Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop.
Denise is the host.
Reputed to hate long Sixes, (anything over six sentences), and, when it comes to stories with five or less sentences, Denise is remoured to exude disdain like Martin Luther hearing Johann Tetzel sing his way into town, with what may very well have been the first commercial jingle: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” (Wiki here.)
This is a Whitechapel Interlude week, let’s pick up the tale.
Previously, in the Whitechapel Interlude…
The brilliant, if not emotionally-unstable, Professor Egmont attained a preeminent status in the scientific community of his time not merely for his intelligence and education. It has been said, not only among biographers and psychologists, that ambition, the loose-morals sister of genius, is the difference between ‘great’ and ‘immortal’. Egmont’s genius was to construct a machine capable of transporting a person through time. His ambition was to improve the history of Man. The Order of Lilith, like near-invisible variances in the weft of human history, was created to save Mankind from such remarkable people.
This week’s prompt word:
DISTRAƆTION
“You’ve brought what I’ve asked of you?”
The softness in Mother Schader’s voice, to a random passerby, might be heard as timidity and perhaps, even, a nervous distraction, however, neither condition was possible; having risen to the position of Reverend Mother of the Bavarian chapter of the Order of Lilith made the first, laughable, and given the 3:00 am meeting in an alley off a dead-end street in Brașov, Transylvania, the second, moot.
Night-black shadows, charcoal scrawls on the namesake soot-darkened walls of the city’s famous, Biserica Neagră, became animated, first detaching from the stonework of the cathedral, then to shaping themselves into a man, “I have found what you …requested of me, surely I’ve earned the right to know what causes this, brass-and-ivory clockwork, to be so dear,” glancing down at the burlap bag with red-streaked cord binding, he smiled, “Given how many people were granted their valuation of their lives against my possessing it, I sense a story.”
In the moment between the chase and taking its prey, it is said a wolf hoods its eyes, the better to bank the raging fire within, Count St. Loreto stood, the parcel just out of reach of the woman; were she less focused on her mission, she might have indulged in a smile at such charm, instead, her eyes became the hooded ones, “We are after prey that you, Cyrus, should hope never to take the scent of.”
Hearing his given name, the Count’s posture became slightly less feral and, shaking his head, momentarily curtaining eyes that didn’t quite glow, “I would not be merely the father of my kind, had I even a fraction of the confidence of you and your charges;” growing jealous, the night shadows pulled at the man, who, with the hint of a bow, continued, “May I be of further service to the daughters of Lilith?”
“Were our respective progenitors not so very …intimately acquainted”, while the Mother Superior’s smile provided the italics, her eyes served notice that she remained the dominant half of the transaction, “But, alas, while gods might deign to live as humans, some of us divine from that choice, an insight into the limitations of immortality”.
(Language Advisory for the following musical accompaniment)