Creature Leader

By Sim Stevenz

The Plague and the War took many things from Drayven Locke, but it did give him one thing: hatred for everyone and everything. A fateful night inspires questions, a search for answers, the title of Creature Leader and ultimate dominion over the planet Pax. But amidst all of this, his struggle to forgive darkens his heart.
Clyne, a woman from his past haunts his presence. With her appearance comes more questions than answers.
Sealen Solnen is just another victim of the Plague and the War but she becomes so much more when she meets Drayven and makes it her destiny to bring him back to life.
His struggle to forgive and her struggle to be forgiven finds them both locked in a battle for his sanity....and his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sim Stevenz
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301169078

Sim Stevenz

If you look in a mirror and see your reflection, you're on the road to success. If you look in a mirror and see a reflection, but not sure if it's you... Where Writers Walk · http://thevirtualpen.webs.com Sim is an avid, passionate novelist who loves Cats, Avocado, and Purple.

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Creature Leader

By Sim Stevenz

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2013 Sim Stevenz

Discover other titles by Sim Stevenz @Smashwords

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Dedication

~ My Mother ~

and

her love for

me.

Table of Contents

1 And Then, There Were More

2 The Broken City

3 Dreams

4 Going Away

5 Lost

6 There is Something

7 Tair

8 The Creatures Come

9 Deserted

10 Leader

11 Sense of Futility

12 The Campaigns

13 Set Back

14 The Compounds

15 Cold Comfort

16 Perpetual Concern

17 The War, to end all wars

18 Curses and Blessings

19 Escape Delayed

20 Undeserved Mercy

21 Overwhelmed

22 Desperate for Death

23 Tortured Conclusions

24 The Fire, The Ice

Acknowledgments

God gives and He takes away. He has blessed me with a desire to share the written word as fervently as I can.

To my Family, for their loving support, sound advice and inspiration.

To my Editor, I couldn't have pulled this off without her help. She knows how proud I am over her and this effort.

To my Father, for his bottomless well of wisdom.

To my mother, for her boundless love and support.

To The Anonymous Individual.

Thank you All.

1 And Then, There Were More

~ One Thousand shall flee at the rebuke of one; at the rebuke of five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a beacon upon the top of a mountain, and as an ensign on an hill.~

~

'I read this verse with trepidation. I cannot meet its words with my weary eyes without first seeking Guidance. And when I do, I tremble uncontrollably,' Drayven read. 'What does it mean? And why do I grieve over its meaning?'

Drayven let the book fall; in exhausted anguish he draped his enviably taut physique over his desk.

His shoulders quivered; his whole body seemed wracked with agony.

He raised his head, displaying obvious proof that he was one of the Blessed Ones. His eyes were a clear grey, his mouth a devastating statement of stubborn masculinity. He looked to be about thirty; his features deceptively youthful for a Peacemaker. His jet-black hair hung past his ears and covered his neck; it stopped in a ragged rhythm several inches above his eyes.

He rose slowly as if some past injury still afflicted him. His room was large, dim and mostly empty. A bed sat in one corner and a desk sat beside it, dusty and worn.

The walls were bare.

A small cracked window was situated forlornly in the cracked walls beside the bed. Drayven shuffled over to the window, sat on the bed and looked out. The cracked window overlooked a large city, miserable and abandoned. It was called Parady, a shadow of its former grandeur.

Long ago, a plague had infected the entire city. Slowly, it spread to the rest of the planet, a planet known to its inhabitants as Pax. The fearsome Reaper, as the plague became known, was a merciless monster of inexhaustible cruelty. By the end of a year Parady had been thinned to a mere one hundred residents.

Many of them also hid, hid from Invaders they fearfully christened 'It'. No one knew exactly what the 'It' was, except that their mission was to kill.

Drayven Locke was a Peacemaker and the people of Pax prided themselves in their heritage as Peacemakers. However, they were almost extinct as a result of their pacifist practices. Only a thousand or so were left on the entire planet. It was a sad tribute to their halcyon days of failed diplomacy. Drayven was yet a member of an even more exclusive group known as The Blessed Ones. They were trained to be more ruthless, more combative and more unyielding than the typical Peacemaker from their youngest years. The irony of having a few hundred Blessed Ones did not faze the Peacemakers. The few numbers were testament to their effective system of governance they exulted. The Blessed were a relic of the past, showcased during parades and ceremonies of state, their rich uniforms ogled over, yes and exclaimed over, but never admired. At least, no one admitted to any admiration for such instruments of war and animal violence. The Blessed were bred for their physiques, their stamina and their capacity for endurance. They were like show-horses. Blessed Ones were prized as marriageable husbands by ambitious mothers. Marrying a Blessed One was almost like marrying royalty, for they were given a generous income for life and housing befitting such servants of the state.

When the Plague came and later on the Invasion, the Blessed Ones were annihilated along with many Peacemakers. The Plague- this, they were powerless against- but the mustering of their pitiful arsenal of weapons against the ferocious Invaders was not to be thought of as a means to victory. Drayven never made it to the age when he would have received the required training of a Blessed One. He was only a bewildered ten year old when his parents and most of his family and relatives were either cut down by the Plague or by the butchering of the merciless Invaders. Only grim memories kept him company these days. His dreams were always filled with dead faces and mangled bodies. He was a pilgrim in a living nightmare, saved only because he was ordered by his father to hide in one of the wheat bins in his family's food cellar. He remembered the tortured screams of pain and agony. Then, utter silence, like an obscene phantom beckoned him to satisfy his curiosity. What greeted his eyes would always haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. His family were torn limb from limb; their lifeless, mangled corpses looking as if they had been run through sharp shredders until a sickening composite of blood, bone and muscle seeped into expensive Persian carpets and stained them with the colors of death.

The ensuing years were one of dark despair, one after another. Huddling with others just as shell-shocked as he was, faces he did not know asking him if he was alright, trying to survive each horrifying night with the faces of his family haunting him...this was his lot for many years. Only one of his siblings survived but he did not know what had become of her. He'd been by himself ever since he was seventeen.

Nowadays, Drayven kept a room in an old rundown tenement near Parady's heart. He no longer had the kind of money he had during the Pax Golden Age, before the Reaper came. The Peacemakers claimed they never invented money but forms of currency had existed on their planet for centuries. Drayven had never known himself to have had much of a need for notes of any kind. He had been born to grow up in the Age of the Reaper and had only known disease, fear, uncertainty, dearth and a lack of all that had once made Pax great. His family's previous wealth was like a faraway dream. He had forgotten all the luxuries he had enjoyed prior to the age of ten. He dressed simply, much like an impoverished European from Middle Century Earth.

Something haunted Drayven daily. Everyday, he labored over the verse that haunted his dreams when he was asleep and that hung like a death pall over him when he was awake. It was all he had left to remind him of how great Parady once was. All he had for reading materials was the old journal in which the mysterious verse had been inscribed.

It wasn't his journal.

He didn't know whose it was.

He himself wrote at a punishing pace; feverishly, words were scrawled frantically on white pages, day after God-forsaken day. It was as if the words themselves would run off the pages, so overwhelming was the intensity of its author. The sheer desperation of his tortured penmanship would once more conjure anew the Golden Age of Pax...if words had that power.

Other than that, he was idle each and everyday and had been for the last twenty years or so. He had never stopped to wonder why or to ponder if he could find other activities to keep him busy.

He was alone.

He had grown to hate others.

He had begun to accept the harsh, empty room that was his home. Every night when he went to bed, he was hounded by a strange conviction; that he would never see another face for the rest of his days.

Drayven shook himself and rose. He pulled a black jacket, worn and threadbare, from under his bed. He dressed slowly, methodically. After a moment, he walked with measured steps to the door which stood opposite his bed. Opening the door slowly, he went out. When he came to a landing he began to descend the decrepit steps with an air of resignation.

Physically he was very limber and capable. He had been climbing the seven flights thrice a week for the last ten years.

Mentally... he was falling apart.

He felt that he had a sound mind; he knew paranoia skirted the edges of his consciousness, but he didn't care because he had never invited its presence as a treasured guest into the private chambers of his soul. Yet, every time he took the stairs, a part of him died and he was unaware of any pain whatsoever. Each labored step away from his room in the mornings and back towards his room in the evenings seemed to draw him further and further from all other Peacemakers.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned back to stare up the winding flights. It was something he did automatically every time.

He walked across the lobby and stepped outside. The brown, neglected buildings rose before him in their crumbling melancholy. He started off in a westerly direction looking for food; he hadn't eaten in almost a week.

The rest of the day saw Drayven wandering around the empty, dirty alleys and picking his way aimlessly among the occasional piles of rubbish and filth. He kept his hands in his pockets and walked quietly.

He was alone in this part of the city; he hadn't met a single soul there for ten years. He had no knowledge that this was about to change. In fact, he was so unaware of many things that he felt like a disembodied spirit. Before everyone had died on every side of him, he had been a clever, alert young boy, ready to take on the world. Now, he was a shell of forgotten dreams, restrained emotions and unspoken words. He little realized how much he had really changed over the years.

Drayven wandered further than he had initially planned. He began to feel exhausted and annoyed. His search had been fruitless and darkness was fast engulfing the light of day. He tried to retrace his steps in an effort to return home but all attempts to recalibrate his bearings were in vain. He was simply and thoroughly lost.

He would have been very surprised if he knew that the course of Pax's history was to be changed forever as a result of that miscalculation.

As Drayven was stumbling about blindly in the dark, he tripped and fell. When he picked himself up, he realized he'd sprained his right ankle. He dismissed it characteristically and moved on. When he started to feel a sharp pain in his chest , he ignored that also. It never occurred to him that he had fallen over a jagged piece of reinforcement steel. Eventually, it became impossible to disregard the throbbing torment but he was only half-aware that his fall might have been more serious than he had first thought. The truth was that he didn't care, had ceased to care. Pain had been his constant companion for so long that the realities of life were nothing more than a numbing round of repetitive drudgery.

All about him lay the remains of wrecked buildings, stores and tenements. Piles of refuse, dirt, and rubble lay in odd spots around the collapsing buildings. Strong odors of every property bombarded him on every side.

Finally, he gave up and sat down somewhere with his back against a stone wall. Night had fallen completely. He knew he had little chance now of finding his way home when the city looked the same no matter where he was. He sat sulkily for a few minutes before something in the distance caught his eye. He was startled and somewhat annoyed to see that it was a fire; something he hadn't seen for almost ten years. He rose quickly, his hatred for other Peacemakers burning hot in his chest. He made for the orange light, hobbling because of his injury. Before he came close enough, he picked up a metal rod. He seemed to have only one goal: to do what harm he might to other Peacemakers. He couldn't even begin to rationalize his own spite. His mind was hardly his own. His dreams were driven by immeasurable grief and fear; his waking hours haunted by an unnamed despair. His mounting insecurity and nagging hatred had scarcely been mitigated by years of near starvation, perpetual solitude and constant lack of basic necessities.

Drayven drew near the fire. The closer he came, the stronger his recollection of warmth became. Then, for the first time in a