Centaurian Ch. 01

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The businessman lived alone in a house that could hold three full families with little difficulty. He had dined with royalty and presidents and influenced the world around him for many years. But despite all this, he was secretly a miserable man. Having seen enough of it, the world bored him. He had no life within him, and the mental vitality he once felt had withered with time, which would have surprised anyone who knew him as he only appeared to be in his late twenties.

While seldom found in his Manhattan office, at four o'clock the afternoon of June 21st, he had taken a jaunt there to catch up on financial matters. Wearing a coal-colored suit made of the finest fabrics that both his gotten and ill-gotten gains could afford, the man with reddish hair and a dour expression, stalked into the room like he owned the entire high-rise building, which, of course, he did. On arrival, he noted a dark-haired, curvy woman wearing a white skirt and low-cut blouse holding a tablet. She waited for him from the Corinthian-leather couch that dominated the outer office. The man never stopped and Carl, his administrative assistant, followed him to the antique mahogany desk that once belong to a former CEO of a major New York bank.

"You have an array of messages, sir. In order of those most imperative, the President wants to have another round of golf at Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard to have another important chat. The Patterson Brothers are advising you to dump your stock on Friday for the companies they list here. I'm unsure which they are, but said you would know, and there are several other messages of lesser urgency."

"Who is the woman in the outer office?"

He cleared his throat. "She said her friends call her Happiness, sir. She claims to have information you will want concerning the year 1046."

The moment he heard the mention of the year, he had his complete attention. "How long has she been there?"

"About 15 minutes, sir."

"Send her in and close the door on the way out."

When Carl turned to go, they both could see the woman had already let herself in and waited halfway to the desk from the office entrance.

Once Carl closed the door, the woman began.

She tipped her head a little, and her blood-red lips always spoke with a slow, smooth, and slightly breathy quality. "Hello, Aquila."

Aquila, a man known in 2016 as Elias Adrianus had amassed an incredible amount of hidden wealth in the form of precious metals, and visible wealth from his investments. It calculated to many lifetimes' worth of riches, and he considered all of it, to the last penny, his compensation (a pittance in his eyes) for the many years he spent living in misery. He often compared his life to standing in the center of a clock face with the advancement of the ages passing around him while he alone remained untouched by the hands of time.

Over the years, Father Time had taken from him every friend, every lover, every wife, and everyone he had ever cared about. In the past, whenever it happened, he tried to get on with his life—as one does at such losses. He picked himself up, dusted himself off, and kept going, but with every loss, part of him died, until all he had left was a growing contempt for the world and everyone in it.

It had been hundreds of years since anyone called him Aquila.

"Who are you?"

"As I have said, I am Happiness, and I am here to help you."

"Help me, how?"

"Your desire is known to me and can be achieved." She eased behind the man, and she laid the tablet before him. The image depicted two men sitting on a sea wall, and as the video played, one mentioned the year 1046. Her voice was like honey, and she smelled of jasmine. "The man to the left is Henri Estalon. He was your father. He is now dead. The man to the right is Ronan Stallion, the man he chose as his replacement." She slowly forwarded the video and paused it the moment the transfer occurred with a brilliant white light spilling from between the two men. "You are the son of a man bound to an eternal flame, and you are its product. So long as that flame burns, you cannot die."

He couldn't stop staring at the image before him. "How can I extinguish the flame?"

She leaned into his left ear and whispered to him. "The flame and the stallion are connected. To kill the flame, you must kill the stallion...with this." Standing behind him she reached out and placed onto the desk a dagger made of an unusual metal that Adrianus had never seen. She moved to his other ear and spoke as if whispering sweet nothings in a slow sensuous purr. "He is vulnerable, but you must find out how."

"And then I'll die."

"When the stallion dies, you die."

"But to kill someone..."

She whispered seductively into his ear. "You have already killed many times," she said planting the seeds of her temptation. "You played both sides of wars throughout the last two centuries, and your lobbying kept people from the medicine and care they needed to survive. You have killed many, but you did so from a distance where the deaths were out of sight and out of mind. What would you find easier, continuing to do that for all eternity,"—she moved to his other ear— "or to kill this one man directly, thereby ending your own misery?"

Unable to find a flaw in her argument, he asked her, "Where will I find this Ronan Stallion?"

"He is in Miami. I cannot guarantee he will remain there. He is...protected. You must catch him when and where he is most vulnerable." She drew back from him and left his peripheral vision. "How can I find him?" He turned his chair to see her, but she had vanished, leaving him armed with only the dagger and the information on the tablet.

He used the intercom. "Carl, have them prepare the jet. I'm leaving for Miami."