The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

Five & Six

5

Before allowing the edges of her shoe to slip beneath the next curtain, Dactalla paused. She sensed an unnerving stillness on the other side. Nothing was moving. She drifted through space, millimetre by millimetre. She slipped between the curtain, that was split in the middle, one side slightly overlapping with the other. She slid into the room, which was permeated by a pale pink light. There was a Behemoth floating somewhere in the air. She could feel it. It was the walls and ceiling itself. It was breathing slowly.

She moved without sound, as if she hardly existed in space, through the steel grey curtain of the fifth veil.

6

The walls of the next room flowed and seemed to breath, as if some crimson and dark brown life-form stretched from floor to ceiling. Beneath her feet, Dactalla felt the ground wasn’t quite firm, as if she was walking on the spine or exoskeleton of some primordial beast. The light was thick and perfumed, as if with a combination of musk, chypre, and fougère. In the middle of the room on a divan that was lost under his enormous bulk, sat Gascitar. He looked like a mountain covered in a dark green foothill of robes, and valleys of black velvet. He’d been waiting decades for a moment like this.

From what Knifestream had told Gascitar, he imagined Dactalla as a dark goddess. In his lurid imagination, she was part reptile, smooth and slick enough to slide around every Discordian danger. He would give his eye teeth, put his own head on a platter, just to see the bright form beneath.

Gascitar wondered what lay beneath her perfect form: a saw-scaled viper with sharp fangs, or an insectivorous lizard that could devour its prey like a Venus flytrap? He imagined her in the way one might imagine Salome dancing before Herod, or the seven-stage striptease of Inanna on her way to meet Ereshkigal, the dark goddess of the underworld.

Gascitar imagined her resplendent Derelectan body in front of his eyes, all her defences down, in obeisance to her dark lord. He would take it all in, and perhaps finally admit to himself what he had always kept a secret: that his precious lust for power wasn’t as great as that other lust, which he knew to be dangerous, since it might turn him from victimizer to victim. Deep down, he feared, and yet he also hoped, that this was the only type of surrender he would ever make. He yearned to be one with the primal swamp magic that had made the Derelectans the most feared and desired creature in the universe.

Dactalla knew what leches these Demon Priests were. She unbuttoned the blouse that floated across her abdominal belt, just long enough for the old geezer to open his mouth in awe, at which point she pulled down her skirt and let the glowing blue pentagrams flow and crackle around his dark green cloak. She then pulled up her skirt, readjusted her blouse, and walked through the ash grey of the sixth veil.

For the next week, Gascitar sat immobile, staring at the stars as their light dwindled and his spirit shrivelled into a tiny black dot, and then floated into space.

7

In the next room Knifestream sat at an olive-coloured desk, looking at his screens. He knew Gascitar would buckle at the first scent that emanated from Dactalla’s lower belt. He knew the ingredients of those smells. His lab had worked it out. Thousands of his spies were using the exact same proportions of chemicals, gulling security agents and state ministers, depriving presidents of their will to keep secrets, and paralyzing even the hardest operatives from remembering what they’d let slip. He wasn’t about to be taken in by such a crude display of swamp magic.

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Next: 🎲 The Seventh Veil

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