The Temple of Pain: Interlude

While Chris Alan was rejoicing with his wife and friends at the news of a newly begotten daughter, far outside the Covenant Sphere and the peace therein, a planet lay covered in dark clouds that constantly rained. The planet had little if any plant life; its landscape was mostly rock and cliff. Embedded high in one cliff face was a dark, foreboding castle. Inside the gloomy palace sat five beings of great power. Three were Elementals and the other two were mortal but had “gifts” of their own. These five had forged their alliance long ago and worked for the highest bidder. One time they had done some dirty work for Blackthorn, but that was hundreds of years ago. They were loyal to one another and that was it; they claimed no loyalty to either side of the divide between the Lord of the Realms and His foes. Their motto was: “Pay us, and we’ll get it done.”

Agatha, the mortal female, seemed laid back in her chair as usual. Aggie (as she was usually called) was not an Adami, but an Evelight (an analogy of Eve), though she passed for an Adami easily enough – a fact which caught most of her prey by surprise. To the feminist Empress Crabs, her race was referred to as “divine”, and Agatha was a chief “goddess” whom even the fearsome Crabs feared. Most Covenant Citizens (even Lightchildren) didn’t know her race existed. The Deep Space Survey had never discovered the Evelights’ home worlds, and not even the Manikins had entered their space directly. Otherwise, the Lord kept the Evelights’ existence a secret from His servants, for the present.

Agatha was one of the oldest of the Evelights, and she remembered the great war that the Crabs had lost and lost badly. Now she had four of them as personal body guards. They were disgusting creatures but great defenders. One had to hand it to their species for the clever ruthlessness, certainly. The Crabs had promised freedom for females of other species, but they had given out bitterness. Once the males of a target species were extinct, the Crabs kept the females either for food, work or breeding through cloning. Within the Crabs’ space, the Evelights alone had been spared this program of conquest, because not even the Crabs’ tremendous advantage in numbers had done them any good.