever since. This is the person who I have strung along for, after the Na Halien went away for good. His name is Fior.

It’s sad how often I remember my Lord Fior here, yon night, on the Bonne Valle Quatra, healing inside a small tube.

I start to fall asleep again. Everything I think of reminds me only of everything grand I once did long before I ever locked eyes and mind with the Slave. Since that time, I am cursed.

Later, I awake to find the Medic at my side. He tells me about how my eyes are sutured shut in order to protect some special nutrient in there.

I am lost in my memories.

Another full month passes while I am healed inside the medic’s tube.

TO CONTINUE THE ADVENTURE CLICK ON CHAPTER SEVEN: “NYERA IS GONE” FROM THE RENEYT HOMEPAGE!