Read Online Mad Gods - Predatory Ethics: Book I by Athanasios - Free Book Online

of church
leaders who followed a path very divergent from that of the Catholic Church.
They worshiped the First and Rightful Son of God, Satanael, not the Weakling
Son, Jesus. Balzeer and his predecessors continued in the old ways — open
belligerence for those that followed the Weakling’s Citadel, the Catholic
Church, and complete submission to the pleasures of the flesh.
    The new initiates, and even some of the existing
adepts, had shown their desire to make their faith seem more amiable. Their
time would surely come, but for now, Balzeer and his dogma ruled.
    He turned two more rights and went down a narrow
stairwell to the back entrance of the library. As he twisted the brass handle
of the mahogany doors, their weight turned on intricately carved, gleaming
hinges.
    He surveyed the vast room and the book-lined shelves,
openly contemptuous of anyone present. To his regret, the room was empty. No
one was seated on the leather couches, or the luxuriously upholstered wingback
chairs, situated by one of the room’s three fireplaces. The seats would have
been comforting, had they not been placed before hearths that depicted the
torture and torment of the Venetians’ Inferno. Balzeer had commissioned a
promising group of art students to carve them, to his specifications, from a
long forgotten volume. It took them nearly a year to complete the project. They
finally went mad from the constant exposure to the images. Eleven months after
they had started their work, seven bright, young, promising gibbering idiots
left the mansion. He remembered them as one would remember a particularly good
screwdriver; they had been worth his attention.
    He walked to the center of the room and stopped. His
left arm began tracing unseen patterns before him in the air. They remained
invisible until he mouthed words and phrases of slithering intimacy, like a
lover’s whisper or the slit of a sharp knife. His intonations barely audible,
the tracings began to glow with the sickly yellow of a festering wound.
Continuing his work, Balzeer raised his right arm and weaved patterns below
him. The patterns took on a tone of an angry purple bruise.
    Beneath him on a priceless rug, weaved from the hair
of slaughtered innocents of a bygone era, a swirling whirlpool of colors
materialized. He began to slowly sink into it, unperturbed, until a short time
later, he was gone. Only the smell of mutton indicated that he, or his textured
whirlpool, had been there at all. He glanced around the chamber into which he
had sunk. At each place he glanced, a black candle sparked to life. They only
produced enough light to reveal the abominations surrounding him.
    All about the room, and at various stages of
decomposition, were human remains. Some dangled from hooks, while others were
impaled on stakes from beneath and from the sides, hanging like forgotten
clothes. Impossibly, considering their state, a few continued to move,
unnaturally kept alive to suffer and to provide the room with its needed fuel.
The room ran on misery — it was its spark, its essence and its lifeblood.
Balzeer had created it during a moment of inspiration. He literally detested
getting his hands dirty, but he needed the ever-present sacrifices, so he kept
them all alive as long as he could. Some had been suffering for years, others
merely for weeks.
    There were no animals, because they were incapable of
providing the required agony. No animal expected, or wished, for anything
besides a painless existence and food. Humans, on the other hand, had a
lifetime of dreams and hopes that he could grind into dust.
    The physical pain was part of it, but the real fuel
came from their mental and psychic torture. He chose people who had the most to
lose. Sensitive souls, just entering their adult lives with promise and
expectations, found themselves barely surviving, until a bald persecutor came
and showed them the essence of true pain. When they were left alone with each
other and their shared grief, it all