52 Project #28: The Court of the Lion King (Patreon)

I returned to the apartment building where Daro and Anzali and I had lived before we went down to the sea. It had not changed in the way buildings change-- its paint was the same color, it seemed no more or less weatherbeaten than before. The railing on the 3rd floor balcony still sagged. But it had changed in the way homes change, because it wasn't home any more. Because different people lived there now, filling it with their strange scents, and because I had changed. The scent of the sea was still in my nostrils. I would never smell the comforts of home again.

Renting the third floor apartment did not present difficulties. I walked through the silence of the apartment, marveling at its emptiness. The furniture was still there, the faded rug, the great sagging bed, the tired appliances. But all the personality was gone. Anzali's bright prints had been taken off the walls, which themselves had been whitewashed again to remove our cheery yellow paint. White is a disturbing color, the color of bones and of drowned skin, pink human and green farla alike. Even the humans of other colors became gray, in death by water. If I needed to be here long, the white walls would glare in my eyes and drive me mad.

There was a knock at the door, startling me, and I almost fled. But it wouldn't be the Lion King, not here, not yet. He wouldn't know I was back. I opened the door.

A human greeted me. "Hi there, new neighbor. I'm Rachael from the second floor apartment. Just thought I'd come say hi. Need help moving in?"

Rachael was chubby – not just by farla standards, but by human – with short brown hair and a squeaky tenor voice. She had pale skin, which she covered with more makeup than most humans, and her chin and brow seemed unusually defined for a female human. "Hello," I said distantly. "I'm Ashmi. No, I don't need help moving in. Thanks for asking."

"Oh. Well, sorry to bother you. You want to come downstairs for a cup of tea or something? I like to get to know my neighbors. It cuts down on the insecurity, you know. Living in a place like this-- well, this isn't the best of neighborhoods, you know?"

"I know," I said bitterly, and wondered if this androgynous human knew the Lion King. I also wondered if I could still drink tea. I was afraid of my bone-white apartment, and loneliness. "I'll come downstairs if you want, but I don't know if I'll be able to take tea. I tend to be allergic to nearly everything."

"Well, come on down. You don't have to have tea if you don't want it. You're a farla, aren't you?"

I stepped out of my apartment and followed Rachael downstairs. "You can't tell?"

"You're a bit pale, aren't you? I never saw a farla so white. I thought you guys were all green. Not that I think it looks bad, I think you look gorgeous. At least, I don't know, by human standards or something, but maybe you don't feel good?"

"It's the color we turn when we're away from our Mother," I said. "The Sun. It is not a well color, and I thank you for your concern, but really, don't worry about me."

Rachael's apartment smelled like cats. Unsurprisingly, three came to greet Rachael, and another one sat on a moth-eaten armchair and glowered at me. The cats seemed unsure of me. Farla generally get along well with cats, sometimes better than with the humans who brought them, and I had always liked them. These, however, avoided me, and I avoided them. Rachael noticed. "Don't you like cats?"

There is one Cat that I despise. But I wouldn't say so. These cats were nothing of the Lion King. "They're all right. These don't seem to like me."

"That's funny. Normally they're all over strangers. What's wrong, guys? You being little bitches today?" Rachael turned to me apologetically. "They get like this sometimes."

"I don't blame them." I took a deep breath of cat-scented air. It was not quite enough to drown out the scent of the sea. "Forgive me for my ignorance. I'm not very experienced with humans, but... you are a woman, aren’t you?”

Rachael laughed. "Already? That’s great!"

"I don’t understand."

"I’ve been trying." The human went into the kitchen to put on tea. "Just managed to get on hormones two weeks ago. This place, well. Not a lot of doctors, and the mail’s not too reliable."

"What do doctors and the mail have to do with your – no. This is none of my concern, I’m being very rude."

"From a farla, I’m okay with it," Rachael said, coming out with the tea. “I’m a woman, but I only figured it out for certain a year ago, and it’s taken me this long to get the hormones I need.”

“I didn’t know humans could have an ambiguous gender," I said.

“Yeah, sometimes we’re born with the wrong genitals and hormones, and it can be hard to figure out what we really ought to be. I’m thirty-five. I don’t know if farlae age like humans do, but that’s, like, more than a third of a human’s maximum average lifespan, more than half of how long we usually do live when we grow up in neighborhoods like this. I didn’t grow up here, though, but just a few cities over, not so close to the water, but other than that it’s just like this. So that’s a long time to not know, but I know it now. Gonna start growing my hair out now that I have my shots.”

I doubted the other city was really just like this. This city was different from any I had known. "I see," I said, though I didn't really understand most of what she was talking about. I tried to smell the tea, but I could only smell salt water.

"Do you want something? Some water? I feel bad that you're allergic to tea and all."

What I needed, Rachael could not give me. Or at the least, I would not take from her. "That's fine. I'm all right." I had not been all right since we went to the sea. I no longer even knew how many years it had been. "How long have you been living here?"

"Oh, a year and a half or so. It's a bad neighborhood, but it's cheap. You know how it is. Hard to get work nowadays."

I didn't know how it was, but I nodded politely. "Yes."

"Now that I’m out, a lot of humans won’t hire me. This is the kind of neighborhood where they’ve got really old, traditional attitudes, you know? And I guess you've got it worse. Not many farlae here."

"This was a farla neighborhood once," I said. "An artists' community. It was poor, but it had a soul."

"Well, it hasn't got one now," Rachael said, with an edge of bitterness in her voice. "That's just like us humans. We wreck everything."

"You feel too much guilt. This may be a human neighborhood now, but its soullessness is not human doing." Panic choked me like seaweed as I realized I'd said too much. I had lost my old instincts-- I had no way to know if Rachael was the Lion's or not.

"You talk like you've been here before."

"I must go." I got up, hastily. "I'm sorry."

"Uh, okay. Health problems or something? Or was it something I said?"

"Health problems," I lied. "Perhaps we'll talk again. I'm sorry."

***

I locked the door of my apartment behind me. It wasn't necessary; what I feared could come through walls, and there were no mundane threats I did fear anymore. But it would disturb me if Rachael came upstairs and came inside while I wasn't watching. I wanted to be careful of what she might see.

I thought she was a sweet, harmless soul, if a bit strange. I would wish to befriend her, another time, perhaps, but not here. Not where anything might warp under the paw of the Lion. I could see the signs she'd spoken of now. This place no longer had a soul.

Once Daro had argued that humans could be rendered soulless, could be enslaved, far more easily than the farlae. Farlae, he argued, had been created as slaves, and would die free rather than live that way again. Humans, freely evolved, knew no better. Slavery was a sporadic thing in their history and was performed by groups of them on other groups, never something their race as a whole had suffered. So they did not notice being enslaved. They couldn't see the loss of their souls until after the precious stuff was gone.

At the time I had called Daro racist, but secretly suspected some part of his theory to be true. Now I knew better. Farlae had fled this neighborhood because they'd heard of our fate, I thought. And humans moved in simply by the laws of diffusion, there being more of them on this world than us. Unaware of the danger until it was too late. Farlae would notice an absence of farlae, and stay away, feeling unwelcome. Humans, the majority, had no such warning system.

And farlae could be enslaved, stripped of will or soul. Sometimes the choice was not between slavery or death. Sometimes it was between two forms of slavery.

I thought I could sleep. But the bed would not touch me. When I closed my eyes and lay down, I felt myself in my ocean bed once more, curled like a child in the womb, the green water penetrating me and washing my thoughts away. It didn't matter. I didn't need sleep anyway.

I left my apartment and went to explore the neighborhood by night. It had changed physically after all. No one I'd known would have allowed their apartments to become so run-down, let so much trash collect in the streets, or left broken, melted vehicles like mountains of plastic on the sides of the roads. Aside from me, no woman walked abroad, and I was invisible if I chose. Gangs of young male humans lounged about, predators waiting for prey. Empty drug vials and used-up dermal patches littered the sidewalks and the paths between the buildings.

The Lion King's place alone had grown in splendor. His nightclub, Heaven, looked positively palatial, glittering with light and music. He sat in the center of the neighborhood, with a vast spiderweb thrown in the air about him of parking for aircars. There were no longer any grounded streets leading to his court, and all the buildings that used to stand around Heaven had been swallowed by the glittering fibers of the parking web. From the ground, only someone light as a wraith could climb the web to reach the cars, as I did; the human children down below could see fat, juicy prey overhead, but had no way to reach it. They were driven sullen, reminded of what they didn't have and could never get, made impotent by the Lion. And so in impotent fury they raged against those that had no more than they-- which was why no one walked alone on the night streets, and no women walked at all.

This was what I saw when the Lion King first arrived. But then it was only a vision in a dream-clouded farla's mind. I didn't truly know what the Lion King truly was until the day he summoned me to his court. None of us knew. I tried to tell myself that, to remind myself that Daro and Anzali's fate was not my fault. I didn't believe my own reassurances at all.

The club itself was the last place I went, that night. Invisible to almost all, I wandered the two dance floors, peered in some of the upstairs bedrooms and slipped back out again. Heaven had grown more openly decadent since last I was here, with more bedrooms for the transactions of perversion and vice. They were no longer hidden away on the top floor, available only to members of the Lion's court. I saw businessmen cavorting in swimming pools with women who were no more than animated shells, the vivacity that seemed to pour from them as artificial as the sunlamp light that glittered off the pool. I saw humans and farlae both drugged out of their minds, performing obscene rituals of life and death for an appreciative audience of both races. I saw other humans and farlae voluntarily drinking down hells'brews, filling their bodies with a greater variety and concentration of drugs than even the poor victim-slaves had been poisoned with. And none of them saw me. I didn't expect humans to see me, but the fact that I was invisible even to farlae said that the farlae in this establishment were all spiritually dead.

None of this surprised me. It filled me with hate, but hate gave me strength. I remembered what had been done to me, what had happened to my husband and wife, and why I was here. I decided to risk finding the Lion King.

***

The topmost floor of Heaven was the Lion King's court. One could not get in without an invitation, but in a sense the Lion had tendered me an invitation all those years ago. In any case, only the Lion himself could have kept me out, and he didn't man his own doors.

I saw him on his throne, with four scantily-clad women serving him. Two were human, one was farla, and one was as he was, part cat. The humans once manufactured other humans with the blood of animals mingled with their own. Normally cat-humans manifested only with cat-shaped eyes and bodies far more graceful than a typical human body. The Lion King himself was thought a mutant or a throwback, or else something entirely inhuman, with his features subtly shaped to seem more cat than human, and his curly golden hair almost a mane. He was feeding from one of the human women as he held her in his lap. The others were massaging him or stroking his hair, oblivious to the bloody fate of their companion. Favored courtiers, men and unattractive women, competed for his attention, praising him and giving him information on his business.

He could not speak as he drank, but eventually he released the woman he was feeding from. She dropped to the floor in a heap, and I shuddered. In my time, his habits were not quite so open. I turned and left as I heard his voice. It was deep and mellifluous, no different than I remembered it, and I feared that my hate would choke me and I'd do something rash. I hadn't come all this way to throw away my best chance.

***

In the morning, I went to visit Rachael. My sight of the Lion King had fortified me, and I no longer cared if she was his creature or not. I needed information.

"Hey, Ashmi!" she said cheerfully, answering my knock in a bathrobe. "Want to come in and get some breakfast?"

"I'd like to come in, in any case," I said, "though I've already eaten."

"Oh. Well, if you don't mind watching me eat, come on in. I was kind of hoping you'd come in." She stared at me as I entered the cat-full apartment and seated myself. "God, you're gorgeous. I'd give anything to look like you."

"If you would give what I have given, you're a fool," I said softly.

"What?"

"Beauty is only a danger, in a place like this. I need information, Rachael; about the Lion King. What do you know?"

She swallowed. "Um. I don't think it's safe to talk about him..."

"It's safe. No one is listening, I am not an informant, and if you are I don't care. Tell me what you know about the Lion King."

"I don't think--"

I stood up again, and stared into her eyes. I let her see a small fraction of what I truly was. "Tell me."

"Oh, God." She stared at me with fear, not envy, now. "You're-- you're not--"

"I am not. Yes. I won't hurt you, Rachael, not unless you keep information from me."

"No wonder you didn't want to eat." She swallowed again. "All right. I don't know much-- I'm too ugly for the Lion and too poor to go to his club. But I know what everyone in the neighborhood knows. He's not human, for starters. I mean, more than the way you're-- uh, maybe the way you're not. Um. I mean, he isn't natural. He isn't just a catperson, he's something else. Something else totally."

"Yes. Something that can strip away a will, or a soul."

"And pretty girls have got to go to him, if he wants them. He doesn't take them all. And most of the ones he takes come back, though they don't remember much about what happened, and they're usually not so pretty anymore. Some of them, though-- some of them don't come back at all."

"How do the girls go to him? How are they chosen?"

"Anytime someone new moves in, his people check to see if there's a pretty girl in with them. They'll probably come to take you tonight. If there are any remotely pretty girls, they go with the Lion King's men, and they get presented to him in his court. And if he likes them, they stay there."

"Yes. It was not the same in my time, but it was similar." A fierce pain beat at me from within. "What of those who won't submit?"

"The Lion King's bullyboys don't give you a choice. You have to go with them."

I smiled bitterly and looked hard at Rachael.  "You wanted to be my friend. Yet you made no attempt to warn me-- though you thought I was beautiful, and that must have meant you knew the Lion King's men would come for me."

"I was scared," Rachael whispered, looking down. "If I'd warned you, and you'd run away... and he found out..."

"You might find yourself walking to the ocean," I agreed. "No, I suppose it doesn't matter."

"Ah--" Rachael looked up. "Did it happen to you? Did you..."

"When the Lion King first came," I said, "I lived in the apartment I live in now, with my husband and my wife, Daro and Anzali."

"Your wife?" Rachael sounded startled, and then nodded. "Oh, right. Farlae live with two women and a man, don't they? I'd forgot."

"The Lion King summoned me. He had less power in those days, but he was less well known as well. I thought he would be a patron for my art, so I went willingly enough." I lost myself in memory a moment.

We had such bright happy lives then, and knew nothing of it. We had problems with bills, lovers' quarrels, emotional intrigues with the rest of the farla community, and we thought those were troubles. I was a naive innocent when I went to see the Lion King, thinking he had heard of my art. But what he wanted was not what I had created. What he wanted... was what I was.

The demand was for my body. I knew it went deeper than that. Farlae tend to be more sensitive to such things than humans; it was my soul he wanted, and I knew it. I refused. He threatened to kill me, to kill my husband and wife. I told him that all of us would rather die free than live as soulless slaves.

I looked up, shaking myself free of memory. "I was a naive fool," I said harshly. "But the Lion King has no more power over me." I stood up. "Rachael, I forgive you for not warning me. But if you tell the Lion King of his danger, or give him or anyone else any information concerning me, I will kill you slowly. Do you understand me?"

She nodded, shivering. She knew what I was capable of.

***

They came for me that night.

I feigned sleep, lying on the sagging mattress in the semblance of a nightgown, waiting for them. They unlocked my door and shook me, roughly, thinking they were waking me. "Get up. You've been summoned to the palace of the Lion King."

So even he called it a palace now. I looked at them with dazed eyes. "Do I have time to get into some clothes?"

One of them snickered. "Why bother? You'll just be taking them off again anyway." They all laughed.

I went with them in my nightgown and my artfully disheveled hair, out to their aircar and from there to Heaven. They brought me to the top floor, to the court of the Lion King. And I stood before the creature who'd destroyed my life, and felt the hatred surging in me, giving me strength. On the outside, I showed frightened, sleep-bewildered eyes, the face of a beautiful innocent.

"What is your name, girl?" he asked me. His voice was beautiful, rich and deep as the sea.

"Ashmi," I whispered, letting myself tremble. I looked down at my feet, at the enamel floor, and forced myself to see a reflection.

"Ashmi," he said reflectively. "I knew a farla named Ashmi once. Years ago... She looked much like you, but not as pale. And she gave me trouble. You won't give me trouble, girl, will you?"

"You should know what happens to those who resist the Lion King," one of his courtiers hissed.

"Disrobe," he ordered.

I stripped, letting the nightgown pool around my feet, and turned around for him like a bird on a spit as he ordered me to. Finally he smiled, showing sharp teeth. "She'll do. Take her to my chambers and have her wait."

I scooped up the nightgown and slipped back into it. Once I was in his chambers, alone, I let it disperse into mist. I sat on his bed, naked, and remembered our journey to the sea.

He had demanded me, body and soul. I'd refused, and he'd laughed. "You have spirit, don't you," he said. "Go home then. Go on back to your husband and wife. I have no shortage of beautiful women, that I need to trouble myself with you."

And gods help me, I thought I was free. I ran back to Daro and Anzali, to tell them what had happened, to seek their comfort. I ran up the stairs to the apartment, and into Daro's spotless kitchen, where the two of them had stayed up late, waiting for me.

But as I met their eyes, a compulsion struck, consuming the three of us. I explained nothing-- I couldn't speak. All I knew was that I had to go down to the sea and die, and that my loves felt the same way.

We left the apartment, holding hands, and began to walk. We felt as if we were in a dream, inexplicably shared. The empathic bond between us had twined around us all, dragging us down together. Perhaps this was intended to be my private nightmare, and the bond I had with my loves, the linkage between our minds, pulled them down with me. Or perhaps the Lion King had always intended to send us all. Throughout the night we walked, slowly, in a daze. The sea was normally half an hour's journey by aircar.  On foot, holding hands and walking with dreamlike slowness, it took us all of the night and most of the next day. We were exhausted, but there was never any question of stopping. The sea pulled us with some strange gravity. Hydrotropic, we flowed down the path of least resistance, through the city and out, until we came to a cliff over the ocean.

I felt their love for me, and mine for them. I felt an overwhelming despair and exhaustion, a hunger for the ocean's balm. We looked at each other and nodded. Then we released one another, and separately we leapt into the sea.

Daro and Anzali were dashed against the rocks at the bottom, immediately. I fell into a deeper part, cushioned by water, and curled up in green darkness to sleep my despair away.

***

The Lion entered the room, awakening me from my reverie. "Good. You've got your clothes off." He smiled at me ferally. On him, it was more of a baring of teeth than a smile, and spoke of hunger. "Lie down."

He removed his own clothes and came to touch me, to cover me with his lightly furred body. "Gods of hell, you're cold, woman. What have you been doing, standing on the balcony with your clothes off?"

"It's a cold night," I whispered.

"I'll warm you, then." His hands had articulated digits, but furred fingers and pads on his palms. With these paws, he explored my body, finding no body heat anywhere. Alarmed, he licked at my neck, and when he found the reassuring taste of salt there bit in, drinking what ran through my veins.

What he needed was blood. All I had was seawater.

The Lion King jerked away, spluttering, and stared down at me. I smiled at him, the same baring of teeth he'd shown me.

"You knew me," I said. "Many years ago. And I gave you trouble."

He tried to back away then. But I grabbed him and pulled him down to the bed, pinning him under my weight, the weight of the ocean. I opened my jaws wide and let the semblance of normalcy fall from me, showing myself as I truly was-- a skeleton animated by seawater, a demon driven by hate. He screamed. I dove upon his throat and tore at it, drinking his hot blood as my claws dug into other parts of his body, tearing flesh away.

The Lion's life force was strong, fed by the blood of innocence and whatever demons he served. But my hate was stronger. He fought me, digging his teeth into my neck once more. All he drank was seawater. He tried to drink that, hoping to weaken me, but he might as well have tried to drink the ocean dry. I drank his blood and it was finite, though fortified with the blood of many victims. I ate bits of his flesh, torn away. As his struggles weakened, I released his neck and burrowed my face into his belly, chewing through the flesh. Drenched in blood, I reached my bony hand into the opening I'd made and clawed through his liver and lungs. Finally I tore out his heart and showed it to him. He died then.

The air was filled with a rustling noise. The souls he had stolen from young women, from men, from the neighborhood itself, fled from the punctured hole in his body. Some were partially consumed, and would never be strong again. The sight renewed my hatred, though my enemy was dead and his soul bound to the darkness.

For this moment alone I had the power. I had stolen the life force of the Lion King, and I had within me the strength of the sea and the energy of my hate. I could have called a tidal wave to destroy Heaven and all the tormentors within. The tormented would die as well, but that would be only a blessing, I felt. The neighborhood would be destroyed, but there was nothing in this blasted ruin of a hometown worth keeping anymore, was there? Destroy it all and let the survivors rebuild. Yes. I felt the charge build within me, and almost gave myself over to it.

But then Rachael would die as well. And she was an innocent, who had kept her soul, though the paw of the Lion had undoubtedly started to warp her. She had not warned me, but she'd tried to befriend me, as best she could with her fear of the Lion King. If I killed her with a tidal wave, I was no better than the Lion King, killing as it suited me.

There would be no tidal wave. I let the energy fade away. Let someone else save the city; I had done my part. I was so tired.

It was time to return to my ocean bed, and to my loves. I faded away, and let myself turn into mist, carried back to the sea.