During adolescence and adulthood, Daniel was slightly corpulent from his grief and overindulgence, except his visage that maintained its masculine vigor. Heavy liquors gave the sensation that his rejection of the occult and the establishment, had exiled him into the ways of a bottom-feeder, incomprehensible to simplehearted people. His fondness for fried desserts and meats, sometimes accompanied this vice. He thought of a biblical passage spoken by God to Satan, after he tempted Eve toward the fall, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”
When he was twenty, his suffering was suppressed beneath cynical mirth. On a wintry night full of bustling crowds, he watched the shallow waters froth and bubble. Their intensity mimicked boiling, due to the subaquatic, underground bases near the seashore, ridding the toxins the cult had left from its malpractices. Their white, fanlike noise resembled an angel’s exhalation, making his skin crawl as he traversed beside the waves. Each one was self-automated, and fueled by energy that expelled the dehydrants from the water. In these circumstances, the drugs had been designed as invisible, permeable gases, now so weakened by the bases that this area was declared sanitary, no longer prohibited as it was a month ago. Some spots were even perfectly uncontaminated.
Daniel noticed Peter Rawson sitting at one of the tables, in front of a pub called Blue Minister. He was one of Griffith Alliance’s elites, who taught at his school John Wright High. His whitish blond hair and freckled, triangular face, gave his impersonal soul a daunting appearance, worsened by an occasional monotone. What infuriated Daniel to this day, was that many female teachers, pretty and eloquent, supported and admired this wretch, in spite of the way he treated women while banded with his organization. He was presently accompanied by two girls who looked a couple years older than Daniel, with jeans, vermillion bikinis and mousy, dreamy demeanors that, in comparison, made him spiritually hideous, as the decaying anatomy is in sunlight.
Without bothering to be inconspicuous, Daniel decided to eavesdrop on their conversation. With a smirk forming as he furrowed his brow, he approached the table with his head swimming as he struggled to keep his balance, and stopped a few feet away from them. Peter’s eyes were nonreciprocal while they briefly landed on him, haughtily ignoring his curious presence. They left no window to look into his private affairs, with an abandonment Daniel felt only the male sex was capable of.
The Specters of Tradition: Volume 1: Daniel Schroder 