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Shape of Things to Come
Part 1:In the Fullness of Time Chapter 4
Justice with favour have I always done;
..........(Henry VI Part II William Shakespeare ) |
Piper spent the afternoon taking a short rest then preparing the evening meal for a very large family of busy people, something that would keep for reheating and storing because she could almost guarantee Cole would not make it for sit down supper, and probably if he did not, Leslie would not.
She also spent some time looking at finances and because she could not help herself worrying, she checked the state of the family college fund and considered possibilities for expanding it. Piper often worried about the college fund, and so too did Paige because it was often under pressure due to her role as mentor, foster mother and big sister to the Simpson family. Phoebe was always sure that they would manage no matter how many members of the family wanted to go to college. She did not worry.
Once many years ago, when there were only three Halliwell children Piper had drawn up plans for all of them to go to college. Now it had come to juggling for nine and somehow… just as Phoebe had foretold, they were…managing.
“Just life” Piper thought. “You can never can really plan.” Certainly, the witch Jade had not planned to be killed, leaving a distraught husband incapable of caring for five children.
Well only three if you counted those the Halliwell family had legally fostered but as far as bills impacted, it was five.
Scrutinising figures was a way that Piper often used to reassure herself instead of worrying. One of the problems of being affluent, she had discovered was that despite being well off on paper, and the family certainly owned a considerable real estate portfolio, cold hard cash was sometimes lacking. She and Leo received a salary from the company but not a huge one and Cole took a salary from his small but expanding law firm but it was almost negligible. Phoebe made very good money from her books sales but that always came in the form of large royalty payments that were marked for mortgages. Paige earned her own money but she still worked for the community employment centre and her wages were on the wrong side of inadequate for the skills required.
Even so it was sometimes her money that kept the family in food. Something Paige was glad to do because she harboured a deep guilt that the pressures on the family finances were her fault, no matter how many times she was told it was a collective decision.
The figures in front of her told Piper that somehow or other the family was getting by. And somehow or other all Jade Simpson’s children went to college, despite being virtually abandoned by their father. And somehow the three Simpsons who had completed their degrees and were now working for nothing like the salaries that Piper had once believed graduates earned, repaid some of the costs.
Ever since Leslie earned her law degree three years ago, she had been repaying money to the fund, even though what she earned from Cole was in no way comparable to what she could have earned at a large company. But she was a happy working with him, something for which the whole family rejoiced. Leslie dealt with hard up cases, or witches who could not afford huge fees and under Cole’s guidance she occasionally had the satisfaction of striking retribution on those who needed it. Cole’s sword of justice in her hands was a dangerous weapon.
Fern who had studied archaeology and art was employed in a large museum, and had done her best to put money back into the college fund, until she enrolled to do post graduate work as part of the job. Donald had now graduated as an accountant, and though his new college graduate salary was in Piper’s view a disgrace when the cost of the degree was taken into account and Donald’s costs were high when he moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, as a matter of honour he too was paying back debts and helping his two youngest siblings. Charlie the youngest daughter was in the last year of her degree and planned to get a teaching qualification and Robbie the youngest was just starting an IT degree.Therefore, the fund was looking relatively healthy so, with a struggle, the four Halliwell children would go to college if that was what they wished.
Although she had never been to college, instead undertaken her training as a chef in the last ten or twelve years Piper had learnt a great deal about college education, not the least being that it was humoungously expensive. She has also learnt that student loans nowhere near covered the cost of education and that repaying them left students in penury for years to come. As Leslie, Donald and Fern knew.
Piper had also learnt that many undergraduate degrees were not designed to qualify anyone for real work. When she had first seen the list of subjects that Leslie had studied and then what Fern had studied, she had been quite awestruck by their lack of usefulness.
“What on earth is the use of history, literature and philosophy.?” Piper demanded.
Phoebe who took her new career as an educator very seriousy assured her. “They get an education, they learn to think, they learn to evaluate, not take things as presented, to question, to put thoughts together, to write thoughts coherently. They learn, to challenge uncontested statements, to explore new ideas, to refocus old ones. Its important for the world that people don’t take everything on face value. Then they learn a profession”.
Piper as an employer of quite a number of staff, thought of the horrors of dealing with employees, especially inexperienced employees, who constantly challenged everything they were told, who insisted on trying new ideas, who did not take things as presented but reviewed and reflected, in fact employees who did anything but just buckle down and do the work.
She muttered viciously. “Bosses must love that”.
Piper had then learnt even more about universities when, in the midst of the family dealing with five young students, Phoebe decided to go back to college to undertake her doctorate, not only because she had the time but because she took to heart the criticism of her books, that they were pop-psychology and that she was just someone with an undergraduate degree, sprouting things she really did not know about. Fortunately, in Piper’s opinion, Phoebe with such good book sales, could afford to pay her own expenses. However, during her studies Phoebe worked as a lecturer, and after graduation as a consultant lecturer for post-graduate students, so Piper learnt a great deal about the politics of educational institutions and much of it was not good.
With both Fern and her sister undertaking post graduate work, Piper learnt that the idealism of learning that Phoebe had spouted was becoming rarer and rarer. Indeed, Phoebe had suffered great disappointment when she joined the college staff. Instead of cloisters of sombre learned people, she discovered that universities were a hotbed of political intrigue and corruption, as research was dominated by big money and government contracts, rather than need for pure understanding. Phoebe discovered that university management was interested in prestige and money not the pure pursuit of knowledge, and they administrated the institutions accordingly.
According to Phoebe, Piper understood that many administrators took it as gospel, that employers no longer wanted smart people to learn the job, but rather people who were trained so employers did not have to spend time, effort and money. In fact, after so many times listening to Fern and Phoebe complain about university politics, Piper had concluded that universities were battlegrounds between idealists like Phoebe who sprouted the purity of learning and research, and administrators who were faced with the reality of finances and market requirements.
Piper sometimes became excessively annoyed that since Phoebe and Fern had joined the college and educational hierarchy, in the Halliwell family education had become a common subject of discussion and argument. Over the course of these discussions, Piper learned that university administrators did everything in their power to reduce what Phoebe described as the academic content of courses and replace it with horror of horrors, in Phoebe’s view, training.
“It’s not that job training is bad” Phoebe said one night in disgust as she cried her aggravation to Paige and Piper. “But just not at the expense of free thinking.”
Paige and Piper were dubious but Phoebe was on a roll. “If I did not know better” she declared “I would swear all education administrators are harbingers of evil.”
“All of them?” asked Piper bemused.
Phoebe shrugged “Not quite all of them” she admitted.
Piper who hated history and anything related to humanities and was also an employer was not sure that leaving college prepared to actually work in a profession was a bad thing. However, through Paige’s account of her work, as well as Donald and Fern’s experiences, Piper had learned that more and more employers wanted to pay graduates who had four years learning and intern job experience the bare minimum salary, sometimes barely much more than people who had not finished high school earned, justifying it because they were new to the workforce. Paige was concerned that because employers had no investment in new staff, many employers had no compulsion about firing them, especially when their salaries were supposed to rise, as they became more experienced, and instead hiring cheaper new graduates.
Shutting down the screen with the college fund showing, Piper recalling all the passionate arguments, worried where Halliwell passions would take them. She sincerely hoped that Phoebe’s complaints were just bitching and not premonitions because when Piper thought of the money that the Halliwell family had invested in learning she quaked at the idea of it being funnelled into evil. But regardless, for a person who did not have a university degree, Piper knew a great deal about college education.
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Dismissed by Tempus, and sent to the part of down below that the underlings of his master Tempus had allocated to him, the new demon Briareos surveyed his domain and began counting his resources. Not that he intended he should have a master for very long. The space allocated to Briareos was not worthy of his evil. It was a dark, narrow and rank corner of down below and consisted of a few small low-ceiling caves and not much else. However, it was not the Great Pit of Evil, where Briareos soul had languished for five hundred years and that was a relief enough for now its immense evil to have some satisfaction.
This domain was located close enough to centre of evil to satisfy the source’s order that the new demon be carefully watched. However, the minions who carried out Tempus orders also made sure that Briareos had no chance of close cooperation or uninvited influence on his master. Indeed, the location made it difficult for even invited influence because of all the protective blocks put between it and the source’s lair. In the view of the demons surrounding Tempus, if the new demon could not answer his master’s call, so much the better. In the view of Tempus, if the new demon could not find a way to answer his call, regardless of obstructions then he was not worthy or able to serve his master.
The new demon Briareos understood that Tempus was well aware that the orders he gave would be carried out with the minimum compliance by his minions. In his life time as a mortal, he had played with power and thrones and had been both the sycophant and master in these power games. How those minions were dealt with would depend on Briareos own cleverness. If he could create a place for himself in the demon hierarchy or better yet create an influential clan of his own, then Tempus would know how to reward him and punish his enemies. And then he would defeat his master and punish them himself.
Briareos stood in the centre of the largest cave. These caves had no luxuries such as comfortable accommodation or any impressive presence to intimidate visitors but that too would change. He rested his hands over the paunch that was his stomach and his benign face took on a petulant expression as he glanced around. In his time as a mortal, he had resided in great palaces that were some of the most beautiful buildings ever created. Briareos had no doubt he would soon reside in such luxury.
He tested the corporal form of the demon he was. He could dematerialise but not with the aesthetic almost spiritual power of the great demon’s shimmer, more like a shiver, a decomposing. He had small defensive weapons. He could just destroy lesser creatures with something like weak fire from his hands. Briareos was annoyed more than concerned about the limitation on his power. As a demon, his soul now had a demon core. He knew he would find power. He would take it from those he collected as underlings, then take it from those who were his enemies, and then take it from the Source Tempus. He would have no qualms about the violence and destruction of how he would take power, because that is what he had always done.
The demon that Tempus had called Briareos had been an evil, evil man, a fact recorded in almost every history book about European medieval times. He had been called Pope Innocent IX and generally he was described amongst the saints, the good men, the scholars and the sinners, the weak and the bad who held the office of pope as the very worst of them all. Although he had been dethroned a number of times, Pope Innocent IX had reigned for most of the last thirty-eight years of his life which coincided with the last years of a previous Source’s epoch, the one who ruled through most of the medieval ages and finally met his end some five hundred or more years ago.
Some fifteen years before Innocent IX had been called to account through death, by greater powers than those on earth, he had been dethroned when two unlikely rulers, and victims of Innocent’s ambition and power-grabbing of the great European kingdoms, had joined their resources to depose him. Innocent IX defeated them in one of the bloodiest battles of medieval earth, and then reinforced the victory by very publicly torturing to death, any priest, bishop or cardinal who had even acknowledged the two rulers.
He had saved his throne and power by making a deal with evil, selling his soul to a notorious warrior/priest demon whose power, useful in medieval times, was to acquire great knowledge which it then used to manipulate its minions and enemies. This demon accumulated much of the hidden understandings of the previous popes through the soul of Innocent IX and some years later used that knowledge to make himself the source, even though he lost half his face in the battle to take his throne.
One of this new source’s first acts was to claim the power and evil of the souls he had acquired and the most evil was Innocent IX. However, among the disappointments of the new source, much of the magic that allowed his predecessor to gain greatness throughout the period known as the Dark Ages in the earth realm was missing from the Grimoire. Whilst that source finally created his own magic and lore as other sources before him and more would after him, he could only claim the evil and power of the souls taken by his predecessors. Therefore, the souls he took himself were little more than trophies, held in storage for the next source, although the punishment for mentioning this in the underworld was to join those lost souls in the pits.
Pope Innocent IX had been the first called, the first condemned to the pit under the new source’s reign and there he stayed for the whole five hundred years, the most tormented evil because the new source could do nothing worse to him.
Pope Innocent IX himself was recorded to be a small benign, overweight man whose innocuous presence hid an iron will and an insatiable appetite for power. He was the reincarnated soul of a wizard who had fallen on evil times but was not quite damned. However, he had no intention of rehabilitation by good deeds.
Innocent IX was a member of one of the most well-known Italian political families. His uncle who was also pope ordained him a deacon and then a cardinal before he was 25. In that capacity, the priest who would become Innocent IX made himself a very rich man who manipulated the many religious institutions that had vowed their loyalty to the hierarchy into serving him personally. Such was his influence that before he was thirty, he was named vice-chancellor of the church and served in its inner cabinet all the while acquiring more influence and wealth. He murdered his uncle in the later part of the fifteenth century, and then had himself elected pope by bribing his fellow cardinals. The man who would become Briareos had enjoyed the irony of his papal name, Innocence.
The history books never really knew the full extent of the evil of Pope Innocent IX because the mortals who wrote them were not magical and they could not understand his craving for power and his connections to the underworld. They did describe him as an immoral man under whose rule the ecclesiastical empire, made up of the Pope’s lands and properties and allies was a haven of iniquity where the most evil of evil, many in fact demons or adherents of the pope who had sold their souls, gathered to take part in their perverse pleasures. At first, Innocent IX was by no means secure in his power however, and many of the rulers of Europe resented him in his roles, therefore he made it his work to remain unchallenged. He was not completely successful as he was thrown out of the position three times but each time by connecting to evil, he was able to return to his throne, and his stubborn determination to remain in power until the bitter end ultimately resulted in him dying while still in office.
For Innocent IX, there was no difference between temporal, religious and magic roles. During his reign, Europe was always at war which was of no concern to Innocent IX. He made allegiances with European rulers to further his rule and then discarded them and stripped their powers when they challenged him. One of Innocent IX’s more usually ploys was to ally with one king, then declare that king an infidel when he was no longer useful, after which he would order under threat of damnation another king to rid him of his ally. He continued the cycle for thirty-eight years.
He issued a decree that it was necessary for salvation that every human be subject to the him and when they resisted, he waged wars, sacked cities, eventually leaving untold souls dead, innocents and sinners alike. Some died on the battlefields, some through traitorous deals, some through mock courts and some in villages and towns that starved because of his wars. Villages were raised, inhabitants who may have known something that pope wanted were tortured, women and children were raped and thrown aside. There were battle fields littered with the dead of long forgotten armies, just to keep the Pope Innocent IX on the papal throne.
Nor was his evil confined to those he killed in battle and aggression. He was one of the most promiscuous of popes. He fathered several children, some of whom were finally damned and shared his pain in the pits of the underworld. He put his evil children into positions of power and brutally killed cardinals who protested, and even complained that their screams as they died were not easy to hear.
After his death and incarceration in the Great Pits, Innocent IX to be known as Briareos had observed what he could of demondom, and through all the pain and agony he suffered he had understood some of the happenings of the magic world. Even in that evil place he had rejoiced as much as his agonized soul could when the three sister witches destroyed the old source.
He had also watched as Tempus made his plans and discovered through the souls and demons the new source condemned that Tempus was infiltrating the human institutions, particularly those of learning and recognised that Tempus had a clever evil. Not unlike his own.
Briareos had understood learning. In his time as pope, he had gathered monks and learned men and used their knowledge to manipulate the great leaders around him. He had done this, by insisting that only knowledge that he declared true, was true and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a heretic. In those days, heresy had been punishable by a hideous death so Innocent IX had purged thousands and thousands of souls by declaring them heretics.
Innocent IX was famous for founding many of the universities that became the most significant institutions of learning in the earth realms, although their original charter was to give him power by pursing knowledge that he declared was not heretical. However, after his death, Good had subverted these institutions to their cause and kept the source of the time from destroying them. Innocent IX had a long memory for vengeance, and the humiliation that Good had ruined his plans was not lessened by five hundred years of agony in the pits.
Innocent IX was not a man who had new ideas. He had always stolen from those around him and repeated his own successful actions, which was possibly why he had been thrown out of power three time as his enemies recognised patterns. Freed from the pits, Briareos realised that the infiltrations of the higher learning that Tempus had begun was his best prospect to succeed, and he had no compulsion about the cost of destroying them. There was satisfaction in subverting institutions of learning to evil so they would have the role he had intended as pope.
Briareos stood in the centre of his new lair and rubbed his hands together. His usually benign face was lit with the fire of evil. There was work to be done. He needed to locate souls he had used in their lifetimes in the pits and humbly ask Tempus to reincarnate them as demons to serve him well. Then he needed to make alliances with those demon sects who were already ensconced in the bastions of learning. Some of the minions already infiltrated into the institutions could be used and some could be destroyed. Briareos needed to consult with some of the scribes that now shrunk in fear from Tempus because their brothers had been sent for the pits for telling the source things he needed to know. Briareos would learn what Tempus did not want to hear.
And then maybe he could destroy Tempus. After all he knew how to do it. He knew it was prophesied that one of the Charmed Ones would destroy Tempus, because he had listened to the priests and scribes condemned to the pit. From those same scribes he learned things that suggested to him the charmed sisters were the key to allow a once pope and ruler of the western world, to rule again. Then he would destroy them, because he had no fear of the consequences of evil. Those accursed witches may have fought sources but they had never had the magic to destroy a demon as clever and evil as the one-time pope, Innocent IX.
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