THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3, CHARLES E.J. MOULTON [best desktop ebook reader TXT] 📗

THE TALES OF THE HAUNTED KINGDOM


BOOK THREE

THE IMPERFECT ANGELS

A Trilogy of Novels
By
Charles E.J. Moulton


© Copyright CHARLES E.J. MOULTON 2005


CHAPTER ONE: THE IDES OF MARCH

The kingdom was asleep.
It was an uneasy rest for it anticipated change.
It was tossing and turning in its’ sleep, bad dreams haunting its’ inner vision. These bad dreams had manifested themselves in the form of an illusion where the former king of the empire was its’ only citizen. He was a citizen who each day was lead by angels and demons in right or wrong directions. These creatures had one goal in common: his duel with the witch Lucinda in the cave of souls in the forest of the original sin.
Everything depended on the outcome of this duel.
The winner would win reality.
If the king won the duel then his reality, the one where he was asleep and dreaming this illusion, would vanish and leave him benevolent leader of the known world. If his sister the witch won the duel the dream that he was living would become grotesque reality.
Even if the king won the game, he still had to travel down the seven levels of the underworld in order to find his family. They were trapped in caged replicas of their own home in the lowest level, imprisoned like mice in a bad world.
Lucinda had bequeathed this warrior’s countrymen with a terrible blight that had the warrior sleepwalking in a terrible illusion until the fallen eagle again could spread its’ wings and fly.
It had been cursed.
One ray of light had appeared in what had seemed to be a dim fog of depression.
The virtuous tutor had produced what was now an angelic warrior and the result was a man ready to face his fears.
King Alexander, the warrior in question and ruler of what at the moment was a sleeping empire, had seen his territory assailed by mysterious riders eight years ago and was riding through unknown territory as a result of these assaults. One of the long forgone attackers, a blonde and female forest gypsy messenger named Nina Ray, let herself be caught and assaulted by the King’s daughter Belinda, who was a princess devastated by her own anger.
Belinda was a woman with a history.
11 years before that questioning of the attacker of Nina Ray Belinda had heard the woman’s name uttered by the exiled royal sister and the Princess Lucinda Winsletenna.
Nina Ray had then been described as a bringer of the apocalypse.
Belinda’s world started to crumble upon meeting Nina Ray in person. Belinda fled into religion and although the angels helped her, Belinda was too far away to be saved away from the underworld. She fled into passion, but passion was a very cunning foe. She fled into wedlock, but wedlock crumbled in the face of death.
Lucinda attacked her niece just as Nina Ray had attacked the empire, aiming to drown Belinda whilst Belinda bathed naked by a waterfall. Thinking she was safe, she saw that this was not the last of the attacks. After Belinda’s tumultuous wedding celebrations Lucinda returned.
On the last day of feasting, the witch came home with a ten-headed Kerberos creature, half dog and half snake to curse the kingdom with a threefold manifesting pestilence. Lucinda had been thrown out of the kingdom for murder and arson and, just as her own prediction had been, she had come back to haunt them.
At first nothing happened that indicated a curse was on the manifold.
A child was born. His name was Alfred and he was the heir to the throne. Everything seemed fine until a mysterious gentleman arrived. His name was Nomed Snekawa and his bon vivant attitudes made the palace shiver and cheerful and the same time. He became a man for all seasons at the royal palace in immaculate velocity. He became an entertainer, a repairman, a lover of royal harlots and medicine man for small wounds faster than the princess enjoyed.
An epidemic turned the entire city of Clurafar into a coughing nightmare. The man with the strange name had the cure for the sickness. Belinda warned her father that this man might be dangerous. The King did not listen and went on with his plans to cure his palace from the epidemic. After being seduced by Nomed, Belinda gave in and took the potion that would cure them all.
The palace fell asleep on the 23rd of September 1425 and woke up with Nomed Snekawa gone. What they found was the haunted kingdom, a place that soon was devastated by war and scandal. Two years, nine months and five days later Alexander was the last inhabitant in the haunted kingdom, seemingly left completely alone after Belinda died on May 28th 1428. It had been 978 days of incubation before the haunted kingdom actually had turned real in the form of the third curse.
After war and scandal came solitude.
Alexander was troubled by ghouls and travels to a distant future and let himself go completely.
On March 7th 1429, Belinda returned from the dead to tell her father that the world he was living in was an illusion and that his task was to ride out into the wilderness to find and track down Lucinda and kill her. That way he could save not only his entire family, trapped in a replica of the royal castle located in hell.
Alexander set out on a journey. He met the archangels and saw the soul-collector spring out of hell to get him. He spent two months in a forest and a week on the wasteland of lost souls, before meeting his younger self who led him to the archangels in disguise.
They made him an angelic warrior.
Alexander had spent the last year with these archangels in a forest village, where the houses had built up in trees. That ides of March 1430 he first now realized that these villagers had been nothing else than angelic creatures, training him to face Lucinda, making him a wizard.
Somewhere in the breeze of time that now for the first time in years blew across the plains of the old land there was the voice of a lost nation crying out, a voice existent only in the minds of 36 sleeping delegates from the Prosperanian nation. It was a land torn apart and captured within a time trap by a woman disguised as a bon-vivant of sorcery. The woman, a witch, had been hunted by her brother Alexander a year now. He had gone out into the haunted kingdom to find her in order to wake up to reality once again.
He knew that the only way to save the reality was to find and kill Lucinda.
If he lost, everything would be lost as well.
The origin of the last battle that now occurred lay in the dawn of time, before the Lord split his creation into two realities in order to save mankind from the his original son called Lucifer.
Lucinda was a weapon against God to win the alternate reality and prevent the era of peace to commence in the form of Alexander’s grandson Alfred. With Lucinda’s help, Lucifer was avenging himself upon his blood brother Michael for encaging him in his own cave where the duel between Alexander and Lucinda was to take place in due course.
Alexander’s former arch enemy King Adnicul of the land of Nocturania had been betrayed by Lucifer and encaged. Adnicul was Lucifer first sin transformed out of seed of good from the tree of forbidden fruit in paradise.
Since then Adnicul had been a nervous soul, crisscrossing eternity as countless demons. The angels, in particular his former servants Eric and Rebecca, were going to try to team up the two former foes to win back the good land and send Adnicul back to his tree on the Fields of Nostalgia
Alexander, out to win back his kingdom back, woke up that morning very well rested, thinking about his conversations with his friends his tutors Old Father and Queen Carla the night before. He walked to the lake for a swim and then climbed up an apple tree to pick out an apple for breakfast. As he then walked about the village looking for his friends, he more and more realized that everyone had left him in body and began to wonder why. Wearing the woollen shirt and sheepskin vest Carla had made for him herself, he oddly felt like someone that was walking around in a suit of armour, strong, bewildered, encaged and happy.
Ruth, Peter, Fred, Carl, Carla, George, Manuel, Old Father were every one of them now gone without leaving a trace behind. They had appeared as unexpectedly as they now had disappeared.
His best friends were gone. Why so suddenly?
The king had forgotten how it was to be alone. Those old feelings from the long time in the forest returned. This time, though, it was different. He didn’t feel like a victim anymore. Nobody could push him down. In spite of simple clothing, the slight spring chill and complete solitude, he felt stronger than he had ever felt in his youth. He felt like the man he was, a newly trained and very well equipped warrior ready to face a supremely difficult challenge. Fear was there. The fear did however not haunt him. For the first time in a long time Alexander Roderick Winsletenna felt how well Fabian had tutored him in the arts of magical swordsmanship and angelic wizardry.
The breeze was yielding, the sun was frosty, the birds sang, but the individuals were gone.
The mead barrels were empty as his heart was full of joy.
The stables across the road had no horses and now even Mercutio was gone.
He was completely alone, but content.
Carl’s blacksmith-workshop was empty. Leaves covered the pathway. The hooves and hammers lay around like discarded old meat grinders after a slaughter. Someone had dropped his tools and left without further discourse.
He looked up toward the tree house and saw the clouds behind the branches. He saw his room from down here and all he could feel was the strange sensation of having survived another attack.
Even the lake was deserted. At times he could find himself going there just to meet Peter or Ruth on an errand to find a few flowers to put on the tables of the pub.
But even by the lake there was no one to be found.
The village had been fled. No, not fled. Deserted.
That was the word he was searching for. Deserted.
What had happened to Carla? Did she just feel like leaving him alone?
And Old Father, that dear mentor? What had happened to him?
He reviewed the past year that had surpassed so quickly and with such vigour. It had made him into the man he was today. He clearly remembered meeting these woodland creatures at the marketplace and he remembered becoming one of them. He realized that they were disguised angels.
He climbed up the tree and checked all the rooms inside the tree houses.
No one there inside his room. No one here in his study. No one behind the curtains before the cupboard. No one in Carla’s room. No one in Old Father’s house where he had spent nights discussing life and philosophy in order to understand the mysteries of learning.
He climbed down the ladder and slipped about halfway,