Who is Kai?

12.04 Revelation — Chases

2011-10-23T00:01:00.021+02:00

Garish hues glanced over the steely arcs before them — undulating ruby slivers within the murk — as they clambered clandestinely from hull to hull.

“Where’s your ship?” cut Nira’s whisper back at Kai.

He flicked at his hand-display and held up a glinting map of intertwining vectors. She looked back, her eyes searing through the shadow between them as she deciphered the mesh in a heartbeat.

“Right — follow me!”

She twisted her body round and slid immediately down the side of a ship, followed unquestioningly by Onnd in a faultlessly silent somersault. Shen quivered into yellow indecision, but Kai slipped away after them and grabbed Shen’s leg, pulling him down.

They dropped together to see Nira and Onnd disappearing over the edge of the concrete platform into blackness; Kai and Shen leapt as one into the falling flash of sanguine diamond, and Nira drew them unforgivingly through a precariously cautious descent, slipping from level to level, twisting between hulking hulls and scurrying through shadows until at last they dropped onto the dank grit of another platform, just a few ships along from Kai’s.

“Here, sir,” seeped a SYS-soldier’s voice into the dusk around the hunted four as he marched past dejectedly, his colleagues patrolling the area farther along, “Yes, I read you, sir....No, sir, we still haven’t relocked their signal, sir. They got out, somehow, and.... Yes. Yes, sir!”

He sighed heavily, and as he passed beyond a blade of stationed ships, Nira slunk out around the hull, pistol in hand, with Onnd, Kai and Shen snaking after her, weaving through umbral wakes until they came to Kai’s metallic sphere. Kai leapt up to its equator at once; Onnd carefully broke his fall as he tumbled unceremoniously back from its smoothness. Looking up in confusion, Kai’s wide eyes could find no trace of the etched ladder he had climbed down earlier. The shuffle of approaching troops yanked him back into the shadows, and he thrust himself to his feet running his hands over the cool ripples of the hull searching desperately for the way to ascend. Suddenly Nira grasped at his sleeve and pulled him close.

“This what you’re looking for?” she hissed, and pressed him against a cold, serrated strip of alloy in disgust, adding, “Stupid kid!”

Following Kai, they each stretched up and surreptitiously scaled the ship’s side, then dropped in through the hatch.

In a flurry of golden ruby gleam, the ship’s consoles winked in and over and fell round and through each other in limp disorder, before Kai hastily flicked them back into place one by one like unruly children.

Shen, Onnd and Nira looked around, thoroughly unimpressed.

“Is this IT?!” blurted Shen in crimson bluster.

“This will be...adequate,” muttered Onnd in gentle disquiet.

Kai looked at Nira apprehensively. In silence, she simply shrugged, then quietly shook her head, “Well...just another of the day’s disappointments, I guess. Don’t worry, kid, I’m already over it. Let’s just hope...”

She stopped short, and the others turned to where she was looking; through the milky white panel in front of the steely chair they could see outside — SYS-soldiers were busily collecting into a confusion, pointing, speaking frantically into communicators, and aiming their weapons straight at the ship.

“Let’s just hope,” repeated Nira dryly, “that it can get us out of here.”

“So now we simply follow the prodigy?” hissed Jhor at Sann’s ear as she cut a marble vein of warriors deftly through Destiny’s stone labyrinth.

“This was Onnd’s decision,” said Sann calmly; she flicked her staff out as she leapt and an errant SYS-soldier rolled into a wailing heap beneath her.

“Indeed it was, my very young Sann.”

“B’rra?!” said Sann with sudden urgency into her hand-communicator.

“We are all One,” continued Jhor, “yet we — most of us — must simply follow.”

“Now is not the time, Jhor!”

“And who, dear Sann, decides the time?”

“B’rra?! Come in!” continued Sann, “Where could he be?!”

Suddenly a score of flare-repeaters crackled up and seared through the air as the street behind them filled with a horde of SYS-soldiers sprinting into pursuit like a foul shadow.

In a small, plain room with grey makeshift walls adorned by nothing but a single, tiny sheet of garish blue and yellow curling in at the sides — a printed image of an idyllically sunny beach — a long, bronzed creature dangled and coiled its various appendages over and around an equally saggy yet ill-fitting chair as it snored loudly from two slits that may well have been smiling, delightfully unaware of the disembodied voice trying to cut into his dream.

“B’rra? B’rra?! Are you there? We’re coming! Now! And so are the SYS!”

Next chapter — Challenges

Sunday 30 October 2011

12.03 Revelation — Changes

2011-09-11T00:01:00.004+02:00

Sann led the blazing streak of I’sta white around the ancient curving stone into a busy, cobbled lane circling its way outwards from the centre of the city, the long line of warriors snaking impossibly swiftly through the cries and screams of Destiny’s fleeing forms and hues. Jhor’s breath suddenly hissed at Sann’s neck as SYS-soldiers spilled into the street before them on both sides and lifted their immense weapons; before the flares could even be roughly aimed, however, Sann and Jhor leapt high and long and descended in whirls of staff and silent fury, effortlessly flicking a score of hapless SYS-soldiers into terrified heaps of shadow. As the other soldiers piled their way in over their fallen comrades, and as Sann and Jhor continued onwards without a glance behind them, the line of warriors ploughed through the ranks, each flicking a staff to one side then the next as they passed, felling two each. Bringing up the rear, the twins whirled into near-perfect reflections of Sann and Jhor before them to cut the final files into a sprawling, agonising mass of black uniforms. The twins landed on sure feet, surveyed the scene of annihilation behind them, then turned to each other — the first bowed to her sister; the second wafted her slender hand upwards into a gesture of recognition before they both smiled then leapt into graceful pursuit of the others.

In the forum, the first SYS-soldier gradually clawed his way back to his knees, as another — he who had taken control when the first had been struck down — stepped up and spread shadow over his commander’s prostrate form.

“Is he dead,” seeped Lúez’s voice icily into the second soldier’s ear.

“No, sir, he’s…”

“Then make sure he does not get up.”

“Sir?”

The first soldier squinted up at his comrade. More recovering soldiers tightened in around them.

“He has let me down,” continued Lúez, “So, if you do not kill him, then he will redeem himself to me in just a moment...by killing you.”

The first soldier shook his head in disbelief: “Reish! My friend! You...?”

“Names?” cackled Lúez, “Names?! No time for names! Choose!”

The second SYS-soldier pondered for a moment, then took a step back and lifted his weapon. And as the bolt of flare echoed around the stone forum, Lúez hissed, “Congratulations on the promotion, my clever little grunt. Now...sort out your swarm and find that boy!”

Kai, Nira, Onnd and Shen sprinted from the forum through the narrow, crowded streets.

“Better hope Sann can lead them to B’rra in time,” said Nira.

“Sann has my complete trust, Nira,” said Onnd, “And B’rra...”

“Who is this B’rra?” wheezed Shen as breathlessly as he could imagine someone to be.

Onnd glared down at Shen as they ran: “B’rra is the most brutal, conniving and fiercely intelligent blackguard in the entire Destiny underworld. You had better hope you never have to meet him yourself, old man.”

Shen flushed over brightly beige and gulped hard at the air he could not breathe. Nira smiled.

Following the contours of the map on his hand-display, Kai darted suddenly off to his left and into the elevator atrium from which he had emerged a few short hours before. The others followed, but stopped short at once — a huge, hulking SYS-soldier blocked their way. One huge paw went all the way up to one of his fore-ears. Nira’s hand moved towards her gun, Onnd’s to her staff. The SYS-soldier gazed down at them, but his focus was elsewhere; he replied into his communicator, “A whole family? Kids and all?! Messy! By Déhath, what’s this city coming to?!”

He noticed the three under his nose, then drew his hefty head back up on his stocky neck to meet Onnd’s intense glare.

“What you looking at, outsider?!” he growled, “Get out of my face!”

“Gladly, idiot,” snapped Nira, “There’s only so much hideousness a girl can take!”

Shen whimpered away to white.

“Hey!” growled the SYS-soldier, following through with a confused silence.

“Clever! Just my type!” spat Nira.

“No, no! We...we’ll...,” stuttered Shen in nervous ripples of orange, “We’ll just be off then!”

Kai shuffled around the SYS-soldier in a breath of relief, and the others followed him towards the line of elevators. They squeezed themselves into one of the energy shells and dissolved into the ground at once.

As the elevator shot downwards, the four looked around and down; far below them, tiny black lines of SYS-troops were snaking in between the rows of ships. Suddenly a vertical shaft of red light swept across their elevator, then disappeared.

“Is that it?” said Nira to Onnd.

“It must be,” Onnd replied.

“What, what, what?” blustered Shen.

“They’ve found us,” said Nira.

“Oh no, no, nooooo!!” bawled Shen as the elevator began to slow and redirect itself.

“Well,” said Nira, “this SYStem isn’t working for us anymore. Time to get out.”

She nodded to Onnd, who immediately flicked up her staff and stabbed it into the shell of the elevator tearing a hole in the energy field with a blinding flash. Icy air gushed in deafeningly around them, punctuated by the levels of parked ships rushing upwards.

Suddenly an inanely pleasant voice effortlessly filled the thundering space around them in a perfectly unperturbed pitch with an invisibly broad smile: “Please do not panic. Your SYS-elevator is experiencing a slight malfunction. Assistance will reach you very, very soon. Remember — trust the SYStem and walk with light!”

“Thanks,” sneered Nira, “but I think we’ll find our own way now.”

Onnd twisted hard at the staff and the elevator grated and rasped to a stop.

“Come on,” hissed Nira and leapt straight out from the elevator into the dark, followed by Onnd. Kai looked at Shen; he forced back a smile in a terrified glimmer. Then, together, they leapt out after them.

Next chapter — Chases

Sunday 23 October 2011

12.02 Revelation — Consequences

2011-09-04T00:01:00.014+02:00

“Yes...sir,” said the SYS-soldier with a nervous gulp. He hesitated for a moment, then took aim again with the flare-repeater, calling out, “Men! On my signal!”

“You fire first, you fall first,” said Onnd softly.

Kai watched on as the consequences of his choices unfolded before him — a single moment, seemingly unending. Clouds again swallowed up the steely sun, dimming the cold air around the SYS-soldier as Onnd — without blinking, without a breath — carefully monitored his nervous movements; his finger twitched impossibly slowly over the trigger then pulled it towards his fearful aiming eye. Onnd cocked her head to one side and nodded slowly, almost sadly, as she witnessed yet another disappointing demonstration of ignorance. The trigger reached a hair from home, but before the flare could discharge, Onnd was already upside down in the air bearing straight down on him with her staff — the SYS-soldier lay in a sobbing heap in the middle of a pewter-paved circle on the forum floor before any of the SYS-troops could even register the act.

As Kai’s next heartbeat thumped against his chest, a new SYS-soldier took command with a shout. Another flare repeater was aimed and discharged, followed by a hundred more. Flaming filaments blistered towards them over the ground. Onnd leapt with a calm cry of command; immediately a hundred gleaming I’sta warriors were with her in the air. One blazing bolt made straight for Kai; still in the air, both Onnd and Sann twisted their long, sleek bodies round before the bolt, crossing each other’s path, and with a whip of their cloaks and flicking staffs, the shot deflected upwards. At the same time, Nira grabbed both Kai and Shen and forced them down onto the ground. Shen screamed wildly crimson and tried to force himself back up to flee. In one movement, Nira spun her body round, fighting against the unexpected ferocity of Shen’s strength, and put one foot on his head as her hand thrust deep into the roll of fabric at her side, plucked out the violet-grey pistol, and let loose a volley of scarlet streaks at the SYS-troops. Onnd and Sann landed lithely, shared a fleeting glance and nod, then cast themselves upwards again into fluid and separate orbits.

Fire rained across the forum. A thousand screams erupted into the air as citizens fled. Warriors pierced between the flaming daggers and cast their staffs through stinging arcs at the SYS-troops. Before Kai’s heart thrust its next beat, one third of the soldiers collapsed onto the ground in wails of terror; but the I’sta were already back in the air, spinning into a hundred graceful circles around the rest. Onnd and Sann danced and wove faultlessly around the hapless troops, felling them in droves to lead the warriors down into their second effortless strike — and then only one third of the SYS-soldiers remained, surrounded by the soundless wash of white about the screams of their fallen comrades.

And as Kai felt his heart push out its third beat, he watched the curling trails of Onnd and Sann lace their way around and through the final dropping SYS-troops and back towards him, landing effortlessly — they were not even breathless — between him and the first fallen SYS-soldier, followed almost immediately by the rest of the warriors around the forum, leaving the place suddenly strewn with the prostrate forms of hundreds of whimpering SYS-troops.

“That was easy,” said Sann.

“You seem surprised,” said Onnd plainly.

“Let...me....GOOOOooAAaaaaaAAARGHHHHH!” screamed Shen; Nira rolled her gleaming eyes as she took the point of her heel from his forehead.

“Don’t bother thanking me, idiot,” she said as she got up.

Shen sprang to his feet, looked around and shivered away his ruby veneer into a calm, pearly shimmer as he courteously helped Kai up and looked around the forum: “My, oh my! Every...single...one! You I’sta certainly are efficient. Well, now I assume we...run away? Yes?”

“That’s the first useful thing you’ve said all day,” said Nira coldly as she adjusted her weapon and scanned the entrances to the forum.

Onnd turned her head; the first SYS-soldier was emerging from his coma of terror.

“Sann,” she said, turning back to face her first disciple, “I need you to lead the I’sta.”

“Master?” said Sann in disbelief. Jhor stepped in from behind them past the SYS-soldier, pushing him over again with her foot as her eyes remained trained on Sann.

Onnd’s austere lips curved almost imperceptibly into a smile as Sann looked up to her, unsure.

“You are more than ready, my Sann,” said Onnd; Jhor circled them, eyeing the scene from a distance, with the rest of the warriors coming in close behind.

“And you, master?” said Sann.

“Nira and I will stay with the boy.”

Sann’s eyes brightened and her breath quickened more than it had done during the entire skirmish: “He is the One, is he not?”

“He is only one boy, Sann,” said Onnd, her visage and voice darkening again, “But ‘the One’ is an idea we can harness, and this boy’s vision may bring us closer to the Shield. Go now, Sann! Find B’rra and lead the I’sta safely from this place! We are no longer welcome here. If we are separated then blaze your way to the blind eye of the silent storm — our paths will cross.”

Sann bowed before her master, then called out, “I’sta — with me!” as she sped away, followed by the white mass of I’sta — all but Jhor, who stood her ground and looked darkly over at Onnd. Onnd met Jhor’s eyes with unconcealed contempt, then turned her back. Jhor thrust herself away into pursuit of her younger superior.

“They’ll have my ship now for sure,” said Nira, then waved her pistol at Kai, “What about you? You have one?”

Kai looked into Nira’s gleaming eyes and nodded. And smiled.

In the silence, Onnd watched the long line of I’sta flow out of the forum through one of the great stone archways, then looked back at the reviving SYS-soldier.

After a few moments, Nira shook her head incredulously at Kai: “So? Where is it?”

Kai nodded himself rapidly back to the moment and made immediately for the opposite forum wall, gesturing for them to follow. As Kai, Nira and Shen swept into a sprint, Onnd stood her ground and turned back to the SYS-soldier. He was scraping himself up onto his knees from the ground and looking around for his flare-repeater. Onnd stepped slowly over to him as, in the distance, more of the black-clad SYS-troops began streaming through the other archways into the forum. The SYS-soldier looked up at Onnd's towering figure: “I beg you, I...”

Onnd simply touched her staff against his arm — he howled out in immediate, hyperventilating fear and collapsed with bloodshot eyes onto the icy stone of the forum again. Onnd’s lips curled back into a microscopic smile, then whisked herself around into a blaze of white, and, as Kai, Nira and Shen neared the far wall of the forum, where no new SYS-troops had yet appeared, a heartbeat of Onnd’s impossible speed and grace brought her back alongside the three.

Next chapter — Changes

Sunday 11 September 2011

12.01 Revelation — Choices

2011-08-28T00:01:00.028+02:00

Kai’s eyes gradually became accustomed to the new danger before him. Onnd, Shen, Nira and Sann stepped up behind him, followed by Jhor; Sann raised her hand — Jhor stopped as commanded, glared through the back of Sann’s head, then slid backwards into the line of subordinate warriors, her charcoal eyes barely concealing her fury.

The SYS-soldier’s trembling trebled in rate and reach as he peered out from behind his weapon at the ever-increasing mass of hostility. His voice wavered in perfect synchronisation with his trigger finger: “Uh...you t...too, then! All...of you. Under arrest. Come with me now and...there won’t be a problem.”

Nira’s lips curled into a relishing grin: “And if we don’t?”

The SYS-soldier mustered his most ineffectually intimidating look: “Then, there will be trouble.”

Nira’s eyes brightened over her smile as she replied calmly, “I think that ship drifted off quite some time ago — with all of us on board!” 

“NOOO! Wait!” cried Shen in a fulvous flurry of fear and pushed in front of Nira with his hands reaching for the silver sky. “Young man,” he said, flushing over immediately to a dusty shade of neutral, “We’d really rather not have any trouble. You don’t need to arrest us. No. No...we’ll just be on our way.”

The SYS-soldier took a nervous step towards Shen and aimed the muzzle of the flare-repeater directly at his head. Shen stumbled backwards into Nira screaming in a sudden ruby panic, “FINE! FINE! FINE! I GET IT! FINE!”

“Idiot!” hissed Nira and pushed him away.

“Maybe they’re right!” stuttered Shen, “Maybe we should just do as we’re told.”

Nira’s eyes stabbed blazing blades of incredulous disgust back at him, nodding in Kai’s direction: “He’s young! What’s your excuse?!”

Onnd stooped down and whispered in Kai’s ear, “It is time — ‘Chosen One’. You believe yourself to be special? Now is your moment. Make your choice and lead, if that is indeed your fate.”

“What she means,” said Nira, “is to decide — them or us! Because if you don’t,” she patted the red roll of fabric by her side, “I’ll decide for you!”

Kai turned and looked at Nira as the silver sun broke through the clouds, then Sann — she smiled back at him — and finally he lifted his eyes to Onnd as she straightened herself impossibly tall again.

You saw to make me free.

And with a slight smile curling onto his lips, Kai nodded up at the greatest of the I’sta.

My way is clear.

Onnd turned around immediately and readied her staff, calling out at the SYS-soldier for all her kind to hear.

“It seems as though we are at an impasse.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered Nira at the SYS-soldier, “That’s a hard word. It means you’re screwed.”

As the SYS-soldier’s eyes flicked around in search of a sound to stop his lower jaw from shaking loose entirely, his spine shot straight to automatic attention as shadow pierced his ear again and sheared through his skull.

“Yes, sir,” he spluttered over the communicator, “There are more now.... Yes, and her.... And a boy. Yes, sir, that’s right.... How did you...? Yes, of course, sir. I’m sorr.... Sir?”

As he stumbled his way through the hopeless exchange, Onnd signalled to the long line of I’sta — each one of the hundred warriors readied her staff. Onnd turned back and stepped up with ominous ease towards the SYS-soldier. The ranks of SYS-troops readied their steely weapons and aimed into the line of white as their commanding officer floundered between impotent words and slightly more impressive silences. Suddenly he looked up — Onnd was towering over him, engulfing him in her shadow.

“Sir? Yes, sir! How many? Well...I think they’re tall here, sir. I mean, all here. Sir. No...no, they are not co-operating, sir. So...please advise.”

High up in the temple, standing in the shadow of his begetting filth, Luéz watched out over the forum and cackled into his communicator: “Advise? Ad...vise?! Certainly. I advise you to take your little gun, point it up at her head, pull the trigger and kill her. Then kill the boy. Then kill the rest.”

Next chapter — Consequences

Sunday 4 September 2011

11.22 Revelation — Separation

2011-08-21T00:01:00.028+02:00

“Yes, th...that’s right...all of you! Under arrest!” said the SYS-soldier, his throat tightening. “Now...tell me — who’s in charge here?”

The silence he had dreaded immediately after asking the question screamed through his ears — the long line of I’sta remained steadfast and still; ranks of SYS-troops readied themselves behind their commander. The SYS-soldier took a step backwards and heaved the flare-repeater to his shoulder.

“Well...uh...,” he continued, his lower jaw starting to quiver as though the temperature had suddenly plummeted, “if you do not comply, my orders are...are....” He gulped hard as his finger shivered its way towards the trigger. “Well...my orders are clear. Men!” he croaked past his roughening throat, and continued, “On my signal!” as yet more SYS-troops filed into the forum and trained their weapons on the outnumbered I’sta.

Kai looked around the chamber, the fire of conviction now blazing in his dark eyes, then stepped vigorously out from the centre of the circle and made for the door. Onnd raised her staff as he passed, readying to swat him down.

“And where do you think you...?” began Nira, but Shen blurted out, “He’s the One!”

“Just one of many. And easily replaceable,” said Onnd, her grey eyes trained on the boy.

“He’s leading us!” said Shen, ignoring Onnd.

“Us?!” said Nira, her thin eyebrows arched in disgust at the word.

“He shows the way!” continued Shen, unperturbed.

Kai neared the door; the circle of warriors parted as he approached.

“See?!” cried Shen, and scuttered over to Onnd pointing a ruby finger up at her face, “Even your sisters know it! This is it! The time is now! Right now! The defining moment in your history. You know it is. You know this boy has the way.”

“You really need a whole team of head-doctors, don’t you!” spat Nira at Shen, “He’s just...some kid!”

“But what if?!” said Shen, turning his flickering, flustered face to Nira, “He might show us the way to the Shield.”

“Again with the ‘us’!” she snorted.

“Yes! Us! I’m pretty sure you want to be there when he finds it. Because I’m pretty sure you can’t afford not to be! Right?!”

Nira’s eyes smouldered into anger...and barely concealed avarice.

“Yes,” laughed Shen, “You can hardly even imagine that kind of wealth!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Nira softly.

Kai reached the door, where the twins stood dutifully — one barred the way with her staff and looked to Onnd; the other looked to Sann, then slowly lifted her staff away and bowed her head to Kai.

“No wonder you need me!” said Nira furiously to the warriors, “You’re all soul and principle — just no backbone! If you hire me to lead you in this — especially today — then let me!”

“Perhaps they’ve found a new leader?” said Shen.

The tightening tension strangled air from the room.

Nira looked to Onnd: “Well?”

Onnd calmly shook her head, then opened her mouth to speak.

Instead, however, it was Sann’s voice that came: “Master. Forgive me, but...even if this boy is not the One — the only One — perhaps we can no longer wait for...perfection. He has something, a gift. He sees a way. And we need someone.”

In the long silence that followed, all eyes fixed on Onnd — including Kai’s.

Finally, Onnd nodded reluctantly to the twins by the door — the second sibling shadowed her sister and removed her staff from Kai’s way.

“Oh, that’s just great!” shouted Nira, “Years of planning. Gone! For a boy! A child!”

Kai remained, staring at Nira. She glared back with lustrous fury: “Go! Go now!”

Kai opened the door and the music from the bar hammered into the chamber around them. He thrust himself out into the dark throng of revellers.

Nira was the first to follow him, shouting over to Jhor as she went, “Disarm the charges! Now!” then roared at herself over the din, “This is going to be a mess. I know it! And I’m going to have to clean it up!”

Onnd walked after her, followed eagerly by Shen. As she reached the door, however, Onnd stopped, turned, and thrust her staff at Shen’s throat. He turned pale purple as she bent down and hissed in his ear, “If I find this to be a ruse, old man, then your easing — your death — will be very slow and very painful.”

She whirled round again and left Shen in quivering blush by the doorway. Sann followed her master, then Jhor, and then the rest of the warriors exited in an efficient file. As the last warrior left, the twins left their post and joined the tail. Shen flickered back from fear and scampered after them, trying to elbow his way through the impenetrable line of alabaster white, his erratic moods radiating green and red over their robes in the darkness of the bar: “Excuse me. I say, could you please let me...me...me....aaarrRGAGAHHHHH! MOVE!!! Let me through! He’s MY friend! MINE...my...oh my! If you don’t mind, that is?”

As Kai reach the far door of the bar, Nira nodded gravely to the bartender. Most of his eyes widened as he saw the long, solemn tail of warriors behind her. He fished under the counter, brought out a roll of red fabric with one tentacle and the pistol he had offered her earlier with another; he pushed the gun deep into the bundle and tossed it to her. Nira caught it without looking, unfurled a thin strap with a flick of her wrist, and slung it diagonally over her shoulder.

Kai ploughed through the door and into the dank, lightless stairwell, followed by Nira’s gleaming diamond eyes and the silent train of I’sta leaping up the stairs after him. He thrust open the door and light blazed in; his left hand shot up to shield his eyes, and as he stumbled blindly forwards into the forum, and as the ring of tall, white statues before him gradually came into focus through his slitted eyes, Onnd boomed a word of frightful beauty behind him and the marble sea parted, leaving Kai’s eyelids to crack slowly open and alight on the object directly in front of his face — the searing muzzle of the SYS-soldier’s flare-repeater.

Next chapter — Choices

Sunday 28 August 2011

11.21 Revelation — Detachment

2011-08-14T00:01:00.031+02:00

Nira folded away her arms again and resumed shaking her head.

“Nice trick, kid,” she said coldly, “‘You’re one in a million!’ This means nothing!”

“The Chosen One reveals the Shield,” cried Shen, “that hides within the Tree upon the hidden rock. It’s there! Dahma! ‘One came to in the void’!”

Nira snapped her head round at Shen, eyes blazing: “And you! For the love of non-existent gods, will you please stop quoting the Epic! It doesn’t make you clever! All it means is you’ve read one book in your pathetic little life. Dahma does not exist! Believe me — we’ve looked!”

“Dahma is a symbol of something greater,” said Jhor.

“It’s a waste of time is what it is,” said Nira.

“Something you have plenty of to waste, Nira...at our exp...,” said Jhor.

“Do not finish that sent...!”

“Enough!” hissed Onnd, and the room fell tersely flat.

The retracting planets reflected off Kai’s dejected gaze; his anger simmered.

The eerie emerald gleam reflected off Sann’s still stare; her doubt withered.

“The One?” she whispered.

Kai stumbled back to his feet, exhaustion and fury battling within him. Shen lurched immediately into orbit around him, then Onnd stepped up and began circling them both in the opposite direction, glaring coldly down at Shen as they went. Shen looked up at her imposing silhouette within the holographic glow; he quivered pink in fear, then gradually gathered sanguine strength and steeled himself against Onnd’s quiet domination.

“You...you do not believe?” he said.

“I believe when I see, and only when there is no doubt,” said Onnd.

“But...can you ever be fully without doubt?”

“It has not happened yet.”

“Then perhaps you need to find your faith.”

“Perhaps you need to shut up!” spat Nira.

“My faith tells me that Dahma and the Shield are there,” said Shen with fervour, “within the cloud as the boy has shown us. It must be true! I feel it!”

Onnd’s response fell heavily around Shen’s unruly blaze of hair: “Feel?! Think, old man! You know nothing! And this boy has shown us nothing. The entire system of N’van has been scoured and plundered and crushed by Déhath for longer than any of us can imagine. And our clandestine search lasted for as many generations as we dared. There are but seven planets. If Dahma ever existed, in the nebula or otherwise, it would have been discovered.”

“Yet your ancestors believed,” said Shen.

“My, my, someone’s trying on ‘brave’ for size,” said Nira from the side, as Onnd and Shen passed each other again in opposing circles around Kai, who was staggering up against the wash.

“Perhaps Dahma existed once,” said Onnd, “A place the Firsts knew, as you say. But it is no more. It dissolved into a myth, a symbol of our truth. The Eluciaë savoured the intangible, hence their creation — hence their evolution.”

“Hence their...abandonment?” said Shen.

Betrayed.

Onnd stopped short and her eyes stretched into quiet, silvery fury, before — as Kai revived between them — she turned and cast her icy glare at Shen.

That Way is gone.

And as the greatest of the I’sta towered over Shen to choose his fate, Kai turned to see the stars unfurl and twist their way through trails of milky comet white evaporating back into the withering roots and fading boughs of the ancient Tree of Light. It shrivelled back to blackened void; Kai supped its light and life — he raised his eyes, which smouldered now with fresh resolve, and met the gaze of all and one within the space around him.

I’ll be the new!

Next chapter — Separation

Sunday 21 August 2011

11.20 Revelation — Alignment

2011-08-07T00:01:00.023+02:00

From the breathless void, Shen thrust his arms above Kai’s dark mane and filled the space with ecstatic flame.

“Sculpting symbols hidden in the skies,” he said, his voice rising in pitch and verve with each syllable, “Awaiting One so Ephaïl may rise! This is not simply a life-map, but...but by Ephaïl Himself, it’s a map-map!”

The chaotically curling planets continued drifting through the room, their rainbow hues glimmering across the surface of the nebula.

“A map. How wonderful,” said Nira, her words grating against her tone, “We already had a map! So, look...before you...”

“Wait,” said Jhor suddenly, carefully studying the system’s ebb and flow, “Something is wrong here.”

“I agree.” Onnd’s whisper cut through the room. “Sann — is this right now?”

“No...,” began Sann.

“Nice try, kid,” said Nira gruffly and turned to Onnd, “Now can we get rid of them?!”

“It’s not right now,” continued Sann, “But it’s right...soon! Or could be — one possible outcome as the star destabilises.”

Nira turned back to Kai; she looked him up and down. Still unimpressed, she continued, “Those planets still aren’t aligning.”

“And with the star about to die,” added Jhor with a dark grin, “they never will.”

The fiery orb drifted slowly towards Nira as she stood with her arms crossed. Kai cocked his head and studied the invisible orbital threads as the sun approached, then stepped into and through the ruby glow towards Nira. Stopping beside her, as the sun continued on behind, Kai smiled shyly, then looked back at the approaching planets.

His breathing slowed, then all but stopped; one corner of his shy smile curled up cheekily.

As celestial bodies writhed through errant courses to the light to flee the fingers of the distant dark — some curling upwards to the left as others dove away reversed — Kai lifted his left hand, opened out his palm towards the centre of the room and with a heartbeat flicked the planetary system into a subtle tilt. He crouched down, pulling the disc with him — the black hole rose to the ceiling, the sun set behind him. He looked up at Nira, and silently invited her to follow.

Her diamond glare seared through his audacity for a moment, then softened to fiery sapphire as she rolled her eyes upwards. Reluctantly, cooly, she crouched down beside him.

With a twist of his wrist, the planets lurched into accelerated orbits in front of Kai and Nira. Behind them, the sun flailed from crimson to bloodied gold, dying throes brushing fire around their shoulders. The racing bodies quivered through their fraying orbits as gravity collapsed, drifting from ancient, dysfunctional ways into the unknown.

Then, slowly, Nira’s gleaming eyes widened.

The system began to tear itself apart, and as the dying star swelled up, and endless blackness readied its insatiable gullet for the spoils, the rainbow of planets slowed, drifted out, spun round and slotted in beyond all mortal wisdom to something unforeseen, something flowing in the laws of death, not life.

Upon the tilting disc, fanning out from the ruby star, the planets formed themselves into irregular lines, a pyramid upon the plane — first one, then two, then three in perfectly imperfect lines, an ordered disarray of ranks, planetary pawns to shield their final sibling, a gas giant brushing up against the vast nebula at the centre of the system.

His gleaming birth

Again Shen’s arms blazed into the air: “The one, the two, the three! It’s the prophecy! See?! I told you. I told you all!”

An all-but imperceptible smile flickered over Nira’s lips; she clenched it away at once, peering around the room to see if it had been noticed. Kai looked to her and offered his smile in return — then faded.

dimming prime

Turning back to gaze deep into the nebula, Kai stretched out his finger, pointing into its hidden heart.

within the towering peaks

Kai stared into the nebula as it drifted towards him, tiny glints of diamond punctuating its surface.

to split the clouds

“But there’s nothing in the nebula,” spat Jhor, “It’s been scanned and scoured a billion times.”

Kai looked to Nira again; he swallowed hard then took a deep breath as though about to speak — suddenly the convulsing sun behind them exploded into a silent supernova. Kai bowed his head; his hand fell and the images stopped, then began to seep backwards in time, back to where the universe held them now.

Nira nodded in unsurprised disappointment and got up. Embarrassment rippled over Kai’s face and twisted into soundless anger.

“He’s already shown himself, you fools!” cried Shen furiously, “It is the prophecy! Believe, or else...”

Without warning, the room twisted tensely still; all faces turned suddenly to Sann — an eerie emerald gleam blinked from the data surface and reflected off her shock.

“Sann?” whispered Onnd across the chamber.

“It’s true,” she began, her voice almost quivering, “The orbits will reach this irregular alignment as the star dies. But it’s the life-map that...that...”

“What is it?” said Nira, exactly as Onnd said, “Who is it?”

“It...it’s thousands, millions of different life forms spliced together as one,” she said, then looked towards Kai: “But one of them...is his.”

Shen turned back to the nebula glinting ecstatically: “The twilit end and blazing dawn bled into One. It’s Him!”

Next chapter — Detachment

Sunday 14 August 2011

11.19 Revelation — Integration

2011-06-19T00:01:00.020+02:00

The light that flowed about Kai’s hand focussed into tiny silver strands and stretched themselves aloft as they coiled in around each other. With his eyes still closed, Kai smiled as the wispy helix rose, then doubled and doubled again.

“A life map!” said Sann in amazement, then looked to Onnd.

Onnd directed a single nod at Sann in response; she obediently stepped over to a data surface by the holograms to scan and analyse the genetic threads, which now bled shadows, shaping softly from the gleam — a shroud of black.

wreathing gash of filth

Shen quivered yellow, and stammered, “That’s Him! That’s what we saw!”

Then he, Onnd, and Jhor whispered all as one in awe, dismayed, “Déhath!”

His lightless pall bled back to blood-red coils. Kai looked deep into the structure, zooming in and flowing through the loops and turns with subtle movements of his hand, trying to comprehend its countless crimson orbs and bloody forks encircled by the holographic blue.

as final light glints off her hidden glance, her voice a sigh upon the air

“Is that it?!” spat Nira suddenly, “That’s all you have in that quiet little head of yours?!”

“Look inside when you lose your way.”

Suddenly, Kai’s eyes peeled wide in realisation, and he leapt forward to the centre of the room holding the scarlet threads, parting the sea of warrior white as he went.

“Onnd,” said Nira, “Come on, what is this?!”

“Wait!” shouted Shen.

Nira glared back at Shen, disembowelling him in her mind, as Kai flicked the gleam back out from molecular branches to the complete complex of helices, then stretched his arm into the holographic light, pushing the system of coils deep into the Tree at the very centre of the temple. Almost at once, an unknown force began to pull and stretch and reshape the hologram. The helices unfurled then wrapped again around the husk of the Tree. Red gave way to gleaming white, and roots of light sprouted from the Tree reaching down and outwards to the lower half of the sphere, as glimmering buds emerged upon the trunk and burst into a complex, writhing plexus of glistering branches stretching up and out into the temple’s space.

Onnd, Sann and Jhor exchanged glances, then moved in closer to Kai, just as he removed his left hand from the sphere — his creation remained; the Tree continued thriving. Kai cast his ardent gaze around, then thrust himself into orbit, pacing breathlessly around the orb. Onnd and Shen followed in his wake. Nira stood fast and frowned, arms still firmly crossed.

Suddenly he stopped, reached out and took hold of the holographic branch map, then placed it within the central sphere; not only did it swell and shape itself around the Tree, but it also exerted its own force within the new universe, flattening the sphere slightly and threading lustrous branches and roots into its weave of filaments. Then Kai reached out and effortlessly pulled in the planetary system; the bodies shimmered through countless colours as they realigned gravitational fields around them within the glimmering matrix in innumerable and incalculable ways then slowly shrank to infinitesimal dimensions, disappearing into the intertwining mass of light. Finally, its myriad stars glinting off his eyes, Kai took hold of the holographic galaxy and slid it deep into the sphere, where it began to expand and reposition its swirl of stars around the branch map’s channels and the tuberous boughs of the Tree, then imploded the top and bottom of the sphere towards the brightening core, until, at last, the symbiotic whole found balance. Every pair of wide warrior eyes looked on in awe as the galaxy — their galaxy — expanded to fill the chamber with the manifold layers and dimensions of its incalculably complex plexus of channels, currents and conflagrations in more detail and with more veracity than any of them had ever witnessed or imagined.

Before anyone could speak, however, Kai pressed his eyes shut again and lifted his left hand; with furrowed brow and increasingly rapid movements of his hand, he drew every single soul in the chamber into a searing, soaring track through swarms of light, streaking along channels, sheering under sapphire giants through temporal eddies hanging over nascent dwarfs and rounding glittering pulsars as their path began to merge with slender ruby strands that curved and coiled about themselves within the void until, suddenly shooting through a gleaming comet’s tail, he slowed and stopped and hovered far above a system of planets: nine distinct spheres with one bright, one black at opposite ends, the darker gasping, gulping in the spiralling strands of fading life from the other — a binary system: one waning crimson star; one swelling disc of sable. Between them, trapped in chaotic and impossibly irregular orbits — yet orbits still; a semblance of order within a system’s dying chaos — hurtled seven spinning spheres, each a different colour, together composing a spectrum whole, around an impenetrable nebula that glistened as a mirror with the rainbow hues of seven silent keepers.

No one in the chamber breathed.

Kai suddenly curled his fingers into a fist, and the room shot back to silent flight, flowing effortlessly into orbit around the system, and as he neared the disc of densest black, and as its darkness fleetingly eclipsed the light of its living, dying ruby twin...

its dark upon the sun

...Sann gasped — “N’van!”

Next chapter — Alignment

Sunday 7 August 2011

11.18 Revelation — Emergence

2011-06-12T00:01:00.019+02:00

The warriors moved in, then looked to Onnd; she silently pondered the fate of the captives then nodded reluctantly.

“But, but...,” stammered Shen, “Stop! Listen! You need him! Stop!”

“No, old man,” said Nira, “We don’t need either of you!”

“No?! No?!” screeched Shen suddenly and boiled to red, “Don’t say no to me! You can’t say no to me!”

Fuming, he suddenly glared straight at Onnd, the fire of his wrath blazing into her eyes. Onnd simply stared back, smothering his flames and quietly crushing his hidden soul. Shen turned his eyes away and looked around the sea of faces.

“But it’s the Shield, you lothals,” he cried, “The Shield! He knows! It’s N’van! You need the Shield. Don’t you see?! You need him to win!”

Nira turned away in disgust. Shen suddenly leapt forward and grabbed her arm. Nira spun round immediately, flicked her arm up and twisted Shen’s down — his face smacked hard against the floor.

“Never,” spat Nira down at him, “Never touch me. It’s that simple.”

Shen’s fury broke; he wrenched his arm from Nira’s grip and leapt up in a blaze of scarlet, but before he was back on his feet, Onnd and Sann flicked their staffs towards his throat — one staff grazed the other, and a sudden a burst of lightning gleam cracked into the room. Kai lifted his left hand instinctively to protect himself, and the light imploded back in around his fingers. The inspissating spark glinted off Onnd’s wide eyes, and Sann looked on in awe as Kai drew in the diamond glister and stepped cautiously forward, putting his other hand up in capitulation. The warriors tightened in around him.

“Wait,” cried Shen and Sann as one, then Sann continued, “I think he wants....”

“Sann!” boomed Onnd in warning.

“He wants to show us!” blurted out Shen.

“Master,” said Sann nervously to Onnd, “Please, I mean no disrespect, but you sensed something different about this boy too, I know you did. He bears the light. Perhaps fate has brought him here to help us.”

“You trust too easily, Sann,” sighed Nira shaking her head.

“And that will be your undoing,” muttered Jhor.

“Yes, he bears the light, Sann,” said Onnd carefully, “But he is just a boy, and we have already chosen our path. Nira is right — this is no longer the time.”

“Yes, master, but you have taught me far too well,” said Sann, curling her thin lips into a nervous smile, “We I’sta fight tirelessly to defend the truth, even when its form is not our own, even should it prove inconvenient to our current situation. Our truth must always remain balanced and considered, otherwise we are no better than the Sucthul.”

Onnd was silent. She turned her eyes back to Kai and studied him. Finally, as everyone in the room watched her anxiously, she turned her gaze back to her student with an almost imperceptible glint of pride, and gave a single nod. Kai looked nervously around the ominous circle of Truth Warriors. Holographic colour glistened off his apprehensive eyes — the galaxy, the branch map, the planetary system, the spherical temple. The Tree.

unfolding tall

He brought his left hand down before him and allowed it to flow from side to side.

shining hand outstretched

The light drifted along with his movements leaving a gauzy, glistering tail.

“Yes, it’s very pretty,” said Nira impatiently, and folded her arms.

Kai looked up and into Nira’s diamond eyes. He smiled in endless quiet, then turned his shining palm upwards, closed his eyes, and crumpled his brow into deep furrows of concentration.

Next chapter — Integration

Sunday 19 June 2011

11.17 Revelation — Reckoning

2011-06-05T00:01:00.032+02:00

The sudden surge of attention wrenched Kai from his stupor of shock; he looked sheepishly around the ring of white warriors, until his eyes froze and his mouth fell slack — striding, floating, driving into sharpened air across the stone from within the holographic glow came her breath of red, her piercing diamond eyes.

Eventually, Kai remembered to breathe; his eyes remained transfixed by her blazing gaze. All other eyes in the room stayed on him.

Then, after an eternity of silence, solitary smacks of applause trickled into the void — Jhor slowly clapped her long, white palms together with a derogatory, “Impressive!” then turned to the other warriors and sneered, “My queens, we have no need of meek ‘kings’ like this!”

Quiet laughter rippled through the chamber, but Sann quickly silenced them: “Jhor!”

Jhor glared back at her, then bowed her head and returned to the ranks.

“I tell you,” blurted out Shen suddenly with a flurry of hue, “He held my light, and shaped it, and...and...and he used it to see and hear...Déhath! He saw His plan!”

Again, all eyes flicked towards Kai. Nira moved in closer, eyes flaring.

“Whoever you are, kid,” she said, “you’d better start talking soon!”

Shen put his arm tenderly around Kai’s shoulders.

“It’s all right, Salvator. We’re safe now. You can tell them what you saw.”

In the forum above, the SYS-soldier floundered in his lack of visibility below the Truth Warrior, despite his best intimidatory intentions.

“I asked you a question, outsider!” he said, “What...is going...on?!”

The warrior effortlessly disregarded him, her eyes fixed straight over his head. The SYS-soldier looked nervously back at his troops, who had also almost forgotten his existence, then turned back again.

“I’m warning you...young lady...if you don’t...”

His moment of near-courage was rudely interrupted by a rasp in his ear. He stiffened immediately as he recognised the dark presence summoning him; he reluctantly turned away to listen, then muttered anxiously in response, “Yes...yes, of course, sir!...Uh...sir?! All...all of them?!”

The hiss cut through his skull, and the soldier flinched, then spat out nervously, “Yes...yes I understand, sir! Of course, sir! Right away!”

He looked over at his troops and lifted his flare-repeater. They gradually noticed, readied themselves one by one, and lifted their weapons, pointing them towards the wall of warriors.

The SYS-soldier turned back to the I’sta, gulped hard at dry air and forced out, “Well...you are...all...under arrest...for, um, for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism!”

Farther down the line of I’sta, another warrior lifted her hand to her mouth and whispered into her communicator.

“Really, Salvator, it’s all right,” continued Shen warmly, “You can trust me. And you can trust them. Now...help us to trust you. Tell us! You’re safe. It’s fine, it’s really...”

Enough!

“Oh...come...ON!!” exploded Shen in sudden scarlet, “Just speak, you duthnul!”

Kai’s trembling mouth hung open desperately, as though he was trying to remember how to make the sounds.

But still nothing came.

“Yet another speech abstainer,” said Jhor from within the ranks, “How original.”

“And how convenient,” muttered Nira.

“Simply shaping yourself to a prophecy,” continued Jhor, “does not give you the right to...”

Jhor stopped speaking immediately as Onnd stepped up even closer to the captives. For a moment, as she studied Kai, no one in the room as much as breathed. Finally, Onnd aimed her intense gaze at Shen.

“What did you see, old man?” came her fluid, forceful voice, and Shen began at once to quiver in green.

“I...I...I saw two...two of the Dark Three. And they summoned what seemed, what appeared to be a...a shade of Déhath Himself!”

“We suspected the High Priest was Lúez,” said Sann, “But the other — Sílb?! This is...”

“How can we be certain,” said Jhor suddenly and lurched toward Shen, unable to restrain herself in the ranks, “that you are not Sílb in disguise, old man?”

“Me?” whimpered Shen, “No...no, I...”

“No,” spat Jhor, “No, you are right. I doubt one of the Three would take such a ridiculously menial form!”

“JHOR!” Onnd’s awful roar resounded through the stone chamber; the room turned to ice. “My lower, lesser disciple — you have already been warned once too many times this day. Now take your rightful place within the ranks, and obey my word without fail!”

The head of every warrior bowed down in fear — but for that of Jhor; she defiantly met Onnd’s gaze.

Onnd did not falter, did not react, did not even move, but simply gripped and crushed Jhor’s grey eyes with her own, moved one slender hand almost imperceptibly towards her staff, and whispered slowly, “I warn you this one time, Jhor Hal — and there will be no second — know your place, or, I swear by Ephaïl Himself, you will be Eased from the I’sta.”

Jhor’s breath quickened; her dark eyes quivered slightly, and she began to blink uncontrollably. She bowed her head, and shuffled ashamedly back into line.

Onnd turned again to Shen, who was trembling in pink.

“Now, old man,” said Onnd with terrible stillness, “What did you see?”

Words spewed from Shen’s quivering lips: “Well, I couldn’t really understand, but...but — oh, please don’t hurt me! — but I saw lines and patterns and stars, yes stars, or one star, and planets all around...planets...one-two-three-four...seven...seven planets. All together, all as one. Aligned. And a misty cloud of...of.... And a dark, a black.... And a word, I heard a word...from Him, from Déhath — oh, Ephaïl save me! — he said...he said...‘N’van’!”

The word seemed to echo for an age through the chamber.

Eventually, Onnd nodded slowly, and looked to Nira.

“N’van?” said Nira quietly.

Shen nodded wildly, as though his head would topple off at any second.

“Yes, yes, yes...N’van! That’s what He said!”

“N’van?” said Nira, with more than a hint of derision in her tone, “The ancient system of the Eluciaë...with the nebula...and the planets...aligning to reveal the location of the Tree of Light, Shield of Ephaïl, so on, so on?!”

“Yes, yes, yes! It must be!”

Nira smiled wryly.

“Right. You know...even if the star in that system was not just about to go nova...”

a fiery close

“...and be swallowed up by its own black twin, those planets wouldn’t align properly for another two millennia. But still, you’re telling me now, that after endless study by the I’sta, and after aeons of Déhath scouring the system and finding nothing, He now says this is the place after all. I’m sorry, crazy old man, but I don’t think so! And...”

The chirp of Nira’s hand-communicator interrupted her, and she turned to the side to answer.

“But...but,” stuttered Shen to the warriors around him, and pointed at Kai, “He knows! He saw!”

Onnd’s voice cascaded over them in beauty and power, “You, old man, are just a fool, no doubt. But you, silent one — who are you? What is your place in our story?”

Nira suddenly spun back round to them.

“Right, we don’t have time for this!” she blurted out, “Things are heating up up there; we have to wind them down down here! So, let’s keep this simple!”

She pointed at Kai.

“You! Who are you?”

Nothing.

“Where are you from?”

Silence.

“And what are you doing here?”

Nira waited long enough for the answer she knew would not come to not come, then simply said, “Well, I’m glad we could have this talk.”

She nodded to Sann: “Get rid of them — we have work to do!”

“But where shall we put them, Nira?” said Sann, “We don’t...”

“Put them? Oh Sann, you really are the sweet one, aren’t you! Our time is now. We have to go. Get rid of them!”

Kai and Shen stumbled back in terror as the line of warriors closed in.

Next chapter — Emergence

Sunday 12 June 2011

11.16 Revelation — Convergence

2011-05-08T00:01:00.025+02:00

As Shen whimpered and wailed in rosy terror, Kai struggled futilely against Onnd’s impossibly firm grip; she held them both upside down tightly against her sides as she flowed along the passageway. Only from the rapid rush of chilly air across his flattened face could Kai guess at how fast the warrior was sprinting through the dark — her movements were as fluid and calm as her breathing.

Suddenly a narrow door cracked open in the wall, flooding the corridor with light, and the warrior forced the three of them through it, scuffling over the stone floor into a round chamber. Shen screamed as he saw countless upturned warrior legs enswathed in glimmering white leaping straight at him. The warriors plucked him and Kai from their captor and whisked them towards a large holographic sphere in the middle of the chamber surrounded by other glowing images. Kai’s dazed eyes peeled wide and drowned in the temple’s blue and violet gleam as the warriors’ white bled into one behind upended shapes and sheen — a diamond galaxy, a branching map, a planetary system. A breath of red brushed past the other side obscured, and as twin warriors held him and Shen fast, then flicked them back upright with their feet dangling half their height above the floor, the noiseless I’sta chorus moved in around them boiling Shen into a scarlet rage of fear —

“Put me down, idicimes! Put me down this instant!”

Kai’s eyes remained transfixed by the swirling crimson glint, as a Truth Warrior drifted elegantly up to him.

“It’s you,” said Sann.

“You’re right,” barked Shen without looking, “That’s him, I’m me, and you’re you. Now, let us go!”

Sann shifted her eyes to one of the twins, then back to Kai — the identical warriors nodded together and lowered the captives carefully to the floor. Kai squinted up at Sann; the light from the holographic galaxy flowed around her head in a diffuse halo. Shen looked up and recognised Sann with a flicker of orange.

“Oh! It is you!” he said, “You saved us earlier! You and...and that serious-looking one! We cannot thank you earnestly enough, my friend and I. And now...now....”

Shen’s orange seeped away and his mouth hung open as his skin became awash with scarlet and grey.

“Oh...my...! I’m sorry to have to tell you this...but you are all in grave danger!”

Blank stares engulfed him.

“Oh, no...no, not from me!”

Sniggers rippled through the circle of warriors.

“No. Under the temple!” continued Shen, “The Way is all corrupt, it would appear, and...there’s Sucthul there! The High Priest himself is one of the Dark Three!”

Another warrior stepped forward; Sann moved aside and the others bowed their heads in respect as she neared Shen, grave and austere — Onnd.

“The Sucthul Three?” came her terrible and beautiful voice as she towered over him, “How can you know this?”

Shen turned pale, gulped through airless dread, then continued, “They were...chasing us. We were escaping...trying to escape. You I’sta were right all along, and...”

“And you doubted us?” said Onnd coldly.

Shen gulped again, and then forced out as much of a nervous whisper as he could from his tightening throat: “N...not for a moment, ma’am. Not...ever.”

Jhor stepped forward, her thin lips twisting into a dark smirk.

“Why in Destiny would one of Déhath’s Three be chasing you?!”

“The Dark Three!” gasped Shen, as though he had already forgotten, then continued wide-eyed and bright like a child, “Yes! Yes! It was Lúez! And Sílb!”

Jhor raised a silvery eyebrow: “How detailed of you!”

A rainbow of pride flickered across Shen’s face.

“Thank you,” he said in complete sincerity, “Thank you for noticing. I certainly do try....”

The silence stabbed through Shen’s eyes and his colour trickled away as he registered Jhor’s derision.

“Well...I think they were after him — he’s the One!” blurted out Shen, pointing at Kai as his radiant flicker of pride returned, “And he’s my friend!”

All eyes shifted fluidly towards Kai. Shen continued, his voice skipping ahead and tripping over his own thoughts, “Yes we...he did! He saw! He used the light, and I was there. I saw. Well, it was my light, actually. So of course I was there. Of course. And I was so scared. I was bleeding and was all — AAARGH — you know? Like a binkoth. But this boy, he came with his hand and did the thing and...and...well he held the light, my light, and...and he shaped it! He did!”

“He bore the light?” said Onnd pensively, then began circling Kai, studying him.

“Yes! Yes, that’s right. Just like the prophecy says. And he’s a ‘silent soul’ too! I do believe he’s the One!”

Onnd continued around them without comment.

“Well...he might be the One,” wavered Shen in the heavy hush, his colour draining away to doubt, “He could be. I mean, maybe he’s one One, at least. Some One, or other. All I know is that he did the light thing, he doesn’t say much, and then they were after him — Lúez, Sílb...and Déhath Himself!”

Onnd’s eyes rippled wide.

“Déhath?”

Onnd completed her circle and hung over them like a tower. A breath of red flowed through the light towards Kai and his mouth fell open, just as Sann and Jhor stepped up and loomed over him beside Onnd, and Shen began to quiver palely pink.

“Well...boy,” said Jhor, “If you are the Chosen One...show us!”

Next chapter — Reckoning

Sunday 5 June 2011

11.15 Revelation — The Hunt

2011-05-01T00:01:00.012+02:00

Kai and Shen scrambled to their feet in the dark as the predatory cries rushed towards them. Shen grabbed Kai without thinking and tried to pull him away; Kai defiantly thrust him back against the wall.

“But...Salvator?! They’re coming! We...we have to...”

Before Shen could finish his whimper, Kai grasped his pale cloak and dragged him off down the corridor.

They faltered through the rough stone darkness, Kai’s hand chafing against the walls as the corridor wound this way and that. The air turned icy cold. The pursuit grew louder behind them — screeching, cackling, scraping, hunting.

Kai stumbled as he wrenched himself and Shen round a corner; his hand smacked hard against the wall to steady himself — but the rasping sound of rock was replaced with a dull squelch.

He stopped. Shen tumbled in behind him.

“Salvator? What is it?”

Kai took Shen’s arm, and pulled back his sleeve — the corridor lit up around him. Their mouths opened as one in shock; from Kai’s came wisps of rimy dread — the walls were lined with bodies. Parts of bodies. Preserved. Frozen. Stockpiled. Tattered remnants of white fabric hung from bones, peeled from filmy skin and sealed sunken eyes.

After a seeming eternity of frozen shock, Shen suddenly erupted into a scarlet scream; it echoed through the crimson chamber behind them and mixed with the scrambling sounds of pursuit. Kai thrust a hand over Shen’s mouth; the cry remained — sound seemed to be oozing from the mesh skin of his throat.

Then, without warning, Shen flushed over green. Kai snapped his hand back as though the change of colour would sting him, but Shen was now another Shen!

“My goodness. They do say ‘Give yourself fully to the Way and stay with us forever!’ Needless to say, however, my dear Salvator, this was not quite the way I had imagined!”

A grisly wail pierced the air, and Shen flicked immediately back to red. Before he had time to scream, Kai dragged him down the corridor.

The hunter was closing in. As they passed a junction, Kai heaved Shen into a narrow side corridor — no more than a fissure. They squeezed through the rock walls of the cramped space, but stopped short as scuffling sounds brushed past in front of them.

In Shen’s rosy light, at the end of the cleft where it opened out into another murky corridor, an eerie file of sallow hoods bobbed past. Kai tried to drag his arm up past the rock to cover Shen’s mouth, then realised the futility — he could only hope.

The soulless line of pale marched past and away.

Kai closed his eyes and let out a long, trembling breath.

When the procession was safely out of sight and sound, Kai forced himself out from the rift into the corridor and pulled Shen away in the opposite direction.

After only a few rapid breaths, however, the passageway began to descend. Shen suddenly clutched at his own throat, fighting his own impulses to scream, stifling his voice into a hoarse, agitated whisper —

“Up, boy, not down — up! We have to get out! We...”

Another vile shriek stabbed through the air from behind. Kai hauled Shen away.

The walls of the corridor had returned to stone, but were no longer flat — rows of chiselled sculptures of countless races watched them coldly as they scrambled along in Shen’s rusty aura. The passage opened out again at another crossroads. The shriek returned, now disconcertingly close.

They looked around, trepidation growing. By the feet of one of the statues, an almost imperceptible light was blinking red. Before Kai had time to even guess at it, a terrible screech almost deafened him. The hunter was closing in. They darted into another sculpture-lined corridor and tore along it as quickly as they dared in the darkness, until they almost smacked straight into a stone effigy; the passageway curved sharply round to the left. They dashed in — then stopped cold!

Trapped in a dead end of eerily looming statues, Kai and Shen looked around in panic as dreadful footsteps scraped into the corridor where they had just been. The hunter slowed to a sadistic saunter. Kai desperately tried to cover Shen’s glowing skin, snapping the buttons at his throat back into place and pulling the cloak over his head. A soft, hissing cackle dribbled through the dark, and closer the predator came, sniffing at the air. Kai held his breath; Shen held his emotions. In the lightless passageway, a shadow blacker than death seeped slowly towards the corner.

“Little one,” came Lúez’s evil hiss, “Come out, come out.”

Kai and Shen groped silently along the dead-end wall for something, anything that might save them, release them, defend them. A faint gust of air brushed strands of Shen’s light-filament hair out from under his hood. In the wisp of fresh dim light, their eyes peeled wide and they looked up at a towering alabaster statue of a Truth Warrior.

“Oh, my,” whispered Shen, almost inaudibly, “That looks just like...”

Onnd shot out her arms silently from within her sculpted cloak and plucked Kai and Shen from the corridor into the void, just as Lúez slithered round the corner into the dead end.

He licked at the empty air, then snarled to himself in disgust —

“Menial tasks!”

Next chapter — Convergence

Sunday 8 May 2011

11.14 Revelation — The Plan

2011-04-24T00:01:00.038+02:00

The Truth Warriors filed from the Outsider door and fell into a perfect line around the curved walls of the forum, which was now crawling with SYS-troops.

Close to the door, an idle bunch of SYS-troops were hurling questions at all who dared walk past, led by one, slightly shorter SYS-soldier — the junior officer Luéz had eclipsed earlier. As the warriors emerged, he spun round as orders buzzed through his ear. He nodded at the hidden voice, then stepped tentatively towards the warriors. As he left his distracted troops, he spluttered ineffectually in their direction, “So, you all just...just stay there. Right?”

“Aye, sir,” sighed one of them inattentively and continued cleaning an oversized flare-repeater.

The SYS-soldier nodded, then walked towards the line of tall warriors, muttering to himself, “I can handle this. I will handle this. I am handling this!”

When he reached them, and quelled his self-enabling chant, he looked up at one of the imposing I’sta as close to her icy eyes as he dared, while trying to hold onto a threatening a glare —

“What’s...going on?”

The warrior remained staring silently, dutifully ahead.

In the round, stone chamber of the Outsider, Nira paced around the spherical hologram of the temple, which etched threads of blue and violet across her red as she finished outlining the plan for Sann, Jhor, and the other Truth Warriors of the Inner Circle.

“So, that’s it,” said Nira with her nonchalant practicality, “The charges are there — here — beneath the temple.”

She pointed at the tiny, blinking red points within the plexus of subterranean passageways.

“Onnd’s priming them now. It won’t be a big show, but it’ll be big enough to bring the catacombs down in on themselves, choke the Sucthul supply chains, and collapse parts of the forum into an open ring around the temple.”

“Crush the arteries,” cried one of the warriors suddenly, “to stop the flow of new blood into the evil heart of the Way!”

Sann smiled. Jhor glared.

Nira stared at her expressionlessly for a moment, then said, “Well...yea...if you want to be all ‘I’sta’ about it.”

The warrior lowered her head.

“It will send a clear signal,” continued Nira, “The ring in the forum should lay the network open to the surface so all of Destiny will finally see the conversion chambers. But there will be casualties, and Destiny may then see you, the I’sta, as terrorists.”

“Well, we will be terrorists,” said Jhor dryly.

Nira stared at her in heavy silence, then went on, “But the truth about the Way can get out at last, my friends, and then your position will be restored.”

“And if it does not,” said Jhor, “we will have to leave Destiny forever.”

“Our escape plan is in place should we need,” said Sann, “B’rra has everything ready and awaits our call.”

“We knew the Way was going to strike the I’sta at any moment,” said Nira, “Your existence in Destiny as you knew it was already over. Now, whether you leave or stay, you will take control and send a signal throughout the galaxy!”

The room fell to a tense hush.

Finally, Sann stepped forward and said, “Warriors, we will decide our future today. We will say how the new Tree grows. When Master Onnd returns...we begin.”

Moments later, as the warriors of the Inner Circle murmured amongst themselves around the walls, Sann went to Nira.

“My friend,” breathed Sann, “You have done all we asked of you and more. We will be forever indebted to you, Nira, no matter the outcome today.”

Jhor slid up to them as Sann was speaking, and muttered under her breath, so no other warrior would hear, “Sann...How long have you known?”

Nira shot a glare up at Jhor as though she would relish crushing her pale throat, but Sann remained calm.

“Jhor, I never thought it would come to this,” said Sann, “And I too have my misgivings. But this is Master Onnd’s way, and secrecy was her decision. I am sorry...”

“I wouldn’t be too sorry, Sann,” sighed Nira, and turned away from Jhor to look at the myriad blinking points of red around the holographic catacombs.

“Onnd is the wisest of us,” continued Sann, “She will lead us to the Truth, and...”

Suddenly there was a crash from the far side of the chamber; Sann and Jhor spun round, eyes wide, then leapt towards the scuffle.

Next chapter — The Hunt

Sunday 1 May 2011

11.13 Revelation — Father

2011-04-17T00:01:00.037+02:00

Deathly edgeless shadow swelled into a faceless pall of dread, a lightless silhouette surpassing and engulfing all. Lúez drew back his trembling claw from the bloody flame; his charred skin smoothed over immediately to obsidian black, as he and Sílb sank to their knees before His image —

Déhath. Maker of all that Light repelled.

They quivered beneath their cloaks as the grating, icy chill forced them down in cherished supplication, and they stammered up a hiss from dreadful, hidden maws —

“Father!”

The noise that answered wound and wormed its sickly way behind Kai’s eyes then wrapped its black around his nerves and scratched his sinews taut as piercing, raw perceptions smothered him apart with a blunt, serrated edge —

“Lúez. Sílb. Abhorrent strays. The One?”

“He...he,” stammered Lúez past his tightening gullet, “was not here.”

Déhath convulsed in wrath and choler and spewed His murk upon His servile brood; they wailed in loving torment.

wreathing gash of filth

Shen collapsed beside Kai in colourless spasms.

“It is!!! It’s Déhath! Ephaïl, deliver us from evil!”

But Kai did not hear — Déhath’s snarling rasp dug in, engulfing him in blackened bile, his senses drowning into one behind his burning eyes the void and light stained all with slender arms outstretched to One alone as mists descend between two suns... 

One light

“...One dark...”

together coursing seven celestial orbs about the spectral diamond dust

aligning all

“...revealing ancient Ways...”

the Tree

“...of Light...”

and Ephaïl

His dimming prime and gleaming birth within the towering peaks betwixt the golden seas and crimson flush above a secret body streaking silent twisting threads to split the clouds

It’s here

“...N’van...”

a fiery dawn

I see

an incandescent disc

“The Shield!”

I feel

“The end!”

I know

“He’s here!”

The final shriek ripped Kai from the vision. His spine froze and cracked as he saw, below, three shapeless visages of deathly null staring coldly up at him, as wisps of scarlet, spiralling threads dispersed between them.

“Can...can they see?!” whimpered Shen palely beside Kai, peering down through the portal.

Déhath’s edgeless, endless shadow washed away as parting words stabbed through Kai’s brain —

“Now prepare the end!”

Immediately Lúez leapt straight up at Kai, who wrenched himself back in fear. The pool of light began to shrink and turn opaque, as Lúez’s claws hooked into the stone of the ceiling on the other side and two more talons thrust and whirled into a shrieking blur of scraping grinding through towards him. Sílb bowed before Déhath below as He disappeared into a veil of grime, then turned and darted from the chamber into the shadowy corridor. As the light bled away, Lúez’s terrible screeching scrapes faded too, until only distant echoes trickled through the dark space around them.

Then, from the tense, lightless hush, came, gradually, a distant, growing rustle — claws clicking rapidly over stone!

“Salvator! They...they’re coming!”

Next chapter — The Plan

Sunday 24 April 2011

11.12 Revelation — The Way

2011-04-10T00:01:00.039+02:00

Kai recoiled in horror and lifted his hand to cover his mouth; the image began to turn opaque and dissipate, along with the sounds from the chamber, as the final dying screams still echoed through the dimming corridor around them.

“The Priest!” stammered Shen in a nervous hue of yellow, “The High Priest of the Elucian Way...is...is...one of the Dark Three!”

Kai sank against the cold wall as the light faded from his wide eyes. Breathing hard, with Shen looking on, Kai dug his fingernails deep into his left arm.

it’s wrong

“It’s all right, Salvator,” whispered Shen as his shade brushed over to soothe.

all wrong

“We couldn’t have known.”

my way is lost...again

“The Way must be corrupt from the core. We have to escape!”

the sighing grey-haired queen in flow

“But I’m here. I will help you, my friend.”

“Kai is not the One alone!”

“You are not just one boy alone anymore, Salvator. We are two.”

Shen smiled proudly orange, and touched Kai lightly on his left hand. Kai flinched, looked at Shen with terrified eyes, then took hold of himself and peered down at the seeping light. He thrust his hand over the shrinking pool and pulled it back into translucent, shimmering order —

Lúez stepped through the soup of organic debris below. As he went, turning over and examining festering limbs and decomposing faces with his sceptre, he peeled off the metal strips from the handle and gouged them into his bloody cheeks, pulling the torn flesh taut again with a gasp of relief.

With the stick, he twisted round the lifeless neck of a young man, whispering, “Fight as One with me until Light’s end is...”

Suddenly, he cast his sceptre away, shrieking furiously, “Where is He?!”

The staff cracked heavily off the head of a monk, who did not react but simply continued dragging away a ravaged corpse, as another tall figure cloaked in white drifted furtively through the shadows into the chamber. Lúez spun round in surprise, then leered as he hissed through guttural clicks and wails that pierced Kai’s eyes —

“Sister.”

It was spoken as an insult.

The remaining monks moved respectfully out of the way and bowed as she drifted in, tall and threatening, and came up close to Lúez, looking down at him from a half-concealed visage of lightless, shapeless dark.

“Brother,” she spat down at him with icy superiority.

“Ephaïl save us!” cried Shen suddenly, and crept around the pool of light as though it would drag him under at any moment, “Another! Two of them, here! We have to go, boy! You cannot even imagine the danger this represents!”

She turned and hissed with piercing wrath, and the monks shuffled obediently away. Immediately, she turned back to Lúez and they began to spit and snap, their heads jerking back and forth, almost tearing at each other’s flesh as their words thrust deeper into Kai’s skull.

“Working hard to please,” she screeched with condescending contempt.

“Menial tasks,” spat Lúez in reply, “Loathe this age! Before we reigned. But now...?”

“Respect! The end of age will come. Do as He decrees! I and Túra take such chores without complaint. Our Father will not bear your mortal flaws again, Lúez.”

“Father does not know such endless tedium, Sílb,” seethed Lúez, and dug the metal further into the ragged, pallid flesh of his cheeks.

Sílb simply peered at him in revulsion: “Weakness, sibling! You think I whine and bleat as you?”

“Pain, this constant pain, it...”

“I endure,” she snapped in disgust, and wove her sable matter down into an effortless copy of the SYS-officer before him, “I suffer my incessant, hateful form and so must you...despite your shameful flaws.”

He spat humiliated wrath; she lashed out an adamantine claw and sliced a fresh gash across his face. He struck back at once in sable rage and stabbed a point up at her eye. Her SYS-officer’s glare did not flinch. He stayed his onyx blade. She laughed.

“Coward! Live in fear, not pain!” she hissed.

Lúez drew away his claw.

“Did you take him?” she said.

Lúez stared blankly down at the residue, and breathed heavily, “No. He was not here,” then turned away and licked at the seeping wounds on his face.

His sister’s identical SYS-officer form grinned through glassy grey teeth, and as she pressed her claw into his back, she whispered coldly, “Lúez! Weak...arrogant...brother — Father’s pride will never...”

He spun back round at once, and slashed down at her arm, gashing through the black to red as he scowled a mortal warning. She flinched in pain — then grinned.

“Suffering is my lot and pride. But you?” she hissed through cackling laughs, “You are just His errand boy!”

Lúez spun away in wrath and dragged himself across the floor of stiffening blood and bile towards the altar, where he stopped and held his clawed hand out over a dark red flame. His flesh began to singe and crackle and sear, sending up a hideous pall as Sílb shifted in beside him. Lúez showed no sign of pain, only reluctant duty as he gazed down into rising, shaping smoke that swelled and spawned a hideous silhouette of blackest seething, wreathing filth whose name they uttered all as one — Lúez, Sílb and Shen above — within the sputtering, burning hate —

“Déhath.”

Next chapter — Father

Sunday 17 April 2011

11.11 Revelation — The Offering

2011-04-03T00:01:00.019+02:00

The chanting swelled up from below through the shimmer: “The Way is Light, the Way is Light!”

Shen whimpered against the wall, holding his wounded arm, then suddenly flushed to violet and opened his mouth to rage. Kai glared over at him in disgust; Shen somehow understood that it was not the time for his opinion on any matter and seeped back to a dispassionate pale.

Kai turned back to the glimmering pool of light expanding and opening out around his left hand, and focussed down through the pearly sheen into the round chamber below; the tawny stone walls were lined with smoky, crimson-flamed candles as the last of the followers shuffled into the hall and were duly hustled into perfectly ordered ranks and files before the High Priest. As they finally came to an excited rest, the High Priest’s smile broadened and gleamed as he chuckled genially —

“Well done! Well done, everybody! You have taken your first brave steps toward an important and significant future. Please, let me see all your beautiful faces!”

They lowered their hoods and exchanged exhilarated glances with one another.

“That’s it,” continued the chuckling priest, “Good. We’re all friends here now, right?”

Laughter washed through the room and up around Kai. One of the followers towards the rear of the room, a young woman Kai’s age with dark curly hair, looked up from almost directly below him, smiling. Her beautiful, black eyes seemed to meet Kai’s, and he pulled his hand away instinctively. As the window of light began to shrivel and shrink, however, she continued looking around, still smiling, unaware of the secret audience above. In doubt as to why he should be hidden at all, Kai inched his left hand back to the light, and it obediently opened out again below him.

“My friends,” continued the priest, all eyes again fixed on his shining smile, “I applaud you all for your courage and faith in coming here today, for offering yourself so openly to the Elucian Way.”

Carefully controlling his colour, Shen crawled cautiously towards Kai and peered through the portal. Below, the candles stretched long, dark fingers of smoke up along the curved walls and across the ceiling.

“I know all of you here have studied the sacred texts for years, now. And probably my own holo-casts too, right? Yes, I thought so. Ha ha! I could tell you were all really smart, beautiful people!”

Laughter rippled through the thickening smoke.

“So you all know you are here today to serve a higher purpose, which may even be beyond your current understanding of the Way. But I know you are all willing to learn, willing to serve...and give.”

The smoke began to obscure Kai’s view slightly, and he pulled his eyes taut as Shen widened his.

“And it is this openness that has brought you here today, my friends, to the inner circle, where we keep the glorious secrets and revelations you’ve all been seeking all your lives. Excited?”

“Yes!” cried the eager youngsters as the murky haze began to fall.

“Yes!” laughed the priest, “I’m sure you are. Almost as excited as I am.”

Sooty dust landed, barely noticeably, on the rows of white-robed shoulders, then drifted down towards the floor.

“You see, this day, this moment, is just as important for me. This is my mission, my friends, to bring you here, to show you all the true Way, to draw you in to a fruitful and beneficial future — for all.”

The floor began to darken as murky fog ebbed subtly up around the followers’ feet, and shadowy smoke rose from the tapers behind the priest. He snapped his sceptre against the stone, and the monks stepped forward — they lowered their hoods, revealing a variety of races, with a curious selection of growths and attachments on their faces; all, nevertheless, wore the same austerely cold expression. Some of the followers looked around at their friends and fellows, smiles wavering slightly, as the majority remained looking up with complete trust at the High Priest. He laughed again, turning slightly hoarse as the pall thickened around him, flowing out and over his duteous congregation.

“And I am here for you! To reveal to you our dearest, deepest secrets, and thus ensure your immortality.”

As the smoke thickened further, Kai moved his hand around as he tried to see more clearly down into the chamber; the pool of light followed with his movements. The shadowy pall now hung as a thin veil at shoulder height around most of the followers. Those who had noticed, were looking down and around in concern, their breathing becoming more heavy.

“And I am so very deeply touched, and humbled, as you all offer,” the priest began to laugh hoarsely, “Yes, offer yourselves...of your own free will,” his laugh thinned into a hissing cackle, as he continued, seething sickly, “To me! To my Way.”

Nervous laughter trickled through the shadow. Suddenly, the young woman at the back of the hall, directly below Kai, screamed. The priest smiled, laughed, then as the murk condensed around him, his face seeped away to a sculpted faceless visage of adamantine dark, defying light.

“And I thank you, my ‘friends’!” continued his hissing chuckle, as he shrugged, “I thank you...for your lives.”

The chamber erupted in the inimitable screams and shrieks of imminent death; smoke began to whirl and flow around the hapless followers and sable flames filled the hall — seeking, scorching, searing and consuming. Young souls ran to the doorway, but the monks blankly blocked their escape and threw them back into the room and to the floor. Tongues of filthy shadow licked through melting, gaping, eyeless sockets, breathless, screaming mouths and snapping, singeing sinews in search of organs, memories, intelligences, abilities and cells that could be exploited, recycled, converted — or simply enjoyed. The terrified screams faded one by one as life submitted to weakness and thus surrendered to death. Emotionless monks sifted through the dreadful pall for useable parts, as the priest’s lightless silhouette opened outs its straight arms and hissing laughter echoed through to replace the dying screams. And as the terrible shadow subsided and fell, Kai caught sight of final transformation as the faceless, shapeless black reformed.

“One you are, all One!” it scratched.

To the wan flesh and gaping, bloody cheeks Kai had seen before.

“All mine!” he gasped through tears of joy.

The SYS-officer stood proud and tall.

“Súcthul, all as One!” he wept.

And laughed.

Lúez.

Next chapter — The Way

Sunday 10 April 2011

11.10 Revelation — The Catacombs

2011-03-27T00:01:00.050+01:00

The slamming portal resounded down the murky stone corridor lined with holographic flames lighting the way for the procession of the faithful.

“The Way is Light! The Way is Light!” continued the chant behind the High Priest as he led them towards the prestigious and mysterious inner circle of the Elucian Way. Shen shuffled nervously along behind Kai at the rear of the file, glowing dimly yellow in the dark — tiny, focussed beams of light escaped from the ends of his hair-filaments, etching phosphorescent spirals across the walls.

“Salvator?” whispered Shen anxiously behind Kai, “Salvator?! Stop, Salvator! Please!”

“The Way is Light!” continued the eager incantation.

“Salvator!!” continued Shen, hissing out as much urgency as he could without disturbing the procession, “Are you actually sure that you should...that is...?”

Kai glared round at Shen, whose face was flickering through uneasy fulvous hues.

you’ll see

“You see, I feel this might not actually be quite the correct path for you.”

you’ll feel

“Not quite yet at least, I feel. That is, I know you seem to be searching for something rather particular here, but....”

Kai slowed and stopped then turned to Shen, as the procession continued down the passageway. He studied Shen’s shimmering scepticism for a moment, then smiled down at him hubristically and placed a dismissive hand on his shoulder.

you’ll...

Shen flared up into an immediate blaze of ruby and his top three buttons tore open at once as he exploded in wrath, jabbing an accusatory finger forcefully into Kai’s shoulder as he snapped —

“You...fool! Idiot! Indicime! Look what you’re doing! You have no idea...no idea of how monumental a mistake you’re making, do you?!”

“The Way is Light! The Way is Light!” echoed farther down the corridor.

Bewildered and unnerved by the fury, Kai pressed his breathless back against the wall beside a holographic flame, which burned off his terrified eyes as he looked desperately after the receding procession.

“That was quite a sudden conversion to the Way, don’t you think, boy?! Grecknous zikk!!!”

“The Way is Light! The Way is...”

His fellow followers descended away from despairing eye and ear into the curving corridor, which glowed dimly red.

“No!” continued Shen manically, “NOOO! I’ll not let you do this, Salvator! Your gift is too great. You saved me, after all! Saved me!!!”

Shen rolled up his sleeve; the two scars from the hydra serpent’s fangs were glowing white on the coloured texture of his arm.

“Your destiny is another, Salvator! Anyone can give themselves over to the Way, and then just disappear into the SYStem. The Way is good, I’m sure, but...there’s something there that I don’t...I just can’t trust. Can anyone really be that selfless?! Young man, can’t you see...?”

Enough!

Kai stepped forward furiously, and raised his left hand at Shen, who turned pale and swallowed his words at once. Again Kai’s visage softened and he simply smiled benignly at Shen...

forgive

...then turned and walked away down the corridor towards the crimson glow below, leaving Shen behind, disheartened and speechless.

As Kai reached farther down the dark, empty passageway, following the echoes of the far-off chant, he passed an intersection. He stopped for a moment as a draft of cool air brushed past his face from the side, and he closed his eyes to feel the breeze. The distant incantation wafted over him, and just as he noticed the rapid shuffle from behind, his muscles tensed, his eyes forced in and his footing thrust back and over and down, and as he felt his body thrown and dragged across the floor, the pain seeped in from his tightening throat and smothered face and his breath smashed back against the stone.

His sight was gradually returned to him — Shen’s blazing blood-red eyes were a razor’s edge from his own, and a vice-like grip pierced him with paralysing dominance against the cold, coarse wall. Kai gasped quickly at breaths, as Shen simply shook his fiery head, then stopped, then jerked several short, sharp nods, then shook them ferociously away again — an infernal, private debate.

“Yes!” hissed Shen through his clenched, scarlet jaws, “This was the only thing I could do. I....”

His eyes swirled a deeper shade, and he brought a silvery finger up to Kai’s face threateningly.

“You! I told you! Ignorant boy!”

Kai tried to stretch out a trembling palm to offer peace, but again Shen flared up, crushed an arm against his mouth, tightened the other around him and dragged him away down the narrow passageway to the side. Struggling futilely against Shen’s abnormal strength, Kai could only focus his terrified eyes on the two glowing fang wounds on Shen’s arm pressed against his face; his ears took in only his own smothered breathing and his feet against the rock.

After terrifyingly endless seconds of twisting, scraping, violent turns, Shen stopped short and released Kai, who fell to the ground shaking in shadowy fear. Shen looked around frantically. The chants of the Elucian disciples no longer reached the dank air around them. Suddenly, Shen’s ruby fury seeped to blue and he leapt ecstatically from foot to foot.

“They’re gone, Salvator, we’re safe!”

Kai pushed himself with quivering legs to the wall, and breathed hard back against the wall. Shen stepped towards him; Kai turned away at once, his arm raised to protect himself.

“What? What, Salvator?!” said Shen, his violence gone from colour and mind, “You saved me, I saved you!”

Shen’s light reflected off Kai’s incredulous, terrified eyes.

“Well...I had to! I’m doing you a good deed, here, my friend! That’s just.... Now just you look!”

Shen burned up again to ruby; Kai cowered.

“Salvator! Fool! You’re no follower. ‘An outcast spurning all yet bound to lead’! Remember, lothal?!”

Kai steeled himself and clenched his jaws, then rose defiantly to his feet. Shen cooled again to blue.

“My friend. My friend! They prey on the young, you see, and the easily led. Those looking for something, anything — only for them would the promise of everlasting life actually mean anything. Some esoteric words and a prescribed interpretation then add a touch of fake passion...well, to be honest, Salvator, I’m surprised you fell for it. And, I have to say — I'm a little disappointed.”

Kai looked at Shen with disgust for the first time, and shook his head slowly. They stood opposite each other in tense, dark silence until, gradually, drifting into the air came distant chants —

“The Way is Light, the Way is Light!”

“They’re coming for us, Salvator! We have to get out of here!”

Shen moved off, but Kai remained obstinately where he was. Shen saw, and his anger boiled back up to the surface.

“Young man! I’m serious! Come now!”

Shen stepped threateningly up to Kai, but Kai stood his ground. The chants became louder, drifting up from below. Shen clutched at Kai’s arm, but Kai lashed out defiantly, and struck away Shen’s arm with all his might. Immediately Shen fell to the ground screaming in agony, holding onto his arm.

“One hand saves me, the other hand harms me,” he sobbed, “Salvator!? How could you?! I’m your friend!”

“The Way is Light, the Way is Light!” rose the distant chant.

Whimpering through pitiful, dry tears, Shen lifted his hand — a single drop of light oozed from one of the wounds, burning impossibly brightly into the dark. Kai lifted his left hand to shield his eyes.

an incandescent arc of final light to end his crimson sight

Shen sobbed pathetically; Kai went to him, reluctantly. He kneeled down beside him, and placed his left hand over the wound. Shen flinched and rippled through a spectrum of colour, and the space darkened. As the chanting grew from below, Kai lifted his hand — Shen’s wound was again miraculously restored, but a drop of light remained hanging from Kai’s palm, and as he pulled it away it fell blindingly to the ground. Kai instinctively lurched down with his left hand to cover it. Darkness enveloped them again in the strait passageway.

Gradually, Kai’s hand began to glow; the light spread out slowly in a circle from his hand and seeped down into the stone floor. He lifted his hand cautiously; the circle expanded farther, rippling through colours and shimmering gleam until an image began to form — a round, stone hall lined with smoky candles; faceless monks led in files of eager, chanting volunteers, who arranged themselves obediently in lines before a white-robed figure — the High Priest, looming by the altar at the far wall in the chamber directly below them.

Next chapter — The Offering

Sunday 3 April 2011

11.09 Revelation — The High Priest

2011-03-20T00:01:00.062+01:00

In a glorious beam of white, the High Priest came to rest a breath away from Kai beside the marble pool. Almost immediately a phalanx of hooded monks pushed through the eager crowd, then hushed and steered the masses, along with Kai and Shen, into a controlled ring of silent adoration around the priest. The light dimmed around him, leaving him standing alone in his bright robes, until, slowly and with palpable gravitas, he drew back the cowl. A wave of stifled gasps rippled through the congregation.

He was a man of early middle age — tall, bright, attractive. His perfectly sculpted golden hair gleamed almost as brightly as his diamond-blue eyes, which stared out into the crowd with honed intensity. His tanned skin, which was flawless, but for a few well-treated pockmarks — distant echoes of adolescence — drew tightly over his high, distinguished cheekbones. His mouth held emotionlessly flat for a tense moment, before, without warning, it broadened into a smile as wide as his face revealing teeth so sparklingly pearly white that they risked eclipsing his own dazzling robes.

“I do love a dramatic entrance!” came his congenial drawl, and the crowd erupted immediately into wild applause, with many of the younger members whistling and cheering euphorically; he received them with a well-practiced yet personable, self-deprecatory laugh.

In his left hand he held a long black sceptre with shining silver strips along its grip; he tapped it respectfully on the marble floor in a series of glittering clicks while maintaining his broad, bright smile and shaking his head at the exalting throng — his years of polished prominence expertly handled the embarrassment of idolisation. He eventually lifted his right hand to quell the gushing adulation. His smile flattened out again, and as though released from its beguiling power, the crowd hushed almost at once. The High Priest suddenly looked straight at Kai, then pierced his intense blue gaze deep into a thousand other hopeful ones.

“Tell me!” he called out with a commanding tone that sucked every other sound from the temple, “Are you looking for a Way?”

“Yes!” called out many in the crowd spontaneously, followed by yet more cheers and whistles, before again trickling away to silence.

“Tell me!” continued the priest, the intensity of his steely eyes swelling, “Are you looking for the Way — the only Way?”

“Yes!!!” came more emphatic cries from the congregation.

“Are you here to GIVE yourselves to the Way?”

“YES!!!!!” roared and sang and squealed the sea of worshipping souls.

The priest suddenly struck his sceptre down onto the pristine marble and a thundering crack resounded through the temple, silencing all as one.

Finally, through the tense hush, the High Priest slowly raised his right arm and proclaimed, “You are all...every One...Chosen!!”

The crowd erupted into cries and chants of exaltation, each raising an arm — or similar, if they lacked the exact appendage — into the air towards him in respect.

“Yes, my friends, yes!” laughed the priest, as the congregation again calmed with him, “Isn’t it great news! You see, my friends, the Way needs you — all of you! Many lose their way in life. I’m sure you know people like that, friends and family around you who have no direction, no faith.”

the boy uncertain of his path among the surge

“Then there are those who say, ‘Sure, take the Way seriously, but not too seriously!’ As though it were possible to love with half a heart! No! The Way needs you, needs all of you — all your love and faith. Unless, of course, you’d rather be ‘warriors’ of some other ‘truth’?”

A ripple of knowing laughter spread through the crowd.

as shadows burn and shift

“Yes, my friends, we all know about the I’sta, of course — the ‘Truth Warriors’ — fighting oh-so-passionately for their cause. But they have the audacity to tell us that only they know the ‘truth’ — even when they know so little of their own history! Descended from the Eluciaë, they say. Really?! Then why do they need to genetically modify themselves to stay ‘pure’, I wonder? With so many generations of such eugenics, how can we be sure that they didn’t just alter their appearance to look like the Firsts? And how, then, can we be sure they ever stood for true Eluciaë beliefs?”

Murmurs of agreement swirled around the space, as the priest’s fervour blazed up, accentuated dynamically by fingers in the air.

“No, you know the real truth, my friends — they are nothing but racists, sexists and elitists! They are everything that we fight against, the opposite of our Way’s acceptance of all as one. The I'sta, I tell you now, are simply unenlightened terrorists! We are the modern way. We are real! And we accept you all!”

Impassioned cheers roared into the air.

his shining hands outstretched

The priest’s ferocious fervour softened slowly back to smiles as he calmed his zealous worshippers with a fluttering palm.

“Wow! My friends!” he said, flashing his irresistible smile, “When I believe something deeply I really let you know, don’t I?!”

The crowd bloomed into adoring laughter.

“But these people are in need, my friends. They wish us nothing but harm, but still we will try to help them. We are all one in the Elucian Way, after all, and we must even accept our opposers. So, my friends — help us to help them. Dedicate your lives to the Elucian Way. Look at the majesty of this place! Our glorious temple, at the heart of our great city-state. The Eluciaë...,” the priest’s voice wavered emotionally for a moment, before he regained his composure and continued, “The Eluciaë, the Firsts created this for us, left this for us. And here in the Elucian Way we must continue their great work, spreading the word and the faith, and continuing our spiritual and scientific evolution together with the SYStem. And, unlike the secretive I’sta, all of these treasures belong to you, the great people of Destiny. I want you all to live forever in this glorious Light!”

The crowd broke spontaneously into applause, and a chant of “The Way is Light! The Way is Light!” rose into the air around the smiling priest.

elúcian, seeing all

Kai’s wide eyes sheened over in emotion as he looked up at the High Priest. Again the crowd calmed to his signal.

“Only if you give yourself fully to the Way can you be reborn. Only if you give yourself fully to the Way can you achieve immortality — a return to life. We have the secrets here, my friends, the revelations for one and all. Leave your empty lives behind and join us — join me!”

a blazing path

“Join me in the inner circle. Now! Today! Learn the secrets of the Elucian Way...”

a silent cry

“...and you will live forever. Save yourselves and your loved ones. Give yourselves to the Way, and immortality is yours!”

she waits in restless anguish

“The Way is Light! The Way is Light!” proclaimed the High Priest, leading the captivated congregation back into their chant. Kai simply stared, in awe of the man, intense and entrancing.

I see

“The Way is Light! The Way is Light!”

I feel

“The Way is Light! The Way is Light!”

I know

The crowd was crying, wailing, raising hands to the skies and chanting in a thousand unknown tongues. Suddenly, the High Priest smashed his sceptre on the marble, silencing all with a thunderous crack.

the grey-haired queen, her robe in flow, her staff in steady hand, her voice a sigh upon the air, now clear...

“You are all...”

“Kai is not...”

“...One!”

“...the One...”

“And no one...”

“...alone!”

“...is alone!”

“Kai is not the One alone!”

The priest’s diamond eyes pierced Kai’s.

“Follow!”

Our way is here!

The priest lowered his arm, smiled brightly to the congregation, spun round and strode off proudly. As he went, he nodded to the austere, hooded monks, and they stepped forward to lead the eager, young volunteers into ranks and files behind him. Kai stepped forward, smiling zealously; Shen’s face blanched as he saw.

“Salvator? Salvator?! May I say, Salvator — I am not entirely sure that you should...that is to say, you shouldn’t...”

Kai turned and glared.

his father’s bitter pall

Then Kai’s fury softened and dissipated to a serene smile.

“Salvator! I would really rather encourage you to...to think before....”

I’ve thought for years

Kai left Shen floundering and joined onto the rear of the excitedly solemn procession. Shen shuffled after him as, before the High Priest, an army of monks pulled up and opened two sides of a monumental, wooden portal in the floor. The priest followed the marble passageway down through the circular gate, followed by the unquestioning, faithful masses.

I’ll wait no more

“Please, Salvator! Show some restraint!”

We’ll live!

Still with his tranquil smile, Kai descended into the stone-walled passage, and the monks began to release the wooden doors to the ground.

“Oh, my! Salvator! What shall I...?” blabbered Shen, looked around at a loss, then tottered forwards and leapt into a tripping tumble down into the dark unknown; the portal doors fell tight and sent an ominously long, crashing echo through the temple.

Next chapter — The Catacombs

Sunday 27 March 2011

11.08 Revelation — The Light Frieze

2011-03-13T00:01:00.030+01:00

From null it stemmed, and folding over and through its glinting fibre midst, the milky gleam above condensed into a ring of nebulous, drifting forms, a disembodied crown around the ancient branches long since withered from their lofty regal dome. As Kai and Shen scuffed their feet across the marble rings, their necks strained up and thrust their awestruck eyes aloft along with many and countless more to spy the heavenly wisps of lustre curling shapes from shapes in shapes.

“One...came to...in the void,” muttered Shen, as the light of One above cleft effortlessly to Two — one bright, one dusk, “Elucian. Sucthul.”

Shadow and light began to swim and weave around each other’s writhing girth — hunting, fleeing — as Kai and Shen stepped beneath the shimmering loop.

“The duality at the heart of our universe — our mortal symbiosis.”

darkened disc dimming prime

The eddies of light and dark began to shift and shape to life.

“Elúcian and Súcthul became aware — formed identities.”

One pure elúcian light reflected off Kai’s gaze —

its slender shining hands outstretched

“Ephaïl.”

— encircled by a cloak of sable súcthul night.

“Déhath.”

shadows’ shifting scourge

The light and shadow each then bled off as three and three along the frieze and sought conflicting stars, spreading out to tell the tale of cyclic Light and enduring Dark. Along their intertwining paths, an eternal celestial dance, the Three and Three concealed and hounded Ephaïl in speeding, spinning orbits round and through each others’ sight, until they rushed and crashed as one across the frieze and splintered reshaped glory into Kai’s ingenuous sight.

“They hid Him. Ephaïl. They hid Him from Déhath, the Three of Li.... His own Three. He was not ready, you see, Salvator. Not ready to face Déhath again. They had to save Him. They....”

Shen’s voice wavered as his eyes flushed widely grey at the transfiguring gleam above. Kai’s dark eyes held fast in light, but sensing Shen’s disquiet, his hand again went out to calm him.

“The Tree,” continued Shen in softening stammers, “There’s the shining Tree. Within the Sucthul shadow. And there below...do you see, Salvator? The One! The Chosen One. ‘The One of rootless doubt who’d seek His shield, and resurrect the icy pulse concealed...One chosen to reveal, the Shield of Ephaïl’.”

Shen breathed in a deeply airless breath, then looked directly at Kai — in pride.

“The prophecy of the One, Salvator.”

Yet Kai remained transfixed by empyrean light as it slowly, steadily swelled to engulf the Shield, and then the One, and finally overwhelmed its Sucthul shadow, sending exultant luminous waves along and through the frieze, and when it seemed as though it would bloat and burst and gush its gleaming innards into space and shower its purifying clearness over one and all, the ancient, steely sun suddenly withdrew behind a charcoal cloud and the entire frieze withered and bled to chilly echoes in dust.

Shen restored, and shook his boiling head in the deafening silence: “This lothlous...grecknous...slithous...WEATHER!!!! I HATE this place. I HATE to be here, to live here. I need...I need LIGHT to live. LIGHT, not THIS!!!!”

Kai again took hold of Shen’s arm; at once he cooled.

“What? The Shield? It’s in the Tree. The other Tree.”

Kai led him towards the very heart of the temple — the snowy marble pool, in which pellucid emerald blues rippled serenely around the ancient, lifeless Tree.

“Where?” continued Shen alone, “No one knows, Salvator. No one. ‘Well hid within the stars’, you see. Not a soul.”

Kai looked down into the silvery plash — his reflection wavered and swam in the light from the oculus above; it shaped a nimbus about his dark, curly mane, and his mirrored wiry wisps of shadowy hair stretched upon the sheen like branches and roots and danced within the shimmer. Shen looked around the temple, his brow furrowing into colour as he noticed a rising sea of white cloaks moving in towards them over the marble as a ring, murmuring, pointing. Kai’s eyes simply widened as he saw the light around his silvery crown intensify and shift.

Such Light is born?

The congregation closed in tighter around Kai, as Shen flustered into a coral blush of panic — a ray of blaze was descending onto Kai from the oculus.

Or can it be assumed?

The sea of white stared up at the sky as the luminescence drifted down towards Kai; they murmured, then shouted, then applauded wildly, as from the heavens towards the centre of the temple descended a figure, a man, in a spectacularly white robe, suspended and carried down in a beam of energy. Shen’s panic turned benignly pale, and he raised a single rainbow of eyebrows behind his translucent skin.

“What a rare honour, Salvator — the High Priest.”

Next chapter — The High Priest

Sunday 20 March 2011

11.07 Revelation — The Elucian Temple

2011-03-06T00:01:00.025+01:00

With loosened lower jaws momentarily abandoned by their wits, Kai and Shen stepped tentatively ahead into the Elucian Temple enrobed in dusty white. The curving stone wall of the rotunda cupped them in smooth wonder from behind and stretched out around them, embracing them at the merest edge of the temple’s impenetrably deep and wide expanse of chilly, pious air within its perfect semi-sphere of golden violet marble, which dimmed and blurred into the distance. The majestic swathe of the temple begged no monumental pillars or columns to support its shell against the pull of the planet’s silent, hurtling spin; the faultless shining lilac curves swept simply up into glinting gold, before gliding round to flatten out and open at the apex in a hollow oculus disc. Within its consummate space, the temple held all unquestioningly as one, the many and countless breathing souls that sought within its hallowed air below, perplexed and awed.

Suddenly Kai’s left hand shot out and grabbed at Shen’s cloak, pulling him close as his own eyes remained transfixed by the temple’s grandeur.

“I know, I know,” whispered Shen, regaining his balance, “I always get surges through the filaments on my back when I see this, Salvator, and I lose all my words. All of them. Every one.”

A laugh of sheer joy convulsed up from deep inside Kai; stifled into silence at his throat, it escaped silently but surely from his eyes as he turned and gazed at Shen, making the next words both redundant and inaccurate —

“And I usually turn a little purple too. Speechless and purple. You see?”

Kai’s bright smile remained as he turned back to breathe in the next stratum of the temple. Before him, the floor dipped slowly, slightly towards the building’s core through myriad rings of coloured marble until it smoothed onto the vast, central circular dais of crystalline white. This disc was etched with interlocking onyx circles, a complete Elucian Symbol, with the overlapping surfaces of the circles shimmering through a rainbow of tiny precious stones — an opulent fog. Upon the white, and over the rings of tawny, lilac blush all around the hall, trod countless feet and pads and hooves of worshippers, workers and tourists. Despite these swarming specks of life, however, and their solemnly quiet clicks and clacks, which sprinkled up into the dusty golden chiming beams that echoed brightly about the place, the temple seemed almost empty, such was its gargantuan size.

“The Firsts!” said Shen breathlessly by Kai’s ear, “The Eluciaë made all of this, sculpting all from stars and stone to stand for millions, sacred millions of generations, before they...before the...the light....”

Kai glanced uneasily at Shen, expecting “light” to send him reeling into cacophonous spurts of colour, but Shen simply closed his eyes, swallowed hard at the air he could not breathe, then blinked back with a smile and looked around the temple serenely.

Within the curving walls, glittering strands of inlaid amethyst and sapphire wove up through the marble, snaking in towards and around eight huge circles, each four times Kai’s height and evenly spaced around the temple walls — eight grand, imposing component circles of the Elucian Symbol, mosaicked in inset, burnished black and white. Before each one bustled a congregation of chalky, chattering robes — kneeling, bowing, murmuring, raising parchments and icons, and rocking from limb to limb to limb.

“Each has its own following, my dear Salvator,” said Shen, nodding over at the symbol, “Even the Dark Three are revered for their enduring might, and the perspective they offer the Light....”

Shen’s eyes glazed over in a yellow sheen. Kai tugged at his robe, and with a rapid shake of his head, sending his white hair-filaments into a flurry, Shen returned without incident.

“This is a somewhat contentious point, however. Not all agree the Dark Three should be esteemed. But the Elucian Way accepts everyone, recognising and embracing all offshoots of the original Way.”

As they made their way towards the nearest symbol, Kai noticed a collage of paper and slate and holographic sheets pasted and pinned to the walls around the broad circle.

“For every official symbol, there are a thousand unofficial icons...”

As they neared the penitent throng, Kai could make out some of the symbols — birds and palms, lambs and flowers, sickles and fish, all wrapped and held and penned and pierced by haloed suns, angular grilles and watery discs. Other symbols had long since faded and could no longer be distinguished from the dust.

“And the Way accepts them all as one.”

As they walked past the circular symbol itself, the subtle chimes that wafted through the temple focussed off the smooth stone and resounded in their skulls. Kai looked around, trying to ascertain the source; Shen instinctively pointed to the huge opening in the roof. Kai looked up and up and up, pulling taut his eyes until he saw — invisible channels of energy drew in the rain from the sky above towards a plane of light-vibration spanning the circular oculus. The water swirled onto this gossamer sheet, which dipped slightly in towards the middle as it filtered and sifted the rain back into purifying drops that trickled and flowed through ever-decreasing circles towards the open centre of the disc, chafing the invisible light into a rippling sheen of sound, a tapestry of tiny jingling peals and chimes that swirled and spiralled down into the hidden, lipless mouth and fell and fell and fell into a calm cascading stream through air and time, singing to the marble floor below, where the Elucian Symbol’s oval core raised its pristine marble edges into walls around a sparkling pool that frothed and rippled and flowed around a single sodden, lifeless husk of wood.

“That’s all that’s left,” whispered Shen, shaking his head until it began to shake him back, “All that remains of the Tree...the Tree of Light. The Tree of Light. That’s all.... I....”

He stood in solemn, trembling hush, and wiped his tearless eyes as the rain began to lessen and pull the shimmering chorus of chimes into a lingering diminuendo; Shen’s shaking head relaxed as the choir withdrew, until he was as still and wan as the temple’s lull.

“They left,” he whispered in melancholic paresis, “The Eluciaë. They just left. Moved on.”

Kai’s heart halted an instant as he realised that his own dark eyes were filling with Shen’s tears; he reached out, and as his hand touched Shen’s arm, colour and cadence flushed back.

“Yes. Yes, you see? They constructed all this to feed the Tree. But after the Cataclysmic Era it was all but destroyed. This is all that remains...here, at least.”

Shen’s enthusiasm rushed back in and he threw his arms around and up.

“Salvator, did you ever wonder why the temple is so huuuuuge? The Tree! The Tree was...colossal! It must have been!”

About two thirds of the way up the rotunda wall, the marble flowed seamlessly into gold.

“See this dome? It would catch and reflect the illumination from the Tree, and together with reflections from the pool and the starlight and the vibrations, the whole dome would be filled with the Eluciaë's greatest creation. Only vestiges remain now. Echoes. Ghosts.”

Kai tightened his eyes again, pursuing shadowy spirits in the heavens. Faintly flickering coruscations drifted amongst the golden sheen, hovering shapelessly.

“Ghosts indeed,” whispered Shen, “Stained by the new sun. And with the weather changing every minute on Destiny now, even when it does appear nothing stays for very long, and...and....”

Far above the oculus, the cloudy grey gave way at last, releasing a blinding deluge of steely sunlight through the heavenly eye of the temple.

“Oh...my!”

The brilliance darted and dazzled around the walls in fluid colour, though no longer merely as reflections — the light itself was beginning to gather into a ring within the empty space of the dome.

“Salvator! It...it’s here!”

Lines were forming, curves and dips and bulges and grooves of fluctuating gleam — a band of shapes, in three dimensions, flickering in and out of completion.

“There it is, my dear, dear friend — the light frieze.”

Next chapter — The Light Frieze

Sunday 13 March 2011

11.06 Revelation — The Antechamber Ring

2011-02-20T00:01:00.014+01:00

Kai and Shen stepped together through the archway into the Elucian Temple, shaking off the biting, burning rain — Kai from his shadowy curls, Shen from his unruly filaments bright. About twenty paces ahead of them, another faultless wall curved up and up and in within the first towards the dusky heavens, the outer wall gradually leaning in towards it until they flowed as one into the hidden golden gloom far above. Kai and Shen shuffled towards the centre of the space between these walls, which formed a circular cloister around the temple proper — an unbroken, ambulatory antechamber ring — and looked up in awe. Cascading up along the inside of the outer wall were lines of narrow holo-windows; mercurial sunlight filtered through to a shimmer, lapping diffracted colour over the silky inner wall. Alongside these windowed threads unfurled an endless strand of horizontal glassy marble slabs that seemed to hover in the air — stairways, held within fields of invisible ancient energy. The two stood in solemn silence amidst the dusty, flaxen air, as chimes wafted through from the inner sanctum, echoing aimlessly around the stilly antechamber amongst the hints of distant screams and cries from the bustling city outside. Over the polished stone of the walls ran veins and seams of text — subtly scored symbols, scripts and hieroglyphs that supped the light and caressed the shadow within them as they had done patiently for innumerable generations.

“The Epic,” gasped Shen, before quivering into a ruby eruption, “THE EPIC! In a THOUSAND COLOURS OF ELUCIAN!!!!!”

“Shhhhhhhhhhh!” hemmed through the powdery air about them. They turned to see a monk enswathed in ivory robes bearing the Elucian Symbol embroidered in gold. “Show respect,” added the monk flatly, then moved back towards a plush, purple curtain hanging from the inner lip of an entrance to the temple within; he slotted into position opposite another monk, each of them hovering beside a wooden rack of neatly folded white garments.

Shen’s colour chilled, and he turned back to Kai, eyes wide in consternation, then brought his face close to Kai’s and repeated in an almost inaudible whisper, “The Epic, in a thousand colours of Elucian.”

Kai held back a silent laugh.

“Sorry,” said Shen sheepishly, then looked around the antechamber passage for some tensely silent moments, before snapping back to face Kai blurting out in a suppressed whimper, as though in reply to an unheard challenge, “What’s that? Yes! Yes, of course I’ve seen all this before. It’s just that whenever I’m here it feels like the first time again! Salvator, do you see those symbols there? Come! Look, Salvator, look!”

Shen dragged Kai over to the curtained entrance, soberly minded by the two monks, and pointed up at the component Elucian symbols chiselled over the archway; he continued in an intense whisper, “Each one symbolises a distinct entity, you see. The two larger circles are Ephaïl and Déhath, and the six smaller ones around them — see? — they are none other than the Light Three and the Dark Three. See how they all fit perfectly together into the one main symbol? Salvator?”

Kai was nodding, smiling, his dark eyes blazing brightly.

“Oh, forgive me, Salvator! Of course you know all this,” said Shen, “You have no doubt seen a thousand holo-casts about this very temple. However, if you will permit me, Salvator, it is really quite different to be here in the flesh. Do you not agree, my friend? Just wait till you see inside. Come!”

Shen pulled Kai towards the curtain, and the two hooded monks came up to them silently, heads bowed, each offering a folded white robe.

“PERFECT!” cried Shen suddenly, then whispered carefully to Kai, “No one will recognise us now, Salvator! We will fit right into the SYStem. I mean, the Way. Well, both, in fact — the Way and the SYStem are as inseparable as god and messiah!”

They accepted the robes respectfully; Kai smiled warmly, but the monks kept their heads bowed safely away from eye contact as they backed away in their long white garb.

“They seem to have the same tailor as the I’sta!” sniggered Shen colourfully, before his face flushed with greyish austerity: “Although, the I’sta would never serve the Elucian Way. Certainly not! Not now. Not like before. Nor would the Way allow them in. Permanent outsiders, you see, having strayed from the pure path.”

Shen pulled the robe past his chaotically sparkling hair and down over his olive uniform until he stood suddenly constrained in grubby white, one shoulder squashed up higher than the other and his neck thrust forwards, as though his spine had been broken into submission. He smiled through an embarrassed blush as Kai pulled on a more well-fitting robe.

“My dear Salvator — are you ready?” asked Shen, awkwardly straightening himself out.

Kai’s smile broadened in excitement, and they moved towards the curtain.

“Oh, and Salvator,” croaked Shen from within his restraining jacket, “As for what they said back there in the forum.... I mean, there seems, at times, to be certain — how shall I say? — misgivings from some citizens regarding...well, regarding me. Please, I’d rather you did not pay too much attention to what others say about me, my boy. I will be a wonderful friend to you, Salvator, I promise you, if you will allow. I have no particular wish to be ‘popular’, as such, but.... Well, I am simply somewhat misunderstood, you see. I change my mind and manner rather often. I am fully aware of this. It is simply my nature. Consistency is overrated, Salvator. I have always been of this opinion! Well...for as long as I can remember, and.... Ohhh, my, by the Three...!”

The monks stood, bowed, with the ends of the drawn curtains in their pale hands, allowing Kai and Shen to drift through the gaping entrance — their mouths fell open as the Elucian Temple opened out and revealed its endless, faultless grace before them.

Next chapter — The Elucian Temple

Sunday 6 March 2011

11.05 Revelation — Grand Entrance

2011-02-13T00:01:00.029+01:00

As the rain pelted down, pealing into the golden dome far above, Kai and Shen darted over the silvering sheen of the forum away from the SYS-soldiers, who were still flooding the Religious Quarter in fear. As their feet dashed across mosaicked Elucian symbols in black and white, each of which revealed only one of its component discs, neither Shen nor Kai could contain their excitement — they made straight for a vast semi-circular archway, one of the looming temple’s four grand entrances carved perfectly through the smoothly hewn wall, which stretched up and up and up in a silky, seemingly endless windowless curve of marble until the stone flowed indiscernibly to faultless gold in the crowning dome. Droplets of rain hissed off Shen’s bio-holographic skin as he raced, and his mouth bobbed from half- to fully open in awe at the lines and curves of inlaid gold and silver and jewels that glistened out from the wet walls; had he actually needed breath, it would have been lost in sheer exhilaration. It did not take long, however, before his mouth fluttered back into hyperactivity —

“You know, Salvator, we are so used to all these colours representing ‘classical Elucian art’ — their purity, subtlety, simplicity. But when the Eluciaë were here and built this, the sun was, in fact, you know, a completely different colour, completely different, in a different phase of its evolution, so everything here — gold and marble and silver obsidian emerald alabaster and...and...everything — it would all have appeared really rather different, not at all what we expect today, and...and...just...more — just more!”

Kai chuckled a glance from under his sodden curls over at Shen as they scurried and wove their way past and through the citizens of Destiny.

“Oh, Salvator, forgive me! This is all simply so...so exciting for me, to be in the presence of such wonder. And excitement just...just surrounds me, fills me, consumes me! You may actually regret — if you do not mind me saying — regret being unable to tell me to...to just shut up! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! But you’re doing your ‘silent soul’ thing. I understand. I ‘get it’ — even though I am not entirely sure who you are, or wish to be, or aim to be, or.... I have no doubt that you could cultivate your own following in the Religious Quarter, Salvator, if that is, in fact, your wish. Hundreds, maybe thousands would be eager to hear what you...well, what you can’t actually say. Many a successful career in Destiny is built upon such carefully crafted fame...and...and....”

Kai sniggered silently again in Shen’s irresistible wash of colour, as he looked back to see if they were being followed.

“I mean,” continued Shen, “If your parents thought you were this special boy, and...”

her silent choking cry

“And...well, every parent thinks that, don’t they?” he said idly.

Kai smarted from the sting, and his smile drained into the rain.

“If you can harness and exploit that ‘entitlement to adoration’ aura thing, though, you might actually get some believers, followers, disciples, lovers, whatever...whether or not you actually ever do anything!”

Shen noticed Kai’s fading smile; he leapt ahead, span round and his legs continued propelling him backwards without faltering, facing Kai directly as his brow creased the the colour from his face.

“Well, at least you know your parents,” stammered Shen, his lip starting to quiver as he galloped backwards, “Or, I assume you do...Salvator. Dear Salvator. You see, I myself do not have that particular privilege. I’m not even sure what they were, or if they are still alive. But you...you...Salvator?”

Shen’s voice trailed off as Kai slowed to a distracted saunter and looked up in astonishment. Shen spun back round to the front in a clumsily faultless movement, then slid into a stroll alongside Kai. Treading carefully together in awe, Shen put his arm around Kai’s shoulders, as the buzzing flow of souls increased around them into the gaping mouth of the temple entrance. As they strained their necks to look up at the temple wall, they could now see raindrops flicking hissing sparks off translucent holographic windows, tall and strait, and flush with the wall and replicating its colour and texture; the line of windows coiled up around the half sphere of the temple towards the dome in an almost imperceptible line. Etched into the stone rim of the entrance, which curved up to ten times Kai’s height, were yet more glittering component symbols. Shen suddenly burst into a fit of uncontrollably luminous laughter and hopped several times excitedly before wresting himself back to a more subdued and respectable glow.

“Well, this is it, my inaudible friend,” whispered Shen in Kai’s ear, clenching his elation behind his bio-holographic teeth as they stepped as one beneath the massive arch.

“Welcome to the Elucian Temple.”

Next chapter — The Antechamber Ring

Sunday 20 February 2011

11.04 Revelation — Time

2011-01-30T00:01:00.011+01:00

Nira tightened the bloodied cloth around her hand as she looked up at the opening door — a tall line of sombre Truth Warriors flowed in, swathed in the beats and shouts of music and revelry from the bar. They fell into position one by one around the flaking walls of the circular chamber, forming a ring around Nira and the flickering hologram of the Elucian Temple in the centre.

The warrior twins who had been guarding the door followed after and took up similar positions by the door inside the chamber. Behind them came Jhor, whose downturned eyes were dark and troubled; she came to rest away from the group, close to the hologram. Finally, Sann entered alone; as bright as her young eyes were, they could conceal neither her weakened state from the Truth Surge, nor a sense of foreboding. The Twins closed the door on the thumping beats behind her, and a tense hush hovered in the chamber as the holographic lights flickered emerald ruby over the warriors’ anxious snowy faces.

“Where’s Onnd?” said Nira.

“Master Onnd went ahead to prepare,” said Sann, “She said I should begin.”

“You?!” said Jhor tersely.

Around the walls, warriors’ eyes darted between Sann and Jhor in the heavy silence.

Nira nodded slowly, then stepped out from behind the holograms, her gleaming silver eyes scanning the room.

“Well...,” she said, with a heaviness in her tone, “It’s time.”

Sann stepped towards the middle of the chamber, and spoke slowly: “Sisters. Warriors. It has come sooner than we expected — it will be today.”

The silence in the room became immediately unbreathable. Jhor looked to the floor and shook her head.

“Master Onnd has confirmed an imminent appearance by the High Priest. The time of our Truth is upon us! Onnd says we can no longer...”

Sann’s voice trailed off as Jhor, her head still bowed and shaking in disapproval, began to click a crescendo of tuts from her sparse lips.

“Sann, Sann, Sann, my dear,” came her dark whisper, “So much promise, yet so...young. You cannot yet see where this will lead us. I have said...”

“I think we’re all aware of what you think by now,” said Nira, stepping in between them, her eyes blazing.

Jhor narrowed her smoky eyes at her.

“We can’t just sit around waiting for false prophets,” continued Nira.

“How dare you, Nira!” hissed Jhor, “You do not share our beliefs.”

Nira’s eyes blazed up, then softened a little as she took a deep breath.

“You’re right, Jhor. I don’t. But I’m concerned that...”

“So why are you even here?!” spat Jhor suddenly, cutting her off.

Nira’s eyes flared up again to platinum white.

“Stop right there, Jhor!” said Nira firmly, yet respectfully, “You asked me for help. And I have given it. For years now.”

“For which we have paid dearly.”

“Well, you could pay better, to be honest, for the risks I take,” snapped Nira, before sweeping scarlet towards Jhor: “I sympathise with your cause. Truly. But this is my place. You want my help, we’ll do things my way, and...”

As Nira approached, Jhor lifted her staff very slightly. Nira stopped short, glared down at the staff in disbelief, then lifted her defiant, blazing gaze to pierce deep into Jhor’s smoky challenge. All breath in the room stopped short. Nira pressed in tight clenching her fury behind her teeth as she glared up at the warrior: “I don’t care how powerful you think you are, Jhor Hal — or would like to be — but if you ever so much as breathe at me in a way I don’t like...you’ll see something, Jhor, even you.”

Jhor lowered her staff and her eyes. Sann’s mouth curled up almost imperceptibly at one side.

“Besides,” continued Nira, softening her tone, “I need to know everything going on here, so I know what to deny later on. I have profits to consider.”

Some of the warriors sniggered secretly, dispersing some of the tension. Then Nira turned and addressed the warriors as one.

“My friends, this is not the time for doubt or indecision. That time has passed. This was the course of action you all voted on, and that’s why I’m here — to help you. It’s time to take a stand against the SYStem for your Truth!”

Nira looked around as the warriors took a breath as one, and pulled themselves up taller. Jhor backed away slightly.

Nira nodded and turned: “Sann.”

Sann steeled herself and stepped into the centre. The light of the holograms — the galaxy, the branch map, the circular city, and the temple — shimmered around her as she spoke.

“My sisters — Destiny’s Tree is rotten from the core,” she said with quiet authority, “We will cut it down, so it can grow afresh. We are no longer the branches. We are the roots of the new!"

The warriors around the room nodded quietly.

“We shall bring this age to a close! I’sta — prepare for the end!”

“I’sta!” came the spontaneous chorus, and the warriors lifted their staffs to Sann — all but Jhor, who kept her staff down as her dark eyes glared. Sann met her gaze — she held no anger, no fury, no forced austerity. Instead her look was defiantly pure and held Jhor’s glare without fear, without doubt. Slowly, Jhor looked down again and lifted her staff suppliantly.

Sann acknowledged Jhor’s declaration with no sense of victory; she simply offered her noble humbleness: “It will be an honour to fight by your side, Jhor.”

Jhor nodded, without meeting Sann’s eyes.

Sann turned and addressed the room again: “Outer circle, line the forum in preparation! Inner circle, we must wait here for Onnd to return.”

The Twins pulled open the door, allowing most of the warriors to file out from the chamber through the thumping beats of the bar towards the exit on the far side, leaving a smaller circle of warriors to tighten in around Sann, Nira and Jhor by the shimmering temple.

Next chapter — Grand Entrance

Sunday 13 February 2011

11.03 Revelation — Simple Pleasures

2011-01-23T00:01:00.012+01:00

Lúez strode back into the forum through the stone archway with an almost
elegant gait, once again strapped and buckled tightly into sculpted sable black. The SYS-soldiers standing close by, who had been happily harassing the citizens of Destiny, stopped cold when they saw him and tensed to attention, each suddenly smothered by an icy blanket of dread — even without the knowledge that he was, in fact, one of the Dark Three.

Lúez’s cold eyes were still trained on the hapless family of four scurrying away over the forum; the father was urging his family on more quickly, much to their annoyance, as he twisted back his neck to see if the shadow of the SYS-officer was still upon them. Lúez looked ahead again, and his mouth curled into a hideous grin; as he paced silently forwards, his shadow crept over an unwitting SYS-soldier like an eclipse — a junior officer with two thin, red stripes on his black collar, and his back to the SYS-officer as he barked orders at a group of soldiers over whom he apparently had some semblance of authority. One by one, the soldiers’ blood turned to ice and their eyes peeled wide as they watched the SYS-officer descending upon their commander. As they all stretched themselves up into terrified attention, the junior officer stopped barking and cocked his head to one side, confused regarding the sudden show of respect from his underlings. Then an icy rasp pierced his ear —

“I assume...you have them,” came the hiss.

The junior officer understood at once; he gulped hard, pulled himself up straight and turned around reluctantly to look up at the SYS-officer.

“No, um...,” he forced through his drying, tightening throat, “Not actually...yet, Sir!”

Lúez crooked over his sculpted spine, bringing his ashen face within a fetid breath of the junior officer’s twitching mouth. A single, splurting cackle spat from his torn lips —

“Yet?!”

The junior officer gulped harder, and faster, but neither air nor words came as he redefined his concept of how much regret was possible in one short life.

“I...I....”

Lúez explained in a sinisterly emotionless rasp: “Well...we will have them...or we will no longer have you.”

“Yes, yes of course, Sir, and...”

Two other junior officers sporting similar insignia and terror slid nervously up into the SYS-officer’s shadow, temporarily delivering their colleague from further humiliation. With eyes as dead as joy, the SYS-officer sliced at the air three times with his adamantine claw, and the officers scurried off at once in different directions. His eyes followed after the soldier to his right as he scurried secretly away in pursuit of the family of four, and then back to the first junior officer as he resumed barking orders, his throat gradually opening again and his quick, quivering legs keeping him just ahead of his taller troops as he dragged them towards the Religious Quarter.

Lúez started slowly towards the temple and grinned to himself: “Such simple pleasures.”

Moments later screams of panic pierced the air as the junior officer had his troops pull down orators from the edge of the Religious Quarter. Shen’s finger was still prodding Kai’s chest as they both looked up at the light of the sun wavering through darkening clouds over the dome of the temple.

“‘A dying star is our salvation true’,” whispered Shen.

Kai’s dark eyes blazed. A drop of moisture spattered onto his left hand. He clenched his fist at the slight sting, and held it with his right hand. With a hiss, a droplet landed in Shen’s wiry mass of glowing hair and a rainbow wisp of of steam snaked up, almost like a new strand of chaotic hair coming to life. A flock of four-winged birds flapped up from the forum’s stone in a crackle of unexplained fear, just moments before an ominous rumble filled the air.

it’s time

“I do believe it is time, Salvator,” said Shen at once, “Destiny’s skies are far from kind to visitors — your skin is yet too thin.”

The clouds broke. Abrasive rain cascaded down as though an invisible canopy had been pulled asunder. Above the temple, an energy field crackled and fizzled into shape — a million tiny sparks shimmered into a funnel, drawing the rain towards and through the lofty roof. Immediately a tapestry of chimes wove through the air in a glittering choral knell. The SYS-soldiers tightened in around the far end of the Religious Quarter and more shrieks and cries wove into the chorus. Shen and Kai grabbed each other’s arms and pushed and pulled and shouldered their way through the unruly crowd until they finally shot out into the open forum and ran straight towards the temple.

Watching the trickling specks of Kai and Shen from high above as they ran through rainbows in his direction, Lúez stood observing from a tall, narrow opening in the stone wall of a stairwell in the ancient temple. He swallowed deeply, then curled his grey lips into a private, rasping sneer —

“It's time.”

Next chapter — Time

Sunday 30 January 2011

11.02 Revelation — The Shadow of the Way

2011-01-16T00:01:00.072+01:00

As Kai and Shen stood looking up in awe at the temple, on the far side of the forum the SYS-officer — Luéz — strode in. SYS-soldiers all around tensed to attention, and three junior officers slid up to him nervously. They held there for a moment in tense discussion, then, following three efficient gestures from the SYS-officer’s adamantine claw, the three ran their separate ways: one stumbled away to the SYS-officer’s left, and dragged a troop of SYS-soldiers deeper into the forum past the broken bazaar; another scuttled off alone to his right; the third rounded up another unit of SYS-soldiers and marched straight ahead — towards the Religious Quarter. The SYS-officer himself finally made off slowly in the direction of the temple.

Shen shook his varicoloured head and awoke from his trance of wonderment, then resumed shouldering an orbit around Kai, whose ardent dark eyes remained trained on the Way ahead, as the three orators continued preaching over the murmuring chorus.

“So, young man, you are here to find your true Elucian Way, I presume?” said Shen politely.

Kai looked at him; his eyes blazed like black fires beneath his mass of dark curls.

“Yes, of course you are — you and each and every one of the thousands of new Destiners every day! To name a planet ‘Destiny’ is an inspired stimulus for its economy!”

“...the cheapest, most energy-efficient Way to immortality...”

“And Destiny can offer every one of you so very much,” continued Shen, accelerating into an unbroken breathless string of enthusiasm, “Everyone is promised a new life here, everyone, even if it’s not always the one they expected. If you cannot afford to stay on the main island, the Way will even offer you inexpensive housing on the far side of the planet — if you are strong enough to do without regular visits to the temple, then you can probably live without sunlight, wouldn’t you agree?”

“...the light of life and renewal...”

Shen’s colour faded suddenly to pale yellow: “Forgive me, my boy! How rude of me, I did not introduce myself. My name is Shen. Shen Sol-Pá.”

Kai remained silent, and they looked at each other awkwardly for a moment.

“Well...,” continued Shen, “Perhaps, if it’s not too much trouble, you could...tell me your name also?”

Kai gestured, somewhat embarrassedly, towards his mouth, then courteously extended a hand to Shen. Colour flowed back to Shen’s face immediately, and, overjoyed, he grabbed Kai and hugged him warmly.

“It’s fine, fine, fine — you’re a silent soul. I understand, I do!”

“...and only One will fulfil the three great prophecies...”

Releasing Kai from his forceful hold, Shen sank immediately into seriousness. His brow furrowed grey, and he pulled up his sleeve, checking his arm where it had been bitten.

“How...how did you do that?” he stammered, “I’m...this...my skin is bio-holographic. Inside I’m just...just light, fluid light. And you.... Just one tear in this skin and I’m....” His hands flicked into the air to illustrate his potential death of dispersal. “I need it for atmospheres, you see. I can go at any time! Any time! But me...my light...you held it. Shaped it!”

“...we embrace the light of Ephaïl...”

Shen’s eyes burned bright and wide, and his building tension shook him from deep inside until he could no longer contain his colour.

“It’s the prophecy! It must be!!”

Almost immediately his voice and hue began to cool again.

“Well, it could be. There are so many of these prophecies. Certainly, the one in question is the first official prophecy of the Way, but...there are thousands of these ‘fulfilments’ every day here in Destiny.”

“...the light in every one of us...”

“You could be simply choosing not to speak, for all I know. That happens all the time.”

“...and it is time for us all to speak up, for we are all One!”

Shen suddenly flared into a scarlet rage and leapt over and up to the second orator’s box, shouting sarcastically, “Yes, we’re all the One! Of course we are! The Way has always supported each and every One...especially the rich Ones.”

Laughter rippled through the crowd, and Shen leapt down in a flamboyant gesture of gold for his audience. The first orator shouted over at him —

“You ridicule the Way? The Gods?!”

Again Shen blazed up and leapt across at him. The crowd divided to let his fury blast through, and the orator began quivering in his plush, purple velvet.

“The Way?” called out Shen, “Ridicule the Way? No. Only you, you indicime!”

The crowd let out a peal of laughter, but Shen cut them off with furious cries: “And anyone else that claims to know the deepest secrets of the universe. Especially when they can afford clothes like these!”

He tugged at the trembling orator’s robes, almost pulling him down, and the crowd laughed again, nervously. Shen roared in hysterics at the orator’s quivering terror, then raised a glowing hand to the sky and bowed to end his performance.

In the distance, the first group of SYS-soldiers marched out of sight around the temple. The SYS-officer, skirting past the far edge of the Religious Quarter looked vaguely up to his right as Shen leapt from the box back to Kai. The second group of soldiers reached the edge of the Religious Quarter and started grabbing citizens by the arms and feathers.

“Don’t listen to the I’sta propaganda! No, no — the Way is for you!”

Shen looked over at the SYS-soldiers, pushing in closer.

“We were lucky before,” said Shen, distractedly, his colour fading nervously pale, “If the I’sta hadn’t been there with their emotion...staff...things, then we would be in quite some trouble now.”

“They are not the True Elucian as they say, but scheming outsiders!”

“But we won’t be safe here for long. The Religious Quarter is not what it used to be, I fear! Although, to be truthful, I cannot remember very much from before....”

“Join the Way, now, and then we can really make a difference. New volunteers are signing up today at the temple.”

Kai’s eyes burned black as the orator spoke.

“Come on, Salvator,” said Shen and started to push his way out from the impatient triangle, but Kai gently took his arm, pulled him back, and turned them both to face the massive Elucian Temple. The skies behind the imposing, golden dome began to darken.

“Well...you did come here to find your Elucian Way,” said Shen apprehensively, prodding Kai’s chest with a single, shining finger, “So there is really only one place you might find your truth.”

The SYS-officer’s second group of soldiers started tearing down orators at the edge of the Religious Quarter; screams of panic pierced the air.

The SYS-officer himself was no longer anywhere to be seen.

Next chapter — Simple Pleasures

Sunday 23 January 2011

11.01 Revelation — The Religious Quarter

2011-01-09T00:01:00.089+01:00

Shen hauled Kai along with one hand, the other fumbling the top three buttons of his coat back into their slots, as they scuttered towards a teeming quarter of the forum beneath the imposing dome of the temple. All around them, various life forms stood and perched and hung and swung on boxes, crates and poles, preaching and proclaiming out over groups of voracious listeners. Shen looked back at the SYS-soldiers fanning out into the forum asking questions, then dragged Kai into the middle of a tightly packed congregation within a triangle of orators. As the crowd closed in around them, the three speakers seemed more interested in disproving the others’ claims than reeling in new believers to their respective folds. The audience remained enthralled in apathy anyway. The first speaker spoke as smoothly as the purple velvet of his robes —

“I’ll say again, we should simply follow and trust in the light three — the luminous Gaíl, Miché and Jesthí. They will make themselves known to us when the time is right...”

The second orator cut in, wagging a long finger in front of his straggly beard, which was green, like his austere regalia —

“No, no, no! No! We simply cannot wait for help, not even for the light three. We have no way of knowing who or what or where they are, so we must take arms against the dark evil of Lúez, Túra and Sílb ourselves — no matter what!”

The third, a quadruped of tarnished brass, purred with calculated elegance —

“I’m sorry, but our focus should truly stay on the light three — they are sublime immortals, reborn time and time again, often unaware themselves until later in their lives. They deserve our trust and support and...”

“No, no, no! It’s the insecurity of the shapeshifting dark three that need our attention. They are here, among us — now! These beasts have lived since the beginning, but they can be killed. It is our duty to seek them out and cut them down.”

“My corporeal colleagues, time and again time, allow their fleshy substance to be infected by emotion. We have run highly effective diagnostics of the Epic, from which we can compute that the light three and the dark three all contain elements of both Ephaïl and Déhath. This is a simple, conclusive truth based on the perfect facts with which we have been programmed. Yet it is us — we machines — that are constantly accused of perceiving only absolutes. I emit to you now — even a rudimentary task-based terminal can decipher what they cannot, these fleshy weaklings and their — ha...ha, ha ha — their ‘Way of the Perpetually Confused’.”

The argument continued crackling around them, to murmurs of concurrence and disapproval. Shen looked back nervously — the SYS-soldiers were spreading through the forum, but not towards the Religious Quarter. Suddenly he flared up in brightly overjoyed colour, and jumped about. His top button flicked open. Kai looked at him, partly in fear, partly in confusion. Shen, seeing Kai’s look, and the glares from those around him, quickly wrested himself cool again.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Kai, “We’re safe now. This is the Religious Quarter — people only ever look for themselves here!”

Shen turned silent and looked aside, then, as he scrutinised the words he had just heard himself say, he swelled up again into a bright flurry of colourfully proud chortles, as though he had just invented humour, interrupting the orators, and drawing looks from the audience; many were looking at him through narrowed eyes, as though they could not decide whether to reprimand or revere him. Shen looked around, and shrank away from the gazing, glaring eyes, shyly buttoning up his coat with a whispered, “Sorry.” Quickly losing interest, everyone turned back to the orators. Shen regained his colour and began pacing around Kai, shouldering his way past annoyed spectators as he went.

“Oh, Salvator!” he cried, “Look all around you, my good, good friend — a thousand colours of Elucian. I’ve been looking, looking for as long as I can remember, for the colour to suit me best!” He stopped and looked around, various hues shimmering across his face as myriad life forms and religions filled his eyes, before he sighed distractedly, “For as long as I can remember, indeed.”

Shen’s gaze fell; his attention seeped away. The crowd murmured around his dimming silence. The sun dipped behind the massive temple, cooling all in grey, and Shen looked up sharply, as though he had been prodded back from slumber.

“So many searching souls here,” he continued, then twisted back his glistening neck to look up at the huge temple, “And all of them in the protective, tolerant, nurturing shadow of the official cult — the Elucian Way.”

Next chapter — The Shadow of the Way

Sunday 16 January 2011

10.17 Revelation — Lúez

2010-12-26T00:01:00.042+01:00

The purple-lipped girl ran to Blaiput, crying out, “Oh, oh, honey! So soooooorry!” and crouched down beside him, taking his head into her lap, stroking his greasy, scaly hair.

While Sann was still recovering from the Truth Surge, Onnd lifted her staff and pointed it down at Kai. Her stark lips parted, about to speak, but Shen, on the other side of Kai, blurted in —

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! So...uh...you!” he said, pointing at Kai with a fluorescent finger, “You took my...you knew...you HEALED me! How did...?”

Before Kai could even prepare his silence with a breath, Shen erupted into an exalted flurry of colour —

“You...are...my...SAVIOUR! Salvator of light! Light! LIGHT!!!”

He fell suddenly pale and silent. His mouth dropped open and the air turned icy still around him, as he muttered —

“‘One...One silent soul to...to bear the Light.’”

His face began to flush and his voice slowly rose towards a new intonation —

“‘To hold a truth concealed.’”

Finally his rapture burst into a blinding rainbow of realisation —

“In limbs of light as One! The One! You are the Chosen One!!!!! You must be, boy!!!”

Sann, still breathing heavily, looked up at Shen. Onnd’s eyes remained trained on Kai, unmoved.

The preacher caressed his pet reassuringly and helped it to its clumsy feet.

“Oh Blaiput, honey,” continued the girl, oblivious to Shen’s cries, “That was, like, soooo terrible! I don’t know what I would do if I lost you, or, like...totally....”

Her voice trailed off as the young follower she had been pursuing looked back at her shyly from behind the staggering hydra. The girl smiled back coyly, wriggled her fingers into a wave, and stood up — Blaiput’s head dropped straight back down onto the hard stone.

“Oh, my poor heads!” grunted Blaiput to himself, looking around at his crushed and broken canisters all over the forum while holding onto his own overwhelmed skull with one hand, untangling himself from the rope with another.

As Kai looked up at Onnd and Shen in silent, wide-eyed fear, awaiting either judgement, staff or madness to crash down onto him, the two warriors suddenly raised their heads as one and looked behind them, as though some unheard signal had pierced their ears. Shen’s colours cooled immediately, as did his accent: “Oh. Well, I would rather not have to trouble you at this moment, young Salvator, but, you see, the SYS-troops will be here soon, very soon.”

Distant sirens wafted into the still air around them.

“Indeed,” continued Shen, “And, without doubt, they will blame absolutely everything on anyone close to the I’sta here, and...”

Shen gestured up at the warriors as he spoke — but they were gone.

Suddenly the steely sun blazed through the clouds and a blustery gust whistled through. From the far-off archways, oppressive SYS-soldiers began to make their way into the forum, grabbing people and hurling questions. Shen helped Kai to his feet as the wind threw back their hair; Kai’s long strands of curling black snaked in and around Shen’s chaotic shimmer of crystal as they stood in silence for a moment, shoulder to shoulder, looking into the distance.

“Well come on!” said Shen suddenly, scratching his behind, “We can’t stand around here all day just looking...amazingly handsome! Follow me, Salvator!”

Shen spun round and dragged Kai away towards the temple, as the preacher calmly led away his broken beast in the opposite direction, tottering towards the forum wall into a sea of soldiers and through a teeming archway. Once through, they clandestinely turned into a dingy, deserted alleyway.

The cold light of the sun licked dimly in over the lofty tops of the crumbling stone walls of the narrow passageway, along with the eerie whistling gust. The weary hydra stepped forward into its master’s shadow within the gloom. It stopped, sniffed around with lethargically flicking tongues, and looked down — by its heavy hooves lay a body stripped of clothes, its flimsy neck twisted up unnaturally, revealing the bloodied, lifeless face — the preacher!

As the hydra stood with comprehension seeping slowly in, the shadow began to shift around it. Its serpent necks twisted round, but before it could see its master, a hideous adamantine claw slashed in and gouged and hacked at its serpent necks; all but one of the snakes vanished at once leaving only dripping, seeping gashes of gore on the hydra’s massive body. The beast had nothing left; it hissed and fell to its knees, and wailed into the air for mercy with one lonely serpent maw. The contoured claw of steely black grabbed the last neck, and squeezed, then pulled it towards the forming face — the SYS-officer! The skin of his cheeks hung like bloody lips. With his other claw he tore off his fraudulent preacher’s robes and fished into his sable SYS-uniform for the metal barbs, which he then lifted to his cheeks, gouged into his own skin and pulled the gaping wounds closed. Crushing away the beast’s remaining life, the SYS-officer glared straight through the hydra’s two remaining eyes.

“Think yourself remarkable?!” he taunted in a sickly hiss through vitreous teeth.

From the hydra’s broken, dying body sixteen tiny, embryonic serpent heads began to sprout.

“Or your regenerative malevolence?!” he continued, then pulled the serpent even closer to his ragged, grey lips and spat a derisive sneer: “Creature of a day!”

His long, razor digits tightened and crushed the final breath from the beast, and as its dark eyes glazed over, he let the carcass drop to the ground. The foetal heads continued growing for a moment, then dwindled, the SYS-officer watching on with a callous grin.

At the mouth of the passage behind the SYS-officer, the family of four that had fled from him earlier scuttled past in a squabble. The mother had seized command and was holding her left hand up in front of her, following the map on her hand-film. The young boy and girl skipped on ahead, still trying to find the right mythological figure to vanquish one another, as their father dragged along behind, having been supplanted. He looked idly into the alleyway as he walked past. Without thinking, he stopped and peered through the murk. His eyes adjusted, and his mouth fell open as he glimpsed the SYS-officer towering over two battered, bloodied corpses.

“But I said!” came the voice of the boy, as he ran on ahead into the forum crawling with SYS-soldiers, “You can’t beat me. I’m...I’m Lú...”

The boy’s voice echoed away. The SYS-officer twisted round his sallow head and spied the man.

“Yes,” he hissed softly, softly enough to envelop and pierce the man with dread, then sneered, “That’s right, child — Lúez!”

The father gulped hard and retched at dry air, then scurried away to his family as fast as his pounding heart and quivering legs would allow.

Lúez snorted a private, sickly cackle, then followed slowly after them, back towards the forum.

Next chapter — The Religious Quarter

Sunday 9 January 2011

10.16 Revelation — Surge

2010-12-19T00:01:00.028+01:00

It might only have been an edge of a flake of skin on the end of Kai’s fingertip that connected with the truth staff, but as Onnd leapt away at the hydra, followed loyally by Sann, a thousand emotions convulsed as one vibration through Kai’s face in a fraction of a second before his body went limp and fell, his eyes turned wide and blank, and his gaping mouth took no air.

Onnd and Sann flowed into perfect concentric circles in opposite directions around the hydra, working in fluid harmony to land blow upon blow on the hapless beast. The preacher, on the other side of the whirling battle, lifted his arms to the sky and wailed, “Submit to the mighty Marklar! Test your faith-ah!” His followers ran that way and this, unsure of what was to come, in the next life or before. As the warriors orbited the beast like spritely white particles, the hydra twisted round on its heavy legs, thrusting its snapping serpent jaws out into the blur. As it did, the tether tautened, reeling in the panicking Shen and Blaiput, bound helplessly to the beast at one end and the lifeless Kai on the other.

As the warriors landed on lissom feet, elastic energy pervaded their muscles immediately impelling them up again into an endless fluid dance in which gravity had no say. At each hidden strike the monster flinched in immense fear, but with the preacher grinning on behind it, the beast seemed only to be growing stronger, recovering more quickly.

With a terrifying, deathly rasp Kai suddenly lurched up straight between Shen and Blaiput who stifled their cries at once and stared at Kai as Kai stared out agape with eyes awash, aswirl with surging sighs upon the flowing truth in mists of slender shadowed staffs outstretched from urgent flowing white to dim its prime a child in crimson flush in restless anguish seeing all and naught in secret bodies streaking silent courses to a fiery close in incandescent arcs to wake his sight his queen in white and grey alone with flaming eyes as shadows burn and swallow all...

Without warning, the white trails ended abruptly with the warriors standing calmly upon the forum’s sheen — breathing only slightly more deeply than before — their staffs by their sides, directly in front of Kai, Shen and Blaiput. The wounded hydra staggered over to the preacher, pulling the pile of three across the stone; Onnd and Sann stepped aside to let them slide past.

“What? WHAAAT?!” screamed Shen in red, “You’re just going to let us...us.... DO SOMETHING!!!!”

Onnd flicked her piercing glare down at him. His colours froze at once, and he squashed a reserved, “Please?” out his throat as he slipped over the stone.

At the other end of the tether, the preacher placed his hands upon the hydra’s new heads, crying out, “By faith in Him-ah we are restored by Ephaïl’s eternal light-ah!” Onnd and Sann looked at each other; a hint of uncertainty etched lines across their high brows, as, in front of the preacher, the hydra quickly revived and grew in strength — and size. The preacher cackled loudly and cried out, “The Marklar! The mighty Marklar prevails over even the once-great I’sta!”

The hydra spun round, its writhing serpents full of fury, and began thundering straight towards them. Shen and Blaiput clattered fresh screams off each other. Kai looked on, agape, silent. Onnd turned to Sann and calmly uttered a single word —

“I’sta.”

Sann’s eyes peeled even wider in disbelief and apprehension, but Onnd nodded, and smiled. Shen heard; he stopped screaming and strained his neck to look back at the warriors.

“Truth? TRUTH? A TRUTH SURGE?!!! WITH US HERE IN THE MIDDDDLE?!!!!!” he screamed in scarlet wrath. Blaiput ceased his sobs and looked at Shen with wide eyes full of realisation. Shen’s red flushed away to a green as pale as his coat; he gulped, then whimpered, “We’re lost!” The two tried with renewed vigour to scramble away in opposite directions, but the tether held them fast. Kai simply looked around, as though hypnotised. The hydra hurled itself into a gallop across the stone. Realising there was no way to free himself in time, Shen grabbed Blaiput with a surprising surge of strength and wrestled him to the front to bear the brunt of the imminent assault.

Sann had still not moved. Her breath quickened. Onnd nodded, and whispered, “You are ready, my Sann. Trust!” then leapt away towards the hydra, sailing over its knotted necks, and stretched out her staff in the air to run an agonisingly graceful line down the monster’s spine as she passed. The hydra wailed out louder than ever as it slowed — but it did not stop. Onnd came to a faultless rest in front of the preacher and glared disgust straight into his eyes, holding up her staff as a warning. The preacher simply grinned — albeit nervously — and they both looked back at the charging hydra.

Sann took a deep breath and kneeled. She wrapped her staff into her robes, flicked the mesh-gloves from her palms and closed her eyes. She drew in a deep breath of time, then took her staff in her bare right hand — at once her neck twisted involuntarily in pain; she steeled herself against it and retook her composure, then lifted up her left hand towards the charging beast. The hydra faltered, shaking its heads at some unseen force, but fought on. Sann closed her eyes again and focussed her strength.

Those looking on in the forum saw nothing.

Kai, however, saw all — his head swam and his heart raced as he looked back and forth between Sann and the beast, wide eyes ablaze, no longer able to blame the lowly sun and clouds above for what he saw. A strand of shadow twisted out from the centre of the hydra as it ran, and snaked towards Sann’s staff. As the shadow swelled and spun, light began to bloom deep within the warrior’s body. The hydra slowed and breathed heavily; the glow inside Sann intensified as the staff drew shadow from the charging beast. And when its venomous thunder was almost raining down onto Kai and the others, Sann calmly uttered —

“I’sta.”

Her word cut like a dagger through Kai’s eyes and down into his heart — “Truth”.

A sudden pall of shadow wrenched out of the beast directly into Sann’s staff, and then, her heart ablaze, a bolt of blinding illumination shot out from her centre through her left arm and straight into the massive beast. The hydra simply collapsed at once, unconscious, as though all its breath had been sucked from it, and slid to a halt inches from Kai, as the whirling clouds of light and dark dispersed around him.

Sann remained on the ground, head down, breathing heavily. Onnd looked back at the dumbfounded preacher; the corner of her mouth curled up in defiance, before, with the tiniest flick of her foot, she leapt up high, high into the air, sailed over the broken body of the hydra, and landed with perfect grace beside Sann. Sann swallowed hard and forced herself to her feet with her staff — its texture was noticeably darker than before. As she raised her eyes to her master’s, Onnd put a tender palm to her disciple’s cheek and whispered proudly, “My Sann!”

Shen looked around, throughly unimpressed: “Is that it?! Really?! No fireworks or explosions or anything?! I always thought the ‘surge’ would be so much more...impressive!”

The blinding light still ablaze inside him, Kai looked at Shen in disbelief — had he not seen the truth?

The hydra stirred; first one head awoke sluggishly, then another and another, each hissing a faint whimper as they looked up and around, terrified and broken. The preacher erupted in tears of joy as it revived, painfully aware of the price of smuggling a new hydra cub into Destiny. He ran to his pet and threw his arms around its feeble necks. His few remaining followers scuttled in behind him, having nowhere else to go, followed by the purple-lipped girl, who seemed to have forgotten everything and was now eagerly eyeing one of the preacher’s young followers.

The I’sta turned to Kai and stepped towards him, as Shen finally loosed himself from the tether, apparently now with ease, and looked at the warriors with insipid disinterest as they trained their intense eyes down onto Kai. Kai looked back up at them in trepidation. In tense silence, all eyes in the forum flicked from the warriors to the boy and back to the warriors.

Ignored completely, Blaiput sighed gruffly, “I fine. No, really...I fine.”

Next chapter — Lúez

Sunday 26 December 2010

10.15 Revelation — I'sta

2010-12-12T00:01:00.013+01:00

Eight serpent heads lunged with long fangs dripping venom — Kai, Shen and Blaiput could do nothing but force their eyes shut in preparation for death as it rushed down onto them.

There was a terrifying scream — but death did not come.

Kai cracked opened one eye to see the massive hydra recoiling in pain — and fear — from Sann’s elegant staff, which was held lightly and surely in front of them. Sann remained poised like a statue on her lithe, cloth-bound feet as the beast stumbled and trembled backwards, straining at the tether, which ensnared Kai, Shen and Blaiput as one. Onnd stayed to the side, observing.

The hydra stumbled to a halt breathing heavily, as it slowly regained composure; its serpent heads revived one by one and rose defiantly into the air. When all eight had come around, they let out another screech in chorus and the beast took a single obstinate step towards Sann. Before it had even thought to take its next step, however, Sann was upon it — there was no noticeable preparation for the leap, and her movements made no sound; quicker than a heartbeat she was simply soaring through a gracefully potent arc towards the hydra with her staff, and as she spun and twisted effortlessly through the air to land, she flicked the staff towards one serpent head and brushed the tip upon its scaly neck like a feather a fraction of a second before her feet returned soundlessly to the ground. The hydra let out a deafening wail and backed away in fear, but the single affected head recovered quickly and the beast lunged back at Sann with a terrible screech. Sann leapt up — again with perfect ease — and over the imposing height of the hydra, flipping around in her gliding arc, twisting her head to look straight down at the serpent heads flailing up at her in the air; she calmly reached out her staff and flicked it with rapid simplicity at one snake then another and another before her elegant curve descended, and as she landed on one slender foot she was immediately in the air again, flowing into a circular dance around the beast, girding it in a blurry volley of fluid, noiseless caressing strikes, each forcing the hydra deeper into a painful stupor of terror, before she came to a sudden, sure rest back between the beast and Kai.

In the lull, Onnd looked around, as though someone had whispered her name — far across the forum the SYS-carer was now carefully watching the battle and talking into his hand-film. Onnd turned back to Sann, breathed a low word of caution, then began walking slowly around the dormant battle. As she stepped, the hydra shook and raised its heads, then lunged and stabbed at Sann. Again Sann leapt without a noise, away to the left — the hydra’s fangs missing her by a breath — leading the beast from Kai. The tether pulled quickly tight, however, and the three, just as they had begun untangling themselves, were dragged out over the stone. The hydra charged at Sann. She leapt at once into a whirling ring of confusion around it; it stopped and thrust its eight heads all about searching for her flesh within the encircling white blur. Sann flicked out her staff from the cloud for a single delicate stroke and one of the hydra’s serpent heads hissed away in fuming fear. Sann reappeared from the blur and landed, but as she did her foot twisted slightly and she stumbled. The hydra recovered quickly and attacked the weakness instinctively.

Onnd’s eyes peeled wide — and she leapt; with impossible grace and ease, she sailed over and through and past the hydra’s writhing necks, then spun around and landed sure. The hydra pounced. Without knowledge of fear, Onnd simply pushed out her smoky staff and let the hulking hydra come. One of the serpents stabbed at it — and before anyone knew or saw or believed, the entire hydra was on the ground before her, rasping wheezing whines of dread.

Sann looked up and smiled humbly at her master, as her long fingers tightened the white cloth bindings around her ankle; beneath her fingertips tiny spots of greyish blue seeped through the fabric. As the massive hydra remained prostrate before Onnd in a quivering heap, she looked round at her student. Onnd said nothing, but her warm, wide eyes held Sann close, filling her with strength. In a blink of finesse Sann was back on her feet; Onnd’s spare mouth curled softly in pride.

With a sudden, paralysing screech the hydra recovered and leapt at Onnd. Onnd whirled back to face it, whispered a secret word of beauty, and both she and Sann were again in the air; in a single gesture of flawless grace, both staffs thrust down into one of the hydra’s necks, and with staffs whirling to rest by their sides, the warriors landed at exactly same time, at an equal distance on opposite sides of the beast as it staggered and quivered in icy fear — the neck was broken, and hung limply from the massive body. Onnd stood as a statue in front of Kai, Shen and Blaiput as they scrambled into a crouch behind her flowing robes, looking with wide eyes past her to the hydra — the other serpent heads came to from the pain, saw their feeble sibling, and started attacking it, tearing at its broken flesh as it screamed its solitary death throes.

Kai looked up at Onnd as the bloody fratricide continued; light broke from the clouds above the lofty warrior, washing brightness around her ivory robes into Kai’s wide eyes. Onnd, sensing his gaze, looked back and down at him with searingly cool intensity. Kai lowered his eyes and focussed on the fluid, shadowy texture of the staff by her side, then looked back to the hydra — the beast stood still, breathing heavily. The broken neck was gone; as gore dripped from seven serpent jaws around it, two more foetal heads sprouted from the bloodied stump.

“Oh, great!” sighed the preacher, “More mouths to feed!”

As the necks grew and the hydra reared up on its hind legs roaring into the sky, Kai
reached out tentatively towards Onnd’s truth staff. The hydra thundered back to the ground with nine writhing, seething serpent necks and charged straight for Onnd. Shen screamed and tried to crawl away. Blaiput sobbed, and fumbled to untie himself. Onnd and Sann nodded to each other and readied themselves, as Kai’s fingertips brushed up to the staff.

Next chapter — Surge

Sunday 5 December 2010

10.14 Revelation — Sanctus

2010-11-28T00:01:00.022+01:00

The serpent screeched and wailed as it blazed in Shen’s escaping light, which unfurled from his arm like a luminous wing. The hydra’s other serpent heads reeled in pain and horror, as Shen convulsed through colours and fell to the ground clutching at his wound in unfettered fear.

“Help me! Stop it, please!!!” wept Shen, “I’ll die, I’ll DIIIIEEE!”

Sann remained standing close to her master as they continued observing from afar.

The girl pulled ineffectually at Blaiput trying to free him from the flailing hydra’s tether.

The inexorable gushing light filled and swamped Kai’s sight, a surge of wretched fear that bled through Shen’s colour-prism fingers. He looked to Kai in desperate need, in terror, his life, his fading blazing life engulfed in the shadows of a seven-headed beast and its wraithlike keeper. A soul engulfed. Repressed and crushed. And now in silent, searing immolation —

flowing into gold renewed aswirl about the shining outstretched hands

returned

Kai leapt instinctively to Shen; his left hand reached inside the fluid light, unharmed, as his other hand covered the wound. Slowly, calmly — emphatically — the light began to gather and shape around Kai’s fingers. He smiled serenely as the blaze flickered off his gaze.

Onnd’s eyes peeled wide with a fluid ripple of blue. Sann looked to her master — and saw the truth reflected.

The preacher’s mouth fell open, then curled into a grin. He stepped away from his floundering beast towards Kai.

Onnd flicked her hands, and the mesh half-gloves snapped straight to her palms, fusing onto them automatically. She took her staff and rose to her feet.

Kai’s calm intensity pierced the blaze and held it, focussing the light into a single, fantastically bright core. His tranquil breath belied the moment as he pulled it back towards Shen’s skin, the colour of which was rushing from shock to wonder. Released from light, the serpent flailed wildly in its final throes as the flames scorched it down to a stump, then subsided leaving only blackened scales. Kai lifted his right hand from Shen’s arm. Shen’s fearful, wide eyes pierced Kai’s; the warm serenity of Kai’s deep gaze calmed him. Shen then tentatively lifted his own hand from his arm — the wound was inexplicably healing in a scar of light. Shen looked on in awe as Kai guided the final flickering filaments back through the scar into him. It fused and healed.

Restored.

Onnd and Sann looked at each other in tense silence, then turned and began making their way slowly over the cold stone forum towards Kai and Shen.

“H...how di...?” stammered Shen, then, looking deep into Kai’s eyes, he said carefully, “I’m sorry....I’m sorry you saw that.”

Kai smiled back at him warmly, calmly — centred. Then, as the sounds of the forum bled back into his now, his smile faded, as though he too was waking from a dream.

As the hydra stumbled about on unsteady legs, the preacher strode up to Kai proclaiming to his scattering followers, “Wait! The Marklar shows the Way, the light of prophecy and self-immolation. Praise Ephaïl, his light inside us! Praise Elúcian-ah!”

The hydra came to from the pain with renewed flailing fury and thrashed both Blaiput and the preacher off their feet. Blaiput became even more entangled in the hydra’s tether and the preacher glared at the beast with seething, hidden wrath. The hydra’s choler grew, and all around watched on in awe as, almost imperceptibly at first, then undeniably, something began to sprout from the charred stump.

“Oh no,” muttered the preacher, although loud enough for all to hear, “Not again!”

Making their way slowly across the forum, Onnd and Sann drifted past the string quartet, three of whom, oblivious to the fact that their entire audience had now fled, were still shouting caustic insults at one another, as the fourth sat by himself, used to such arguments, spinning himself a quiet, calming melody.

“It is the prophecy, I say,” boomed the preacher, leaping to his feet again, “Death and resurrection!”

The raving hydra lumbered up to Kai and Shen with thundering hooves, as, growing into the blackened space where the lost serpent had been, came two embryonic reptilian heads. Suddenly the beast reared up on its hind legs and screeched into the air with triumphant wrath, flicking Blaiput through the air on the tether over and onto Kai and Shen with an agonising crunch. As they writhed and scrambled over each other to get away, all three became impossibly ensnared in a pile of limbs and rope. The hydra pounded its front hooves back onto the ground, cracking the stone beneath them, and dragged itself towards the three as two new heads continued growing.

"By Lúez,” gasped Blaiput, “Now it really angry! Now we die! And my head not freezed yet!”

Blaiput began sobbing as they all scuffled and scrambled to get free. Shen pulled abruptly with surprising strength, whipping Kai round to the top of the pile. Eight serpents descended to his face with a baleful hiss, as the formation of the two new heads completed inches from his eyes. The hydra readied itself to strike again. Shen’s face flushed into an intense mosaic of terrified colour, engulfing Kai and Blaiput in his fear. Kai stared up helplessly as the hydra’s necks curled back to smite from within the darkening skies above.

A single, elegant word — spoken without urgency — cut calmly through the chaos.

Kai, Shen, Blaiput, the purple-lipped girl, the preacher, his followers and the hydra — all turned to see the source, as the wind momentarily ceased its flow through the forum.

Standing tall, silent, and poised were Onnd and Sann — I’sta — Truth Warriors. Both commanded stares of respect soaked in fear from all around, as they stood almost as tall as the hydra itself, their keen eyes soaking in every detail. They each held their long truth staff, with a black, smoky texture in noiseless flux within.

The breeze returned. The clouds opened. The warriors’ elegant white robes, sheer and strong, billowed gracefully, gathering an almost imperceptible shimmer.

No one moved or made a sound in the impossibly tense silence. Sann slowly turned her head and looked to Onnd — the commanding word was hers.

The hydra’s eight spiny tongues flicked at the air and sensed. Tasted. Its sixteen eyes narrowed defiantly at the warriors, then each and every serpent let out an icy, deathly, deafening hissing screech, before it turned back to its prey, the hapless pile of three.

It pounced into a stabbing strafe of fangs.

Kai, Shen and Blaiput scrambled and screamed and clawed. But the hydra was upon them. Their fates were no longer their own.

Onnd gave a single, subtle nod, with a single, supple word — and her loyal Sann leapt in.

Next chapter — I'sta

Sunday 12 December 2010

10.13 Revelation — Cacophony

2010-11-21T00:01:00.017+01:00

The canisters crashed and smashed on stone, spewing out frozen heads and hissing screams as Kai grinned coldly. Blaiput’s sorry stall buckled and crumbled onto another, which collapsed and toppled onto another, and another, and another, each spilling their wares over the ground as their owners added raging cries to the swelling cacophony. The quartet of musicians scratched off their tones as chaos clattered and rattled around them, and immediately launched into a scathing verbal attack on each other’s ineptitude as their audience fled.

Onnd and Sann sat up slightly, their intense eyes widening as they observed more keenly from afar. Blaiput and the purple-lipped girl hurled an assortment of insults and abuse in a variety of languages at Kai, as Shen and the preacher continued casting theirs at each other and the rest of the hydra’s unsated serpents continued their hunt for heads. Blaiput spied one of his beloved skulls reeling over the stone. He leapt to it and grabbed it; as he landed, his foot twisted over and into the hydra’s coiled tether, and as it lurched away, the rope slithered and wound tight around his leg, wrenching him over and dragging him off bellowing in terror as he clutched his icy head. The girl’s lips turned bright red again; she screeched in helpless panic and ran after Blaiput for no particular reason. Limbs and organs sagged and shredded over shattered glass, thawing and flattening onto the paving. One of the hydra’s hind legs stomped down inches from Blaiput’s face as it dragged him along, flattening another exposed brain on the ground and splattering it all over him.

“You fools!” cried the preacher, watching his beast escape, “You anger the mighty Marklar — from Marklar!”

“Fools? FooOOOOOLLLSSS?!!!!” bellowed Shen like a gravelly tempest, “USSSS?! YOUU grecknous lothal — YOUUU!!!! You lose control of your...your...and....” Shen started shaking his head, as though stung by a thought; his colours cooled, his hair calmed. “Control. You need...I need...I need to get control of...oh...oh, I’m most frightfully sorry.” He looked around, quietly confused, as though having just woken. Without a word his eyes followed the hydra dragging Blaiput through the chaotic panic in the forum, followed by the girl, then, with his polite demeanour and accent restored, he spoke discreetly to the preacher, “This situation does seem somewhat precarious...if you do not mind me saying.”

“Pagan!” bellowed the preacher, “Don’t try to fool me again with your changing tones!”

Shen look at him timidly, silently, then pulled at his scruffy trousers, which were too short and shabby to match the pomp of his green coat.

“I am often too impulsive, it is true,” said Shen sheepishly, “I am fully aware of this side of me. Fully.” With an awkward contortion of his neck, he noticed the three loosed buttons under his chin; he idly refastened one as he continued, “However, my good man, let us discuss this matter in a mature and balanced manner, if you will allow.”

The preacher looked away in disgust and shouted across the forum at the top of his voice, “Marklar, return!!!”

The hydra suddenly slid to a halt and thrust its massive body around as it lunged after an errant head beneath its feet, casting Blaiput up and out into the cold air, whipping the thawing skull from his grasp away and over into a seemingly endless arc towards the café where Onnd and Sann sat; it landed with a disgustingly flat squelch in the lap of a lady who had been a model of decorous composure not a heartbeat earlier. Now she leapt up in a spectacular scream of perfect shrillness, and almost burst straight out of her seemly laces. The soggy head, which was now as flat as a disc of dough, slid and flopped to the ground. She scuttled away as fast as her pencil skirt would allow, deserting her panic-stricken child at the table — the child who had been staring at Onnd and Sann some moments ago, and who was now at a loss as to which oddly shaped head she should stare helplessly at. The diminutive waiter waddled up, smiled at the child compassionately, then checked the table for payment.

As Kai gradually emerged from his venomous stupor, his grin began to waver as he witnessed the repercussions of his furious impulse, the growing waves of chaos.

“Come,” continued Shen, “We can discuss this calmly and perhaps avoid unnecessary injuries, or even deaths! Nothing good can come from a death...”

“Silence, Heathen!” yelled the incensed preacher, “Ephaïl sacrificed Himself countless times to reveal the truth of our salvation!”

“Well, this is a somewhat...contentious point,” muttered Shen to himself as he fumbled with the the next button, before continuing kindly to the preacher, “Firstly, however, may I suggest that you exercise your...considerable authority over the beast — the ‘Marklar’, if you will — in order to save and protect us all.”

Terrified citizens fled in all directions from the hydra, which was now in a wild rampage tearing itself in all directions to consume every soggy head and limp body part that was not fully accounted for, with the hapless Blaiput and the mindless red-lipped girl in tow. The preacher glared at Shen in fury, then screeched desperately over at the oblivious hydra again.

“I...you see I simply wish,” stuttered Shen as he stepped back in growing fear, “That is to say, it is my sincere hope that together we can resolve this matter. I mean, this could very soon get quite out of...”

A disgusting squelch punctuated his thought. He looked down to see his foot on top of a glittering white glove, from which the putrid juice of dissolving digits oozed out. Shen’s face crinkled into a green mosaic of repulsion as he muttered, “Exactly.”

The hydra ground to a stop, shovelling up cobbles with its hefty hooves, and its seven serpent necks writhed around in search of food. Blaiput crashed abruptly into its stocky hind legs, and the girl’s lips turned pale lilac as she fell over Blaiput and under the hydra. All that remained of the frozen body parts were macabre puddles of gore about the forum. The hydra turned back to find the preacher, as both Blaiput and the girl tried to scramble away. The beast’s squirming necks gradually wavered into focus as fourteen soulless eyes aimed straight at Shen’s shining head. Shen swallowed nervously at the unwelcome attention, and blushed bright blue in stiffening fear. Kai also felt the hydra’s focus; his grin was gone.

“My...what a hideous beast,” muttered Shen nervously.

“Pagan fool!” wailed the preacher, “You disrespect the Marklar! You disrespect the Elúcian Way!”

“Well, with all due respect, my good man,” stammered Shen, without taking his icy eyes from the hydra, which had begun shuffling towards him, again dragging along the luckless Blaiput. Shen’s nervous fingers groped about his neck for the last undone button, “You seem to be the one clinging to a false prophet. We do have a certain responsibility to those who look to us.”

The hydra looked towards its owner for guidance as it hesitantly made its way towards the irresistibly bright Shen, but the preacher was too distracted to notice it approaching.

“Don’t you lecture me about responsibility, heathen! My focus is always on those who need me.”

The unnoticed hydra quickened its pace into a trot towards the luminously flustered Shen. Blaiput bounced over the paving, still fast in the tether, as the girl flapped around in a helpless fluster behind him. Kai’s eyes widened in alarm; he stepped over to Shen and pulled at his arm to try to take him out of the beast’s path.

“Oh my!” spluttered Shen, oblivious to Kai’s attempts, his shaking hands clutching onto the last button, which was half inside the hole, “Oh my indeed! My good...good man! I most certainly must contest your subjective view; however, perhaps we should first...”

“Subjective view?! Ephaïl is Truth, you ignorant pagan, you ludicrous heap of fluxing light!”

All at once, Shen stopped shaking and stood deathly still. His colours cooled. His eyes flicked coldly to the preacher and he glowered in breathless silence. His fingers calmly pushed the top button into place over his throat. Kai held his breath as he stared at Shen in bated confusion — then, in a shiver of realisation, he stepped back. From ice, Shen flared up into impossibly bright scarlet. The three top buttons of his coat exploded out again from his blazing neck, and his hair erupted into fire as he lunged towards the preacher.

“Pagan? Ignorant PAGAN?!” came his swell of fury blazing into a new accent, “YOU impostor!!! YOU slithe!!!!! YOUUU utter FAKE!!!!!!! How long have I been listening to your inane, empty DRIVEL?!! My ear is not a toilet, you lothlous FOOOL!!!!!!”

The preacher retreated in bewilderment. His followers looked at each other hesitantly. Onnd and Sann observed quietly from afar with increasingly intense eyes as the hydra pressed on towards the fiery Shen.

“Spew your ancient ‘wisdom’ all you wish into vapid, callow ears — they’ll pay your paltry price — but KEEP YOUR INSIPID LUNACY FAR FROM ME!” Seemingly fearless, he pointed straight at the approaching hydra, “Now...your pet! DO SOMETHING, you SUCTHUL IMBECILE!!!”

Kai moved again to Shen, trying to pull him from danger. Shen snapped round; his crystalline forehead wrinkled into a scarlet frown. The preacher took a deep breath and turned back to his followers.

“Do not worry! Do not fret, my children! This is but a test. Ephaïl is Truth! Exclaim!”

The group muttered in embarrassed uncertainty, “Ephaïl is...Truth?”

“Idiots!!!” spluttered Shen as he spun back round to them, almost wrenching Kai off his feet, “Idicimes!” He turned back to Kai, and saw the hydra just as it launched into its final hunting gallop throwing Blaiput into the air. The girl screamed past ruby lips and Shen’s colours bled away at once leaving him a pallid sheet of shock — his mouth hung open as the monster swelled and rose and towered right in front of him.

“So...very...sorry,” whispered Shen in ice.

A ravenous serpent head lashed out at the paralysed Shen. Kai wrenched at Shen’s arm and pulled him over and down just as the hydra’s head smacked into the ground beside them with a tremendous crash, cracking open the stone paving — its eyes went blank and the neck fell limp. The other heads reeled in a daze, and the girl pulled Blaiput to his feet, as he tried to free himself from the rope.

Shen screamed to life and wrestled with Kai on the paving. He pulled up his coat-sleeves and frantically checked his glowing, textured skin. The sun blazed through the clouds — only Shen’s clothes cast a shadow; where his skin was bare, there was no sign of him on the ground. The hydra began to drag itself out of its daze; Kai saw and scrambled away, dragging Shen with him, who was glowing noticeably relieved. The hydra saw Shen’s glinting head and made for him again, dragging its own unconscious neck along on the ground. One of its clumsy hooves trampled down on the head, and it screeched back to life, furiously biting back at its own leg, pulling Blaiput off his feet again and back into the fray. The leg kicked back at the serpent, missing Blaiput’s face by a breath, and in a rage the serpent grabbed a huge chunk of the broken paving in its jaws, whipped itself back up and around and cast the stone at its sibling ophidian heads. The stone tore past Kai and Shen, a hair from their faces, and shot into an unstoppable, bouncing, crashing path over the forum towards the café where Onnd and Sann sat in silent observation. Smaller fragments started crumbling off as it went, flying off in all directions.

Onnd and Sann, watching the commotion in the forum, saw the slab of rock hurtling towards them. Sann looked to Onnd. Onnd looked back to Kai, unperturbed, and nodded almost imperceptibly. In one fluid gesture, Sann flicked her wrists and her meshed half-gloves bonded onto her long, white palms; she took her staff and leapt up. The last few courageous patrons of the café screamed and fled from their tables. The waiter, with one eye on the approaching rock while forcing a quivering smile of reassurance, waddled quickly around the tables collecting credits. Alert and dutiful, Sann towered above him, and as the first few fragments flew towards them, Sann whipped her staff around with graceful ease, flicking each and every one of the tiny projectiles down and off and safely into the ground. The waiter gulped a sigh of relief, then scurried off.

The huge slab of paving was streaking in. Sann’s intense eyes drank in every movement, every detail of the careening silver stone as it made straight for her master Onnd, who sat observing — not the stone, but Kai. Sann breathed deeply, slowly, and whipped around her staff to angle it precisely at the incoming stone, and as it hit, the staff pierced a tiny groove along the centre of the stone’s edge. She simply held the staff, no impulse made, but nature’s power surged and in a crackling spark of friction the stone shattered into countless shards. At once Sann leapt up and through a silent halo in the air, her staff a blur of effortless agile grace, she flicked and flipped and curled and crooked the fragments into dust, and as quickly as she had leapt her nimble, cloth-bound feet returned firmly, quietly upon the grey; unchanged she stood, the ground awash with pewter pebbles as silver powder lighted by her feet.

Completely unaware of this display, Kai and Shen scrambled away over the stone as the hydra lurched after them. Blaiput ground along behind. The girl screamed. The preacher yelled. His followers dispersed. Shen looked round just as another of the hideous serpent heads struck. Kai tried to pull him away, but Shen raised an arm without a thought to protect his head. The fangs pierced his meshed skin, and he erupted into a shriek of terror.

“My skin! Save my SKIIIN!!!!”

And as the fangs withdrew, Shen’s light gushed out, his essence, soul and life engulfing and igniting the serpent head in a hissing wail of fire.

Next chapter — Sanctus

Sunday 28 November 2010

10.12 Revelation — Outsider

2010-10-31T00:01:00.008+02:00

Nira slammed the door behind her, cutting Destiny’s deafening light dead cold. Her eyes alone screamed brightness through the murk as she began her steady descent of the stairs towards the dull thumping beats below, shaking her head slowly as she stepped, stifling, spurning, smothering back her dissenting thoughts, her ancient voices.

“Have to,” she muttered through her gritted teeth, a fragment escaping from a hidden whole.

She sank further into the darkened depths, running her hand along the decrepit stone wall as she went.

“This place...”

The constant beating thumping throb below piled up and dragged her down.

“Corrupted...”

Her steps slowed; the beats pushed stronger, deeper, faster into her breath.

“Weak...”

Her head shook in a furious twitch —

“Today...”

— and the burn of her eyes intensified; she stopped, turned and struck the stone wall with her bare fist.

“Enough!”

Ancient paint flaked off around her bloodied hand into a cloud of dust, lit up for a moment by her eyes like a nebula. Her teeth still clenched, a pearl of white formed in the corner of her eye, swelled and tore and slid down her cheek in a line of illuminated despair, and dimming, dropped from her chin through the drifting dust and disappeared into the shadows.

Suddenly, the raucous beat roared into the corridor with garish, flashing lights from the bar below — a man stumbled out the door and up the stairs toward her. She looked away and wiped her face immediately, then continued down the stairs.

“Ahhh, just the gir...woman I was looking for,” slurred the man, wiping his mouth clean, as he came closer to Nira, “I got a great deal for you that...”

“You have three words,” said Nira coldly, without halting her descent.

“What?”

“That’s one. Two left.”

The man slowly comprehended, then, with a deliberate breath as Nira passed him, he stood up straight and offered, “Religious exoti...”

Nira clicked her tongue before he could finish: “Lost me on two already.”

“But...but...they’re selling out!” said the man in desperation.

“I bet they are!” said Nira without looking back.

The man stood in silence, trying hard to think of more convincing words, as Nira disappeared through the door into her bar — The Outsider.

The incessant beat of the music pounded through her; the swirl and flicker of the garish purple and green pulsed over her; a myriad of beings small and tall and elegant and awkward, danced and shook and twirled around her as she made her way across the floor holding her hurt hand, cutting a channel through the sea of bodies as they moved aside to let her through without question. As she passed the counter, she nodded at the bartender, who grabbed a cloth from behind him with one of his tentacles, threw it to another limb, and then cast it carefully to Nira. She wrapped it over her chafed knuckles.

“They did this,” she muttered to herself through an outward pretence of gratitude to the bartender. The bartender lifted another tentacle offering a pistol, and grinned. Nira smiled, now genuine, but shook her head and walked on.

On the far side of the room, four musicians stood in a ring facing each other’s backs, upon which they swiped and prodded and pulled with countless stubby fingers, inexplicably filling the room with a heady, pulsing blend. About them four gold-robed dancers spun round and round in circular trances, their arms outstretched, their robes flaring out around them as they hovered over the floor. Nira passed through the pulsating space; she smiled her smiles, she nodded her nods, she winked her gleaming winks, but inside the pulse was gone, the tone was mute — her mind was on the day. Gaudy-coloured holographic images filled the spaces between and above the revellers. Nira’s shining diamond eyes absorbed them. She shook her head again.

“The only way...colourless existence...”

Along the walls, behind the throng of dancers, dealers and drunks, stood ranks of Truth Warriors, young and old — tall, silent, still. Threads of colour flicked over their dutiful eyes. Some looked around, quietly anxious.

“They’ll not lose their voice,” muttered Nira beneath the pounding music, “Their colour.”

She reached the far wall, where two warriors, identical twins, stood solemn guard by a door. They nodded reverently, and opened for her.

She entered a round stone chamber and the door closed behind her, muffling the beats and shouts. In the centre of the room hovered a collection of holograms, all in glimmering motion — a galaxy, a temporal branch map, a plan of the circular city, and a representation of the temple at the centre of the forum above them. Nira stepped sternly up to them, and looked straight into the temple — the golden dome did not end where it reached the plane of the forum, but continued downwards, curving in towards a mirrored dome below, forming a perfect sphere. From the withering husk of the Tree of Light in the centre of the temple, a complex plexus of roots and veins stretched down and out — a subterranean labyrinth of passageways. Along these branches, at certain points, tiny red lights blinked in anticipation. Nira bowed her head.

“I’d rather die,” she murmured.

“Nira?” came a voice from the far side of the room.

Nira snapped her head up at once, eyes blazing. Through the shimmer of the holograms she saw a Truth Warrior with dark, grey hair standing tall and grave by another door.

“Jhor. Good,” said Nira, in immediate control, “Call them.”

Jhor darkened further in acknowledgement and nodded.

“It’s time,” breathed Nira, “Time for your truth.”

Next chapter — Cacophony

Sunday 21 November 2010

10.11 Revelation — Crescendo

2010-10-24T00:01:00.025+02:00

“My skin, my skin!!!” cried Shen, terrified, cowering behind Kai, who was struggling against impuissant limbs.

“Yea, yea! Your skin. We, like...know!” said the girl.

The preacher leapt over and grabbed Kai, who was slumped over the pewter paving chafing at his bleary eyes to force the world back into focus. The hydra lurched after the preacher, but again the tether choked it on the stall, which was now listing perilously. The other stall owners and clientele tried not to look over at the growing commotion as the stocks of canopic canisters clattered against each other; one glass jar slid, toppled and fell — Blaiput caught it just in time. His expression of relief changed immediately to a fond smile of recognition as he saw the face inside.

“Ephaïl survives in our souls-ah!” declaimed the preacher, shaking Kai vehemently; Kai’s crown floundered in the tempest. Shen leapt up from behind Kai, all traces of his previous crippling fear removed.

“Ah, interesting!” said Shen with precision to the preacher, punctuating with increasingly animated, glimmering hands, “Indeed, here is a somewhat...contentious point in the whole, my good man. This rather fine metaphor you mention...”

The preacher ignored him, shaking Kai harder and harder to make his point: “Do you believe, boy?! Do you believe in the light of Ephaïl inside you?”

I feel

“Oh...oh, the...the light?!” mumbled Shen, looking away, “The light! Yes! The light...it...”

Blaiput was suddenly standing right in front of Kai and thrust the jar up to his face; it held a sallow, thorny head with a cross of fake jewels upon its brow.

“Famous dead one!” grunted Blaiput eagerly, “You buy now!”

Shen shuffled away hunched over, with his head held agonisingly in shimmering hands: “Oh! Ah, this clarity, this lucidity. It’s not for us. It does not help...”

A sale seemingly not forthcoming, Blaiput grabbed the disoriented Kai with one stocky hand and pulled. The preacher, incensed, heaved Kai in the opposite direction. Both shook him violently this way and that, as he shook his own head in dizzy confusion and mounting anger as Shen, shambling beside them, moaned and groaned and glowed in red and violet, light bleeding from each minute chink of his mosaic face and from the ends of his filament hair until three brass buttons on his long, strait coat twitched and spat open one after another, and he screamed —

“AAAARGHHHHHHHH!!! Youuuuuu!!!!” shouted Shen directly at the preacher, his eyes manically wide, his accent altered, “You lothal! You hereth!! You fraud!!! Prey on these newcomers?! These weaklings?!” He thrust a blazing hand directly at the preacher’s band of followers, who looked around sheepishly, pushing each other towards Shen in false conviction. The preacher paid no heed, however, tugging violently at Kai, trying to wrest him from Blaiput’s solid grip.

The lines in Kai’s eyes bled back to one; his frustration welled and boiled to wrath. He looked up at his assailants as they thrust him this way and that; selfish, uncaring eyes encircled him, rejecting his silent pleas, avoiding his selfless plight in shadow. The preacher pushed; the salesman pulled. Kai tumbled this way and that. His head wavered and toppled and snapped back up with wide eyes straight ahead. His mouth fell open as the world crumbled about him into the faultless gold majesty of the temple.

“Accept the light!” exclaimed the preacher.

I know my way!

“You take head now!” grunted Blaiput.

It’s time to act.

“Idicimes and greckens all!!!!!” cried Shen.

It’s time to be!

Onnd’s distant gaze blazed silently; Shen exploded into a feral cry! The wind gusted and gushed wildly cold over the forum, whistling through the jars of skulls, as Shen’s shouts swelled in a savage, squally crescendo. And as the preacher and the seller wrestled Kai between them, Kai lashed out wildly to break free, striking the jar from Blaiput’s rigid thumbs. Countless anxious eyes darted towards them as the glass shattered — the pallid head rolled out onto the silver stone between them within a pall of icy smoke.

Blaiput looked in shock at his spilled treasure, open to scrutiny for the first time in two thousand years. The preacher glared at Shen in fury. Fourteen beady serpent eyes pursued the head. The SYS-carer looked round at the commotion. Shen looked through his prism eyes at Kai in raging crimson; a dousing glimmer seeped from the thawing head as it came to rest. Seven ravenous serpent heads lurched at it, squabbling over it, tugging at the rickety stall; one flicked out its bristly tongue and reeled in the head to its maw — half of the head shattered like glass under its fangs; the rest was devoured, false treasures and all.

As he shuffled unsteadily away towards the temple, Kai’s anger was boiling over into the tempest around him.

“Hey, new guy!” said the girl, “This is all sooo your fault, right?! You gotta fit better into Destiny, OK?!”

Kai spun around at once; Shen’s blood-red fire blazed in Kai’s sight as the darkening skies and furtive eyes washed up and over and through and...

shadows shift

I’ll wait no more!

“ENOUUUUGGGHHHHH!!!!” cried Shen in blinding coral white.

Kai’s eyes were ablaze. He stormed back in fearless defiance of the shadows all around him, grabbed hold of the collapsing stall, and wrenched it over with all his seething might. The wood and rags turned over, throwing stacks and rows of jars and canisters rattling, crashing, smashing to the ground around them releasing a macabre mess of rimy heads and hands and feet awash in swirling icy mist.

And within the deathly pall of screaming scowls of shock and fear and fury, Kai grinned.

Next chapter — Outsider

Sunday 31 October 2010

10.10 Revelation — Chorus

2010-10-17T00:01:00.011+02:00

Breathing in her scarlet wake, Kai’s lonely gaze remained transfixed as Destiny’s chorus swept in over him like a storm.

The girl’s lips were now bright ruby. From beside the stall she screeched at Kai, “Hey, new guy! You better watch out for Shen, OK! And, like, don’t mention light...right?!”

Without removing his gaze from the door of the Outsider, Kai got up slowly from the old man and his dead wife. The forum dimmed to grey in sudden icy gusts, and the preacher pushed past the stall of frozen heads, dragging along the huge hydra and his straggling group of fresh disciples.

“The new winds bring us signs and portents!” shouted the preacher, straining towards Kai with seven writhing serpents in tow, “Test your faith now-ah!”

Sitting at the café, the two alabaster sculptures in ivory robes — Onnd and Sann — observed Kai coldly, and the man in the strait, green military overcoat — Shen — bounded straight towards him. Kai distractedly took a step backwards — inadvertently digging his foot firmly into a hydra claw. A deafening screech rent the icy air and Kai spun round in shock as he stumbled; serpent heads curled down at him from twice his height, flicking bristly tongues of malefic breath over his face.

“A volunteer!” cried the preacher, “A brave one to test the venomous Marklar. Ephaïl is Truth! Exclaim!”

“Ephaïl is Truth!” bellowed out the band of followers in chorus without a whiff of doubt — the doubt that had filled them just moments earlier, before the preacher had seduced them soundly with his zeal.

Reeling from the hydra’s hideous breath, Kai lurched away, staggering back towards the stall, his dazed eyes wide; all around him colours bled to silent screams of blinding final smiles and drowning sobs of shadow. The SYS-carer glared back in murky disgust as an emerald storm of white blazed up to Kai's side.

The preacher pursued him, dragging the hydra and his followers back the way they had come. Kai, giddy from the venom, staggered to the stall and clung frailly onto it for support.

“Ah, now you want buy head, yes?” said Blaiput, and started sifting through his canisters for a suitable skull.

The preacher took the hydra’s tether and fastened it onto the rickety stall beside him.

“Hey!” grunted Blaiput at the preacher, as seven serpents flicked covetous tongues around his wares, “Only freezing heads here!”

“Behold the rapture of the Marklar’s gift-ah!” cried the exalted preacher to his followers, ignoring Blaiput completely, “This fortunate one now sees the truth we seek!”

In a breathless bolt of green and brass Shen was upon them, with his hair — an unruly mass of light-fibre filaments — in an intense white flurry. He stopped before them; they turned and looked with uneasy expectation in the heavy, icy stillness. Wringing his hands and furrowing his crystalline brow into a spectrum of colour, Shen addressed them, hesitantly erudite: “I.... So...good day to you all! I must say that I could not help but notice...that is, appreciate your fascination for this young gentleman here. I too have...observed that...”

“Oh, Shen, by the Dark Three, shut up, right!” said the girl, “We’re, like, soooo over you, OK!”

Shen stepped vigilantly up to Kai, his crystalline eyes trained on the girl’s ruby lips: “Forgive me...sweet girl. However, this seems to me to be of quite some import. That is...AAAAAAARGHHHHHH!”

One of the serpent heads lunged — Shen screamed in a flurry of red and blazing white as his hair blasted about him in blustery panic. With Onnd and Sann carefully monitoring his movements from afar, Shen dove behind Kai for protection as a cloud of ancient dust spewed up from the stall.

I see

Other proprietors at nearby stalls looked round at the growing storm of commotion. The serpent neck snapped taut against the disintegrating frame, its head straining a breath away from Kai’s, the tongue flicking fresh toxin in his face. Kai’s eyes rolled back further as he stumbled and slid to the ground.

Next chapter — Crescendo

Sunday 24 October 2010

10.09 Revelation — Onnd

2010-10-10T00:01:00.014+02:00

Swathed in ivory robes, holding a long, shadowy staff, her powerful, sylphlike form drifted down serenely into one of the tall-backed seats at a café sprawled out over the pewter paving of the vast forum. She came to rest perfectly poised; her eyes remained intensely alert.

Her long, narrow face was austerity chiselled in alabaster; her skin was ashen, almost translucent. Her mouth was small and stark, and her noble nose swept sharply up like a blade to large, enigmatic, bluish-grey eyes high above. Her chalky-silver hair was tied back close to her head, revealing colourless markings that traced from the temple down the sides of her face and neck. She crossed her left leg horizontally over the right and rested the staff upright at a slight angle in the fold of her bended knee within her robes.

Steely beams pierced through the fleeting cracks above as she coldly observed the bustling forum around her. Even seated, her solid, alabaster solemnity towered above the diminutive waiter who waddled up to her and placed a flute of glowing liquid on her table. The waiter held expectantly. She did not acknowledge him. She peeled meshed half-gloves from her hands, took the glass in her long, slender, shadow-stained fingers and sipped. Ignored and indignant, the waiter scowled up at her. She lowered the glass from her mouth and angled her head down at him, her eyes tightening into a glowering threat. The waiter stiffened in fear immediately, gulped, then shuffled silently off, his tail wrapped in behind him. She took another sip and resumed her observation.

When the waiter had shuffled a safe distance away, he resumed his waddling swagger past the other customers, who were either staring, trying not to stare, or trying to stop their children from staring at the imposing figure in white, as they anxiously fingered their own overpriced drinks. One child looked up nervously at the waiter as he passed. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw that the figure’s stern eyes were no longer on him, and turned back to the child with a dismissive shrug: “Truth Warriors, huh! They don’t scare me!”

Moments later a second statuesque figure in snowy robes flowed up to the first. She was slightly shorter and younger, with a trace of reddish gold in her hair. She descended with similar grace into identical repose beside the first, crossing her leg the same way, resting her staff, which was a little shorter and textured hoary grey, in the horizontal bend of her knee within her white and blue-grey robes. The waiter shuffled up again and left a second shining glass for her. She looked straight down at him and smiled as warmly as her stark mouth would allow.

“Thank you kindly,” she said in a fluid, musical language, as she peeled similar half-gloves from her long, lean, unblemished palms.

The waiter, surprised, returned the smile and bowed politely, then looked back to the first Truth Warrior, who continued ignoring him. His smile faded. He looked back to the second warrior, arched a disparaging eyebrow in the direction of the first, and shrugged his sloping shoulders. The second warrior’s smile straightened off, her eyes filled with severity, and she warned away his disrespect with a subtly slow and deliberate shake of her head. The waiter’s breath froze in fear again, and he sidled silently away, trying not to rouse the first warrior’s lurking wrath. The second warrior watched the waiter shrink away, then, with a tiny smirk, whispered to the first, “You have made another friend, Master Onnd!”

Onnd continued staring expressionlessly ahead, and said, in a sterner, flatter song than her disciple’s, “Friends will only fail you, Sann.”

Sann humbly bowed her head. Onnd watched intently as, in the distance, Nira spun round in a breath of red and pinned some hapless soul against the wall with her elbow. Sann sensed her master’s focus and looked up. Seeing Nira in customary ruthless form, Sann’s mouth again curled into a slight smile; then her face darkened.

“Almost time,” said Sann sadly, looking up at the imposing temple.

“Yes,” replied Onnd, distractedly, “Almost...”

Within a sudden blaze of diamond sun, between the warriors and Nira, a boy kneeling on the paving of the forum beside the body of a woman caught Onnd’s breath. Sann followed her gaze.

“...time...,” continued Onnd in a faraway whisper.

The air froze still around them. A deflated hulk of a SYS-soldier floundered in Nira’s distant wake as she stormed towards a door with lilac neon blinking overhead. She turned to the warriors. Onnd gave a single solemn nod. Nira nodded back. In the space between them, the boy looked up and round to Nira, as a man in green bounded brashly towards him, barrelling carelessly past a SYS-carer on his way.

Onnd blinked her blue-grey eyes and snapped them back to the boy. A preacher was closing in behind him, dragging along a savage seven-headed hydra and a small, yet fervent, group of followers. Nira reached the door and threw it wide, then disappeared inside, as though to thwart the coming storm.

Next chapter — Chorus

Sunday 17 October 2010

10.08 Revelation — Shen

2010-10-03T00:01:00.004+02:00

Within the colour and flame a young man kneeled and shone, and far off tended to the woman’s fading grey, their shapes in shimmer, their forms an angled blur.

His crystalline glare of bending hue took in this sight, this glow, his eyes askew before he turned his head to look directly at the glimmering boy through the stall of lamp-stands and candlesticks in front of him; his eyes then wavered into line.

He was a middle-aged man with pale skin and wild, white hair, dressed in a tight-fitting, green officer’s coat buttoned up to his throat in a line of brass.

“Shen?” came a brusque voice from the stall in front of him, “For that is silly little name, no?”

Steely beams pierced through the fleeting cracks above and Shen’s face shone from within as he looked straight past the seller and his stall towards the kneeling boy in the distance. His skin was a fractious mosaic, and each tiny movement caused a subtle shimmer of spectra to seep out. The seller was staring impatiently through Shen’s head.

“You, man, strange light man,” he said, “You hear...?”

“Shen,” replied Shen absently, “Shen, yes. Yes, my good man. I just...”

“You just stopping talk,” said the seller, raising his palms to the sky, “That what! So, you want or no?”

Shen was mesmerised. His arms hung idly by his sides. In one hand, which was the same glowing texture as his face, he clutched a golden menorah as he stared at the kneeling Kai within a sudden blaze of diamond sun.

“Look, if you not want,” said the irate seller, “Someone else want.”

“Oh...I’m most terribly sorry, kind sir,” said Shen monitoring each word for precision, “It was simply that...that I saw this young man, you see.”

“Ah, yes, yes. I see. I get,” said the seller gruffly, “Whatever makes happy.”

“No...no, with all respect, sir, I’m not sure you do, actually,” said Shen politely, “You see, I think....”

“I not care what think, strange man. You want light or no, just?”

“Light? Light. Light! Yes! Yes, of course, my friend...”

“You no friend,” said the seller under his breath.

“That’s it! You see, I notice...that is to say, I recognise that...the light...it...it...ohh...ahh....”

“Oh, what now?!”

“Aahh! The light. It’s here, now,” gasped Shen, his skin starting to flicker green and red, his voice becoming more desperate, “The astro-spheres all around. The lucidity. The lucidity obstructs my shine. It...it....”

The seller’s eyes peeled wide in disbelief as he watched Shen transform before him. His skin became awash with boiling, spilling, flaming colour. His arms began to flail wildly and his breathing quickened and deepened, swelling up his chest. Suddenly the top three buttons of his coat burst open one after another and he exploded in rage.

“AAARGHHHHHHHHHH!! Don’t you see, you ridiculous lothal?!” shouted Shen, his voice manic, his accent completely changed, his feral shag of hair blustering about and bleeding light as he thrust the menorah aloft. “You can’t see this?! This is it! This is why I am here. This is why we are all here. It’s Him, and She and me and us and all around and all who’ll ever be, a light eclipsed by fate’s undue designs! Look, look, look, you indicime!!!!”

The seller held surprised for a moment, then resumed being unimpressed: “You say strange things. In strange way. You strange man! You want my light or no?”

Shen glared at him in furious tones, his body tensed as though he would spring forward and rip out several of the seller’s eyes at any moment. Then his colour began to subside, his fuming waned to shallow, nervous breaths, and his hair abated back to white.

“Oh! Oh, I need to get control,” said Shen to himself, confused, his previous voice and accent restored. His shaking hands went to his neck and started buttoning up his coat, and he again addressed the seller, “I.... Oh, I’m most terribly sorry. It’s simply that.... I’m sorry.”

A frown of embarrassed colour creased Shen’s textured forehead, and he abruptly thrust the candelabrum back to the seller and strode off towards the boy within the storm, carelessly barrelling into a SYS-carer on his way as, to his side, observing from afar, an alabaster sculpture gave a single nod.

As Shen marched away, the seller watched on unimpressed, holding the menorah: “OK, you not want.”

Next chapter — Onnd

Sunday 10 October 2010

10.07 Revelation — Nira

2010-09-26T00:01:00.013+02:00

“Hey, I got that shipment coming in later. You got your buyer lined u...?”

In a breath her red flashed round and thrust an elbow at his throat, pinning the ragged rogue roughly against the stone wall.

“Nira?” he croaked.

She forced her elbow harder, silencing him, as her blazing eyes stabbed with diamond fury. “Never business out here, idiot!” she hissed, “Out here I don't know you!” Steely beams pierced through the fleeting cracks above as she added, in a terse whisper through clenched teeth, “And definitely not today.”

“This guy bothering you, sweetheart?” came a voice from behind her — a hulking, black-clad SYS-soldier strutted up to her, brandishing a similarly over-sized, razor-hot flare-blade. In a sudden wash of diamond sun, Nira arched her thin, black eyebrows, doing all she could to suppress a disparaging laugh, before, without taking her gleaming stare from the man she had pinned against the wall, she said, “No, he’s done.” She snapped back her elbow and the man fell wheezing to the ground, then scrambled off whimpering. Without blinking her shining eyes, she flung her long red coat dress around and resumed her headstrong way along the curved wall of stone and glass encircling Destiny’s vast central forum.

“So, where you off to now, beautiful?” continued the SYS-soldier, following after her, tossing his enormous blade from one four-thumbed paw to another then another. Nira stopped short and whirled around into a fiery challenge. Her austere yet elegant cloak of red rolled lightly about her sultry dusk as she looked straight up at him in silence with icy, flaring eyes. As the air began to freeze about them, she finally answered plainly, “The Outsider.”

“Outsider? Can’t say I know it, sweetheart,” grunted the SYS-soldier, “But if it’s one of these bars here then I’d like to take you...”

“Don’t know it?!” spat Nira suddenly, “You’re standing in front of it, stupid!”

“Wh...? Hey!”

“You’re probably supposed to be monitoring it,” she said, adding with contempt, “You SYS! Unbelievable!”

The SYS-soldier’s brow crumpled.

“I’sta ‘hideout’?” continued Nira, “Worst kept secret in Destiny? Remember it now?!”

“Ohhh! I didn’t.... Who calls a bar ‘The Outsider’ anyway if...?”

“It’s my bar.”

“Oh.”

“SYS-idiot!”

“Hey, now you listen to me, young lady!” he grunted.

Nira eyes widened into a gleaming glare of incredulity, stepped slowly towards him, then grabbed his grunts and crushed them to ice: “Young...lady? OK...no, you listen to me now. You SYS-idiots slouch outside my bar, day and night, eating desnuts, harassing my friends and customers. And you think you’re protecting Destiny?!”

“Bu...”

“No! Next time you get ordered off to ‘protect’ something, get some better intel, and then smash it into that thick skull of yours. I’ll be glad to help you with that bit.”

“OK, lady, that’s enough...”

“You’re absolutely right that’s enough. I’ve got work to do, and you’re wasting my time. Just go...play with a bone or something!”

Unflustered, she spun around with poise and walked off, leaving the SYS-soldier with his wordless mouth wide open, and his blade hanging limp in his thumbs. Without warning, however, Nira stopped short again, turned around and stared icily at the brute before making her unhurried way back over, her eyes smouldering like furnaces of fermenting fury.

“And, by the way, if you ever call me ‘sweetheart’ again,” she whispered, then grabbed the flare-blade from his grip with a lightning-quick flick of her wrist, spinning it around and stabbing it down at his groin — slipping it effortlessly back into the steely sheath on his belt: “Well...you’ll see something.” As the hapless soldier wilted into a puddle of flaccid flab, Nira whirled around in a scarlet storm and strode off towards the solid wooden door with lilac neon fizzling overhead — The Outsider.

As she neared, she glanced across the pewter paving of the forum — two noble alabaster sculptures sat observing from afar. One gave a single nod. Nira nodded back. A young man dressed in grey kneeled upon the ground between them bathed in platinum sunlight — they seemed younger every day. He was staring directly at her, as a tempest of furious faces drew in around him. She turned back, threw wide the door, as though she were crushing a thousand SYS skulls at once, and disappeared inside.

Next chapter — Shen

Sunday 3 October 2010

10.06 Revelation — Symphony

2010-09-12T00:01:00.020+02:00

The air froze still around the dead woman, and Kai in his blank grey clothes, as a silent storm tightened in around them.

Far off to his right, the two observed him coldly — solid, alabaster solemnity, draped in ivory robes. Even sitting, their quiet intensity at odds with the chattering forum café, they towered over all around them like twin sculptures, each with her left leg crossed horizontally over the right, and a long, dark staff resting at a slight angle in the fold of bended knee within her robes. They did not move. Nor take their calculating eyes from Kai. The few who dared remain close by sipped nervously at their overpriced drinks, occasionally looking round at them with veiled, penitent eyes.

To Kai’s distant left, the man in the green military overcoat, buttoned tight up to his neck in a line of brass, exuded wrath and joy at once as he raised his hands to the sky — holding aloft a golden menorah — shouting unheard words at a stall-owner whilst looking directly at Kai. The uncovered skin of his hands, neck and face seemed to flicker pale colour, glowing dimly in the dusky forum around him. His wild, white hair whipped about his head like a living wash of bright flame, as he thrust the candelabrum back at the unimpressed seller, and bounded into a brash course across the pewter paving towards Kai.

Closing in on Kai’s back, from behind the stall of frozen heads, the preacher dragged through his new followers and the imposing seven-headed hydra. Its gurgling breaths rasped through the quartet’s tones as it pushed past, almost knocking the purple-lipped girl off her feet. She glowered over at Kai, jeering, “Now look what you’ve done! You are new here, eh! You, like, don’t get involved in this stuff, you know!” She turned away in disgust; her lips turned pale.

The SYS-carer looked around and saw the woman lying dead by Kai. Realising his profit-window had slammed shut, he stormed off with a disgusted sigh.

The old man stood trembling over his dead wife. Her final smile remained. He kneeled down, took her icy hand in his, and bowed his head. Kai stared at them with eyes as wide and deep as the helplessness trying to drown him. In the eerily still air, the old man whispered, “My angel...walk with light.”

The preacher, dragging in the hulking hydra, seized the widower’s quiet truth, and warped it with professional ease for his young disciples: “Indeed...indeed, my friends. Walk with light-ah! Death in Destiny shows us the...the...fragility of life-ah, and how we should nurture the care in our hearts-ah,...

I know your faithless care

“...how we all must...must adore the rich...

I feel no riches here

“...rich and beautiful light that embraces and protects us...”

The SYS-carer turned back and shook his head in disgust. Kai glared at him, fury in his dark eyes, as the preacher’s voice dissolved and the man in the strait emerald coat bounded up behind the SYS-carer, jabbing a carelessly harsh elbow into his ribs as he swept past him making straight for Kai.

“Oh no!” said the girl, her lips turning red as she rolled her eyes, “Here comes Shen! Like we need this!”

To his right, one alabaster statue turned her long, stern face aside, a microscopic movement tearing Kai’s intense black eyes to her at once. She gave a single nod, through Kai — his gaze impulsively whirled and leapt to spy her mark. A breeze gushed in. The light broke through. And there, a throw away upon the silver stone, striding, floating, flowing into sharpened air, discarding weakness in her wake, a breath of red, a scarlet dress in waves of ebony hair and time and music flowing slowing down to her and only her of all and old and now she turned her head, to him, and nodded too, her eyes of bright blue diamonds piercing through, before she swung around and throwing wide a door as though it were his very soul she disappeared inside.

At last Kai breathed again. First sight gone, his eyes remained transfixed by her elegant trace, a ghostly gale through solid wood.

I see

Next chapter — Nira

Sunday 26 September 2010

10.05 Revelation — Elegy

2010-09-05T00:01:00.064+02:00

The sun waxed and waned behind her flowing veil of grey as Kai drifted hesitantly towards the old woman, her life fading quietly away over the smooth, pewter stone.

“We care?”

Music filled his breath, silencing the rushing, crying pulse of the city as he leaned over her. She lifted weary eyes as cold shadow brushed over her skin.

Who cares?
Another life betrayed.

the restless cry

Steely beams pierced through the fleeting cracks above, splashing silvery, haloed light through Kai’s ebony mane. The woman squeezed her eyelids tight again, trying to pull his spectral shape taut through the shimmer.

a mother’s tears

Destroyed. Like hers.

The old man turned to see Kai standing by his wife. He looked on in grieving desperation. A breath of red fluttered smoothly past the edges of Kai’s sight. The SYS-carer stood a short distance away, his back turned, cackling private conversation into his hand-film.

the silence choked

Like mine.
And now I’m here.
But why?

Behind him, fluorescent purple lips accosted the distracted stall owner in an inane blur. The girl looked over to Kai shaking her head.

This place is just the same.
These souls are lost.

Platinum light cascaded over Kai as he kneeled down beside the failing woman. Her husband stepped slowly towards them. As warmth flitted over her face, she smiled and lifted a feeble arm towards Kai.

But who am I...

...is not the One...

...in this, alone?

Shrivelled fingers touched Kai’s right arm — he flinched slightly — and she smiled peacefully up at him, struggling a hoarse whisper: “You’re here, my boy. That’s well...that’s well.”

Just chasing ancient lines.
He saw.

through bitter mournful eyes

My sight...still dim.

as shadows shift him into sight

Too many years.
Too weak to see,
or heal.

Within a sudden blaze of diamond sun, Kai lifted his left hand and warmly lay it over the old woman’s icy fingers upon his arm.

the light to shiver and stir

My home, my place, my self —
all gone.

He looked over at the girl, still chattering, still watching. The preacher, leading his hydra and a handful of new followers in behind the surging, jangling stalls, stopped his sermon short and looked to Kai with manic eyes.

I’m just as lost as they.

Within the distant blur and chaos to his left a man stood beside another stall, crying out in emerald green fastened up in brass below a whisper of bleeding light, his gaze trained on Kai.

Yet still I glimpse an ancient truth,
a way to spark the light.

To his right, two noble alabaster sculptures sat observing from afar, within the rippling shafts of star and shade.

For her, not me —
it’s all for her!
For her to live I’m here.
For her I’ll shine again.

The woman opened her eyes, gasping through her final breaths to Kai, “Soon, very soon. Love you till then.”

And then, perhaps,
for them.
To lead them from the dark,
with me.

The forum stretched out around him, an endless, murky throng of mindless chaos.

As only then I’ll be returned.

The old man came up close, kneeled down by his dying wife, and caressed her silver hair as he clenched against his pain. Kai held her icy hand close. She smiled serenely. Tears trickled into the lines around her eyes: “Light lost in the noise, I slip away....”

Her frozen hand fell limp on Kai’s arm as clouds returned, dimming the forum, but for a constellation bright —

A calculated, alabaster vigil to his right;

A fierce exuberance cloaked in emerald green to his left;

A second breath of red in the corner of his soul.

If I'm not One,
then I'll become.

Next chapter — Symphony

Sunday 12 September 2010

10.04 Revelation — Amabile

2010-08-29T00:01:00.025+02:00

Still staring down at his shoes, Kai’s eyes peeled wide in disbelief. He glanced back at the girl. She smiled modestly and batted her eyelids again. Kai returned a hesitant smile then tried to focus again on the music. The deep, gurgling voice returned: “So, you want head or no? Or maybe heart?” Kai looked again to his side. The girl inched closer to him. When the voice continued behind him, her florescent lips made no movement: “Listen...man! Cryo-head or heart or what? Cryos! You must want, yes!”

Kai looked round. The stall behind him was now manned by a stocky creature with a dirty rag of a vest almost covering the leathery green scales of his stomach. He was busily unscrewing and retightening the lids of various jars, allowing freezing vapour to escape as he did. The contents of the metal containers Kai could only guess at. The innards of the glass jars, however, he now noticed in hideous clarity — each one contained a single ghoulishly well-preserved head, kidney, lung, heart, severed hand or some other unknown vital organ or appendage.

“Want good brain?” continued the gruff seller, “Very good brains now.”

Kai looked on in confused disbelief. The girl pushed up next to him.

“Silly!” she giggled, “It’s just old cryo-heads and, like...bits, you know?”

Kai made no sign of recognition.

“So, OK...like, most of those old cryogenic companies, OK, they went just totally out of business, right?” she explained as she twiddled with her blue hair. “They sold off everything...! Like, there’s only one true ‘way’ to immortality, right? I mean, who’s going to want to, like, resurrect you thousands of years later, you know? They all tried it, freezing themselves, like...you know. Totally never worked though!”

A brush of yellow passed by in the distance, asking ages.

“Old brain, good as new,” continued the seller.

“You’ve got some famous ones too, right Blaiput dear?” said the girl.

The seller nodded, gruffly. In the corner of Kai’s eye, two red figures fluttered through the forum in discussion.

“So...you new here?”

Kai smiled shyly and nodded, as he noticed the preacher waddling into the forum through the marble archway, dragging the increasingly irate hydra behind him. The girl continued with a hint of sadness in her voice, “Nice. Real nice. I still remember my first day here, you know. Feels like I’ve been here forever now, though.” Her purple smile curled away as darker clouds passed momentarily over the sun.

The quartet continued its performance. The sun thrust its steely blaze back over the city. The girl forced her purple lips back into a wide, brightening smile: “Hey, these guys, huh? Wow, right?! They play totally...wow!” She hummed along with the music, swaying her head to and fro, before starting to giggle, “Look kinda funny, though, right? They’re Terrans! Come all the way here to play for us.... So nice!”

The preacher and his hydra had begun to attract a small following in the background. As the music drifted through the forum, embracing all, Kai noticed an old woman lying on the ground, while an old man argued with a SYS-worker beside her. On the upper arm of the SYS-worker’s black uniform was a large symbol of two clasped hands of different races. Kai focussed past the music into their conversation.

“Listen,” grunted the SYS-worker, “No way I’m taking her for less than 3000, OK?”

“But...,” stuttered the old man, “I don’t have.... She’s dying! Don’t you know who this is?”

The SYS-worker looked away, disinterested, muttering under his breath, “Yea, well, she’ll not be anyone special soon, will she.”

The old man was distraught: “But...I don’t have it. Young man, if you knew the things this woman has done for your city, the things she’s seen....”

The SYS-worker tapped the display panel on the back of his left hand: “I can see whatever I want right here. ‘Things she’s seen’?! Whatever. Listen — no credits, no service, OK! Whoever it is. We try to keep things fair here in Destiny.”

The old man was at a loss. He looked down at her, powerless.

“Hey, where you off to, new guy?” said the girl, as Kai stepped away from the stall towards the old woman, the music dissipating around him. “We were just starting to get on really well, I thought. Sweetie?”

The SYS-worker turned his back on the old couple, lifted his left hand to his mouth, and started talking and laughing. He walked off and the old man followed after him helplessly. As Kai approached them, he saw the embroidered slogan beneath the symbol on the SYS-worker’s uniform —

SYStem — We Care

Next chapter — Elegy

Sunday 5 September 2010

10.03 Revelation — Cavatina

2010-08-22T00:01:00.020+02:00

The chaotic current dragged Kai along in bewilderment for a while until he gradually, surely learned to swim. The noise of confusion slowly subsided around him and, increasingly calmly, deeply, he drank in the music and motion of the glistening city, finally slowing to a halt allowing all to flow around him. He looked up, past the ornate, weather-worn rooftops of the ancient stone tenements that lined the edges of the narrow street. As the clouds began to lift, he saw the city’s rings rising, extending far, far out and up towards the massive, steely structures he had flown past — and even through — just hours before. Countless threads of traffic trailed in from the clouds, weaving around the colossal edifices, etching ordered paths across the sky towards the city’s various subterranean complexes.

He lowered his gaze again, and took in the flow of life around him on the musty, paved street; it was the most multifarious selection of creatures he had ever seen — animals, androids, aliens; sexed and sexless; stocky giants and spindly imps, swathed in scales and suits and fell and fur, all wading through a deluge of signs and scripts and sounds on legions of limbs and fins and wings.

Two creatures encased and suspended in translucent red atmosphere suits, considerably more massive than their own bodies, scuttled past Kai on a constant, inefficient flicker of spiny, gangling limbs. Their conversation, like them, was getting nowhere fast.

“Well, yes, you said that already! But who or what created Elúcian and Súcthul?” said the first insistently.

The second gave a routine sigh of exasperation, before replying, “Look. The question is irrelevant. They are concepts. Don’t you get that?!”

“Well, yes, as I’ve said several times I do get that. My point, that you don’t seem to ‘get’ is that for a concept to emerge surely implies a higher logic, a greater...oh, look!” She suddenly pointed at Kai with a whipping, boneless limb within the atmosphere suit as he watched them flutter past. “Look at the legs!” she continued, obviously unaware that Kai could understand, “How does it even stay up?!”

Kai turned back round to see a drunk, leather-clad man slouching over a rusty hover-bike, pushing slowly through the crowd towards him, singing particularly badly. His studded, suede waistcoat and his broad, unkempt moustache, which may or may not have been of hair, were clinging awkwardly to his pasty skin as a veneer of borrowed identity. As he shuffled close, wailing random tones in blatant disregard for the original composer’s intentions, he thrust a vile-smelling bottle up at Kai’s face. Kai turned away...

his father claws a bitter glass

...as the biker swayed off, slurring, “Drink is life! Death to sobi...sorbrie...sobriret.... Drink is life!”

Suddenly Kai felt a tap on his shoulder and he looked behind him — an old woman with flat grey hair and a bright yellow coat looked up at him inquisitively: “How old are you?” Kai could only muster a dark frown and a bemused shrug of his shoulders. The woman let out a hearty, screeching laugh, whirled around and marched back up the street in three bare feet, asking more confused Destiners the same question. As Kai watched her go, his eyes focussed past her yellow to the unmoving black shadow of the SYS-officer. Following. Observing. Waiting. Disconcerted, Kai turned around and made his way forwards again.

Two young lovers floated past, oblivious to the universe around them, embracing each other in feathers of blue and gold within a diamond aura of sunlight. Behind them, in a darkened doorway, two ex-lovers punctuated shouts and accusations with a paroxysm of pointing digits within the shadows.

The street opened out into a hectic bazaar, teeming with greed rushing from one disordered stall to another, on which hastily scrawled signs boasted inexpensive treasures. With a twinge behind his eyes, Kai watched the various scripts drift into focus:

Second-hand Gravestones
Eyewitness-approved Afterlife Carvings
Euthanasia Credit Discounts
“Get-a-Life” Virtual Pantheon
Exotic Eternity Profit-Swap Derivatives

He continued through the bazaar towards a busy crossroads; the road to the left led in to the city’s vast central forum. He flinched again as the stinging discomfort returned. He looked around; the shadow of the SYS-officer remained, distant, yet coldly sure. Still looking back as he walked ahead, Kai stepped out into the crossing street and was immediately caught up in the bustling nervous wash of flight dragging him helplessly along to the right, away from the imposing dome of the temple.

The SYS-officer strode forwards, parting Destiny’s sea with intimidation as he went, without taking his peircing eyes from Kai until he disappeared into the living surf. Kai gone, the SYS-officer turned his icy gaze in towards the forum. As the crowd subsided, he spied the source of their fear — a fervent, friendless preacher dressed in a long, black gown was leading a threateningly tall seven-serpent-headed hydra along by a feeble, fraying length of rope. He called out after the fleeing crowd, “Praise Elucian-ah! Do not be afraid-ah! Do not fear-ahhh! Come, test your faith now against the venom of the mighty Marklar. Do not....” He stood suddenly completely alone. No followers left for whom to perform, he dejectedly tied the massive hydra to a flimsy stall — causing its terrified proprietor to flounder and flap away on four regressing wings — waddled off to a dingy alleyway and proceeded unceremoniously to relieve himself against the dank wall. The SYS-officer’s torn, grey lips curled into a repugnant sneer, revealing decaying, translucent teeth, as he raised a claw to his face, pulling idly at the steely barbs lodged deep inside his sallow cheeks.

Kai was politely and silently floundering in panic as Destiny’s flood carried him away from the forum in a seemingly endless arc of fear and annoyance powerless to resist against the tide driving him on and on and on and round an agonisingly long curving channel passing through another crossroads and yet another full of ire and impatience until suddenly, passing under a grand arch of marble, he was washed out of the street with a crashing, dissipating spray of bodies all around him — into the central forum! As he stood with irritation gushing around him, still not quite sure how he had arrived, he looked around the enormous paved disc punctuated with countless stalls and cafés and alien figures with the monumental temple reaching majestically high in steely gold, dwarfing everyone and everything around it.

By his feet, and stretching all around the plaza, were mosaic discs of black and white within the pewter sheen of the paving: discs of the Elucian Symbol — some complete, others containing only single monochrome discs, emphasising its symbolic component parts. On one of these discs sat four figures, pear-shaped creatures with faces protruding from the middle of their bodies. Three of them held wooden instruments under flabby chins, sticking straight out from their yellowy bodies, while the fourth member sat almost concealed behind a large, dark oval slab. All four of the bizarre beings, each in their own world with eyes shut tight, held pins of wood and hair in their grasping feet, drawing them back and forth beneath the wood across metallic strings in perfectly choreographed harmony, scraping out a divine cavatina. A crowd had formed around the quartet. Kai stepped in behind the listening mass and stood in front of an unmanned stall of glass jars and brushed-metal containers. He quickly spied an attractive girl close by who had been keenly observing his approach with batting eyes. She smiled a wide, wide smile with fluorescent purple lips. Kai returned the smile, shyly, and looked back at the musicians. Slowly, coyly she sidled up to him. He looked again. She smiled even more widely, flaring even more fluorescent, and spun her fingers into a timidly obvious wave. She shuffled up closer still. As Kai looked nervously at his feet, thinking fast about what to do, a deep, masculine whisper gurgled into one ear — “You! Want head?”

Next chapter — Amabile

Sunday 29 August 2010

10.02 Revelation — Tempo

2010-08-15T00:01:00.015+02:00

As Kai gradually allowed the light to seep into his eyes, he saw a myriad of figures appearing from nothingness all around him, stepping in continual chatter from translucent elevator shells around the curving walls into the paved courtyard. Poised in the centre of the atrium were three interlocking rings of smoothly hewn slate arcing up three times his height. The steely sunlight glittered over the sculpture’s surface, as the last drops of rain slid over and through its faultless turns and down into a pool of diamond glimmer within its core, laving elliptical ripples of fresh platinum light up and over and into her finely etched notches as she savoured time.

No one saw such beauty now. In a daily rush to toil, consume, and dither and die, all had lost her very essence. No one stopped to admire the playfully dynamic perfection of her craft as she patiently, constantly, loyally dispersed the passing illumination of the stars within the cradle of her arms each day. These days they all stared blindly down at their private hand-films scored with bleary, soporific colour — a far more immersing way to measure loss and delay. She knew her own time had passed, yet, without a care, she cupped and measured and offered time each day in sweet delight for her hidden age.

Below this selfless performance the family stood within the sculpture’s shadow — the adults argued; the children cried. One parent begged to calm the day; for the other, it was already clearly lost. Kai stepped out into the stream of bodies flowing through and out the circular courtyard into Destiny’s narrow, bustling streets lined with buildings clad in argent, age-worn stone and radiant mosaic. He saw an information terminal to his side, waved the back of his left hand by it, and lines and racing points of light appeared at once upon his hand-film — the concentric, curving streets and their bustling throng.

Unbeknownst to Kai, however, as he stopped and stood in awe of the city around him, one of those tiny points of light, lingering not far off across the street, showed the wretched sable of the SYS-officer. Had Kai noticed that tiny, unmoving, scarlet speck, he would have seen the subtle flow of red dots around it. Had he marked the ominous figure itself, he would have seen how every creature large and small, sentient or no, turned stiff in fear as they approached, looked away or to the ground to avoid his impaling gaze, and crept around his sinister stillness. Missing this, Kai watched as two tiny specks of red rushed in close behind his own then flicked around him. He looked up to see the two children, tears already a distant memory, hurtling into the city in boundless energy and joy. From behind Kai came the shouts of their parents as the boy and girl played on.

“I’m a Marklar! Rawhrrr!” The boy waved a number of arms around as he chased his sister across the street. “Look, these are my heads. Raawwhhhrrr!”

“Well, I’m...I’m a Sucthaë. You can’t kill me!” parried the girl.

The boy caught up and ran straight past her and ahead into a widening gulf in the sea of bodies. “Well...well...I’m...I’m....” He hurtled ahead, looking back at her. “I so am going to kill you now, ‘cause I’m...I’m—” With a dull smack like leather on brick, the boy slammed to a stop and flopped backwards onto the ground. Dazed, he tried to comprehend the physics of his harsh halt as he looked up and finished his thought in the shadow of the SYS-officer — “...Lúez!” His parents stopped short in the middle of the street, mouths and eyes wide in terror. The SYS-officer, towering over the boy, arched down, plucked him carefully into his claw and lifted the tiny, shocked creature all the way up to his putrid, greying face. The child still breathed confusion at the chain of events that had brought him here as rancid air enveloped him and the SYS-officer whispered into his face with a hiss, “That’s just one of many names, my boy.”

The boy erupted into wails and tears. His parents ran over to him, showering the SYS-officer with copious apologies. The girl stayed where she was, frozen in the street. Kai watched on with furrowed brow from the far side. The SYS-officer, without even acknowledging the parents, lowered the boy to the ground. His parents grabbed his hands and dragged him off, apologising and thanking the SYS-officer over the sobs of their spurned son. The girl remained, then turned to Kai. She stared straight at him, ice in her emerald eyes, before spinning round and running off to her family, who seemed to have forgotten her, shouting at her brother, “That wasn’t fair! If you’re Lúez, then you can just turn into anything you want. I’m not playing anymore!” The city engulfed them. Kai stumbled off in the other direction, into the crowd...

and deaths perceived, the boy

He suddenly clawed at the nape of his neck, as though he had been stung, and looked back as waves of alien faces gushed around him; the SYS-officer remained, towering, clouded shadow. Observed and closed. Hunting cold...

the darkness shifts to dim his prime, unsure of time

...a disconcerting pulse prepared.

A company of SYS-militia marched past the officer, saluting him with outstretched arms. The SYS-officer paid no heed, keeping his cold, calculating eyes on Kai as he was swallowed up by Destiny’s sea.

Next chapter — Cavatina

Sunday 22 August 2010

10.01 Revelation — Introit

2010-08-08T00:01:00.005+02:00

The bleary daze gradually dissolved away from Kai’s unsullied eyes. As the numbing, drawn-out barrage of tedious processes and interminable interrogations removed (even if he could have spoken he wouldn’t have been able to answer all the SYStem questions) he found himself standing restored in freedom beside his ship, now safely secluded within Destiny’s vast, murky underground docking network. He looked up — he had no idea how long he had been standing there — and his widening eyes took in a flurry of ships through glassy floors. Large and even larger craft were being propelled along above, below and all around him through sizzling cobalt energy channels to be stationed or returned to the surface. He looked back to the spherical ship by his side, and saw his hand spread out on the shimmering hull — the pristine sheen of the metal defied even a hint of their recent drama — within a disc, the disc Delbo had struck and then evaded, the disc Kai had perceived as its shadow had drifted across the inner hull before his fearful gaze. He slowly peeled away his fingers — the disc was now free from dust, long since seared away in flight, revealing a silvery surface subtly different from the hull’s spectral shimmer of strips; it was a single solid piece, etched chaotically with twisting wisps and curls wrapping over, around and through each other. As he finally separated his hand from the metal, his eyelids flinched as a slight surge of energy dispelled invisibly into the air between his fingers and the sheen; his heart leapt up and out a single beat, then dropped back into line. He smiled at the sphere glimmering off his gaze with tranquil affection, patted it fondly, and stepped out to find his way in the city far above.

The eager click of his footsteps echoed through the complex of concrete and glass as he thrust himself around a corner straight into the broadest of absurdly welcoming smiles. A holographic face twice his height, belonging to a creature he had never even imagined, let alone seen, pierced cooing words that stung behind his eyes for a second before he grasped the treacly ooze: “Welcome to Destiny! For your safety, and the safety of others, please do not attempt to activate your propulsion systems while in SYStem transport. Thank you, and walk with light!” The announcement repeated in various cants; he absorbed each one the same, and as he focussed past and through the hovering face, he saw a guard of the same race as the hologram hunched over inside a tiny booth looking thoroughly bland, dejected and bored. Kai smiled to himself and continued on straight through the face as hovering arrows winked in and out around him leading him towards a bustling stream of beings, bleeding into another and another feeding life towards a row of energy-elevators. As he neared he stopped and watched as people walked straight into the columns without a thought and were immediately, effortlessly whisked upwards at tremendous speeds, up and up and in towards a central column speeding high and higher to the city far above, where myriad channels once again stretched out and strained to reach the unseen spaces of the ancient place.

As he stood observing the intricate arterial system, a family of four pushed by him. One child was crying, commanding his flustered parents’ attention; they hardly even acknowledged Kai’s presence other than as an obstacle as they shoved past. Kai kindly stepped aside, and as they passed, the other child, a girl with bright green eyes, looked back at him, shrugged a sage apology and smiled. Kai embraced her warmth and echoed back a beam as he pulled his dark tousled hair from his face and the family tugged itself into one of the elevators. Energy fizzled precisely around their domestic squabble and shot them upwards. Still smiling, Kai stepped forwards into another elevator. At once level upon floor upon level of parked vehicles flicked downwards past his eyes in a wash of metals, colours, peoples until in a whisper of a breath his eyes squinted tight as steely sunlight blazed and wrapped around him from a break in the clouds and he stepped out into a circular atrium courtyard in the ancient city of Destiny.

Next chapter — Tempo

Sunday 15 August 2010

9.08 Revelation — Debark

2010-08-01T00:01:00.019+02:00

His eyes thrust wide and dry as he twisted and lurched and plummeted away, shooting straight down into a murky chasm between Destiny’s constricted rings pursued by the three SYS-ships, watching on in terror as level upon level of steel and stone flicked upwards past his eyes. The ground rushed towards him and his heart thrashed faster and faster against his chest as the empty gulf narrowed and darkened around him. The pursuing ships pulled back, not daring to hunt into the clouding straits, as Kai fell headlong into the ravenous, ancient black, with the flurry of white and blue glinting off his terrified eyes — the numbers raced to null; time was gone; he held his breath and closed his gaze...

breezes brushed him into sight

His frozen fear splintered into a paroxysm of exhilaration, as the shining symbols swirled away their secrets and, in the spasm of a dying breath, Kai pulled the ship up and out of the shadow into a labyrinth of thinning, ageing lanes of stone. His heart leapt at the intensity of his own bellowing laughter as he struggled with the ship this way and that through the ancient inner circles of the city, the blue light of the massive sun piercing past the spires of descending towers to illuminate the crooked, cobbled lanes. Three distant silhouettes passed overhead — the SYS-ships — following his reckless trajectory insistently from above.

Clenching a grin of wild elation, Kai thrust at the sapphire light, twisting in and out and through the lanes between the ancient buildings, sinking and narrowing at each turn, until the ship grazed against the building’s protective energy shield, propelling it violently to the other side, where the opposite field did the same, jouncing his ship roughly from side to side, curbing his crazed run ahead. Kai sensed the ship slowing, and purposefully pushed harder against the fields. Crackling, sparking cadmium energy spat from the side of the ship as it grated through the alleys. He rounded a curve and ploughed straight into a concatenation of traverse cords, strung from one side of the street to the other, dangling countless clothes to dry (now basking once more in the rain) sporting various numbers of holes for legs and arms and heads, among other appendages. Like a lancet through a lyre, the ship snapped through the entire lattice, launching clothes into the air, through yawning windows and to the ground. A threadbare, four-legged undergarment several metres wide pasted itself over the front of Kai’s ship as it sped. Kai strained his head to see through its orifices, as elderly beings of various races peered out the windows that had framed them calmly for generations, raising hands to the skies and groaning to each other, more in familiar annoyance than shock or fear, as Kai wove down into the inner rings.

Kai thrust himself deeper against the crackling wall, ripping the concealing garment away; it fluttered down in frilly flames towards unwitting citizens below. He twisted his slowing ship down and round and into a broadening street of gleaming pewter paving, where a thousand beings of a thousand races reacted in a thousand different ways as Kai dragged perilously closely overhead — they fled and cheered, they screamed and dove, they shrugged and puffed, they clambered and sobbed — until Kai thrust his ship into a final arc against the shield, the sputtering energy grinding at the metal sphere as he lurched out from the maze into the breathtaking expanse of the city’s bustling central forum.

His mouth fell open as his dark, shining eyes drank in Destiny’s heart — the great domed temple of the Elucian Way towering over him. He shook his head violently to wrench his focus back, chopping with cerulean hands in a vain attempt to avoid the leaping, wailing, roaring, consuming citizens of Destiny, darting over taller heads just inches from a carried sheet of glass and missing a rolling rickety pram to the side of seated clientele between merchants’ stalls and piles of waste and finally grating, scraping down and tearing up the tiles and stones in waves of golden, rosy sparks from steely barbs protruding from the hull until the sphere skidded and shredded and ground and creaked and spun and slid into the most inelegant, clumsy stop.

Kai breathed hard — inexplicably, he was still alive. He jumped up and scaled the tilting, central pillar; by the time he clambered out the hatch, the column was perfectly vertical again. As he emerged from the top, the crowd that had formed to witness this day’s display of certain death dispersed in a murmur of disappointment — not only was he unharmed, but the sphere offered no sensationalistic signs of damage on its smooth hull.

Far overhead, the three black SYS-ships hung for a moment, then quietly, obediently removed, as a paunchy, black-clad SYS-guard ran breathlessly towards Kai. A city custodian of low rank and even lower regard, he looked up as he scurried and watched the ships fly off, then glanced back at Kai, squinting up at the sun as he looked down his cleft noses at his target’s youthful confusion. Immediately, he reduced his gait to a cocksure, sweaty swagger. He waddled into the shadow of Kai’s ship, took a deep, calculated breath and scanned the situation with well-practised nonchalance. He suddenly flicked out a hand — a fresh, scarlet holographic report sheet opened out around his greasy digits, and he began chafing at a comprehensive list of later-to-be-ignored particulars. They hung there in a tense silence for a moment, before the SYS-guard finally finished his report, looked back to Kai, and smugly sighed, “So, eh...you can’t park there!”

Next chapter — Introit

Sunday 8 August 2010

9.07 Revelation — Desist

2010-07-25T00:01:00.014+02:00

Kai darted through the piercing shadowed bands of towers and spires as he fell deeper into Destiny. Heaving at the sapphire light in vain to slow and steer his way to life, he bolted, shot and wove through layered rings of ageing, shrinking structures down towards the core. The sudden flashing red and green of two SYStem ships shot up behind into pursuit, blasting sirens from their angular graphite hulls, submerged in splintering lights. From nowhere Kai convulsed into a wail of pain and clutched his head — a massive, piercing voice exploded gruffly through his skull, berating him with unknown words; the SYS-ships fired precisely focussed sonic laser shafts straight at him. As he writhed and slid about the metal throne to flee the torturous pain, two glistering slats of green and gold flashed up to his left. Despairing instinct strained his hand out, begging for relief. The viridescent sheet pulled close, installing by his side, and on it spun at once a thousand scarlet sound-wave striae within the space. Before his heart had pounded through his chest again, the waves reduced to violet calm and cancelled out the deafening shaft of noise. With a deep palliating sigh, Kai embraced the second pulsing slat of gold without a thought, but straightaway spat out fresh howls of pain and peeled his eyes in disbelief — the gold shot straight into the display panel on the back of his left hand, entwined into a pair of wispy orange threads of light, whipped up and down and stabbed into his skin! He felt his body turn to stone as energy surged up his left arm, gnawed through his neck, engulfed his inner ear and lodged behind his gaping eye.

Kai stared about in incredulously sudden painless calm. Words wafted into his placid comprehension: “Alien unknown, desist at once from your unauthorized descent!” The reality of his predicament rushed rudely back into his awareness. He thrust his left hand back into the sapphire light and threw himself about, doing all he could to comply, to slow and follow and explain, but his shell had already gained too much momentum to wrest itself away from its current downward course. He lugged desperately from side to side as his wide dark eyes soaked in the rosy emerald amber navigation pane’s chaotic spiralling scarlet bolt away from the SYS-ships through Destiny’s ancient stone labyrinth. His other hand flicked desperately through the chalky slat above the blush to find a way to restrain his failing ship. Sheets of signs and shapes flurried past incomprehensibly. Again in blind instinct, as he tore down through the city’s tapering crevices, he grasped and dragged the blue pane up from the amber onto the white. Virescent figures bled and fled, transforming to a blurring cerulean sheen of numbers chasing after constantly changing parts reduced, the ship in constant flux, all parts unknown save one; a constant disc of white drifted patiently, faithfully accompanied by a single, cyan symbol —

As he followed its lazy path, bemused, his eyes slowly focussed past the glowing consoles through the milky portal ahead. His mouth fell wide as a third SYS-ship rounded the corner directly ahead and blazed straight for him blaring, “Desist!”

Next chapter — Debark

Sunday 1 August 2010

9.06 Revelation — Debased

2010-07-18T00:01:00.059+02:00

Deep within the murky, steely shadows of his chamber he sat alone, straining rapid, rasping breaths through a mask pressed against his fetid face. His cold eyes pierced the screens before him, displaying images of Kai’s sphere.

A signal pealed from the secured door. His hyperventilation ceased at once, turning deep and calm. He wrenched away the mask as his turbid silhouette pulled taut with a secret hissing dissent: “This shape will be my end.” With a turn of his head, the steel door slithered open, revealing a nervous worker. The SYS-officer’s maw deigned to a sneer: “How may I be of assistance to you?”

“We.... Sir, we...we...,” he stammered fearfully.

“Out!” the SYS-officer blurted fractiously.

“Sir?”

“The information!”

“Yes, of course! We have it on scanners now.”

The SYS-officer’s sneer reduced at once to wrath; he crooked his neck forward, piqued. The man’s skin turned pale in dread as he realised his omission: “On scanners now, sir!”

The sneer returned: “Fortunate, for us all.”

The worker hung uncertainly in the doorway. The SYS-officer sputtered his curt and callous laugh, before facetiously adding, “Oh, do please stay.” The worker bowed his head timidly and withdrew, as the SYS-officer called out, “Just push it here — now!” He turned back to his screens and the door slid shut. Still images distilled to motion; his biting eyes devoured the chase — seen from various angles, the lustrous sphere shot out from a sliced, striated spire and darted deeper down into the city. With a flick of razor black, the screens became an exhaustive wash of statistics. He perused them methodically, then nodded, and...

He froze. The chill. Grating metal coursed and shrivelled soul and mien as writhing into unseen shadow seeped the cherished wreathing visage, sickly seething filth through murderous choler — “Son!” — the insult retched. Quaking far from light the summoned child spun round in yearning dread and sank into an execrably loving supplication in His deathly pall, stammering in reply, as though his gore might drain, “Here...he...here, it’s here, it’s time!”

Simmering up through shadowed súcthul bile spewed, “Show the way!” The spawning pall dispersed and left him in a sodden, quivering heap.

The shaded presence gone, the SYS-officer lifted up his bitter front and convulsed in solitary dread. At once he thrust a single onyx claw into the skin of his face; he gritted through and seized the pain until its tears turned dry. He glared again at the screens — the shining sphere fell deeper into Destiny, pursued by his unyielding, steely eyes.

Next chapter — Desist

Sunday 25 July 2010

9.05 Revelation — Displaced

2010-07-11T00:01:00.037+02:00

With a loud crack, a protective forcefield repelled Kai’s ship with only minor damage to the building — the resulting shards of steel and glass were quickly fished up into a hovering mass of particles within a protective net of chalky energy extending automatically from the field, fizzling in the stormy rain.

Upon impact, however, Kai, his harness loosed, was wrenched wildly from his seat. What felt like endless death took only seconds — as he was propelled forwards, his outstretched hand pierced the blazing ruby light of the inertial control. Immediately the ship began to spin about him and he floated effortlessly up into still air. Coloured light consoles flew to and through and past him, leaving the solid metal wall whipping inexorably towards him! His eyes closed tight; his body curled into a desperate ball of self-preservation.

An intense whisper passed over him. His breath remained.

He cracked open his eyes and raised his head just in time to see the next wall bear down — and open precisely around him letting him through. He twisted back his head to see — sending his compressed roundness into a contrary, weightless spin in the centre of the sphere — and watched as countless strips of alloyed texture filled in his shape to faultless shimmering flat behind him. The ship spun quicker and quicker around him; he watched its steely shapes shoot past his startled eyes — the walls and shelves the bed and head and cobalt blue the chair and coral mirror red a flitting disc of black on shining galley down to engine coils magnetic tanks and reservoirs of blinding white and up and back to flowing textured walls and suits and sheets of gleam.

Finally accepting his breath was still his own, he felt the tug of weight return and the ship started to slow about him. He noticed again the dark circle pass up and over the slowing inner hull of the ship, like the penumbral shadow of a passing moon — a part of the ship, unknown, unseen, flowed along with the fluid current of strips over the outer hull, yet remained distinctly complete and unchanged. As Kai at last sank into gravitational realignment with the ship, he came to rest on the deck. All was uneasily calm.

In one movement he leapt up and back to the flight throne, and as he saw through the cloudy portal ahead, his mouth dropped wide, appalled — outside, nothing had changed; the ship was still careening straight down the colossal towers. His heart thrust hard against his ribs; he scrambled down nervously into the seat, grasping that his breath might soon be cut short after all.

The ship blazed on past a multiplicity of intergalactic expressions of shock and dread, pressed up to shimmering safety screens or diving away from glassy panes, in lofty upscale homes, gaudy boutiques and endless dreary offices. Kai thrust his shaking hands into the ship’s shining sapphire reins and tried to wrest control as he plunged into a latticework of walkways connecting towers, nudging past a web of crackling energy shields, deflecting him this way and that, before the ship shot giddily out and his eyes turned white — infinite complex lines and files and rows and stacks of traffic brawled out beneath him!

Without a thought, Kai pulled at the blue light and the ship heaved up and flat and pierced straight ahead — directly into the crackling energy field between two stacked floors of a sliced, striated spire. His limbs and organs froze at once, as rows of bronze droids sitting along endless, stretching tables snapped their heads up in unison as the silvery sphere shot past over their heads. With a collective mechanical whir they swivelled their necks as one to follow the ship’s dash through the sizzling energy field towards the boardroom’s head — a copper droid stood mid-presentation, standing in front of an ostentatious holographic chart boasting bars of recent prosperity soaring suspiciously far above a glittering silver disc of projection. The steely spherical ship shot along and through and out the far end of the building without effect. The droids snapped their heads back to the elevated dais with a single metallic purr. Surrounded by serving droids, in front of an oversized company logo portraying two golden robots holding his own rotund and bloated head aloft, the chief executive sat, affluently smug and portly, bracing up a hand-wrought gold cigar in three distended yellowing thumbs, and sporting an expression of idle consternation as the room dropped into silence. He looked down at his collected droidpower with a frown. They looked back at him with an unchanged expression of programmed neutral adoration (which nevertheless seemed fearful). There was a long silence. He finally gave an apathetic waggle of his bulging wrist, shrugged and shook his head, exhaling an exaggeratedly dismissive, “Pfffffft!”

The room erupted in synchronised, obsequious laughter, as Kai’s ship shot away from their firm fiscal future lurching down into the adjacent rings of Destiny’s colossal structures.

Next chapter — Debased

Sunday 18 July 2010

9.04 Revelation — Descried

2010-07-04T00:01:00.010+02:00

The two SYS-workers began stammering nervously at once in desperate supplication for their jobs and souls.

“Was only s...some old ship, sir!”

“Went through the...the...the shield, and....”

In weary disgust, the sallow SYS-officer hissed, “Just...show it!”

They flicked for their lives through lists of recent records. His muted tone belied unravelling restraint: “Show it now.” At last, they both exhaled in sudden concerted relief as a chain of blurry images of the anarchic spherical ship cascaded onto the screens.

“That...that’s it, sir.”

“See, sir, nothing special.”

He glared straight through the man, restraining waxing wrath by grating scorn through flattened vitreous fangs: “You would know, of course.”

“But....”

“No!” His flinty talon flicked just inches past the worker’s terrified eyes. “Just...push it to my chamber.” He stood fast, an imposing sable arch hanging over the worker’s quivering fear.

“Now, sir?”

Again he spat a single laugh of callous incredulity, then without removing his hollow eyes from deep within the man’s lost soul, he emotionlessly hissed, “That would be best.”

“Of course, sir!”

“Right away, sir!”

With a final glare of utter revulsion, the SYS-officer swept around and strode off into the black. And when his steely footsteps had at last dispersed without a doubt, the two SYS-workers exhaled in relief.

Kai was spinning relentlessly, strapped in hard to the metal throne, as the ship hurtled down towards the city. Straining against the alloy mesh and forcing back the black from his eyes against the spiralling strangling G-forces, Kai reached desperately out towards the frantic flaring red of the inertial stabiliser control. As the ship shot down, his mind raced to comprehend his impending ruin; multifarious details shot through his wide eyes and lodged inexplicably in his mind — untamed waves of gold crashed into energy shields around the disc; the floors of massive spires hung as separate slices stacked into the thinning air; submerged mooring bays splayed secretively outwards from the city’s edge...

The ship careened into the median rings. Tiers of eyes of countless races looked up and out in sudden dread as Kai shot down past their lofty windows. Still straining out to reach the inertial control, his eyes peeled wide in pounding panic as he shot towards the tower wall. His other hand fought down to where the safety harness fused its belts to one; he smoothed them free — exactly as the ship ploughed into glass and steel!

Next chapter — Displaced

Sunday 11 July 2010

9.03 Revelation — Deposed

2010-06-27T00:01:00.016+02:00

With rain gushing over the portal, his view obscured, Kai veered left in wide-eyed, breathless panic at the shock of the enormous hand blocking his way; with a deafening crack of cadmium energy, he burst through the side of his ineffectual lane and fell spinning out of control.

The hand — a holographic symbol of welcome to the city, ten times the height of Kai’s ship, wrapped in shimmering, textured logos of the city’s major corporations, for which the constant influx of new blood corresponded to ever-soaring profits. All around the circular city’s sky, each incoming lane was greeted by one such symbol, traffic passing through it as it cycled through a thousand cultures’ defining gestures — welcome, supplication, prayer-invocation, profit-calculation.

The next ships darted straight through the hand as it reshaped into an unknown green appendage and continued down towards the surface. Kai’s spinning sphere, glistening in the rain and reflecting the gaudy lights of advertisements all around, hurtled down and away out of sight of the two unconcerned, burly, black-clad SYStem workers sitting in front of rows of screens on the observation deck of the surveillance post.

“Another one.”

He shook his head. The other nodded. Their thickset necks hardly moved.

“Cough up, then,” he continued, with bland enthusiasm.

The second reluctantly touched the back of his hand to his colleague’s — with only one digit raised — transferring credits through their bio-film interfaces.

“Ten today already,” said the second, sluggishly.

“Yea. Early.”

“I’ll get you back tomorrow.”

“They should really change that thing.”

“Nah. Cost too much.”

“‘Acceptable losses’ they call it.”

“Yea.”

Both pondered in silence for a moment as a variety of ships darted past in front of their eyes towards the city. Slowly, one brow began to furrow.

“Not many go straight through the field, though.”

The second brow followed suit.

“No.”

Again silence. The sky greyed to a darker hue and they looked up at the sinking clouds. Gradually their brows congealed back to flatness. The huge hologram hovering in front of them cycled from ruffling emerald feathers to an intricate, ruby flower. The first worker pointed to it.

“That the one you mean?”

“Yea. Ceaeros.”

“Really nice.”

“Yea. See the woven grain on the upper petals, how it catches the rain? So life-like.”

“Mmm. Though the colour’s not quite right, is it?”

“Nah. They boost the intensity when the weather’s bad.”

“Oh.”

Dumb hush again. Then trenches creased slowly back over their foreheads.

“Wait...wasn’t that ship...?”

“Round? Like the...?”

They turned to each other in fear.

“Should we tell him?” whispered the second.

“No way,” hissed the first, “Not without checking it first. You know what happened...you know...last time.”

“Then we better get that scan up, ‘cause I don’t....”

They stopped short, stared stiffly ahead, and held their breaths. They knew. Before they even heard the cold, calculated steps emerging from the shadowy metal behind them they knew he was here. They huddled over the screens in front of them and began frantically flicking through lists and maps and images of ships with nervous fingers. The clicking footsteps ceased. His scraping breaths remained.

In the chilly silence, the workers choked for air, peeled their eyes up from the screens and cautiously turned their heads around on thewy necks.

The SYS-officer stood tall a stride behind them, half concealed in shadow, clad in sculpted mantle, blacker than blood. The sallow, hairless fell of his head wrenched sheerly down on scarred cheeks fused in metal spurs.

The two clenched blood from their knuckles as they clawed their chairs in dread. One swallowed past his airless, arid tongue, “Clouds’ll be down on us soon, sir, so....”

“Don’t...,” hissed stilly past the tattered, ashen lips, then curling to a gelid grin of twisted, turbid, grey disdain, he raised a deathly adamantine claw and scoured through savoured sibilant sneers — “Don’t...you think...that I...should see?” A single spewing laugh of disbelief convulsed from deep inside him.

“We just thought....”

“No!...”

Leaning forward into silence, his grin ground down, the steely blue above pierced sickly, hollow, lifeless eyes, which stared not at, not past, but through the men as though he long ago had deemed them null and crushed their mortal hearts in bliss.

“No, you did nothing even close.”

Next chapter — Descried

Sunday 4 July 2010

9.02 Revelation — Descent

2010-06-20T00:01:00.010+02:00

He felt the new gravity tug his insides down. He watched the hull begin to quiver. He heard the hiss of air around the ship outside. Inside, however, all remained calm. 
As flames began to lick up to the fore portal from the underside of the ship, Kai grinned ardently. The fire cast off his intense eyes and he strapped himself into the flight chair; the five metallic belts meshed together seamlessly at his waist. An azure light pulsated serenely in the corner of his eye; he recognised the symbol from earlier — the inertial stabilisers. Kai shook his head cooly, smiled defiantly —

Not now. I want,...

— and softly pressed the symbol.

...I need to feel...

Violence thrashed away the calm at once and shook Kai wildly about in the chair, the shining panels before him a blur, the metallic straps holding him sharply fast, the hiss becoming a rush, a roar of thrashing wind and blazing flame as the ship propelled him downwards in a perilous drop towards the planet surface in his infernal coruscating sphere. He laughed in uncontrollable rapture, disenthralled, and louder than he had heard himself in years.

...alive!

The inertial control flashed insistent red, ignored. Beside it, the rosy navigation pane showed the circular city below in rapid approach, as the flame subsided and sank from the window, the convulsions eased, and the roar reduced leaving Kai alone in his dissipating peals. As the sheets of light around him quivered soft to steady, he checked his position through the portal ahead — a steely sky of lines of traffic snaking down into the cloud. The cyan panel at his right was awash with symbols and statistics of the myriad ships and structures all around: temperatures — while those about him still fought off infernal heat, his own ship hardly flinched at all; and further figures flicked around the circular city — occupants, heights, masses, and ages. As he streaked over the tops of towers on the outer ring of the monstrous city protruding from the clouds, the busy rosy amber panel completed the context of the ringed megalopolis below.

Ages? His eyes shot wide. He strained down through the harness of the seat, took hold of the cyan light and flicked it up over the navigation panel. Virescent numbers spread and shot across the urban outline, each darting to its target tower as he hurtled into the cloud. Roaring, rushing shadowy grey filled the window, and Kai’s deep eyes pierced the pane awash with racing jade figures revealing hidden mathematical patterns, systems, and structures all around. The ship jolted again in the turbulence of the clouds, chafing Kai against his alloy belts. Numbers, ages — the city sprawled to unfathomable heights on the outer marge in the most modern spires and towers, some incomplete, in innumerable designs. Each successive ring towards the distant centre was not only a level lower, but also slightly older. As Kai closed in on the city, the display showed the thinning cloud and a surveillance post below. The concentric rings of buildings seemed to spin endlessly in towards the centre, plunging, ageing. In the centre of the navigation sheet the symbol of a hand much like his own began to form. Kai’s brow crumpled. The hand opened into a welcoming gesture. Kai smiled, relieved, and strained to lift his hand to meet it, as the cloud began to thin in the window ahead.

Now I’ll...

He tensed and pushed against the straps to reach the panel with his open hand. In the centre of the panel the city’s eye appeared. The final central rings grazed low and old, structures more ancient than any race he knew. His hand touched the mirrored hand of gold. The clouds thinned, dark to grey to white.

...show Destiny...

As the last shining ring gave way to the immense expanse of the ancient, circular forum, the outstretched hand expanded around his own from the city’s nucleus — a golden, domed temple, the most ancient, venerable space in the heart of the city. The last of the cloud shot past. A wash of rainy grey. An endless city mass below. The surveillance post hanging to the side, and...

...I’m the O...

His eyes peeled dry in dread, his muscles seeped to stone — an immense, ungodly hand blocked his way!

Next chapter — Deposed

Sunday 27 June 2010

9.01 Revelation — Destiny

2010-06-13T00:01:00.017+02:00

The alarm blared mercilessly — Kai leapt up and fell on heavy feet in the flight deck before even realising he was awake. He sank into the throne as his pulse began to calm, and with a gracefully simple flick of his hand through the sapphire violet glow, all but invisible through his bleary eyes, the ship’s engines whined down and the vessel gradually slipped out from the shimmering temporal branch. The aurorae that had borne the ship through hidden, ichorous space and time dissipated around him, and a silent coral flash blinked off his glassy gaze, heralding his return to the chilly void.

As his eyes unfurled, however, the clammy blur reduced revealing through the portal’s milky sheen a teeming flood of life about a single silvery orb. A vast mosaic of tiny pulsing flashes rippled through the black about the disc, launching countless gossamer threads of vessels large and small, all snaking down towards a planet.

I see

A planet, silvery grey, colossal and grand. The uncovered, endless sea of the lower hemisphere glinted like platinum in the cool gleam of the distant blue supergiant — 

by Destiny’s light

— while the upper hemisphere was all but shrouded in swirling graphite cloud. What lay hidden below, however, was obviously the focal point of the planet, as every one of the countless twisting strands of ships descended to the cloud and returned through the same narrow channel. As Kai was being carried along in one such line towards the same hidden destination, ships burst through the energy pocket behind him one after another and followed in his path towards the new world. As he neared the congested funnel of traffic above the mantled sky, his mouth dropped open as he noticed the imposing array of massive patrol vessels, each as vast and unwieldy as an asteroid, encircling the channel. Closer still, he saw the gleaming holographic communications contorting over their crooked, hulking hulls in various cants as tall as temples —

Welcome to Destiny!

Please lower shields now for SYStem security scans.

Be on your guard, and report anything suspicious to SYStem troops.

As Kai looked on from high above, clusters of ships in controlled files entered the atmosphere in a myriad of sparking flecks, burst full in flame and finally doused themselves to tiny specks and disappeared within the stormy cloud below.

Kai pushed away the galactic map, which folded neatly down, and pulled the idle rosy sheet above it closer — countless crimson spots sped down a fulvous cone towards the ground. A cyan sheet blinked eagerly by his feet, and he keenly dragged it up onto the lower edge of the blushing navigation plat; immediately it unfurled into rows of figures and symbols and signs — atmospheric conditions, masses and velocities of ships, hull temperatures, estimated times of descent. As his ship passed through the gauntlet of massive patrol ships — the dull throb of scans vibrated through his skull — more details of the planet below began to appear on the coral screen. Tiny ruby flecks upon the sea limned lines of turbines swilling waves as tall as towers, while others soared on strings of current far above the endless sweeping shells of solar farms and sucked the racing winds into esurient metal lungs. These in turn fed power in, and in, among the clouds, were hovering clustered angular hulks, awkward surveillance posts not unlike the hulls just passed above.

Finally, further in and far below, the bloated sprawling ancient child that guzzled all the gifts of life unthanked — the corpulent circular island city, walled by rings of dizzying towers that broke the clouds, descending from such heights in layered edifice bands that slid beneath the pall in almost faultless lines descending to the distant nucleus of the epic disc, an ancient paved forum, precisely round, and nesting in its eye a majestic temple shining gold upon Kai’s sight.

at last

And as his ship dipped into sky, he set about his first descent towards the dam of countless hopes and dreams, the ancient seat of the Elucian Way — Süd’ba — Destiny.

I’m here

Next chapter — Descent

Sunday 20 June 2010