Free Commitment - Predatory Ethics: Book II by Athanasios Page A

Entire by their predecessors.
    Not even the enigmatic Mother Rothschild knew the Plan Entire. She did, however, know which library Balzeer’s portal was in and refused to tell him. It may have been her way of testing his worth, but Bernhardt stopped playing those games years before. He knew if anyone failed at tests there were no real consequences. In his world, you either failed or succeeded. Tests were for children.
    He walked down turn after turn and went along corridors with mind numbing atrocities depicted in paintings and sculpture along their sides. They hardly registered above thin distractions till he came to a double set of intricate doors. He swung both wide and was exhilarated by what he saw.
    If this wasn’t the portal to the summoning chamber then Bernhardt wasn’t a Hapsburg. Everywhere he looked there were depictions of scenes straight out of the Hell Bernhardt read as a child. These scenes made even him uncomfortable, and the art in the corridors was childhood imagination in comparison.
    Dante must’ve based his nine rings of Hell on the depictions about the walls and mantels of the library. They were fairly new, no more than ten years gone, but they were done according to volumes known only to Supreme Tribunals. They received these texts along with their five cardinal marks and were free to use them as they willed.
    Unbeknownst to anybody under him, the previous Supreme Tribunal Balzeer McGrath had decided to resurrect this chamber. It had a storied history with the last time it was used being before the eighteenth-century Weishaupt betrayal.
    Incantations and intonations were required to use the room, begun with the tracing of forbidden signs. In the past Balzeer’s performance of the ritual was adequate to the task, barely above requirements for access of its function. The intricate patterns he wove into the air were muted before but with Bernhardt they were vivid with a richness that made them come to life. Bernhardt’s predator genes gave the incantation vitality and direct connection to the forces used to conjure. His intonations were deeper, more resonant than Balzeer or any cow’s could’ve been. He mouthed words and phrases of treacherous intimacy created in absolute darkness eons ago that were resonant of a lover’s whispered betrayal or the slit of a sharp knife. The colors previously merely the sickly yellow of a festering wound with Bernhardt’s proper pronunciation took on the deep vigor of venom.
    The Nobility was not quite human, and their natural skills demonstrated that as Bernhardt sank into the carpet in his first effort whereas Balzeer took many years to achieve the same. The angry purple of the patterns he wove was now the indigo of a strangled child. The intonations burst some of the light bulbs in the room and turned the gentle flames of the fireplaces into a blaze. The rug made from slaughtered innocents from a brutal past whirl-pooled into a sinkhole of ruinous colors. He was gone seconds later; the only thing that marked Balzeer’s passing was the smell of burned mutton, but Bernhardt’s left the unmistakable odor of brimstone.
    He reappeared and six black candles sparked to life in quick succession. They gave enough light to see new abominations around him. He was no longer in the library. All about were real human remnants. Some dangled from hooks, others were impaled on stakes from beneath and from the sides hanging like forgotten clothes. A few continued impossibly to move and were kept unnaturally alive to suffer and provide the room with its fuel: misery.
    It was its spark its essence, its lifeblood. Balzeer thought he created it in a moment of inspiration but it had existed well before him; he had but resurrected it. Those still there had been suffering for years, others decades. There were no animals because they couldn’t provide the needed agony a person could. Humans had a lifetime of dreams and hopes that could be ground to dust. The physical pain was part of