Hard Reign

by John Hook

  They brought me down a long hallway. It seemed familiar, and rightfully so. This tower had exactly the same interior as the one we had destroyed near Haven. We emerged from the hallway onto a large semicircular platform. On the platform was an arrangement of alien technology, just as before. They looked like control panels, but instead of monitors, keyboards and switches, they had creepy membranes, like skin, with what looked almost like glowing tattoos on them. All around the platform was a ring of former humans in harnesses that sealed them in and gagged them. Their eyes were wide with pain that never stopped and, while the gag prevented them from screaming, you could hear a high-pitched hum from all around. Worse, I knew that, from the edge, you’d see rings of such tortured souls going down as far as the eye could see.

  I was being dragged from behind by two Shirks so that I could see what was happening on the platform. Two of the Shirks were making hand gestures on the surface of the membranes on the strange machines. I could make out colors changing as reflected on their faces. I tried to plant my feet and jerk myself out of the Shirks’ hold on me, but all I succeeded in doing was shooting pain through my own body. They turned, dropping me to the floor, and then one of them kicked me hard. He leaned over, sneering.

  “Quentin Case. We’ve heard so much about you. I wish they would just let me beat you to death. I’d wait for your proto and do the same to it. Unfortunately, it isn’t up to me. However, one thing I am sure of. You are never leaving this tower.”

  He kicked me again, in the head this time. I couldn’t see for a moment and experienced sharp pain as flashing lights. They grabbed me up rudely again.

  When my vision cleared I could see they had thrown me into one of the harnesses. Most of them were filled with gagged, wide-eyed humans experiencing unimaginable pain. Glamour bodies, although having a biological substrate, did not have the normal human nervous system functions for going into shock. You felt every bit of pain until you were damaged enough to turn into a proto. That was what really made this Hell. You could feel pain for eternity if you were kept alive. That is, apparently, what these harnesses did.

  I made one last effort to spring out of the harness, but it was useless. One of the Shirks just thrust his shoulder into my chest as he held me. Another was securing my arms. There was a sharp pain in my left shoulder and I turned to see a porcelain clip being placed on the shoulder as the fibers from small biological organisms that inhabited the clip went into my flesh. Clips were applied to the right shoulder, chest, stomach and legs. My body burned as the organisms burrowed their way in. I struggled, but no one bothered to hold me. The clips and the harness strappings did their job.

  The Shirks stood in front of me, grinning. One Shirk, the one who appeared to be the leader and had been the one kicking me before, held the piece that would be fitted as my gag. They just stood there.

  Pain, hot and sharp, filled my body. It started slowly from the base of my spine and at first was merely another point of discomfort in a body already wracked. However, then it became like hot knives flaying the flesh along every possible nerve pathway and spiraling up my spine. I tried to push it down but it overpowered my efforts easily and my skin felt like it was on fire. I screamed! I didn’t even recognize it as my voice. It was a soul-shattering sound of one for whom there is no hope.

  “That’s what I was waiting for,” the lead Shirk said with deeply intoned pleasure. “I wanted to hear that once before I applied the gag.”

  The gag was pressed across my face and locked down and the Shirks walked away. I could no longer hear my screams as a sound, but they continued in my head and the world my eyes viewed was awash in red.

  I can’t describe what I went through next without resorting to clichés, none of which would be suitable to actually communicate the magnitude of what I was experiencing. Nor do I know how long a time this went on. At last, however, my mind found a way to do what my body couldn’t—retreat into fantasy. I found myself falling into darkness. I could still feel my body burning, but somehow the darkness cooled it just enough to make it tolerable.

  I landed in the underground chamber Guido had shown me long ago. For a moment I felt excited anticipation in spite of my pain, but there were no signs of Guido. I shouted his name, but there was no answer. So was this just the delirium I retreated to in my pain, or was there an answer buried here that would help me somehow?

  My first instinct was to try some of Saripha’s deep breathing exercises, but it actually made the pain worse and almost snapped me back out of my delusion. I had to keep moving, keep occupying my mind to distance the pain.

  I crossed over to the racks that were designed to hold the platforms. There were four empty slots. I could account for three of them. The blue platform was the one I had which I had absorbed the power of. It lived in me now as an alien energy—maybe an entity—that I didn’t understand very well, but had been learning to interact with as guided by Saripha. Two of the others were the black energy platform and the purple energy platform. Knightshade had those. I had no idea what the other missing platform was or what the three platforms sitting here were.

  I picked one up. It seemed heavier than it should have been. As I held it and attention became focused on my arms, the pain in them started increasing. I was trying to put the platform back when I caught a motion in my periphery. I turned and saw Rooni at the back of the chamber, rubbing up against a corner where the chamber turned into a passageway. Her eyes met mine and for just a moment a slight comfort came over me. However, in the moment’s distraction, I lost my grip on the platform I held and it dropped on the floor, banging loudly in the large empty chamber. The platform shot, clattering, towards Rooni. Rooni’s tail fluffed out and she disappeared around the corner. I ran over to the passageway, but Rooni was gone. I bent to pick up the platform, I think initially with the intent of putting it back, but as anger rose I hurled it across the room. I banged against the walls as hard as I could. I felt like my limbs were on fire and all the pain I was feeling swept into my consciousness. I was back, staring out from my harness into the now-empty control chamber in the tower, screaming screams that no one could hear. For just a moment I thought I saw Rooni and a man of blue on the platform, but they faded. I wasn’t even rational enough through my immense pain to figure out what I was seeing.

  I closed my eyes and, using every ounce of my will, pushed myself down in the darkness. It wasn’t so much that I lessened the pain as I pushed it a little more into the background, like a trapped, drowning man who finds a small air bubble, maybe just big enough for his nose. I felt myself falling again. I felt a small modicum of relief that I might be returning to Guido’s chamber. Perhaps I could learn to take refuge there for my eternity of pain. It was about as much as I could think of. I couldn’t think about the others finding me, maybe Izzy and Blaise with Saripha releasing me as they had the others. I had no hope and delusion was my only refuge.

  I did not land in the chamber.

  I landed in water. It was really little more than a puddle on ground that had been drenched by rainfall at some point. However, all around me, the foliage was on fire. It burned hot, only I couldn’t tell if it was the heat I was feeling or my still-ongoing pain. I really was incapable of rational thought, so I took in everything as an unquestioning observer. I probably knew where I was, but didn’t even think about it. I walked through the mud to the next clearing and I saw the blue girl with the dark hair. Fear filled her face as the fires burned closer and her blue skin became tinged with purple in the light. I stood there. I was thinking I should go sit with her, comfort her as we waited to burn, for there was clearly no escape from the flames. Unfortunately, I seemed to have no volition and could not will myself to go to the girl. She didn’t seem to see me. At one point she looked straight at me but was clearly focused somewhere behind me.

  Then, like a miracle, an angel descended in a shaft of light into the clearing that the flames were beginning to consume around the girl. Had I been capable of rational thought
, I would have felt rage and fear. If this was not the angel who plagued me and carried off Rox, it was one of her kind. I couldn’t think even that clearly, seeing her only as an angel and thinking at least she would save the girl.

  The girl looked up at the angel and started crying. The angel looked at the girl and reached out her hand. For just a moment I had a glimmer of what she really looked like. I had that glimmer once before with the angel I had encountered—teeth on jagged circles of bone, like saw blades, flesh like armor with spikes. I panicked that this creature was reaching for the girl and then she was the Angel again. She looked right at me and I knew she was looking at me. Her eyes created a great longing in my heart and I felt as if I would cry and for just a moment the pain became like a noisy chorus in the background.

  As the flames closed in she swept the girl into her arms and then like a serpent wove her body around the girl and pulled her wings around them like a tent. With horror I watched as the flames overtook them. Feathers and flesh blackened and peeled. Boils formed. I shouted in pain and then looked on my own arms to see that I too was on fire. I stepped into the clearing and in another puddle of water that paradoxically remained despite the raging fire, I saw my entire body was aflame and my head a flaming skull.

  I looked at the charred lump that had been the Angel sheltering the girl. It stirred and the wings, which now looked more like blackened leather pulled tight over bone, unfolded. A blackened figure stood up. The Angel and the little girl were gone. It was the Black Angel I had seen when I followed Rox in my vision with Saripha. She was aflame. I saw now clearly, she had Rox’s eyes. Even through all the pain, I felt something sweet in my chest and a powerful energy in my groin. The pain seemed almost to fuel the sudden onrush of sexual desire. Flames rising from both our bodies, we came together in an embrace and I felt my body let go of everything. Pain. Sound. Breath. Maybe life. Everything was silent for a moment. And then the Angel exploded into ash. I was standing alone in the flames.

  I found myself floating in a dim gray nothingness. There was no pain there.

  Then I was back in the tower, screaming, looking out on the empty platform where strange alien machines clicked and clicked and clicked as the colored tattoos on the membrane surfaces changed configuration.

  Then I saw Rooni beside me. There seemed to be grasses around.

  Then I was back and all the pain tore at me. I think I was crying but it was hard to tell.

  Then I was standing on the platform, right in front of where I was harnessed. I could see my wide, pain-filled eyes above the gag. I was either crying or the tears were flowing from the distress to the nervous system. I could tell, despite the gag, that I was screaming. I saw the eyes meet mine and there was a begging to be saved.

  Except those were my eyes, weren’t they?

  Rooni beside me, in a field of grass, said, “You will have to leave him.”

  “I can’t,” I said, although none of it was making sense. I found myself floating in the grayness again.

  I was back staring at my tortured self. My empathy was almost as great as his pain.

  “If that is me, who am I?”

  “You are always you,” Rooni said as I felt the grass against my bare toes.

  Then I was screaming as pain seemed to grow beyond any limits I could conceive.

  I was standing outside myself, watching myself in the harness. I knew what I had to do. I didn’t understand it, but now I stopped questioning it. I stopped needing to make sense of it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said with deep sincerity. I looked into my eyes. No, his eyes. He who had been Quentin Case and now would suffer horribly like the others here until this pain farm, as I called it, could be destroyed.

  The eyes that looked back at me were filled with desperation. They only knew pain and hope and I was taking hope.

  I stood in the field overlooking the pain farm, the cluster of conical towers down below. I was naked and I was blue. Rooni was sitting in the grass beside me, preening.

  I looked at Rooni as if she had answers for me.

  “Did I imagine you talking to me?” I asked.

  Rooni looked up at me.

  “No, now that you are fully integrated with this part of you, I can communicate, though I won’t always choose to.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of used to that with you magical-being types. So I’m the blue entity now? And Quentin is trapped in the tower in endless pain?”

  “You are you. Both the Quentin you thought of as you and the one you refer to as the blue entity are glamours. There is no blue alien that was hiding inside you. It is a glamour. You control how it appears. Because you regarded the blue energy as alien, you made the entity that wields it an alien.”

  I looked down and saw that I had my clothes back. My usual yellow shirt and tan chinos. No imagination where clothes are concerned. However, I seemed to have left my skin blue. I shrugged.

  “I still don’t feel good about leaving him in there.”

  “Nor the others,” I heard in my head.

  “I take it there isn’t much I can do on my own, right now.”

  “What do you think?” I heard Rooni in my head.

  “So where do you figure in all this? As long as I have you talking.”

  Rooni got up and rubbed my leg. I reached down and scratched her head and neck. She purred and butted against me.

  “Okay, I get it. Audience over. Time to find out what happened to the others.”

  I looked one last time at the towers. It spooked me to think of myself trapped in there, screaming silently behind that gag. What was left of that glamour anyway?

  “I’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

  I didn’t think it would really bring him any comfort even if he heard it.

  I turned and followed Rooni back towards the mountains.

  15.

  My head was empty. My body didn’t feel like my own. It felt alien and, yet, numb. I had no idea where I was going. I started out more or less blindly following Rooni, but she wasn’t really paying any attention to me and when we reached the trees, she disappeared up into the canopy. I smiled for a moment, thinking that she reminded me of Kyo. So I just kept walking in a straight line. I had no destination. I wasn’t even aware of what I was thinking. From somewhere deep inside me an uncomfortable energy began to build up.

  I don’t know how long I kept going. Eventually, I emerged from a mountain pass into a low valley that was dwarfed by the rising purple sentinels of mountains, some of the tallest I had seen. Towards the top they were rocky and the caps were covered in snow. If I had to guess, they were between eight thousand and twelve thousand feet. The sheer majesty of the peaks had a very strange effect on me. At first I was struck by their magnificence, feeling awe. Then I started to feel very small and unimportant. Then, it was as if all my guard went down. I was overwhelmed with sorrow and grief as I felt an inconsolable sense of loss. The loss of Rockvale, the loss of Rox, the loss of Saripha’s mortality, the apparent loss of Guido, and finally, although I lived in this new body, the loss of myself to the pain farm. I cried with every ounce of my being, making no attempt to control it. I had no will, no desire to move.

  All my bravado, and I had been able to do nothing.

  That one thought.

  Suddenly there was a great explosion in my belly and a bright flash of white behind my eyes. I stood and screamed at the sky. I grabbed a rock and threw it into a thick tree. The tree snapped over like it was made of balsa. I grabbed up the tree. Maybe it was balsa, because I hefted it effortlessly and let it fly. It took down another tree. I hammered at trees until they splintered. I yanked down vines. I threw rocks. I had no sense of what I was doing anymore. I had no goal. I would retain almost no memory of what I did. There was just the fire of unquenchable anger burning through my body. The world appeared brighter to me than normal, as if my pupils had been dilated by something.

  And then, as suddenly as it came, it was spent. I was holding only a medium-sized t
runk I had torn from its stump, but it grew impossibly heavy in my arms. It fell and, luckily for me, rolled away after thudding heavily on the ground. My legs gave out and I collapsed. There was no anger left. No sorrow or grief either. There was nothing. I knelt with my head down, feeling empty.

  “Quite a tantrum. Feel any better?” I heard in my head. It was a mocking voice, but there was just a touch of tenderness lurking beneath.

  I looked up. Azar was sitting on a rock. I looked at him, disoriented, coming back to myself.

  “Tantrum?”

  I really had no sense of what had just happened.

  “Look,” he said.

  I rose slowly and looked behind me. If there was an organization in Hell committed to environmental protection, I was probably in trouble for deforestation. Behind me lay a path of destruction that one would expect from a tornado. Trees had been snapped and lay askew on the ground along with shattered rocks. Even some of the trees that remained standing were shattered and splintered, many leaning a bit.

  I looked at my blue hands that, other than the color change, looked pretty much as I remembered them.

  “I did that?”

  Azar studied me. I wasn’t quite sure why. He seemed to be peering inside me. Then his impish look returned.

  “Yes, I’m afraid you did. A waste of your abilities.”

  I looked down at my hands again and then my arms. As with my previous body, I was in good shape, with muscles well defined but not with a body builder’s exaggeration.

  “So, what? That’s my power? I have super strength or something?”

  “Or something,” Azar said slyly.

  “What is it?”

  Azar studied me another minute and then nodded over to a large section of tree trunk that lay on the ground after being apparently shattered from its base. Its girth was enough that it would probably take three men to form a ring around it.

  “Pick it up.”