Ted saw Eknie sitting there, sobbing into her handkerchief.
A gentleman would have consoled her.
Ted closed the door and walked away.
He decided to go for a stroll in the garden instead.
There was a slight lull in the festivities and the punishments of the cult. Of course, no one knew yet that it was, indeed, a cult, but the features that made it more captivating and jealous than a regular old organization were kicking in, and Ted hardly even heard the cultists speaking about any other matters.
It was all divination this, divination that – the rational side of meteorology did not seem to gather quite as much interest. The moods of the clouds were connected to human matters now. A bad rainfall in the early afternoon would turn to a death in the family, and a cognitive bias kept the cultists from noticing all the times when the scrying or whatever this was went wrong.
It was impressive to them, and the scientists along with the scrying women always backed Ted up, for he had hired a few real meteorologists and appealed to their desire to seem intelligent to commoners.
The scientists were just as easily manipulated as the regular cultists.
A web of his own lies thickened around Ted. He wasn't worried, though. Every word that went unquestioned increased the chances for other words to pass through the filters as well.
The man Ted had whipped earlier sought his company often, but as a mere Firefly, the leader could not shower him with such attention.
Ted had redecorated the factory building with different solar symbols and the colors of fire and light. It was a luminous space, with textiles adorned with tiny crystals reflecting the rays of the sun so that prismatic rainbows hit the walls during all hours of daytime.
Ted hated the building. It was too sunny there at any given time, and he had come to despise the star.
He did not feel like spending his time there, and he didn't want to be with Eknie, who had become downright delusional about the nature of their relationship.
Instead, Ted read occult literature in his chamber, occasionally plunging himself into scientific research as well.
The long, dark winter of the Fin fascinated him. There were so many months without a speck of daylight reaching the island that it would have been downright heavenly for someone with a spiritually induced full body migraine. In fact, even though the island was now pretty much cut off from regular civilization, the clouds and the storms had to stop at some point, or then there would be a hole in them, or a way to push through the waves and the strong currents of air.
Ted really considered hiring that fellow Eknie had spoken of, but that required talking to her and perhaps hearing what she had to say as well.
Ted was not prepared for that.
He sipped his pearl tea. This drink was one of the few good exports from the Fin. It was made from the roots of a plant that only flourished in places where ice had taken its hold on the ground. The way the dried leaves were prepared included a magical component. This was the reason why the tea was considered contraband goods. The fermentation process needed human blood, of a recently widowed woman, and from what Ted had heard, the making of widows was sometimes accelerated from the natural, rather slow process it was supposed to be. When the first shiny-eyed nutritionists had returned from their expeditions to the cold south, the current ruler had been horrified. The successor of the Dreamer King had shared none of his spunk and all of his rather soft values. The Rain King, who had, ironically, left his wife a widow too early for her liking, had made it a punishable act to bring any pearl tea to Sennas. This was a shame, for it greatly improved cognition, vitality and male virility. Ted could taste swords plunged into the hearts of men and their wives as he drank his tea and read more about the Fin. He imagined the wails of their wives as the widow blood was harvested.
He did not need an extra boost, he merely drank the tea due to the striking backstory.
He slid his finger down the page he was currently reading, imagining all the lives that had been lost so that he could live in luxury.
The Fin was a brutal place, and no one sensible would have thought about sailing there, storms or no storms.
Ted thought he would probably love it. Granted, some of the stories, if not most of them, were bound to have a flavor of exaggeration, but he had a feeling that he could discern some morsels of truth here and there.
There were such sights to be seen down south, the southern lights, the snow, the icebergs, and the beasts were worth thinking about as well. Some said there were giant bats there, while some claimed to have seen beings much like tigers, but with fangs the size of bananas. The elephants covered in wool were a dubious thing – that sounded like an overactive imagination and nothing more.
Then there was the austere society, bound to seek out pleasure wherever it could be found, and this had apparently resulted in the populace being split in two, for the other part loved mead, moonshine and other intoxicants and the other side believed in sobriety and loyalty to their old religion.
There had been unique problems with shipping people down south, where the indigenous people still lived, but the opposite of the expected had happened and the colonists had started to worship the wisemen and the wisewomen of the original tribes. A synchretist and down-to-earth hybrid belief system ruled the Fin, or had ruled.
Hardly any news came from the south anymore.
Ted smelled blood. He would take the Fin, sacrifice to the sun god and then the road to deification would be open.
He would climb as far as he humanly could within his lifetime, no matter the body count.