New Release: House of Masks, a Gothic Space Opera

Book the First: La fin est proche

Chapter 1: Thomàon

It was a time that had come untethered from time itself, a time which reflected a hundred other times that had come before it, and a thousand more that would surely come after. It was a place of such deception that one’s lies revealed one’s secrets more than they hid them, and of such decadence as to corrupt one’s very flesh, or to refine it—to immortality.

We called it Thomàon, a blue jewel of a world amongst the diamond stars of the black velvet night. We did not recall the origin of the name. In fact, so much time had passed since we had contact with the other gems of the sky that we had all but forgotten that they existed. We told tales of other worlds as though they were fantasies or myths. And every year we gathered together for the Great Masquerade in the Silver City, and sealed ourselves within the Great Dome, while storms and madness reigned without.

Now the Great Masquerade has come to an end, the Masks are removed, all has been revealed—and all lies in ruins.

But once Thomàon was a paradise.

Its fields were green, its oceans blue. Across the world rose the elegant cities of the Grillons, fantastic whimsies of architecture, miraculously created by a savage, stupid, and maddened race. Their cousin race the Scarabées rooted through the earth, bringing forth such minerals as we desired: shining metals, iron, corundum, diamonds, and that most precious material of them all: the golden elixir, which granted immortality. Other creatures may have existed, but we did not much notice them. Machines worked the fields, and brought in the harvests, and carried us across the waves to our private islands, our far castles, our laboratories, our fortresses.

On the world of Thomàon lay but a single great city of humankind, the Silver City. The Silver City could hold at the height of the Season the entire human population of Thomàon, that is, a million human inhabitants. And in the Silver City there was a single great castle, the Castle of the Silver Spire, home of a hundred fountains, reflecting pools, and towers, and a thousand balconies. At the heart of the castle was the Silver Spire itself, an enormous, graceful tower, high enough to bathe itself in the clouds during any weather. It was the only piece of the Silver City which protruded from the Great Dome when it was sealed, and whose tip held such devices as to inform the Silver City when the Season had finished and it was time for our revelries to come to an end.

The Season was a midsummer storm so severe as to require the sealing up of the entire Silver City under the Great Dome. During it, the Silver Spire was projected with images, which illuminated the city in a disorienting maze of light. Dancers in their gowns became like gods while projected upon the Silver Spire. Roses became impenetrable briars; fireworks became conflagrations; sunsets, holocausts. Everywhere in the Silver City would be bathed in that enchanted light, from the castle to the labyrinth of streets, to the navigable wonderland of roofs, steeples, balconies, widow’s walks, temples, gardens, pathways, and cables that stretched everywhere between them.

All of which was nothing, compared to the music.

Viewed by airship, when the Silver City was not sealed by the Great Dome, the castle appeared to be an enormous sundial: the Silver Spire in the center threw such a shadow across the other rooftops as to mark time itself. The inhabitants followed the hours in its shadow: the cafés to the west, in the morning; the sleeping-bowers of the north, for noontide’s lull in the heat; the teahouses and restaurants of the east for one’s repast; and then a return to the castle for one’s entertainments: singers and operas, acrobats and circuses; fortunes told by the Scarabées; assignations; assassinations. Then, throughout the night, a slow ebb to return to one’s apartments in the south, to sup, and to sleep.

When the shadow stood so perfectly straight at noon that the Silver Spire cast no shadow, then it was the time for the Season to begin: prisoners were released from their prisons; miners sealed their mines and caught the last trundling ore-carriers back to the city, always arriving in thousands at the last minute, laughing at the danger of it; artists sighed and cursed the gods for not giving them more talent as their latest paintings, and statues, and other oeuvres were wrapped and brought to the castle to replace last cycle’s decor; bakers and cooks wiped the sweat from their brows against their arms, with no time to take out a handkerchief as they prepared to feed the horde soon to descend upon them; gamesmen rattled their dice and nicked the edges of their cards with their thumbnails, in preparation of their great feasting upon the foolish; beggars and thieves squabbled over streetcorners, rooftops, doorways, and disguises; nobles awaited deliveries of clothing, jewels, and perfumes, in terror lest their illusions be outdone by their fellows; assassins collected the first halves of their fees, and bided their time, sharpening their knives and mixing their potions. Underneath the streets, where in the great, cavernous reservoirs they lay in safety, the gondoliers practiced their songs: tales of lovers, of betrayals, of ironies, of cruel deaths or kind ones, of killers who lived amongst the innocent, of the innocents who so charmed the wicked that their lives were spared for just one more night.

King Corentin and Queen Delphine ruled the Silver City and awaited the raising of the Great Dome against the storms soon to be arriving, and saw that their preparations were good. The Council of Masks, under whom the king and queen served, and which ruled the rest of Thomàon from amongst the populace, speaking for the poor, the lame, the blind, the night-dancers, the beggars, the bakers and cooks, the prisoners, the gondoliers, and even the nobility—their eyes looked out from behind their masks, and also saw that the preparations were good.

To the powerful, all turns of fate are, in the end, good.

But the gondoliers sang gloomily, the Scarabée fortune-tellers cast their shells and hummed dire songs of vengeance, and the hawks wheeled in the sky, and whispered to their hawk-masters of doom and damnation.