Please be advised the following fiction contains dark themes, including coercive sex, death, murder, and reference to the Occult.
Alun Adair sat in his dressing room, painting arcane symbols on his face in gold pigment, when there was a knock at his door. He didn’t pause his work. He knew they were waiting for him.
“Enter,” he commanded.
“Magus.” His assistant, Sol, spoke with his usual blend of deference and discretion that danced just on the edge of familiarity. He was a tall man, with a shaved head and spidery limbs. But the only quality of interest he held for Alun lay on a singular point: Sol was as loyal as they come. “We are ready for you,” he said in a hushed tone that showed he felt the weight of the moment nearly as greatly as Alun himself did.
“Excellent,” Alun replied, not looking up from his careful delineation. “Prepare the tools. I will join you shortly.”
Excused, Sol left silently.
Alun finished the final touches of gold upon his cheeks, and regarded himself in the mirror. He was a vain man, but he thought he had perfectly just reasons to be. The Elatuan designs accentuated the chiselled lines of his jaw, and the brightness of the gold set off the darkness of his eyes. He looked fit to be a conqueror.
Indeed, he had set his sights higher than that. He would not be satisfied until he had become a living god.
~
When Alun Adair married into money, his first order of business was to have a mansion built in the old Gothic style. He wanted the appearance of history and tradition, with the ease of modern comforts – for this house was to be the hub of all political, financial and spiritual commerce. It was vital that it exude extravagance, awe and mystery in equal parts.
The most important part of the house was the room set within its bowels, designed in the shape of a pentagram: The Inner Sanctum. This was where true power changed hands – in the bonds forged within the most depraved and deviant orgies. To participate was the surest way to bind its members to secrecy – for what is secrecy itself but an exclusive club?
Forty-six and a handsome man yet, he retained a youthful vigour and easy charm that won him much favour with ladies – and indeed, with many gentlemen. It helped, too, that he was now rich, and connected with importance. But it had never been enough for Alun. He wanted more – more money, more sex, more influence, more recognition. More love. He had never fallen prey to the stuff himself, but he found he couldn’t get enough of the love and admiration of others.
A student of the Occult and an ardent follower of the old masters, Alun had long busied himself with both the dark arts and the art of the pick-up. There were commoner threads that ran between the two than one might think. Confidence. A flair for the dramatic. An incorrigible inattention to risk.
He had always understood there were greater depths of power to be had than the simple powers of blackmail. That there is a layer which sits just behind ours, which governs and steers all creatures upon their course. A layer in which the gods still live, and who lay a hand upon all of us – not merely in a proverbial sense, but in a literal one.
Of all the oldest and most obscure gods, there was one in particular with whom his sympathies lay. That, of course, was Elatua: the Goddess of Lust. His Order had been built upon Her principle, and every day he honoured Her with his most sordid deeds and deviant desires.
And now, Alun’s efforts were about to come to fruition. This was his highest point: he would finally summon the Goddess Elatua Herself – and reap the rewards so justly owed for his many years of service.
The magus strode down the corridor with purpose, his cloak billowing about him as he moved. He wore it for dramatic effect, and the effect was considerable. A commanding presence was essential to a magus, and he had curated his with care.
Just as he approached the Chamber, fanfare sounding in his mind, he was accosted by his wife, Leah. She set herself between him and the door in a manner more adversarial than he would have considered from his quiet wife of ten years.
“Alun, please,” she said in a low voice, marked with gravity, “please, rethink this plan. I’ve turned a blind eye to everything else, but this… You don’t know what powers you’re trifling with. You can’t mean to open the doors to the otherworld within our own home.”
Her fingers clutched his cloak with urgency, and he felt a flare of annoyance. He plucked her fingers from his lapels with disdain.
“Our home?” he echoed scornfully. Leah blinked and retreated. Satisfied, he moved past her and flung open the doors.
~
Leah retreated, moving away from the Sanctum. Her face, on which she had momentarily permitted fear to show, was now once more a closed book. As she walked away from her husband with practised composure, her chest felt like a cage of panicked birds. This was her lowest point: to stoop to begging, and still fail to hold sway over the man she married.
When she had been promised to him as a newly fledged woman, Leah had been thrilled with her lot. Her family had not been, but they begrudgingly entrusted her and her entire fortune to this unlikely union that seemed to make her happy. At first, it did. She had always known his ambition looked far and high, that his vices ran rather deeper than that of your typical man, and that he enjoyed her money rather a lot more than might be seemly. But he was also attractive, charismatic, and had that rare and exceptional talent of making the focus of his attentions feel like the centre of the universe.
That was before, when she still held the exciting sparkle of novelty for him. After their honeymoon, he eschewed any and all interest in her personhood. Her job now was to stay out of his way, and especially out of the way of his lovers. He told her from the start that he “couldn’t abide a nag”, and so she remained silent. She held her head high and her bearing regally, lest anyone should ever dare think she regretted her decision – and she regretted it abundantly.
Alun was a reckless man. His self-assurance bordered on delusion, such was his certainty that the universe owed him triumph beyond mortal success. Nothing was ever enough for him. And recently, Leah housed a growing anxiety for the direction toward which Alun’s interest had been tending.
The Occult was terribly real – realer than she had ever expected. She had watched his enemies and critics wither from mysterious diseases. She had felt foreign presences in that mansion, especially near the Inner Sanctum. She lived and slept on the second level, which seemed relatively less occupied by unseen forces. Even so, her nightmares now occurred nightly, in which she watched as her home and all that she knew were swallowed into a bottomless pit.
Leah dreaded what bedlam her husband might now unleash.