My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 827: Shadows and Consort’s Visit

When the darkness embraced the world into its eternal, indiscriminate love — folding the sky into a blanket of obsidian and extinguishing the last vestiges of the day’s tyrannical sun — the penthouse grew dim with it.

It would then be wholly immersed in the ablution of artificial luminescence, but always at the discretion of the resident to calibrate as they saw fit; rudimentary logical reasoning, really.

The architecture was designed to accommodate vanity at any hour.

Up here — at this altitude, at this remove from the mundane earth and its pedestrian concerns — existence resembled something approximating divinity; living in the heavens while the world below teemed with what could only, from this vantage, be described as peasants in the well-manicured theatre of one’s own pampered and privileged life.

The resident, the deity.

The millions beneath; the congregation whose fates could be redirected by a single decision, a single telephone call and a single oscillation of mood on a Tuesday afternoon.

It was birthright...

...Most who resided at these altitudes comprehended this implicitly, wore it like a second epidermis, never questioned the arrangement any more than a mountain questioned its own height.

So why did such beings — such architects of other people’s destinies, such plenipotentiaries of inherited consequence — so frequently elect the dim lighting... when they could have had the full incandescent arsenal and the luminous totality that cost the same sum that could have transmuted twelve households’ existences, enveloping them in radiance and reminding them, with every photon, of the gods they were?

...Scratching their egos with kilowatts.

For Phei, though, such arrogance and entitlement was but pretension.

He required no lights to remind him who he was.

The dim illumination of his penthouse was a deliberate election — a permanent configuration engaged whenever the night visited the world after the day’s interminable solar tyranny had concluded its shift.

There was solace in the dimness really.

Comfort in the way the vast, cavernous expanse of the penthouse — which encompassed nearly the entire quadrant of the uppermost floor of the Infinity Chaos Hotel — surrendered its edges to shadow.

The mild darkness conferred upon him a sense of kinship, as though the obscurity was acknowledging the beast he felt himself becoming and had arranged itself into appropriate company.

Standing in this tenebrous sanctum, after today’s protracted itinerary of activities and everything he had acquired and the path he had irrevocably embarked upon, Phei had never felt more like himself since arriving on Hell’s Paradise Island.

There was a peace to it — to being in the companionship of his own shadows that genuflected when he moved and the shadows of the immobilized furnishings that remained sentinel when he didn’t.

The silent choreography of dark shapes responding to a dark man in a dark room — his own shadow slaves, obedient without being commanded,present without being summoned.

’It feels like home.

And Phei had wanted nothing more than to recline in the penumbra and consecrate the evening to his life thus far, clinking glasses with his own silhouette like a man who had reached the particular meridian of solitude where his own shadow constituted adequate dinner company.

But the same darkness that made him feel at home could just as readily become the very thing that strangled him...

...And that had happened without preamble;

...Darkness and reality warped — buckled really — and rent themselves asunder with a violence that produced no sound, displacement of air, nor the perturbation whatsoever to indicate that the fundamental substrate of the corporeal world had just been transgressed three meters behind him.

The aperture admitted the very thing capable of terminating his existence in that very second, and he perceived nothing — not a tremor, fluctuation in temperature, nor was there a single disturbance in the ambient hum of the penthouse’s climate systems — until her voice called him from behind.

"Dragon."

His entire body seized.

Not from fear... from something worse — the cold, crystalline, absolutely lucid apprehension of how weak he truly was. It didn’t matter how formidable he’d become nor did it matter that he’d awakened Void-Ice and Primordial Blood and wielded Infinity Control with the fluency of a force that had recognized its sovereign:

He was still in the end, when the power ranking was tallied, a Master:

And beings like her — beings that occupied the stratosphere so far above his current rank that the distance between them could be measured in geological epochs rather than power levels — could infiltrate his penthouse and sever his spinal column faster than one heartbeat and the next, and the only thing he would feel was the brief, philosophical curiosity of a man wondering why his legs had stopped working.

’It is a humbling sensation.’

Not the gentle, edifying humility of a pedagogue correcting a pupil....

...The other variety: a brutal, unsolicited, almost contemptuous species that seized a man by the collar, hauled him to the precipice of his own insignificance, and compelled him to see exactly how vertiginous the remaining ascent.

A memento mori delivered with the impersonal cruelty of a universe that did not grade on a curve, reminding him that no matter how powerful he had become, he was still not more than a slightly formidable hound who could, at any second, be collared and leashed by someone who found the exercise perfunctory.

Phei sighed and sat down on the couch.

He hadn’t even managed to procure a glass of wine to toast with his shadows;

Victoria had texted him earlier today — a brief, characteristically understated message informing him she’d left a bottle of wine in his penthouse that she thought he might appreciate.

They all knew he wasn’t particularly enamoured of wine as a beverage category, but if Victoria had curated something specifically, it would mean she had been meticulously considered it.

Thoughtful selection that reflected genuine understanding of his palate and taste of his current class, rather than generic assumptions about what boys his age drank.

’Such a shame I am not going to get to open it anytime soon.’

"What is it, Consort."

Not a question but a statement of a sort delivered to the dimness behind him with the flat, unadorned inflection of a man who had been interrupted during the one hour of the evening he had allocated to existential brooding and was not enthusiastic about the schedule change.

"Ever heard of a concept called privacy? Look it up. I believe they have dictionaries at whatever altitude you inhabit."

He could hear her teeth gritting in a frustration. Or was it?

And yet she did not conceal it down beneath the veneer of composure that most beings of her calibre maintained as a matter of professional obligation.

Consort’s hatred for him (if there was any left) was unhidden — raw, undisguised and openly simmering in the gelid air between them like a pot she had decided, ten thousand years into her existence, she could no longer be bothered to keep a lid on.

And that brought him, strangely, a species of solace.