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Post 4 - Belall and Tuyouk
Empress Belall is from the Lauve province, a very beautiful, highly magical, alien with pale lavender skin, big, dark eyes and a long topknot. If she were of our world, she would be considered a serial killer due to her habit of abducting, torturing and killing young men. Ahman-tahk is a very spiritually healthy planet, where a morality enforcement organization hadn’t been necessary for centuries, therefore, there was no one to stop Belall's crimes for many years. Her biggest claim to infamy is the infliction of an ill-considered curse on the women of their planet, which is inadvertently causing the extinction of their race.
As an ultra-magical being, Belall is one of the few women who can transform into a raptor--a giant bird of prey that can spew fire, but her biggest defense is her Well of Souls. With the help of a high-level demon, she created a tiny dimension that is attached to her by a spiritual umbilicus. Whenever she kills someone, she forces their spirit into her Well of Souls to become a source of healing energy for her. Her “Well” keeps her young, heals her injuries, and burns off bacteria, viruses, and poisons.
Belall thinks men are no better than animals, most of them good for nothing but manual labor. Most of her relationships have been with military men and politicians. Except for a few fawning lackeys, Tuyouk would prove to be her longest relationship. She killed every other lover she ever had.
As a child, Tuyouk heard horror stories about Belall. To him, she was the merciless monster who had demolished his town twice in the last hundred years, and was directly, or indirectly, responsible for the deaths of almost everyone he’d ever loved.
Big, strong, confident warrior that he was, at the age of twenty-five, Tuyouk had zero experience with women. He had (and continues to have) an unrealistic expectation of male-female relationships because his foundational beliefs are not built on experience, but on the sentimental stories told by his father, and also, on his own imagination. As a result, he believes there are two types of women: witches and “good women.”
With her penchant for homicide, Belall is definitely not a “good woman.” What made their relationship work for a time was two things. First, Tuyouk’s motivation to stay alive, and second, his penchant to be accepting of other people’s short-comings. Although he despised himself for it, he could see the “humanity” in her--that what she really wanted was love--something he could not give her.
Since Tuyouk was the only man she ever loved, (this was erroneous thinking on her part, by the way, since she didn’t know the difference between “love” and “possession”) Belall was devastated when he betrayed her. Many of her former lovers had tried to kill her, but because of her affection for Tuyouk, she’d never felt so much raw pain as when he joined the Syndicate and fought to capture her.
Murdering his brother gave her a small taste of revenge, but not enough. Three hundred years later, the moment she got word that Tuyouk had returned to the Physical Realm, all her heartbreak and fury came rushing back.
Fortunately, Tuyouk’s natural optimism didn’t allow him to leave this relationship feeling defeated. His prejudice against the witches had deepened, but his romantic idealism is in tact, and he is still determined to find the perfect woman. That is the state of his expectations when he meets Ayana, who I’ll write about next time.
As an ultra-magical being, Belall is one of the few women who can transform into a raptor--a giant bird of prey that can spew fire, but her biggest defense is her Well of Souls. With the help of a high-level demon, she created a tiny dimension that is attached to her by a spiritual umbilicus. Whenever she kills someone, she forces their spirit into her Well of Souls to become a source of healing energy for her. Her “Well” keeps her young, heals her injuries, and burns off bacteria, viruses, and poisons.
Belall thinks men are no better than animals, most of them good for nothing but manual labor. Most of her relationships have been with military men and politicians. Except for a few fawning lackeys, Tuyouk would prove to be her longest relationship. She killed every other lover she ever had.
As a child, Tuyouk heard horror stories about Belall. To him, she was the merciless monster who had demolished his town twice in the last hundred years, and was directly, or indirectly, responsible for the deaths of almost everyone he’d ever loved.
Big, strong, confident warrior that he was, at the age of twenty-five, Tuyouk had zero experience with women. He had (and continues to have) an unrealistic expectation of male-female relationships because his foundational beliefs are not built on experience, but on the sentimental stories told by his father, and also, on his own imagination. As a result, he believes there are two types of women: witches and “good women.”
With her penchant for homicide, Belall is definitely not a “good woman.” What made their relationship work for a time was two things. First, Tuyouk’s motivation to stay alive, and second, his penchant to be accepting of other people’s short-comings. Although he despised himself for it, he could see the “humanity” in her--that what she really wanted was love--something he could not give her.
Since Tuyouk was the only man she ever loved, (this was erroneous thinking on her part, by the way, since she didn’t know the difference between “love” and “possession”) Belall was devastated when he betrayed her. Many of her former lovers had tried to kill her, but because of her affection for Tuyouk, she’d never felt so much raw pain as when he joined the Syndicate and fought to capture her.
Murdering his brother gave her a small taste of revenge, but not enough. Three hundred years later, the moment she got word that Tuyouk had returned to the Physical Realm, all her heartbreak and fury came rushing back.
Fortunately, Tuyouk’s natural optimism didn’t allow him to leave this relationship feeling defeated. His prejudice against the witches had deepened, but his romantic idealism is in tact, and he is still determined to find the perfect woman. That is the state of his expectations when he meets Ayana, who I’ll write about next time.
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