fertility stones (written november 2023) -- fiction

the beginning of my 2023 novel (currently unfinished): fertility stones

Isabella as Child

“Did I ever tell you about the White Monks?” Claudia asked her. “The naked monks whose skin has never touched sunlight and whose eyes have never seen a woman? They take them as babies, only the palest babies. They pick them up from Skull Field outside the city where all the women take their unwanted babies. Have you ever been there? No?! They leave the rest of the babies for the slavers and vultures. Anyway, they take the palest babies back with them to the Holy Fraternity and they keep them in there until the day they die.”

“But why?” Isabella sat up, startled. “How do they worship if they have never seen a woman? Their souls are damned!”

“Not at all,” Journalist said. “They worship the mystery of women. It isn’t enough to have men worshiping the physical form of woman. Men need to worship her mystery too. These men have all kinds of sexual urges, innate sexual urges for women, and yet they can’t even see one. The Woman remains a total mystery to them: they’ve never heard her voice, nor seen her face, nor even imagined the kinds of clothes she might wear. But they know about her and they want her all the same, and they torment themselves with desire for her every moment of every day. The magical power of their sexual energy is far greater than anything an ordinary man generate, and the Goddess harnesses that energy to fertilize the Earth. You see all the farms outside the Capital? Haven’t you noticed there isn’t a Fertility Stone in the Capital? We have food thanks to the urges of the White Monks.”

Isabella shuddered. “They sound disgusting,” she said. “They must see women as babies though, right? What do they eat?”

“Oh, that’s another thing about these creatures,” Journalist said. “They drink milk from this weird animal that gives them these bright green veins and extremely chalky white skin. They don’t have any hair either, not even pubic hair.”

“Oh, they are,” Claudia said. “You know, if they ever were to see a woman… can you imagine what they might do? All that pent up desire and then they finally see a beautiful one, maybe a nice little girl like you? One day, the plan is that they’re going to let them all out.”

“Stop!” Isabella shouted at her older sister.

For years, Isabella was fearful every time she had to walk by the Holy Fraternity. At school, other little girls also told scary stories about the White Monks. Some claimed to know women who’d been attacked by the odd one who had escaped. Others even claimed to have seen one for themselves: one girl spoke with what seemed like genuine terror about the incredibly white, freakish man she had seen standing in an alley looking at her, bright green veins slithering up his skin toward. He was bald, she said, like all of them.

Isabella tried not to believe these stories. In those days, all little children liked to tell tall tales about monsters, and little girls couldn’t stop themselves from fixating upon horror stories about men rising up and taking power. Most of these stories centered upon the Holy Fraternity, the only space in the entire Matriarchy that was reserved exclusively for men, though only men of a certain class and who had endured certain tests of their loyalty to the Divine Woman.

She confronted her grandmother one day. “Why would you allow men to have their own private space?”

Her grandmother looked startled. Isabella could tell right away from the woman’s face that she was trying to think of something to say that wasn’t quite the truth, the way she always did with any topic about which she still treated Isabella like a child.

“Oh, Isabella,” she said, contorting her face with faked relaxation, as if they were not discussing a matter of existential importance. “Men need to have their fun.”

“That place will be the end of the Matriarchy,” Isabella said. “Haven’t you heard about the White Monks?”

Her grandmother became angry, standing up and shouting for Isabella’s mother. Isabella’s mother came rushing in. “What? What is happening?”

“Why is your daughter going on about the White Monks?” her grandmother said. “I told you to explain to her that this was just a monster story!”

“Oh, your holiness,” Isabella’s mother said, bowing her head. “I am so sorry!”

Isabella’s mother quickly dragged her away. She heard her grandmother scoffing and swearing behind them. Her mother pushed her into her bedroom and closed the door behind them.

“Why would you go talking to your grandmother about the White Monks? You’ve been named heiress! Do you want to convince her you’re some kind of crackpot? She could revoke your title!”

“But I have questions, mom,” she said.

“I know you do,” her mom said. “But you need to be patient. One day, Isabella, you’re going to be a Mother. You’re going to have a vote in the Assembly for the rest of your life. You’ll be able to do whatever you want and say whatever you want, and you’ll able to read whatever you want. But right now you don’t have that power yet. You have to wait. Don’t upset your grandma again, okay?”

Isabella promised her mother she would never upset her grandmother again. From that day forward, whenever she wanted to argue with her grandmother or ask her strange questions, she stopped herself. She tried to make her grandmother feel that she agreed with virtually everything the woman thought, said, or did, and the grandmother became increasingly confident that Isabella was the right choice for the job.

Meanwhile, all through her teenage and university years, Isabella was learning and plotting. There were so many crises facing the country: the refugees flowing into the capital, the peasant rebellions across much of the farmland. Her grandmother either did nothing to fix any of this or she voted for proposals that actively worsened the situation. Whenever she went to Assembly with her grandmother, she found it most difficult of all to restrain herself. But she did. She had to! Because once she had power, she was going to change things. She was going to betray her grandmother’s sterile old vision of society and she was going to go down among history’s greatest Mothers.

Soon she learned about the real history behind the peasants. She tried to convince her mother that the peasants’ rage was justified. Her mother threatened to dispossess her of her title herself if she ever said such a thing again. “You want to be killed?” her mother asked, a crazed look in her face.

“My grandma and my mom are both psychos,” Isabella explained to her friend Aurelian.

Peasant Rebellion

The land on which Lenny had lived all his life was now a home for the Neanderthals. Giant and stupid humanoid creatures, with superior muscle but inferior brains, they actually did seem happy and content from Lenny’s hiding place in the forest overlooking his family’s old farm.

“Remember how miserable we were living here?” Lenny asked the other scout beside him. “Now we’re risking our lives in a war to win it back.”

“What else would we do?”

Lenny turned to him. “There’s other political movements for peasants besides warfare.”

“We’ve been dispossessed,” the other scout said.

Lenny rolled his eyes at the vocabulary. Lenny knew a lot of big words, but he didn’t like it when other people used them. “Your biggest mistake was learning how to read.”

“We have a right to till these lands,” the other scout went on, “which we have tilled since the dawn of the Fertility Stones!”

“You sound like you’re narrating a propaganda pamphlet,” Lenny said. “No one is going to listen to you if you speak like that. You need to give up the books.”

“I’m talking about our rights,” he said, ignoring Lenny’s obsession with vocabulary.

“Sure, we have a ‘right’ to live in a shithole that can only make Neanderthals happy.”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, so what’s your solution?”

“Settle down in the city,” Lenny said, and it actually sounded like a joke when he thought about the bridge and makeshift tent he had been sleeping under for the past week. He was happy to be back in the fight in the countryside, risking his life alongside his brother-in-arms in the Revolutionary Peasant Organization. He didn’t actually care about these conversations about rights and political philosophy. He just always found himself disagreeing with whoever was speaking to him, and right now someone was praising their old farmland.

Which was a shithole, Lenny reminded himself, though that was thanks to the landlords.

Right now, though, the aesthetics of the land were irrelevant: if they did not take back control of their land, they were going to die. Only recently, years after the first wave of evictions, had the Sacred Sorority finally voted to allow refugees into the city. But the Sisters had done so over Temple objections, and numerous Elite Women were calling for the peasants to be banished from the Capital. To go where, no one cared. Others did think about the question and settled upon an answer: the peasants should go to a mass grave.

Whatever the solution, the Matriarchs would not allow such a huge peasant population to stay in the Capital forever. There had been sympathy for them at first, but once they started pouring in by the thousands, elite and middle-class women alike began to complain about robberies, rapes, murders, and weapons smuggling. Lenny himself had run a gang that sold drugs and used the money to buy weapons from corrupt soldiers; he’d been involved in plenty of turf wars with a separate peasant gang that was trying to fund a separate rebel movement on the other side of the country. Lenny and almost all the other peasants were homeless; they slept in tents at night. The Capital was slipping into chaos and violence. Sooner or later, they would banish the peasants. Then they would either take back control of their indigenous lands, or they would starve. The war was unavoidable if Lenny wanted to live, and so here he was fighting.

“There they are,” his partner said, and he pointed at the horizon where a group of Temple soldiers were marching up the road toward the local Temple garrison.

Lenny sighed. “This is a suicide mission. They’ll have calvary on us within moments.”

“I’ve been watching for weeks,” his partner said. “This the last patrol for the next few hours. They barely even watch from the towers. There isn’t even any illumination. They’ve grown content. They think they’re too deep into cleansed territory to worry about us anymore. We’ll have just enough time to achieve our objectives.”

“‘Achieve our objectives,’” Lenny mocked. “Once again, the books.”

“I didn’t realize the extent to which you suffered from internalized stereotypes.”

“Yeah, well, I grew up surrounded by them. A peasant who reads? A peasant who reads is a few steps away from being an Administrator.”

His partner scoffed at him. “Shouldn’t you know by now that we peasants need to learn to read for ourselves? You’ve spent enough time in the city to know you can’t trust the Authorities.”

“We could trust the Matriarchs,” Lenny said. “Back then, everyone knew their place. The Matriarchs cared for us like children in their bosom. We were happy. We didn’t need books. It’s not in our nature to read books. Look at how unhappy and obnoxious they’ve made you. They’re bad for us. You’ve read enough of them to know that!”

“Still believing that religious propaganda,” his partner said. “Honestly I thought you’d have grown out of it by now. Look at what the Temple has done to us! You still talk about the Goddess and her bosom. Unbelievable.”

Lenny was mortified by his friend’s blasphemy. “Of course I still talk about the Goddess,” Lenny said. “The Temple is corrupt. Their Administrators have ruined our lives. But that’s just the Administrators. They have the Supreme High Priestess deceived.”

His friend laughed aloud.

“Shhh!” Lenny said.

A few Neanderthals glanced in their direction. They ducked down. His friend kept giggling, struggling to suppress his laughter. “Oh, I’m sorry Lenny,” he said. “But that’s just so fucking stupid. Valentina is in on all this. You don’t think she has been enriched off our eviction? She’s probably the one who came up with the idea to replace us with Neanderthals. Wait, look!”

They looked carefully over the hilltop. The garrison of soldiers was withdrawing. They waited quietly until all the soldiers had receded over the horizon. A short while after that, the sun went down. Lenny remembered watching these sunsets with his father as a little boy here.

“Fucking beautiful isn’t it?” his friend said. “You tell me this isn’t worth fighting for?”

Lenny took a deep breath of the fresh air and listened happily to the creekbed where he’d caught his first fish with his dad. “Does this beat sleeping under bridges by day while plotting pointlessly to overthrow the Authorities by night? Yes, definitely it does.”

“You’re cynical about overthrowing the Authorities because you just trust one of them still.”

Lenny felt rage throttling through him. “Are you saying the Goddess is a mere Authority?”

“Oh right,” his friend shrugged. He sighed. “You really believe she actually is the Goddess.”

“She is the Goddess, and she is going to put an end to this,” he said. “The Authorities won’t deceive her forever. And even if it they could, all our schemes to overthrow them were a waste of time. We’ve spent enough time in the Capital to admit that the Authorities cannot be overthrown. They can only be pressured to change.”

“There’s that revolutionary philosophy,” his friend joked. “When can I buy the book?”

Lenny frowned and scoffed. “I would never stoop so low as to learn how to write. I know my place.”

“I can’t wait for you to finally become an atheist.”

This moron thought they were friends. If Lenny ever had any power, he’d be sure to execute this heathen himself.

“An atheist!” he said. “You speak of atheism when you’ve seen the Fertility Stones failing with your own eyes. We need to redeem the land. We need to redeem the social structures as they should be. This land belongs by divine right to the Matriarchs, not to the Temple. We belong to this land, not to the city. The Matriarchs are our lords, not the City Prefect or the Temple Guard or the Frontier Units. But the Temple has dispersed us from our sacred land, and severed us from the bonds between ourselves and our beloved Mothers.” He gestured at the families of Neanderthals. “The Neanderthals belong in their graves, not in our homes on our fields. Their continued existence is an affront to the Goddess and a detriment to the divinely sanctioned social structure. The moment the Temple stole this land from its proper lords and replaced us with Neanderthals, they disrupted the Conditions of the Goddess. She is angry. And that’s why the desert is expanding. If we don’t redeem this land, we will all starve to death.”

His friend was really laughing now. “Listen to how you talk! You might as well be literate!”

Lenny swallowed the disgust he felt for his parentage and confessed to the truth. “My father was a political scientist.”

“What! Your father! A professor! Where? In the capital?”

Lenny nodded. “I was his bastard, but he came out to the estate sometimes before the Temple stole the land and banned visitors. I don’t believe Valentina knows anything about that.”

His friend raised an eyebrow. “At least we agree on one thing,” he said. He turned around to the others. “Boys, we exterminate the vermin, steal what we can, and retreat within ten minutes.”

“Killing everyone,” Lenny said, “is the most important goal. Don’t be like the Temple. Don’t put your economic interests before the dictates of the Goddess. We are here to purify. We are here for purification, for redemption, we are here to spill as much blood as possible. Don’t be distracted by booty when there are still Neanderthals left to kill.”

This was the most difficult aspect of being a peasant guerrilla leader: convincing peasants to abide by strategies designed to win the war rather than provide them with wealth or amusement.

Isabella’s Bedchamber (Aurelian)

“Why are you so obsessed with what the high priestesses have to say?” Isabella demanded. “Don’t you realize? They are corrupt! This amulet” - she lifted the jewelry off Aurelian’s chest and looked at it with disgust - “is nothing more than a tool those bitches use to control you!”

Isabella leapt naked off the bed and rushed quickly toward her dressing table.

Aurelian sat up in horror. The deadliness of her heresy sent shivers through his body. Still naked and reclined in her enormous bed, he leaned forward off the frame. He watched her slip into a crimson silk nightgown and sit down at the mirror before frantically brushing her hair.

They made eye contact in the reflection.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. She picked her clothes up off the floor in the faint candlelight. She slipped into a crimson silk nightgown and sat down at her dresser, frantically brushing her hair like she often did when she was annoyed with him.

“How can you speak that way against… against the Goddess?”

“Against the Goddess?” she asked. Now she turned to face him full on, her long curly black hair spilling out over the back of her chair. Her eyes reflected the dim light from the candles sprinkled around her bedchamber. “Against the Goddess! You seriously believe the high priestesses are what? Say it. Say it aloud.”

Aurelian’s mouth dropped open. Was she trying to entrap him? Was this some kind of test to see if his faith in the Goddess was true? If so, he’d already dug himself into a hole by agreeing to violate the law by coming into her bedchamber at all. They were together in the Luxury Zone, reserved for the city’s most illustrious women and their qualified guests. He would only qualify if he survived the chase tomorrow. Were he caught here tonight, he could be executed.

“You’re not serious,” he said. “You want to know if I am… if I deserve the hand of an heiress… if I have - ”

Isabella stood up then. “Eight years of high training and you’re still brainwashed,” she said.

“Brainwashed!”

“And I know it’s because they won’t even let you read the books we can read,” she went on, pacing angrily before the bed. “Aurelian, you don’t have to die tomorrow. Please.” She came and sat down on the bed beside him. She reached out and took his hand.

He stroked it uneasily, terrified that this wasn’t a test. What if she really was a heretic?

“Aurelian,” she repeated. “We can run away together. We can go and live with the Neanderthals.”

He shuddered. “Live with the Neanderthals! What is wrong with you!”

“Oh, that’s pretty simple! What is wrong is I don’t want you to die for a pointless ritual that has no other purpose other than to strike fear into the population and enhance the Temple’s power.”

“Isabella!” he said. Did she want the whole country to turn into a giant desert? “How can you! How can you say such a thing!”

She got into bed and collapsed beside him, sinking her face into the pillow. She screamed. The silk and feathers muffled the sound; the stone walls around them hopefully prevented any guards from thinking she was in danger. Then her scream gave way to crying.

He put a hand on her back and gently massaged her. “Shhh,” he said cautiously. “It’s okay.”

It killed him to see her like this. He was used to her relatively independent mind. As an heiress, she was allowed to read more books by more authors than the Censor would ever permit to any man. Perplexing facts about history and religion, many of which she could not share with him without jeopardizing her political position, fluttered through her strong feminine mind: she often shared her doubts with him about this or that decree emanating from the Sacred Sorority. That was her right as a future Matriarch. But these words were heresy. These words - these plans! - could get them both killed.

As he tried to comfort her with kisses on her hair and neck, he concluded with relief that these schemes and heterodoxies were not real. Grief about his likely fate had simply overwhelmed her.

“Listen, Isabella,” he said, whispering as she slowly came down, “I know this is difficult. I… I don’t want to die! I want to live our lives together. I want us to come out of our secrecy so I can be your husband and we can be together for the rest of our lives.”

“We’re not going to be together,” Isabella said. She finally turned her face from her pillow and faced him, glaring. “A warrior-slave is going to slaughter you tomorrow and take your amulet.” She paused. She was starting to breathe harder. “That’s probably what you want. You’re a religious fanatic. You want to die tomorrow so that your soul will dangle forever from the neck of some deranged warrior-slave while he inseminates priestess after priestess.”

Aurelian shook his head and tried his best to ignore her remarks against the Goddess. Too often he had doubted whether his soul would really live on inside the amulet after a warrior-slave snatched it off his corpse. Too often he had questioned, albeit privately, whether he would truly be able to enjoy sex with the priestesses as his soul entered into them during the breeding process. And he knew that if he did die tomorrow, the Temple would examine his amulet: if the high priestesses detected this doubt in his soul, they would throw his amulet into the furnace, extinguishing his very being from existence.

He wanted to survive.

“I’m going to live,” he told her, kissing her on the forehead. He reminded himself that her doubts did not reflect her true beliefs. She was just scared to lose him. “I promise you that, okay? I’m going to run as fast as I can. I’m going to survive. We’re going to get married like we always dreamed, and I will be by your side forever once you are crowned as a Matriarch.”

She nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. He kissed them off her face. Slowly they nestled into one another again. They held each other until they both fell asleep, and in the morning she smuggled him out of the Luxury Zone so he could report for the Absorption of Souls.

The Fertility King (Aurelian)

Aurelian walked with hundreds of other completely naked men through the Great Hall of the Athletic Center. A soul amulet dangled off the necks of each of them. The wails of the fanatical men in the front, each of them desperate to die and be sexually united with the priestesses for all eternity, echoed through the otherwise silent cavern. Their suicidal fervor reminded those of us in the middle that our very desire to survive might render our souls disposable should we die; their screams and moans seemed to echo up in worship toward the statue of the Sports Goddess towering fifty feet above us. Her sword was thrust up into the center of the dome above; flowing locks of her smooth stone hair extended in waves up around the blade, as if lifted by the wind. The head of an anonymous patriarch rested gruesomely upon her sword’s point.

Paintings of weapons slicing through runners’ flesh stretched around the inner surface of the dome. As the victims collapsed to the ground, the warrior-slaves snatched the amulets off their necks. Gazing up into the eyes of the great Sports Goddess, Aurelian prayed that he would survive, live a long life with Isabella, and take his place in the elite public service caste.

As the huge crowd of men proceeded through the enormous hall and began to funnel into University Square through the thirty-foot high doors, Aurelian felt the ever tighter press of bodies around him. By the time he had passed the statue in the Hall’s center, he was hardly even moving of his own volition.

Passing through the doors and stepping out with the others onto University Square, he gazed up at the hundreds of glistening naked bodies lined up along the upper terrace of the Fertility King’s Palace. In stone form, the Mother Goddess towered up from the base of the palace, obscuring the terrace’s center. All the high priestesses were spread out on either side of the Goddess: already they were beginning to touch and kiss one another. Completely naked, their flesh represented every conceivable skin color and body type, from the dark to the light, the voluptuous to the slim, in a display meant to arouse the strongest possible desire among the hundreds of naked men gazing upon them from the vast square below. The Fertility King himself was standing in the middle. Once Aurelian secured his starting place beside the fountain in the center of the square, he could just make out his old classmate’s throbbing erection. The Fertility King wore several heavy chains containing all the soul amulets from all the men who had fallen during the Absorption of Souls and then been accepted as sufficiently pure for union with the Oracle.

The Supreme High Priestess lay naked on a huge canopied bed in the middle of the terrace. Around the bed stood a semi-circle of lesser high priestesses, naked and chanting in the Old Tongue while the nominee stepped nervously up to the bed. Aurelian held his breath for his friend. Only last year a nominee’s stage fright had given him erectile dysfunction. At the command of the offended Supreme High Priestess, a warrior-slave immediately beheaded him with an ax, the the High Council condemned his soul amulet to incineration, and another man was selected from among the scholar-bureaucrats.

Soon this year’s nominee was frantically humping her in full view of every portion of the audience: the students on the dorm balconies to Aurelian’s left, the hundreds of naked men in the square all around him, the scholar-bureaucrats and academics on the university terrace opposite palace, and the terraces atop the great entrance to the Luxury Zone where Isabella would be right now with her friends. Other than the fanatics at the front, who were groaning with exaggerated sexual passion as they began to touch and penetrate one another at the feet of the Goddess, the whole square was silent. Everyone from the lowly first-year students to the most accomplished scholar-bureaucrats to the most powerful heiresses and matriarchs watched the Fertility King as he cried out in orgasm and inseminated the Supreme High Priestess, who pulled him deeper into her with her legs and joined the lesser priestesses in their chant until she had every drop.

The Supreme High Priestess took the Fertility King by the hand and walked with him from the bed to the edge of the terrace, his semen dripping out of her. “All hail the king!” she cried, lifting his fist into the air.

“All hail the king!” repeated the entire square.

The rest of the terrace erupted into an unbridled orgy. The Fertility King drank a potion meant to maintain his erection and was soon absorbed back onto the vast bed by something like thirty naked priestesses. He disappeared into the flesh, as did several warrior-slaves who joined the King’s entourage under the canopy. Across the whole stretch of terrace on either side of the bed, the high priestesses stripped off the clothes of warrior-slaves before straddling both them and each other. Groups of priestesses and warrior-slaves broke out into twosomes, foursomes, tensomes.

This is why I’m really here, Aurelian reminded himself. Even if Isabella turned out to be a heretic, this would all be worth it for the glorious career that awaited him as a scholar-bureaucrat. And if Aurelian survived today and made it into the scholar bureaucrats, the High Council might one day select him as the Annual Fertility King, and for the following twelve months he would continuously have sex with two thousand high priestesses until he had impregnated every one of them. Today’s ritual was meant to inaugurate the year’s nominee, a young man Aurelian had done school projects with just three years before.

Aurelian’s erection was enormous now. The sensuality was so overwhelming he almost forgot he was certainly going to die today. Several runners nearby, many of them on illicit drugs meant to help them deal with the trauma of this day, had already begun penetrating one another. They probably wouldn’t even run. The students on the terraces were fornicating now, and his mind flooded with happy memories of the wild sex he’d had during the Absorption last year. One naked student tripped and flipped off the balcony; Aurelian saw the naked body plummet down into the crowd of fanatics below. The balconies at the entrance to the Luxury Zone, where cliques of Heiresses hosted lavish parties, were also scenes of rampant sex. Aurelian was just able to make out Isabella: she was high out of her mind, he knew, and he saw her getting double-teamed on her private balcony by two men while her friends also had sex around her.

There were no signs of heresy in her, then. She had only been afraid, Aurelian decided, and now she was giving into the drugs and sex in an attempt to not have to think about Aurelian’s impending death. At that, Aurelian gave into his urges and started stroking himself like all the naked men around him. He fantasized about the legendary orgies he and Isabella would host in their compound. The High Council would see his dreams favorably when examining his soul for impurities. He came quickly and then, while the mayhem raged around him, he tried to get himself into the focused mindset he would need if he were going to survive. Unlike many of the others, he hadn’t taken any drugs; he only hoped that choice would pay off.

On the palace terrace, one warrior-slave failed to attain an erection. Another dragged him to the front of the terrace, chopped off his penis and then threw him alive into the crowd of hysterical men below. Aurelian saw the warrior-slave’s body smash into their reaching, grasping hands, and then a blood-curdling scream came to complement the happy screeching and moaning on the terrace. Soon the screaming stopped and one of the fanatics threw a heap of red entrails into the air. Then Aurelian saw a few more organs launch off from the space where the man had fallen. The fanatics cheered, leaping up and down for joy, and then the whole front of the crowd rushed forward toward the feet of the Mother Goddess statue. From the height of his senior-year balcony he had seen this scene before: the fanatics were crawling in desperation to the feet of the Mother Goddess. They sought to lick, stroke, kiss, even hump her. From boyhood they had dreamed of having their seed eternally absorbed into the high priestess soul pool, into the Oracle. Often on an ordinary afternoon in University Square, several of them would be naked and masturbating at the Goddess’s feet. But they wouldn’t be allowed to reach her feet just yet today. The screams he heard now were the fanatics being beaten back by warrior-slaves hoisting whips.

A high priestess just to the right of the royal bed stood for a moment looking down at the mayhem. Then she raised her fist into the air and shook it down at the fanatics. “The Oracle Goddess favors you!” she screamed. “Your seed will be within me for all of eternity!”

The fanatics abandoned their desperate charge upon the Mother Goddess: they seemed to remember that their amulets were pure, that they had proven this, and that their souls would soon be absorbed into the Oracle. They cheered, cried for joy, swayed their uplifted arms in worship. Desperate to finally be slain, they soon began singing a soft hymn in the Old Tongue.

Aurelian closed his eyes and joined them, softly singing the words he knew by heart in anticipation of his demise. Now that he had ejaculated, all he could think about was death. His fear of death today consumed him. He was shaking now; the release of the warrior-slaves was mere moments away. His chances of surviving the slaughter, especially being placed in the middle of the square like this, were slim. He dwelled anxiously upon all he had to lose. He loved Isabella; he wanted so badly to be at her side when the Sacred Sorority anointed her Matriarch. He wanted to serve her as the chief administrative officer of her compound while simultaneously making a name for himself as a scholar. But it was far more likely he would die today, and if the High Council looked into his soul amulet, what would they see?

As much as he feared losing out on his life with Isabella, he also feared the incineration of his soul. He was not worthy to be absorbed into the Oracle. He cursed himself for having sex with Isabella last night. Twenty-nine days of celibacy for nothing. He had broken the Goddess’s commandments and the High Council would toss his soul into the furnace.

He needed to survive at all costs.

The Absorption of the Souls (Aurelian)

Half an hour after the orgy had begun, the Fertility King and the Supreme High Priestess emerged from the mayhem on the bed and stepped forward, hand-in-hand, to take their seats upon two ceremonial thrones that had been placed at the center of the terrace.

A sudden hush swept across the square, although many witnesses continued silently humping and licking on the balconies. The screeching and moaning subsided until there was only a faint echo of panting emanating from the balconies of the heiress suites and dormitories. Once again the most prominent sounds were coming from the wailing fanatics who were now rushing forward with immense violence toward the palace doors, warrior-slaves whipping them back.

The hundreds of high priestesses abandoned their partners and lined up on the terrace. Aurelian scanned each one of them to appreciate the diversity of the women he would be able to inseminate as Fertility King one day: dark, light, and medium skin; brown, blonde, red, and black hair; voluptuous curves on some; slim waists, arms, and legs on others, plus everything in between. He would impregnate every single one of them. They would clench at him and pull him inside, religiously hungry for every drop of his seed. He knew that the way he looked at these women would play into his chances were he to die today; these women were the physical manifestation of the Mother Goddess, their souls united into her own within the Oracle, and his only hope for salvation after death today lay in his amulet forever worn by the Fertility King.

But he wasn’t going to die. I am sober, he reminded himself, while almost everyone around me is drunk or high. I can focus. I can survive.

Suddenly the massive creaking gates began lifting at the entrance to the Palace. Aurelian immediately turned around and began shoving his way through a few men having sex behind him. He made it around just a few bodies before numerous others in front of him were also trying to escape and it became impossible to move forward. His heart thudded hard against his chest;

Raw joy swept over the fanatics up front as the whole mass of them rushed forward toward the opening gate. Aurelian could hear them screeching and babbling, singing and groaning, and then a warcry came roaring out from the cavernous entrance to the palace. He knew what was happening some hundred feet behind him now: a hundred warrior-slaves, naked save for the pouches in which they would collect each sacrifice’s amulet, were charging into the unarmed crowd with steel swords drawn. Men cried out in ecstasy just before swords sliced open their necks; the gurgles of the slaughtered steadily replaced the melodies of fervent worship. Within moments, the fanatics were completely silent, and all he could hear were the terrified screams of the unwilling dead. The awful sounds of shredding flesh and gurgling screams filled the air.

Against the press of bodies desperate to escape the square through the ten-foot-wide street on the opposite side from the oracle, Aurelian dared a glance behind him: bright red streaks of blood and guts were spraying through the air at what was now the back of the crowd. Almost everyone around Aurelian, save for a few drugged-up men who were crushed underfoot in the midst of their threesome, was now lunging frantically forward, desperate to reach the narrow street before a steel sword sliced up their bodies and a warrior-slave’s hand pocketed their souls.

The tip of one of those swords would burst through Aurelian within moments. Raw fear of death, of losing everything he’d dreamed of in life, overtook him. He thrust his whole body against those in front of him, and he in turn was shoved forward by the terrified men behind him. Still he hardly moved more than several feet toward the street, and the groans of the dying were drawing closer with every second. He heard men crying out, pleading for their lives, and he imagined the high priestesses making a note of their names so that their souls could be incinerated.

The panic in the crowd intensified until several weaker men around Aurelian dropped down beneath the press of bodies. A few dropped down in front of him as well; ignoring their gasps for breath, he stomped over them and was able to move forward ten more feet before the corner of his eye caught what seemed like several gallons of blood spraying through the air.

Aurelian thought nothing of morality or even of his future. His awful terror had him thinking only of the need to survive at all costs. He joined forces with a few other strong men beside him. Together they shoved the men in front of them to the ground, stomped onto their faces and backs, and pushed forward until they were tripping through a cluster of trampled corpses. So many men had suffocated or been trampled in the madness, and so many hundreds of others had escaped into the narrow street or been cut down behind him, that the crowd had loosened just enough for Aurelian to begin actually slowly jogging the street.

Screams now seemed to be right in his ear. He glanced to the right. Through the cracks between naked flesh he saw a warrior-slave shoving his sword through the back of a recent graduate he recognized from his history class. Then the largest man Aurelian had ever seen swept a blade half the size of an adult’s abdomen clear through a runner’s waist, severing the victim’s torso from his legs. The whole crowd lunged sharply to the left, desperate to escape the two warrior-slaves to the right who were now slashing into screaming men all around them. But the crowd’s panicked movement only forced several men to Aurelian’s left directly into the sword tips of several chuckling warrior-slaves.

The warrior-slaves had almost surrounded Aurelian. If he didn’t make it through the gate soon, he would die. He knew he was only still alive because the fountain happened to be behind him and the warrior-slaves were pursuing them around rather than across it.

That meant he had a chance. He had been training for this. He shoved people to the ground wherever he encountered them, desperate to create more victims to distract the warrior-slaves behind him, and soon he was running through an ever-thinner mass toward the men funneling through the narrow gate communicating them onto the street. Blood splashed against the back of his neck just when he reached the back of the crowd pushing through the gate.

He ripped the amulet off the neck of the man in front of him and threw it back behind them. The man screamed in terror; Aurelian shoved him back toward the approaching warrior-slave, saw the sword thrust through the man’s chest, and then - with the aid of his earlier ally - he summoned all his strength to punch the men around him in the face and shove them to the ground until he and his partner were deep inside the funnel of people streaming through the gate.

The two of them joined at the hips and forced their way through the bodies in front of them, ruthlessly forcing people to the ground, stomping over them, throwing people to the left and to the right, carving out their path even as increasing quantities of blood showered across backs and heads from somewhere behind them. The gurgling screams and cowardly pleadings of men being cut into pieces were all around him. He could clearly hear the awful sounds of shredding flesh, snapping bones, sliced throats, and disembowelment: when a heap of intestines landed in his hair, he became evermore ruthless toward the weaker men around him, and just before the gate, when his erstwhile partner was his only remaining obstacle, he shoved his former ally clear to the left, causing him to trip over a corpse and fall on his back into a crowd of men. In the corner of his eye, Aurelian saw a warrior-slave thrust a sword down into the man’s neck.

Then Aurelian was through the gate. The space widened once he was out on the street, and he was sprinting for his life with a group of other men as the warrior-slaves mopped up at the gate entrance behind them. As he ran, he sensed the warrior-slaves right behind him; he saw men falling just beside him, even spotted the tips of swords emerging from bellies to his left and right, and a surge of adrenaline sent him sprinting to the point of extreme nausea.

To the left and right on this street, one of the city’s wealthiest, were the mansions of the matriarchy’s most storied families, and Aurelian noticed dozens of little girls watching the slaughter through the windows. Their mothers or sisters held their heads in place so they couldn’t look away. The finish line was just some thirty feet ahead; he hear both the groans of men cut down behind him and the thundering applause greeting those survivors now spilling out onto Government Square at the end of the street. He ignored his growing urge to vomit and somehow ran even faster. His body was in agony, but he kept a vision of Isabella’s beautiful face in his mind, thought against all hope of the life they hoped to build together, and with her voice mysteriously echoing in his head, he exceeded the fastest pace achieved during his training.

Just ten feet from the finish line, he could see the robed administrative executives solemnly greeting the survivors. Another man sprinted ahead of him, and so did a pursuing warrior-slave. Terror swept over him when he realized that this warrior-slave was now cutting down people ahead of him. He would soon be swallowed up and slaughtered.

The warrior-slave cut off a man’s head just before the finish line; Aurelian tripped over the falling corpse. He saw the warrior-slave’s sword plunging toward his own body, but the force of his trip sent him flailing improbably across the finish line, narrowly missing the slashing blade, and he collapsed vomiting onto the ground as the thundering applause filled his ears.

He lay on his back looking up at the bright blue sky, amazed that he was still alive. A warrior-slave appeared, swordless, his hand clutching a massive erection, and looked down at him. He held down his other hand to help Aurelian up.

“Congratulations!” the warrior-slave exclaimed. “Now the real fun begins.”

Aurelian let his head collapse to the side. He watched the warrior-slave strut toward the entrance to the Holy Fraternity, a sacred space reserved exclusively for men who had survived. Other naked men who had finished the race were also streaming through its doors for the celebratory orgy with the warrior-slaves. But Aurelian was utterly exhausted. He lay there paralyzed until he was hoisted up by a group of warrior-slaves and carried toward the sacred all-male space.

The Holy Fraternity (Aurelian)

Isabella’s father, the Supreme Military Commander, was looking down at Aurelian when he woke up on a comfortable bed in a room with bare stone walls, a small wooden desk, and an empty closet. Torches high up on the walls illuminated the room, casting firelight on the man’s stern face.

Of course she had been caught. Aurelian had survived the Absorption and now he faced the death penalty.

“Aurelian,” the Commander said, “awake at last!”

A few other men entered the room and looked down at the recovering survivor. Aurelian heard the passionate moans and screeches of the survivors and warrior-slaves somewhere far away. Then he looked around frantically, torn between the relief of being alive, the joy of being admitted into this sacred place, and the knowledge that he could be executed for sneaking into the Luxury Zone. Even if he survived, Isabella’s position as heiress could be in jeopardy; she had fornicated with an unworthy man after smuggling him into a forbidden space. The Supreme Military Commander must already be speaking with her mother about transferring the inheritance to one of her sisters.

“Tell me something seriously,” Isabella’s father said, leaning in from his chair and glaring down at Aurelian, “did you really believe you wouldn’t be caught? Do you have any idea the gravity of the crimes you both have committed? I could kill you myself. Right here, right now, and no one would care.”

Aurelian stuttered. “I have a right to stand trial,” he heard himself say.

The Commander laughed. “Oh really? How do you think the Consistory will rule after hearing the details of this case? I suppose they might have mercy. They might send you to the mines. Sadly for you, it doesn’t matter. I can kill anyone I want here and no one can do anything about it. I hold all the authority here, and none of these witnesses will care when I behead you right now for fucking my daughter.”

He stood up and unsheathed his sword. The gleaming blade was covered in blood, some fresh and some crusty. Aurelian lifted a hand to protect himself from the massive blade; three men grabbed him from both sides and held him down. The Commander then lifted the sword in the air and carefully leveled the edge over Aurelian’s neck while he squirmed in the bed, far too weak to resist the men restraining him. The Commander then lifted the sword high up into the air with both hands; the blade came rushing down toward Aurelian’s flesh. He was barely able to eke out a scream before its bloody edge made contact with Aurelian’s skin and stopped there. The man was a beast with perfect control over his enormous weapon.

The Commander chuckled and resheathed the sword. “You’re lucky,” he said. “You’re worth much more to me alive. Did you know your little girlfriend is conspiring with her friends against the High Council?”

“That’s a lie!” Aurelian shouted, even as he struggled to regain his composure after what was hopefully his final near-death experience for the day. He tried to sit up; the men kept him down.

The Commander smiled. “Of course, of course,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m sure you’ve never heard any of her heretical musings. Fortunately, my spies have heard her sickening words. And unfortunately for you and her, I am tasked by the Sacred Sorority to protect the Matriarchy and the Goddess against all threats, male and female, and it seems the Censor permitted a few too many books to my daughter.”

“Heresy! Your daughter is an heiress! She has an absolute right to read any book she wants!”

He smirked at him. “You’re very foolish if you think there are no books forbidden to heiresses. Sure, you’ll never be allowed to read as many books as Isabella, but she’ll also never be able to read nearly as many books as the Sacred Sisters. Nevertheless, I know a few things about you, Aurelian. Your family was disgraced during the uprising for supporting the rebels. Your materfamilias has no voting power in the Assembly and your family is desperate to repossess the lands the Temple confiscated from you twenty years ago. Your intentions with my daughter aren’t nearly as pure as you claim. A marriage with her, the future materfamilias of one of the Matriarchy’s most illustrious families, is one obvious path for the legal redemption of your lands. But I would like to offer you a much cleaner path, one that won’t require Isabella, whose position as heiress you must now know to be completely untenable.”

Aurelian hesitated. Everything the Commander said was correct, but his insinuation that I did not genuinely love his daughter enraged me. “You’re right about my family, but you’re dead wrong about Isabella,” he said. “I love your daughter and I want to spend the rest of my life with her!”

“Like I said, Aurelian,” the Commander said, suddenly turning friendlier, “I know you. I’ve done my research. My spies have followed you around the university for years. And what I know about you is the main reason why I am not going to kill you right here, right now: you are not a heretic. You are a true believer in the Matriarchy and the Goddess. And you cannot possibly approve of Isabella’s heresies, even if you deny them to me here simply to save her life. Because you love the Matriarchy. You love the Goddess. You understand what will happen to the fertility stones if a rebellion prevails.”

“You’re a fool if you think your own daughter would overthrow the Matriarchy.”

“Ah, you think I’m saying she wants to overthrow the Matriarchy?” the Commander asked. “No. Why would she want that when she is slated to become a Matriarch and take her seat in the Assembly? No. What she desires is to overthrow the High Council so that all power will reside in the Sacred Sorority - and she, of course, will be the perpetual Consul, a dictator for life. The Temple and therefore the Goddess are her enemies - not the Matriarchy.” He stood up. “She’s an atheist, Aurelian. And if your love for the Goddess isn’t sufficient for you to act, remember that if she succeeds, we will all either starve to death or Sun God soldiers will slaughter us. The fertility stones will fail and this entire part of the world will transform within months into an arid desert. Everyone you know and love will be rotting corpses.”

Aurelian wanted to argue more with him. None of this could be true. Isabella couldn’t really be a heretic; her words had come merely from her fear that he was doomed. His improbable survival today was supposed to launch a new era in which he could be openly engaged to Isabella. He was supposed to be embarking on a glorious career in public service that would restore honor to his family; he was supposed to be at the beginning of several decades of happiness with the love of his life.

“I leave you with two thoughts,” the Commander said, lingering by the door. “First, think about what it would mean for your family if you were the hero who exposed a vast atheist conspiracy to overthrow not only the High Council but the current members of the Sacred Sorority. Do you really want to throw in your lot with a heretic? If I expose you now, I can have you sent to the mines or killed, but the real victims will be your family. After learning about your fornication with a member of a new rebellion, they will be dispossessed forever. Second, if none of this is convincing, then just remember: if you do nothing, you will not have the life you’ve dreamed about. That’s impossible now.” He paused. “Think about it. Think of your mother! Think of your family! Remember the heresies you’ve no doubt heard her utter. My agents will approach you in a week. Meanwhile, please enjoy a bath. Welcome to the Holy Fraternity.”

He walked out of the room. Two creepily pale monks, white as skeletons, naked and covered in bright green veins, entered the room, helped Aurelian stand, and escorted him down the hall to the Bath Hall.

The Bath House (Aurelian)

Several of the creepily pale monks bathed him in an ornate bath. He reclined his head and gazed up at the huge painting on the ceiling. It was unlike any other artwork he’d ever seen and he squinted as he struggled to interpret the meaning. The Sun appeared impossibly as the source of all life. Its rays shone down violently upon the Earth, but instead of their impossible heat turning everything into a desert, they seemed to be causing enormous forests and gardens to bloom. The whole ceiling was one vast garden, but there wasn’t a fertility stone in sight, only the Sun. Aurelian felt a sudden surge of anger as it dawned upon him. Was this painting trying to say that the Sun was the source of all life? He glared at the monks.

Sun worshipers in the Holy Fraternity? It was impossible. They couldn’t possibly know anything about where this painting came from, and he himself must be misinterpreting it. He’d heard disturbing stories about the religious fanatics who lived deep within the bowels of the Holy Fraternity, but the implications of artwork promoting Sun worship in the middle of the Capital made him fear for the country’s survival.

He could hear the distant screams from the still-raging orgy of survivors and warrior-slaves in the Great Hall. There were men whose earliest memories were fantasies about being a part of that legendary sex party, but it had never been Aurelian’s object. He wanted a beautiful home life with Isabella, a glorious career in public service, and the redemption of his family’s property. For these goals he had risked his life, and the sex party would simply be an extravagant celebration before the real work of building his life began. Now, with his bath coming to an end, he was supposed to rise from the tub and join the sex gathering. But awful thoughts left him paralyzed and miserable. What if Isabella’s father was right and she really were plotting with her friends to crush the High Council? If the Commander ever revealed this to the world and Society discovered that Aurelian had been fornicating with an atheist, then Aurelian’s whole family would be disgraced forever. He was faced with a series of options that left him feeling utterly sickened with himself: he could betray his family and run away with Isabella to the Neanderthals like she’d requested, he could betray the Goddess he loved so much in favor of his love for Isabella, or he could betray Isabella, causing her to be disinherited and possibly even executed all so Aurelian could earn points for his family…. And yet, if the Commander were right, was it not Aurelian’s duty, as a defender of the Matriarchy and a lover of the Goddess, to recognize Isabella for who she really was and spy on her in the name of the Goddess?

He shuddered at the idea that the Commander was right.

“You are lacking an erection,” said one of the skeleton-white monks.

Aurelian noticed that the monks did have very large erections, and they were beginning to slip into the tub around him while stroking themselves.

“The Commander requested we treat you to a more private event,” the monk said with a hideous grin.

And yet something about the depth of his whiteness attracted Aurelian. His eyes traced the bright green veins that stood out so sickeningly against that unnaturally pale skin.

“What’s with the painting?” he asked, annoyed. Fuck the commander.

The monk looked up at the sun-rays shining down upon all those plants. Still looking up into the dome, he asked, “Your father worshiped the sun? Didn’t he?”

Aurelian tensed up. He pushed the monk who was scrubbing his chest to the side. “My father was a sick, disgusting man. What do you know about my father? Of course. The Commander told you everything.”

“Some say your father was a hero,” the monk said, making serious eye contact with Aurelian. “I’ve been fantasizing about meeting the result of his seed ever since I first saw him naked in these very baths.”

Aurelian hesitated. “Saw him naked? How old are you? You look like a twenty-year-old wraith.”

The monk smirked. “Magic,” he said nonchalantly. “We have magic that extends our lives.”

Aurelian shook his head, annoyed. “Tell me what the painting means. Are you sun worshipers?”

“We serve the Supreme Military Commander.”

Aurelian laughed. “Then I’m surprised he hasn’t had you all killed yet.”

“He likes to have us in his bed.”

“I’ve heard rumors about your order,” Aurelian said. “You’re the dedicated concubines of the Supreme Military Commander, are you not? I never believed you could be real. You’re the pale monks, aren’t you? Religious fanatics of some kind who have never set foot outside the Holy Fraternity. Well? Is it true?” Aurelian leaned in. He hoped to piss the man off in retaliation for refusing to answer his question. He also wanted to put on a mask of masculine aggression that might conceal the bizarre sexual attraction he was feeling for this disgusting-looking monstrosity. “Are you the Commander’s concubines?”

The sickly white monk sank down into the water and came wading toward Aurelian while the other veiny men began touching one another on either side of them.

“If you are his concubines, I can’t imagine you’re sun worshipers,” Aurelian stammered, recoiling against his own longing to run his hands upon the freak’s skin. “So what’s with the painting?”

“You read too much into things,” the monk said. “Sometimes an artist paints an image for its own sake, not to communicate a religious message.”

Aurelian rolled his eyes. “You sound like - ” he stopped himself. He hoped this man, secluded as he was in the dark depths of the Holy Fraternity, didn’t also know about Isabella.

The monk was looking at him mockingly, like he knew. “Sometimes something is just beautiful,” he went on, gazing back up at the ceiling. “And some other things are so ugly they can’t be resisted. Some things are so ugly they’re irresistible.”

Aurelian shuddered but refused to break eye contact.

“I’ve never even seen a woman,” the monk said.

He put his arms gently around Aurelian’s shoulders; Aurelian shivered despite the hot water, and yet he was definitely getting harder. There was something weirdly appealing about having sex with such a freak.

“That seems heretical to me,” Aurelian said.

“Heretical?” The monk drew closer and closer, his lips nearly grazing Aurelian’s, his head tilted playfully.

“To never see a woman?” Aurelian asked, his pious horrified. “How do you worship?”

The monk smiled and pressed his forehead to Aurelian’s. “Like this,” he said, he hoisted Aurelian’s ass up onto the tub’s edge. Then Aurelian was gasping from pleasure, his penis inside the monk’s mouth. He soon couldn’t help himself: he screamed like a woman, shrieking with joy from the feeling of tongue, teeth, lips, the way this man’s mouth absorbed him. He had never dared dream of a blowjob like this. Within a few minutes he erupted into the monk’s mouth and then leaned back, panting, embarrassed.

“Oh my god,” he said. “That was the most incredible oral sex I’ve ever fucking received. Oh my god.” He was panting hard, desperate for more, his erection already coming back. “Let me do you,” he said. He had never seen a penis so white before, whiter than semen. The hideous lifelessness of the thing disgusted him, but it also awakened something in him. “Please,” he said, and he sank back into the water.

The monk held up his hand. “Next time,” he said.

“Wait!” Aurelian shouted after him. “What is up with the painting? Seriously?”

Now the monk actually rolled his eyes. “I already told you,” he said. “It’s a beautiful picture.”

He turned and left, leaving Aurelian feeling sophomoric and stupid for his suspicions. He forgot sometimes that he still had many of the same old fundamentalist religious tendencies he had before college. Isabella always encouraged him to think more freely, but he still couldn’t just enjoy the beauty of art for its own sake. He had to analyze whether it affirmed or contradicted the Goddess’s morality.

Maybe he’d have been better off if he’d never met Isabella at all. His heart surged with love for her and he hated himself for having that terrible thought.

Everything inside him, all of his emotions, were one moment telling him to leave this place immediately, show up at Isabella’s post-race orgy, surprise her by being alive, take her by the hand and run away with her to live with the Neanderthals. But in the next moment he was overwhelmed with guilt for his selfishness as other factors prevailed: his love for the Goddess and his fear of her wrath against his soul, his fear that everyone he knew and loved would starve to death if the fertility stones failed, his sense of duty to his mother, his family. It debilitated him. He had prepared for this physically. He had prepared intellectually. But he had apparently not been prepared emotionally, and he had not had the self-control he should have when it came to Isabella. He smoked the plants the monks had left for him.

He took the erection potion and wandered to the orgy. He bathed again, privately this time, and did all he could do. He got himself into the crimson robes all survivors would wear to the induction banquet tonight.

The Supreme Priestess (Claudia)

Claudia ran her fingers along the silk purple sash she now wore as a symbol of her authority as a member of the Sacred Sorority. She had never imagined being in a position of political power. All she wanted when she was a little girl was to hide away somewhere deep in the innards of the university studying ancient manuscripts and publishing new research.

Apparently she had chosen the wrong field by devoting herself to the study of the Neanderthals. She had known from the beginning it was an area of research fraught with so-called “heresies” and other controversies, but the more old books she got her hands on in the archives, the less she believed the Temple’s official story about where these creatures came from and how the Goddess intended for them to be treated. She’d never admitted as much in her writings. She’d never risk losing her life of scholarship and learning simply to write a few true sentences. But by compiling summaries and analyses of the claims made in these very ancient books, she was at least able to lay the groundwork for some future researcher who would be willing to take bigger risks.

So she’d proceeded until until two years ago the Assembly of Matriarchs appointed her to an empty seat on the Sacred Sorority. Ever since, she’d been unable to avoid politics. What she knew to be true contrasted too sharply with the charades in which she was now forced to participate. And against her will to live a secluded happy life with her books, she now found herself summoned to a meeting with the Supreme Priestess, a woman only seen four times a year at the absurd rituals that these stupid people passed off for religion. A woman who, despite responsibilities much more serious than Claudia’s, was living the life Claudia wanted for herself.

“Claudia!”

“Your holiness!” Claudia exclaimed, and then she fell to her knees before Valentina when the holy woman, supposedly the ultimate manifestation of the Goddess, entered the room. She was not supposed to even lay eyes on the woman without permission; supposedly if she did, the Goddess would take away her brain. With her eyes closed, she hoisted her arms up in worship and then slowly lowered her entire torso down to the gound until her forehead hit the cold grey stone just before Valentina’s bare feet. She shut down the part of her brain that loved free thought, cast aside her doubts and criticisms of authority, reminded herself that this wasn’t worth dying for. She willed herself to subservience before the country’s highest religious authority.

“Oh please, Claudia,” Valentina said with a scoff. “Rise up, young sister! Lay eyes upon my flesh! You think I really believe that someone as well-read as you believes in all this?”

Claudia thought how Valentina was always laying these little traps when she summoned her, perhaps trying to find some excuse to have her executed.

“Holy Mother!” Claudia exclaimed, rising as ordered but feigning hesitancy to dare a glance at Valenina’s face. “How could you say that! I love the Goddess and I love her manifestations, Lady.”

“Ha!” the Supreme Priestess laughed. “Come with me!”

Claudia followed the priestess down a long hallway. This Temple disgusted her. She could hear the sounds from the massive sex party somewhere far off, somewhere they were getting closer to, although she herself had no clue where inside the massive Temple they actually were. The Fertility King, Claudia thought, and she immediately started reviewing all she had read about the origins of that ridiculous tradition. Then she shut that part of her brain off, afraid the Supreme Priestess might somehow sense her doubt. Even with all her skepticism, she found it difficult to fully reject the idea of the Supreme Priestess as the Goddess’s most perfect manifestation. It had been drilled into her from such an early age that when she was alone, she sometimes still sensed the Goddess scrutinizing the purity of her soul. She still sometimes believed that were she to die, the Supreme Priestess could incinerate her soul by tossing a necklace into a fire. She regularly had to convince herself than none of that could be real, that it was all an invention, and yet some primal part of her was always terrified of the consequences she might face for her thoughts.

“I know, Claudia,” the priestess said as they entered into her massive study, “that you don’t believe in any of these lies we tell to keep the men under control. With their strength they could wake up one day and just decide to kill and rape us all, but they don’t. Why not?”

“Because they understand, my Lady,” Claudia said, “that the whole country would turn into a desert and everyone they know and love would die.”

The Supreme Priestess strolled behind her desk and sighed. “What would you do, Claudia, if I told you that was already happening?”

Claudia stood still, at attention before the allegedly divine, her eyes struggling not to wander to the spines of all the books in this room that only the Supreme Priestess was allowed to read.

“My Lady?” she asked. “What is already happening?”

“The country is turning into a desert,” the priestess said. “The fertility stones are failing.”

Claudia had no idea what to say. She believed in the fertility stones. The records of their efficacy stretched back at least a thousand years. Without the magical energy emenating from the Goddess statues sprinkled across the countryside, there would be no vegetation and no soil. If they were failing, there should be huge numbers of refugees arriving in the city and the country would be in the process of descending into anarchy and civil war as people starved in the streets. It was what happened to the Neanderthals before their own civilization collapsed. She thought perhaps the Supreme Priestess had finally locked herself up in her with these books for just a little bit too long, had been reading accounts of the Neanderthals, getting herself all spooked. Certainly she hadn’t spent enough time outside - she’d never even left the city - to have even seen a fertility stone with her own eyes, let alone to know that they were failing.

Claudia’s doubt in the priestess’s words must have crept into her facial expression. “Do you not believe me, Claudia? Do you think a manifestation of the Goddess could be so mistaken?”

“Lady,” Claudia said, “forgive me. I am simply confused and terrified. Please explain.”

“You’ve been locked away with your books for too long, Claudia,” the Supreme Priestess said, “accumulating all that knowledge and doing nothing with it other than pleasuring yourself. I understand it, honestly. I also get this raw sexual satisfaction from reading all day long. My attendants have to be drag me out of here or I’d never spend any time in the sex parties. I know, it’s my greatest sin, sex avoidance. I struggle with abstinence and I am ashamed for it. But you are at least someone who can relate.”

Claudia kept a face of stone.

“Have you ever wondered what’s in the east?” the priestess asked.

Claudia took a breath. “The east,” she repeated. It was an obscure topic in the texts. To the west were the patriarchs, their ultimate enemies, eternally struggling to destroy the world’s lone matriarchy and with it the Goddess herself. But to the east lay only a neverending forest, hardly penetrated by any explorerers yet full of fertility stones for hundreds of miles. “Just forest?”

The priestess smiled. “Today is your lucky day, Claudia,” she said, and she pulled out from her desk a sheet of paper with the Censor’s stamp on it. “I’ve attained permission for you to have access to an entire wing of the Temple Library.”

Claudia was so shocked and elated by this that she completely forgot Valentina’s claims about the ongoing desertification of their entire country. “My Lady!”

“You will read books only Supreme Priestesses have ever laid their eyes on,” Valentina said, “but although the Censor has granted you permission to read them, I will only let you physically enter the Temple Library under one condition. The research you conduct is for a purpose.”

Claudia tilted her head. “Which is?”

“Have you read, Claudia, anything about the location of the old Neanderthal capital?”

“Of course I’ve read speculation,” she replied.

Something clicked; a sudden yearning to be the one who made such a momentous discovery washed away all her contempt for the Supreme Priestess. That was the whole point of scholarship: to discover something new, to fill in gaps of knowledge and contribute to civilization’s repertoire of information. The rush of such discovery was something she’d always craved, and yet up until now she’d been unable to do more than summarize and analyze knowledge that was already written down in old books. If the Supreme Priestess was intend on handing her an opportunity to break free of her political responsibilities and embark on groundbreaking research, then she felt perfectly fine prostrating herself before her.

“And?”

“There are all kinds of rumors about where it was,” she said. “Some people even say it was here, and that the ruins are beneath us.”

“Absurd!!!”

Claudia jumped in her seat.

“That’s what my attendants claim! They are morons! The stupidity is too much for me. The Neanderthal capital isn’t beneath us. It’s somewhere else. Far to the east. And not only is it far to the east, it’s not in ruins.”

Claudia raised an eyebrow. The Supreme Priestess had just uttered a heresy so grave that a normal person would be beheaded simply for falling under suspicion of possessing the same thought. “Lady… the Neanderthal capital…t Not in ruins? My Lady…. The Neanderthals are incapable of managing an active city.”

“And be sure not to say anything to the contrary,” the Supreme Priestess said. “In any case, you are going to do what I cannot. I am releasing you from the burdens of your political duties. I know you were forced into it. Now I am going commissioning you to leave the city, venture far to the east, find the Neanderthal capital” - she rose up from her seat and began pacing back and forth, nearly shaking in her excitement - “and bring back to me the soul amulet of the last intelligent Neanderthal.”

Oh dear, thought Claudia. All her excitement dissipated. The Supreme Priestess had truly lost her mind and now she wanted to send Claudia on a suicide mission simply to acquire a two-thousand-year-old relic that probably didn’t even exist anymore.

“My Lady,” Claudia said, “as intriguing as this mission sounds, surely the Sorority needs to approve. I can’t simply abandon my post.”

“Yes, yes, I am familiar with the legal technicalities,” she said. “I am planning to address the Assembly next week.”

“About… about this?”

“I’ll give it some kind of cover, of course,” said the Supreme Priestess. “But yes, about this, and another reform I am announcing regarding the Fertility King. Until then - ”

A warrior-slave suddenly burst in. “Your Holiness! There has been another attack on an heiress!”

The Supreme Priestess rose up. “Which?”

“Isabella, your holiness. She lives, but her whole escort was killed.”

Claudia tensed but remembered not to betray her intimacy with the girl. Isabella? Attacked?

“Let’s go,” the priestess said, and Claudia followed her back down the hallway.