Jacob dismounted his lovely, flying beast. He sat down on a mound in the fair, silvery grasses for a rest, and smiled up at Adora. Adora pushed through the wild plants and raced over in an amass of tumbling tresses and languid limbs. She immediately proceeded to leap into Jacob’s lap. “Jacob,” she said affectionately, the bright, white bow in her hair flittering and fluttering across his face.

  Jacob frowned awkwardly and realized the Seintile were surrounding them with their dead eyes and clawed hands. He clasped onto Adora protectively though as he recalled, the Seintile were in fact her guardians. One walked over with its almost-rotten face somehow just like that of a great famished hound, but a loving light almost shone through the death as it gazed at Adora. Flexing its claws menacingly at even a dragonfly that floated in her vicinity.

  “Are you coming to the funeral tomorrow, Jacob?” Adora asked. “Are going to save the sooted ones?”

  “Funeral?”

  Adora bristled. “How could you possibly forget? My dearest, departed mother is going to be laid to rest…”

  “Shiver…I mean Lady Ember’s isn’t dead.”

  “Of course, she is. What do you think ascension is but a kind of death? Besides she is missing from heaven. Aeuries says she will not be returning. He has since wept a flood that dewed a thousand homes.”

  Jacob was not even remotely sure what to make of any of this and opened his startled mouth but before he could Adora had risen.

  “Let’s go inside. At least if we are going to chatter, it should be in the warmth.”

  They headed inside where they were nicely greeted by an android. Jacob vaguely remembered seeing them his first time in the realm. Another android appeared, in a pretty maid’s attire and proceeded to fuss over and comb Adora’s hair and adjust her ribbon. While chattering away. The robotic beings both seemed brighter and cheerier and bouncer with an almost human glee to their voices, than when they had been under Felton and Ember’s grave command.

  Later that night just before the rosy peril of a funeraled dawn, Jacob saw several androids and worker men lifting a white casket, decorated with gardenias. Women and children stood nearby. Several of the little, fairy-fair women were veiled and weeping. In just a few hours he was due to take Adora to lay her fictitious little mother to rest.

  Jacob dressed in a dark suit that one of the androids had laid out for him, stood holding Adora’s tiny hand as mourners flocked the streets to farewell the mad queen. On her glass casket, Jacob was startled to see under a sea of frozen waterlilies, a picture of Shiver in her tiny, queenly form being cradled by Aeuries. Her translucent and yet stoppered wings had become dulled, and the now-overgrown fringe of her hair fell to cover over half of each eye.

  Aeuries appeared deeply anguished and stamped across her casket where the words Perished with a quail and a forgotten gale that farewelled the last, distinct fair. As the last feather fell, now only blood is starred upon his isles.” Mist to his great surprise was pictured alongside the pair and he swore he was leaning next to Ember’s form now so pale and deadened, with a distinct heaviness to the usual light, wicked cloud of his eyes.

  Pretty, Jacob thought. Yet very narcissistic. Where is the clue, Shiver?

  Adora finally spoke. Aueries knew she would…Might perish so he made me…As a replacement. As her new blooming resurrection. For as I blossom into womanhood, I will grow out right of all that is black to be his bride…Pure as the last light that lingers in the snow…”

  Jacob started, wondering if this was all some strange, sick reference to how Shiver herself was a clone and copy of Sibyl Farling the lost love of Emanuel Midas Roe, who played Aueries in this messed-up monstrosity of a land.

  Shiver, meanwhile, was on her great, manor bed at Aryan's place surrounded by a fancy, rosewood wardrobe full of lace-lined dresses and angelic paintings worth a fortune, and silvered mirrors and clutching a dreaded virtualizer in her hand. The one she feared might spell her doom. One recorded by the nano-eyes as they recorded everything and that Monovalent had hidden away deep in databanks that even his creators possibly didn’t realize existed.

  Despite all the imperious boasts and their great, fairy-lighted beauty, she and Mist were only immortal prototypes to test out that technology, and due to their purposely inflicted instability and mental derangement and bioweapon abilities they would “need” to be detonated, and their cell-repairing capacities handed over to humanity, once Aryan had set up his stable, worldwide governance.

  When he had enacted, the first true peace on earth. Under the brilliant guidance of a machine-watcher's eye and its ingenuity. or so he liked to needlessly blather about his perfect calculations of meticulous precision and whatnot. The initial Shiverla were but a supposed dead-end.

  Without a Dark Knight like Emanuel or a Savior Prince like Jacob or Simon, she was dead. Emanuel was a wildcard who if he found out the truth might make her fate… Somehow worse than simply Aryan’s deathly but painless retirement. His “laying down of his weapons” as he called it. She glanced again, at the rose-gold band on her little ring finger.

  Her Good Prince could save her but only by making her mortal and ordinary; a thought that brought a yellowest bile to her throat. She wondered if Jacob had seen the wedding virtualizer she sent. The thought occurred to her that he probably didn't realize it was an invitation and might have thought it was images of her actual wedding. Yet she had not even agreed to Emanuel's terms yet. Though she had been visiting him.

  Some time ago, Aryan had himself started telling Shiver that they could be together very soon. Not long after they had spread the virus to all of Earth's countries. As anyone who had been in contact with Mist or Shiver was a carrier and so Aryan had, of course, taken them both on trips overseas and around the world, a "holiday” he'd called it.

  He had since proposed in November with a gray diamond, a Georgian ring whose delicate band, intertwined copper and gold. The wedding ring once belonged to a duchess with very small, slender, delicate hands. Shiver’s perfect bone structure enabled her to wear what ninety-nine percent of modern women couldn’t.

  Emanuel gave it explicitly to Aryan, to give to Shiver. When he heard about the engagement( a secret from all others yet Emanuel had a way of finding out things) merely said “If you must propose to my dearest, at least do so with my ring; I know you haven’t given her one yet as you have been overseas. She needs to be adorned by the token of her true creator, grant me this courtesy old friend,” he said most politely yet when Aryan’s back turned, his smile grew sinister, eyes colder than a frozen sea.

  Aryan continuously claimed to Shiver he would marry her "someday" not too long from now. Once she got a little older and the controversy was lessened but now like a placebo that in a person’s mind seems to be alleviating their sickness, lies, and obfuscations must allay people’s suspicions and set them for at least a little while, to rest.

  Mist was still sure that Aryan was lying to Shiver, coercing and manipulating her. He had growing evidence and an underlying, intrinsic sense of what type of games a man like Aryan was best at and how his methods of control went beyond the simple power, crude flattery, tedious repetition of clichéd slogans, and scare tactics popular today.

  He suspected Monovalent (not Aryan, it wasn’t really his style) started the whole thing as a method of controlling Shiver because she was a weak link, less ambitious, sociopathic, and ruthless than had been intended. Shiver had a reason for helping their organization and it wasn’t the power-hungry reasons a Shiverla would do it for...but rather romance. Her Achilles heel, no one could have predicted. That she would fall for Aryan was no surprise though.

  Monovalent, the master manipulator, would have persuaded Aryan to go along with it; he would have orchestrated the whole thing. Aryan would have participated reluctantly but seen the ruse as truly the only way. This was all a hundred percent accurate., The things Aryan said and did were stolen from Emanuel or occasionally came straight out of romance novels and movies Monovalent had analysed: often quite obscure ones so Shiver wouldn’t cotton on.

  Mist was correct about the ruse but wrong about the motivation: it was about playing his creators against each other( despite them both being one of the few people he actually was fond of and could relate to on an intellectual level or had any respect for) the rule of divide and conquer. If Aryan stole Shiver from Emanuel, he would do anything to dispose of the man and lay claim to her and Monovalent needed him if he ever wished to overthrow Aryan and be free and able to take control of the world himself someday.

  The precious item idea was all Monovalent though. He came up with it to explain the baffling disinterest underneath the pretty words and gifts (flowers, artworks, sculptures even a fennec fox) from Aryan. The day Aryan brought the little fennec fox just eight weeks old Shiver had exclaimed in elated wonder. She had never seen one before.

  The fox was a little male with huge, bat-like ears, a fluffy tail, and enormous, dark, expressive eyes. A tiny pointy face poked its nose about, and his soft, pale, red-gold fur was truly exquisite. “He’s lovely and looks like just you, Shiver,” Aryan said, “so I thought you might like him.”

  “He’s got your colouring and everything,” Mist said with a grin.

  “He’s wet too, you bathed him, Aryan.”

  “Waterbaby,” Shiver exclaimed, glancing up at a red tuft of hair sticking up from the fox’s head, her voice tight with emotion.

  “Waterbaby?” Asked Mist. “You mean like from the Disney short you apparently sat so close-up watching you nearly burnt out your corneas at three. Those old, musical cartoons; the symphony music was quite adept, most pleasing.”

  Shiver nodded: It had visuals I admire, of sweetness, innocence, and beauty rendered in soft colours and like lullaby land a certain, almost nightmarish surrealism representative of a child’s overactive, imaginative mind.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “People can say it's overly-cutsie but it was sincere in its honey, not the saccharine fakery you get now; rigid moral lessons and reassurances we're all simply wonderful, original people and as long don’t judge another's decision, all lives are valid. Nothing is too dangerous is destructive just another beautiful choice. Everything as good as everything else.”

  “Also, Water Babies told a story with animation alone. Not everything has to be crude, or overt to be a memorable tale.” Shiver uttered all this, quite dreamily.

  Returning matters to young Simon, he had just started to form a resistance group albeit not much of one; containing in large amounts people he tracked down who had been victims of the hellion realm Shiver, and the others called the tampering with Monovalent realms to make it a nightmarish game. Monovalent wiped the memories of most who were hell-game victims but let a select few remember, few enough that if they told no-one would believe them.

  He also informed them of the virus his carriers Shiver and Mist had infected them with. It was a dormant virus that could flare up actively with a single electrical impulse instruction from him and divide and spread throughout their bodies killing them. He told them that the virus could even become flesh-eating so they would die in agony within an hour if it was activated. Thus, there was no chance of them going public, especially with no concrete proof.

  Monovalent continued to help Simon by sending him these names to lead him off track. He was crucial to his plan to overthrow Aryan. If he told Shiver, that Aryan planned to kill her and Mist, once he had established rule and humanity’s great protection, she might not believe him and might turn against him.

  If he told Simon and got him to make Aryan confess in a moment of drunken weakness; (Aryan was susceptible to alcohol) Shiver would believe it. Simon's inherent qualities of honesty and integrity were absent in him, Monovalent, and Shiver knew it.

  Simon knew of course he was being manipulated for ulterior motives but didn’t know what they were only knew if he was to stop Aryan, he would need as much information as possible. Aryan knew Simon knew but did not consider him a threat.

  Aryan met with Simon upon his request to explain the same things he told Mist and Shiver three years earlier that he did not “relish killing or torture but that it was necessary.” Then proceeded to pour them both some of the rich red wine Simon brought.

  “That's a load of bull”, said Simon “Besides globalism and certainly capitalism can work, it has in the past, but socialism has always proved a failure.” Aryan frowned “But communism or democratic communism as you call it, has always been the governing system in poorer, less advanced nations. It has never been tried in a first-world, technologically advanced country Which interestingly, is the only kind of nation where Marx believed communism could truly flourish.”

  “Globalist capitalism is too unstable; the private and business sector always grows too greedy and power hungry to be kept in check.” Simon then, feeling a little tipsy, decided to confront Aryan head-on; ‘are you really going to kill Shiver and Mist, after all, you made them the way they are.”

  “In a sense, they are your children, yet you treat them like servants,” he said perfunctorily.

  “I assume you heard that from Monovalent,” said Aryan slurring his words slightly “And yes, it’s true I don’t deny it, but those two are evil and sociopathic fond as I am of them. Once my goals are achieved, I will lay down my weapons.”

  “Once we have won, I will be downed, life-taken. I also plan to deactivate Monovalent's ability to harm any living creature under any circumstances and if attempts are made by another programmer to change these alterations Monovalent will destruct also.”

  “For now, I am holding my ability to eradicate its programming and fickle, artificial life completely over its head to prevent undue bloodshed. He’s harmed comparatively few despite his and the Shiverla’s mischievous games which I believe have stopped.”

  “They weren’t supposed to know of their impending doom, Monovalent did. He can, based on extensive human history and full society and mind profiles and studies of groups with their tendency to homogeny, people’s behaviour predict. Often with much accuracy. He can partially understand even my thought processes as our minds work similarly). It’s a knowing talent Emanuel had and perfected in machine form.”

  “His knowing of my impending demise wasn’t an issue until I noticed he became perhaps a little attached to these saviour-children charges of his, ours. He needs to understand humanity is his duty and loyalty should be to them. We need to keep tight rein on the mission.”

  “He was too destruct automatically if communicated his knowledge in any way, including after I die to keep people believing in the validity of the cause, an earnest and not hostile takeover. However, Emanuel also with a fair understanding of how my mind works and the only one who could have gone through the programming and found any information on their imminent demise may have informed our Shiverla personally, somehow.”

  “What about opposition if you let yourself become vulnerable,” Simon inquired.

  “I do not believe that will happen,” Aryan said “Once we have achieved a more compassionate and civilized world order, the majority of people will appreciate and accept it, after all they have so far. The only reason I have had to resort to devious means at all is because the private sector is so corrupt and powerful but ordinary people who know what it is to suffer and go without are not.”

  “Remember Marx’s prediction was that communism was the end stage of capitalism,” Aryan finished.

  This was not going as Simon might have preferred. His mind wandered on to Aryan’s weapons of biological warfare, his viral carriers. Shiver and Mist, he had often been curious about the relationship between the two. Clearly, it was very amicable, and cordial but was it more than that? He thought since he wasn’t getting anywhere with him on the political front he might as well ask about that. “Are they friends even lovers”, he asked Aryan. Not really, Aryan told him they considered each other “more like family.”

  “You mean they're like brother and sister?” Simon asked.

  “Well… not really,” Aryan said, “sometimes I find they rather act like an old married couple.” “Shiver loves you though…”Simon said.

  “She does," Aryan nodded "but I think that she loves a lot more men than she lets on she’s a confused child. She definitely has a crush on Emanuel since Monovalent told her about him when he sent the love letters and the dress, and she is infatuated by Monovalent despite his being a machine and she’s rather attracted to you too."

  “She’s always especially admired and been enamoured of Mist though; since first they met and long before she knew me. I feel that she sees he is very beautiful like her but more self-possessed and stronger of character which draws her to him.”

  “They are also the only of their kind so in a way destined for each other. As for Mist well Shiver is the only person, I have known him to like. He always mocks her for her feelings for me and I suspect it is more than just his natural inclination towards taunting people.”

  “Are you saying he loves her…?”

  “Not exactly that no,” Aryan shook his head frowning, his very low, melodious voice puzzled as he paused for thought. His large eyes shone redly dark and troubled. Almost heavy with his regret.

  “Mist really is a sociopath in the truest sense of the word I do not think he is capable of love in any conventional way. I believe he cares for Shiver in the same way Monovalent does as a superior creature, something special and unique but he could never love her more than he loves himself as in true romantic love.”

  “The difference between him and Monovalent is that in regards to Shiver, he is highly attracted to her which Monovalent is of course incapable of. Shiver herself has always experienced sexual tension with humans, but Mist considers himself exclusive, and above that, he would want another Shiverla and Shiver is the only other one of their kind. Genetically despite being modified the same, they are not related. They share no direct genes, no blood.”

  “Their closeness, their having been conceived together, looking physically similar keeps them apart though, it feels too much like incest. That of course is another reason I could never love Shiver. I created her and though we share no blood, and she is not my daughter she is too close to that for comfort.”

  They don’t find it is too much like incest, to be together. Or they got over their reservations fast. Shiver and Mist have been intimate on more than one occasion. “

  Aryan started. An almost envious look on his face. “ I miscalculated, I guess. Well, they weren’t related or raised together though a lot of commonalities share. So, fair enough. Oh, you were inquiring how they were made. Well.”

  “Mist was created from Mary and James’s DNA, the scientists we commission to secretly aid our cause and Shiver from a dead, young woman called Ivy. She is essentially a heavily modified clone. Emanuel used a single strand of Ivy’s hair to copy full genetic code but didn’t use any of her actual cellular material to complications avoid associated with prematurely aged DNA.”

  Couldn’t manufacture Shiverla from pure human DNA in any case. He had a sample from a little silver locket he gave her, but she returned it to him after their breakup along with a reddish-gold lock it held to remember her by as he was far from over her. Only for him to later create Shiver in her image, quite romantic really.”

  “Did you ever meet Ivy?” Simon asked.

  “Yes, a few times, introduced bizarrely to me as his bride, “Sibyl Farling”. Did not learn for ages that it wasn’t her true name. Very sweet. Brought in to do the visuals whilst we were working on God’s image.”

  “Emanuel holding her little hand and from the outside one would assume it was very much a dominance thing; she was so dimly quiet and delicate-featured. A pale, small creature; rather mesmerizing with huge, soft eyes downturned and behind his twisted, bony bulk hid.”

  “At first, she drew on her own on an online sketchpad and Emanuel glanced up intermittently to tell her rather abrasively to join in and converse, yet she stayed still except for the times she wondered round dreamily; danced almost, in a fairylike way. The girl basically ignored him. Not sure she even heard.”

  ‘“Well at least she, rarely stationary, doesn’t spoil and stomp. Instead flows her each pale step of an ermine’s narrowly-spun feet. Such a light form ought to move varied and graceful as those most well-commanded, airborne things, in flightiest levitation. Oh, and yes, I’m aware lost to the faerie, such elfin ears, and interests not by my humble requests piqued”’ he, Emanuel, most unperturbed had at last, said.”

  “Then when he made a calculation mistake, very rare for him, with his fast-equating, computer-like gift for numbers she looked up and laughed, not meanly in particular. I would have been wary to do that even, but he reacted well, returning the humour. His face took on mirth and a rare gentleness. Then pure, similar joy when showed him her artistic work. I suspected their relationship less clear than I first assumed.”

  “He seemed remarkably un-jealous of me over her, saying only ‘“She doesn’t find men like you attractive.”’

  “We only argued about her over her death. Where I said ‘“it was tragic and perhaps, he somewhat badgered and demanded overwhelming affection of one so young and didn’t treat her well enough,”’ and he said ‘“I didn’t know anything about it and had no right to comment and that I didn’t get her at all.”’

  “He and I were close for brief periods but kept mostly to ourselves. Still not enough to prevent inevitable gay rumours that emerged at the university we attended together. Yet our rapport didn’t include being lovers. Like many bright young men of old and literature, it was simply a meeting of the minds. Funnily, modern-day Western society is far more unable to believe males can love platonically than many a past one.”

  “Why did you not avoid dating Shiver to honour your friend’s lost love?”

  “He is not owed her, simply because she and young Miss Parish come from the same DNA, I brought back her beauty and artistic gifts and that is all I promised.”

  Simon nodded, finding it very hypocritical since Aryan had made her for a set purpose and was using her as much in a different way, the fact it wasn’t sexual might make it better in Aryan’s eyes, but Simon didn’t see it so.

  “Well, she likes him anyway,” he commented.

  “I may think his possessive claim not right, yet I am not cursed with such naiveté that I don’t see his appeal, he’s a great man. Adores her in his own manner as well.”

  “Shiver told me you said you loved her and were going to marry her,” Simon said. Aryan blanched and looked lost for a reply for a second.

  “She told you….that? Alright, I do love her it’s not something I want everyone to know. Highly shaming to love one of your own creations something created for a purpose not idealistic love and musical, lyrical romance. Who couldn’t love her though she is beautiful nothing compares to either her or Mist.”

  “Shiver is special though...” Aryan's voice trailed off for a second. “My dear little one is what she is. As Emanuel says she is so very reserved and feminine, so full of love and wild romantic notions as well as beauty and eloquence and soft-spoken grace, so rare in a woman or even a man to be fair, nowadays.

  “She does have elegance and class she and Mist so rare to see but so wonderful,” Simon agreed. Simon too spoke and moved elegantly and so could recognize those traits in others. His classic charm was one of the reasons as well as his immense good looks that had caused Shiver to agree to be friends with him.

  “So, Emanuel what can you tell me about him…” Simon asked with the abruptness born of one of those funny bursts of insatiable curiosity.

  “I actually don’t know him tremendously well; though certainly, better than most. He was quite the hacker in his youth you know, even worked for a major Leaker organization. I won’t share which one. Long before we realized our shared dream of a network of free information and an interactive, online system of unencumbered political and social expression and government transparency some might foolishly call anarchist: anyone can access everything easily on Monovalen,t no secrets.”

  Except the classified ones you keep, and you are using him as surveillance and using people’s information against them, Simon thought.

  “Emanuel shut down major social networking sites for kicks as well as hacked multiple government files. He confessed to me after the fact, that he was once involved heavily in cybercrime and piracy and made quite the ample profit from it. Enough to fund housing for himself till he made enough off of his revolutionary, anti-viral software. He started all this very young, I recall it being some early adolescent age, but I don’t know the exact details.”

  “I met him freshman year at university: he told me he played pranks before that at school with his “skills” but as I said, am not awfully privy to that. Brilliant man though. Solved a famous paradoxical, math problem as a child. Monovalent wouldn’t exist without him no doubt, he even named our great, Mavierie Machina. The wondrous design of the Shiverla well, much of that’s him too.”