Athena was amazed when he brought books which she had never seen before. “Where did you get these?” she asked, quickly reading the contents of several books.
“I can’t tell you my secrets, can I?” he said, jokingly.
Athena pouted but realized he would not tell her. She opened the first book and began to flick through the pages. If she could not find them again, then she would read them all in one sitting.
As she read, Kry still held the copy of the book that he was interested in. The author’s initials ‘J.M.’ were printed in gold on the front of the book.
He opened the first page and read the short preface by the author:
In my many days working in this subject field, I have come to understand the hidden gems found within one’s mind. A User has the gift to use the mind, but to master everything takes some Users a lifetime. When it comes to unlocking a mind, this is usually a simple matter of age. Users develop from an early age and can begin to use their mind to do extraordinary things. Whether you are born with this gift or not is completely random, and you will not know you are a User until you have reached the ages of six to fourteen. Some Users develop faster, but regardless of when the power develops, there is no exact science of how powerful the User can become. What is more difficult, and this is where my research and expertise have often been used, is when it is necessary to lock the mind. Locking the mind is a difficult process for both the User and the one doing the locking. This book will explain the reasons for both and perhaps give the reader at least some insight into the known practices and theories.
J. M.
Kry read the preface several times. He should have known he was a User before he turned fourteen, but he was different. His mind had been locked, and he had no idea that he was a User until he had already graduated from university. The initial shock he had felt was life changing. From the ages of six to fourteen, you had your childhood to develop and understand the abilities you possessed. He did not have that luxury. His discovery of being a User had come with a host of family secrets to which he still had no answers.
He flipped through the book, skimming the pages and stopped at the page heading: ‘Techniques used to a control a User.’
The chapter was riddled with theories by the author with an occasional diagram, but several parts had been highlighted in bold which caught his attention.
The mind is like a minefield; it is delicate and must be treated with the utmost care. In some cases, it is necessary to strip Users of their powers if they grow too dangerous. Now, when we mean dangerous, we do not mean, for example, the Blades. No, in this case, we refer to dangerous Users who cannot be controlled and might become a liability for the Shadow Government. These are the Users who are too volatile to manage.
Stripping the power of a User? Kry was scared of what that would mean for the User. He continued to read.
This is done, first, by stripping them of their personality.
Kry stopped reading. He did not like this book one bit, but he had to know if there was something in here to help him. He forced himself to read on.
Before we continue, I must add that this practice is no longer carried out. The usual practice for rogue Users is to either kill them or place them inside the Sanctuary, the User prison which is governed by the Seekers. The Sanctuary is a morbid and depressing place, and no User would ever willingly go there. The Seekers can be as cruel as the Blades.
Images of figures in white robes holding rods by their side were drawn on the page. Hoods covered their faces, and it sent chills up his spine. He had seen them in the flesh. Some of them had kidnapped Dr. Rhodes and made him a servant of Botulinia. Their rods were capable of neutralizing a User’s ability by disconnecting the mind to the body through the sonic vibrations that the rod emitted. Kry had been a victim of a Seeker’s rod when Byron almost stopped him from escaping from Bellum. If it had not been for Mean Bean, he might not be here now.
He turned to Athena. “What do you know of the Seekers?”
Athena was surprised. “Why do you want to know about them?”
Aside from the Blades, the Seekers were the only other sect of Users who worked for the Shadow Government. Kry wondered if there were people like him who were locked up inside their prison.
Athena raised her eyebrows. “I hope you’re not thinking of becoming one after you’ve finished here!”
He could see the genuine horror on her face at the thought. “No, no, I just wanted to understand about the organization. There’s a reference in this book about them.”
Athena seemed relieved. “You had me worried! You don’t want to join the Seekers. I’ve never found any other group of Users more terrifying.”
“Not even the Blades?” asked Kry, his curiosity rising.
She shook her head. “The Blades are terrifying, but the Seekers have their rods which can disable our abilities. Unlike the Blades, the Seekers have to be trained to become almost emotionless, and that scares me the most. They also have to sacrifice a part of themselves.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kry.
“You don’t know? I thought everyone knew about that. Kry, you need to read more!” she said.
Kry shrugged his shoulders.
“To become a Seeker and to be granted a Seeker’s rod, you must give a part of your User ability away. The training is so rigorous that Seekers loses some of their mental faculty. Emotion and rationality are no longer present after they’re indoctrinated. The lack of emotion also means that they’re unable to produce elemental energy or form barriers. Despite these drawbacks, receiving a Seeker’s rod is considered a great honor among Users. Seekers can hunt rogue Users as mercilessly as the Blades but without emotion,” said Athena.
Kry could not understand why any User would sacrifice the very things that defined them. He glanced back at the open page of his book and tried to imagine the Sanctuary and all the Seekers who guarded it. An image on the page caught his eye. It was a robed figure standing over a man who was kneeling down on one knee.
“Anyway, don’t get any funny ideas about becoming a Seeker!” said Athena.
Kry turned to her and smiled. “You don’t need to worry about that. That’s the last thing I’d ever consider.”
Athena was satisfied and returned to her book. Kry appreciated having Athena here to help him. She was content to read and study. He wished he could be as studious. He then returned to read further.
In order to strip a rogue User’s personality away, we must break them down, mental brick by mental brick. We strip them of their memories.
Kry flipped the page. Another image depicted twelve figures around a table in what seemed was the passing of judgment on another figure before them.
The members of the Shadow Government have the final say on whether a User must be changed. Once done, the User powers lie dormant and are unable to be reactivated until the Shadow Government wishes it. Most die before ever remembering.
Was this what had happened to him? His eyes were glued to the depiction of the Shadow Government. He had a dream long ago of the table shown in this image, but it was a boy, not an adult in the dream.
Athena tapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve never seen you so interested in a book before,” she said, pointing to the images. “Old practices.”
He was silent as he looked at the page.
“Now, the Blades just put you down if a User goes rogue,” said Athena.
Kry flipped through the pages again. “I know this is an old practice, but do you know if this was ever done on children?” He was afraid to hear the answer.
Athena laughed. “Are you joking? Why would they do that? It was only ever done on adults because child Users are still too young to be considered a rogue User.”
He wondered how true that was. “What else do you know about this?”
Athena looked at him suspiciously. “Why are you so interested in this all of a sudden?”
“I’m not,” he said, quickly.
S
he squinted her eyes at him and looked as if she could tell he was lying.
“I just found it interesting that this was even possible,” he said.
Athena let up on him. “Yeah, there aren’t many books on this subject anymore.” She took his hand and looked him in the eyes. “If it happened to you, you’d never know. It’s scary just thinking about it. You’d believe that you were someone else.”
Those words frightened him to the very core.
“Are you OK? I was just kidding,” she said, seeing Kry’s face lose complexion. “That doesn’t happen anymore, so don’t worry about it.”
But what if it had…
Athena returned to her books while he pondered his fate. He had to read more and flipped through the book again. He stopped at another chapter: ‘Reasons for locking the mind.’
Images of the five elements, fire, earth, water, lightning, and dark matter, surrounded a single sole figure who had no face in the center of the page.
We have discussed that this is done to rogue Users, but there are also some other reasons why this is done.
It can be as a request from the User to start a new life. This is the most common cause as many Users have asked for this to be done to them. It is because they either wish to forget a tragedy in their life or something is making them unhappy for them to choose this. Once done, there is usually no coming back, and many Users who do this understand the consequences. Nowadays, the Shadow Government refuses such requests.
There were several more reasons underneath, each with their own paragraph, but it was the last one that made him stop to read in full.
In the rarest cases, it is done because there is something with the User that has to be contained, something that cannot be controlled. Unlike a rogue User, these Users are unaware of what that something is. Some would even say it was a darkness within them. These Users are powerful and do not go willingly to have their memories locked. In my time working in this field, I have locked many a mind, but I can say with a degree of confidence that I have never come across such a case…
The words trailed off, and there appeared to be a missing entry. It had been etched out. Kry tried to read on, but the words were too faint to see. Someone had deliberately rubbed out the last part.
Kry considered everything he had read up to now. Abel had said there was a darkness within him, and now this book said that in some cases stripping the memories away was to contain a darkness inside the User. He did not want to believe any of this, but everything pointed to that truth. Was there something inside of him that had to be contained, and was that the reason why Jaeger did this to him?
“He was a great man, you know,” said Athena, suddenly.
He turned to her confused. “Who?”
She pointed to the book he was reading. “The author of your book, of course, Jaeger Mattius.” She turned the book over and pointed to the initials: ‘J.M.’
He was reading the book of the very person who did this to him. Kry was in disbelief.
“His methods were some of the most unusual, but they worked. He was a genius,” said Athena in admiration.
“Jaeger wrote this?” Kry returned to the previous chapters he had read, trying to understand the voice of the author, the voice of Jaeger. He did not fully understand. Rush had once told him that Jaeger was the head of the Seekers, but what Athena had explained about the Seekers made little sense in regards to Jaeger. Jaeger must have had some rationality to have written this book and to have stripped his memories.
Athena could see the confusion on his face. “Jaeger was smart and was also very loyal to the Shadow Government. That was why he was given the position of First Seeker.”
“First Seeker? How can someone with no emotion write such a detailed book?” asked Kry.
“Seekers and the First Seeker are very different. The First Seeker is the head of the organization, and it’s a position that’s offered by the Shadow Government to a User who has shown outstanding qualities. The First Seeker is higher than any of the Blades in terms of power and governance, but he or she doesn’t undergo the same training as an ordinary Seeker. They’re more of a leader, a figurehead, who reports back to the Shadow Government. Jaeger wrote many such books when he was First Seeker,” said Athena.
Kry stared at the initials.
“He was a key figure in the User Civil War. No one could believe he turned against the Shadow Government, and his disappearance is still one of the greatest mysteries this century,” she said.
This made him stop. He turned to her with a dozen questions in his mind. “What do you know about him and his disappearance?” he asked. The only clue he had was what Rush had let him know. Some disagreement between Jaeger and the Shadow Government had caused him to change sides. A disagreement to do with his blood, but Rush had not explained further, and if what he read was true so far, then he had a whole life of memories locked inside his mind. He was as lost as ever.
“Jaeger was different to previous First Seekers. He showed more compassion to rogue Users and would often challenge the Shadow Government regarding their decisions, but even when he wasn’t listened to he would still support the Shadow Government. That changed during the User Civil War.” Athena pulled out a dusty tome from under one of her mountain of books and blew the dust off. She scanned the contents page, flipped through the book and then turned the opened page to him. Her finger pointed to the title: ‘The Disagreement.’ Below was a drawing of two boys.
“There was a disagreement among the members of the Shadow Government over these two boys,” she said.
He had seen them. They were in his dreams constantly. Their laughter and friendship echoed in his mind, and he had even see Jaeger in his dreams. “Who are the boys?” he asked.
Athena shrugged. “Good question. No one really knows.”
Kry could not help but stare at the image of the two boys, their hands holding one another.
“For whatever reason, the Shadow Government limited the amount of information that was released about these boys and the disagreement itself. There are theories of course,” she said.
Best friends forever?
Best friends forever.
Kry held his breath.
“There are no concrete answers, but some theories say that they were related to the Shadow Government, and others say that they were lab experiments,” she said.
Lab experiments? Kry began to feel nauseous.
“Some even say that they were brothers with unnatural User abilities, prodigies if you will,” she said.
Kry controlled his breathing. “What happened to them?” he asked, his eyes still on the image of the two boys.
Athena sighed. “They were killed,” she said, angrily. “The Shadow Government had them executed.” Her voice was one of disgust. “Jaeger was against the decision and left to join the resistance. He vanished soon after. Some have said that he also died, but I think he still lives.”
He closed the book. “I have to go.”
Athena was surprised. “You look pale.”
He was far worse than pale. His headache had come back worse than before. Boom, boom, boom, the same rhythmical beats echoed in his mind as he tried to maintain his balance. “I’m sorry, I need to go.” Without another word, he quickly left the library.
The winter air blew against the windows of the tunnel which connected the buildings. A growing heat began to form across his forehead despite the coldness around him. He walked past several students in the tunnels, ignoring them as he tried to get out. He could hardly breathe. Everything was a faint whisper, the sounds all blending into one. He turned the corner leading into another tunnel, and he continued until he had reached the front gates of the university where the university barrier ended. Usually, the snow at the gates was removed by snowplows. It was important that the road to the university was always open, but today the snow was falling so severely that it had piled up to a certain degree. He needed to get out.
He opened the gates, formed
a barrier and pushed through the snow. His breath was warm as he began to speed up, running through the snow which was knee deep. There was no denying the truth. He knew he was one of the boys. The dreams, the headaches, the references to Jaeger, they all led him to the same conclusion. He was one of the boys, but he could not remember anything. He burst through the snow, a silent rage building up as the heat he was developing melted the snow around him. Were Julia and David even his parents? He did not want to believe it, but ever since Dominus had said his life was a lie, he had doubted everything. There was no use denying it any longer. He knew the dreams were fragments of memories long ago.
He screamed as he burst through the snow and ran as fast as he had ever run before. He was certain he was one of those boys, but who was the other boy?
Chapter 18 – Growing Darkness
“You don’t need to see the object to move it. If you have a feeling for—” Professor Nam turned to Kry. “Kry! Can you tell me the difference between moving an object which is stationary and one that is not?”
The high pitched voice of Professor Nam shook him from the daydream he was having. Kry did not even catch the question.
“Sorry…what was the question again?” he asked.
Professor Nam put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “My class is not for sleeping, nor is it for daydreaming. I asked you, what is the difference between moving a stationary object and one that is not?”
Rise of the Young: Warriors are not made; they are forged (The Ascended Book 2) Page 25