by Paul Tassi
Lucas was used to cells at this point, though the room he was locked in was clearly meant to serve an alternate purpose on the cloaking flagship. He’d hung around with Alpha long enough to know what the life support system of a starship looked like, and he was staring at a large pair of gravity generators twice as tall as he was. The ship was clearly not meant to house prisoners, so the Archon had locked him in the most secure room on hand. The controls, like the door, were locked, and the displays in the room were a mix of Xalan text and unfamiliar symbols Lucas couldn’t place. He heard the tapping of bone claws on metal outside, meaning the Shadows were on the other side of the sealed door, keeping an eye on him as the Archon did god knew what elsewhere. Lucas was thankful the room had no windows, and there was no more destruction to see. But he could feel it. He could feel the death all around him.
He paced around the room for the twelfth time. It was spacious enough to house the enormous gravity drive, but there was no way to tell how big the ship itself was. He waved his hand through the locked holocontrols once more. There was no hope of hacking them; they didn’t even seem to notice he was there. The room was thick with allium, darksteel, and a litany of other indestructible materials. An improvised prison, but an effective one.
He had nothing.
No strength.
No speed.
No influence.
No Natalie.
No Asha.
No family.
No home.
Lucas eyed the metal edge of the base of the control unit. In a room full of smooth surfaces, the corner was sharp. A dark thought struck him, then stuck in his mind for an hour, then two, until it was all he could think about.
Could he do it? The Archon wanted him, needed him for something. Probably to manipulate him to kill more Sorans as he began his purge of the planet. Probably to become the next Corsair, and fight alongside Maston, where he would be just as brainwashed as the shell of his former friend.
Could he end his own life to avoid such a fate? It would be worse than death, after all. He couldn’t save his family, and they would be better off at least if they didn’t eventually have to fight against him as well as the Archon’s Xalan hordes. He’d been dead for years, and they’d survived, thrived even. Perhaps this time his death would motivate them to find the victory that he couldn’t give them.
He carefully placed the bare flesh of his wrist against the metal corner. It was cold. He was cold. Could he really—
“Spare me such an embarrassing place in history,” came a rumbling voice from behind him. Lucas jumped back from the control cluster and spun around.
“That I would be killed by a warrior who would become little more than a mewling coward in the end.”
The towering shape wandered into the dim light from behind a generator.
A dozen feet tall, natural armor from head to toe. Crimson skin. Infernal eyes.
The Desecrator.
The vanquished mutant Xalan dragged his claws along the allium drive plating. They left no mark, made no sound.
After a moment, Lucas’s heart slowed from its sudden furious pounding.
“The Circle,” he said. “You’re there too. Your father said you were.”
The Desecrator chortled.
“It is a wretched place, locked up with so many I despise. As welcome as it was to find my father again, the other Shadows banished there make it most unbearable.”
“Why are you here now?” Lucas said, rubbing his wrist and shoving his sleeve down over it, now almost embarrassed about what he had been considering.
“To save you from your own idiocy,” he growled. “Self-inflicted death, just as the war commences? Shameful.”
“The war is over,” Lucas said. “You won.”
“I won nothing,” the Desecrator snarled, flinging his claw out derisively. “You killed me, as you may recall.”
“Yet here you stand.”
“As little more than a shade, trapped on a useless plane of consciousness.”
Lucas circled the creature slowly. He was tense, even though he had no reason to be. Still, he’d seen the beast before him end more lives than he could count. His visage alone was terrifying enough, even without a tangible physical form. The Desecrator’s insect wings twitched periodically from inside their housing on his back.
“Why do you care what happens to me? To Sora?” Lucas said.
“I do not,” the Desecrator replied. “Though it appears you are my best hope for both vengeance and release.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I do not begrudge you defeating me in battle. That my father and I share. But what I despise far more than death is being controlled. Chained. Used.”
The Desecrator’s eyes burned into Lucas.
“The Archon has made fools of us all, something we only know now that death has locked us away in the prison of his mind. We are still the slaves we were when we were small and docile as Sora’s pathetic creations. Nothing has changed. The Archon controlled the Council from the shadows and, in turn, pulled my father’s strings—pulled mine. He is the one who sacrificed my brothers and sisters in pursuit of the perfect warrior. Killed my mother with grief. Killed my father and me by provoking you and your companions to action. He turned our entire race into little more than his own sword and shield.”
“What is his end game?” Lucas asked. “What does he want, if not the destruction of Sora?”
“Oh, he does want that,” the Desecrator said. “But place your trust in me when I say that this war you believe is ending is only just beginning if he is not stopped. Though I care not about such things. I want his head for what he has done to Xala. To my family. And if he dies, the Circle breaks. I will be trapped here no longer and will pass on to what lies beyond. Here the chains are not physical, but they hang just as heavy around our necks.”
“What about the other Shadows in the Circle?” Lucas asked.
“Few have actually died in battle over the centuries, as you well know. The Archon slaughtered a number who turned against him after your friend’s dissemination of the truth across the colonies. A few stray rebels eluded his wrath, but most remain blindly loyal, even those who know his true aims. They are lost forever to his madness, and will not be swayed by the bitter voices of the dead.”
Lucas leaned against the oxygen tank as the Desecrator brushed past the locked doorway. His footsteps were silent.
“What are his ‘true aims’? What is he planning? Who, or what, is he?” Lucas fired off the questions he still couldn’t understand.
“The secrets bound in his mind must stay there, and I cannot break free of that constraint,” the Desecrator said with a snort. “Though I imagine you will discover his intentions soon enough. Provided you allow yourself to live that long.”
“Even if I believed all this,” Lucas said, locking eyes with the beast, “that you’re trying to help me, what can you actually offer? You’re little more than a ghost of what you were. You can do nothing.”
“I can sway you from your course of idiocy!” the Desecrator bellowed. “You have slain many monsters. Live to slay one more.”
“How?” Lucas asked.
“Reclaim your gift. Realize your full power. It may surprise even him.”
Lucas shook his head.
“He injected me with something, a serum. Everything is gone. Wiped away completely.”
“A lie,” the Desecrator said. “It is a mental block, not a chemical restriction. Such a thing would not even be possible.”
Lucas was confused.
“What are you saying, that he’s psionically cutting off my power?”
“Yes. It was one of the first things the Council did to rein in my own strength all those years ago. A tactic taught to them by him, no doubt.”
“But it didn’t work.”
“My father trained me to resist their influence. Once the battlefield was level, restricted to physical power rather than mental tricks, I was without equal.
As you saw.”
“Wait,” he said, a realization dawning. “You can resist psionic influence completely. It’s how you defeated the Council. What did your father teach you?”
The Desecrator’s eyes narrowed, like he was considering sharing some great secret with a man who by all accounts should be his mortal enemy. Finally, he let out a long sigh. His breath should have washed over Lucas, but he felt nothing.
“My father made a point of studying the psionic Chosen when their powers started to emerge. He even befriended a select few. He discovered their power, all our power, comes from a deep, pure pain. Pain that must be controlled, managed, turned outward. It is why the transformation process is so agonizing and grotesque, with few surviving the ordeal.”
Lucas thought of the icy torment inside his mind every time he tried to exert his influence, pain which grew worse with each new use. Did this happen to all Chosen Shadows? Was it something they learned to overcome, or manage?
“Pain is more than a feeling of physical discomfort. It is one of the purest things someone can experience, and it has no equal, not even in its opposite, pleasure. Pleasure is fleeting, but pain is everlasting. Pain can span an entire lifetime. In ancient times they used to say that only through true, pure pain can you see the face of God.”
Lucas heard the Shadows growling to one another out in the hall.
“What does this have to do with the Chosen?” he asked.
“The Chosen draw their power from their own pain at first, but the truly formidable draw it from others. To resist, you must embrace your pain. To know it, use it, so they cannot. And if you can master that, you will be free from their control.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucas said. “You want me to hurt myself?”
The Desecrator shook his head.
“No, you fool. Have you not been listening? Pain is eternal. It is not a simple cut of the knife. It builds over time. An instant of pain is nothing, but cumulative pain is a wellspring of unmatched power. That is what you must tap into.”
Lucas blinked at the creature that towered above him. He wondered if the Circle was even real. If this was just him slowly losing his mind. Whatever the case, the Desecrator seemed to know his thoughts.
“Doubt me if you will, I care not. But if you heed my counsel, you may save the lives of trillions, including the precious few you still hold dear. I want the Archon dead for my own purposes, but we share a common goal. There is no cause for me to mislead you here. If I could tear him apart myself, I would, though I must rely on you to bring about his downfall. A worrying thought.”
“Pain,” Lucas repeated. “How will I know when I’ve done what you’re telling me?”
“You will know, as I did. We are both cursed and blessed to have known so much pain, so that we may have so much power.”
And with that, he was gone, and Lucas was alone in the room again.
Lucas was restless, unable to comprehend what the Desecrator had told him. Suicide was far from his mind now, and his pacing had increased in speed as he tried to understand the “pain” he was supposed to find.
Calm down, he thought. How could he tap into a wellspring of anything when his heart was beating like a hammer in his chest?
He stopped, took several deep breaths that filled his lungs to capacity, and felt his pulse slow. He walked over to the pair of enormous gravity drives and tried to understand what he was supposed to do next.
Pain. He’d endured an incredible amount over the years. He could remember every bruise, every break, every bullet, every blade. Was that what he needed? Was that what would be required to “embrace” his pain and free himself?
After a moment’s consideration, Lucas began to strip. He pulled off the tattered remains of the formerly pearl-white flight suit he wore and tossed it aside. His body shivered as his bare feet touched the cold metal floor. He wore only a pair of fitted black pressure shorts.
It was only now he realized that the sickly black veins threaded through him were gone, reverted to their muted shades of red and blue. The Archon’s mental block had made him completely human again, something he would normally celebrate, but right now as a simple man he was of no use to anyone. He needed those oiled veins and those ice-blue eyes that he saw had now dimmed to slate gray as he stared at himself in the reflection of the polished floor. He needed his “gift” back.
He sat down and folded his legs in a way that seemed appropriate for something resembling meditation. He looked down across his skin. It was as smooth as it had been before the Xalan invasion of Earth. The countless scars he’d amassed since were all gone, healed after the Archon pulled his burning body from underneath the corpse of the Desecrator. They’d grown him an entirely new suit of skin, and the injuries he’d sustained since had been healed by accelerated Shadow-like regeneration. For the first time in nearly two decades, he was flawless.
But it didn’t matter. Lucas didn’t need physical marks to remember the horrible things he’d had to endure.
“How do I do this?” he said out loud to empty room. He figured he might as well start from the most recent horrific trauma he’d endured. Since becoming a Shadow he’d felt pain, but only a fractional amount of it. His body was so much more resilient after emerging from his psionic chrysalis, and the brief flashes of momentary pain in battle paled in comparison to what had come before.
The first thing that returned to his mind was what it felt like to be almost entirely engulfed in flame. The Desecrator’s corpse was heavy, crushing, the fire seared his limbs and scalp and he could smell his flesh burning in the aftermath of Natalie’s explosion. He was barely conscious at the time, but could remember it clear as day. The burning felt so real he snapped his eyes open to pat down his arms.
A good start?
He drifted backward further. In his mind’s eye he watched the blood pour from a gaping wound in his ribs from a metal shard planted there by a Council Shadow. The flow never stopped, never slowed. He could feel again the life draining out of him.
He remembered the pure hell that had been the jungles of Makari, running a massive fever, being stung and bitten mercilessly by insects. He remembered how badly the pounding in his head had gotten, like something was trying to beat its way out of his skull. He clutched his forehead in imagined agony.
The voyage there had been even worse. Maston had commissioned two beastly soldiers to beat him as close to death as they could manage. He could feel every wound open, every bone snap. He cringed, and his eyes were forced open again. It took him a moment to catch his breath.
Before that, an iron kick from a towering metal behemoth that detached his ribs. An explosion at the Grand Palace that singed the inside of his lungs and wrenched his vertebrae out of alignment. Lucas rubbed his spine instinctively.
Further back. To the Ark. To a time when he could remember nothing but the giant black claws of Omicron tearing mercilessly into his flesh. Being thrown across the room into metal walls like he was nothing to the horrible creature in front of him. Lucas brushed his hand across his chest, but the scars were gone.
And then, the plasma blast that had blown through his midsection, just as they were ready to celebrate Alpha’s rescue. He’d shielded Asha and Noah, but at a heavy cost. Alpha had hacked up a spare human to replace half his vital organs, and recovery had been nightmarish. Lucas traced his finger along his body where the long, curved scar had once been.
He thought of the one-eyed man who dug a knife into the meat of his thigh at Kvaløya. He thought of the woman he now loved who had initially put a bullet in his shoulder and left him for dead in the Georgia heat. He winced as he remembered the sheer torment of when he’d had to fish the slug out by hand.
But in the end, what he remembered most was the hunger, the constant, horrible gnawing in the American wastelands that felt like his insides were eating him alive. It was constant pain, constant agony. Enough for ten lifetimes.
Lucas’s eyes sprang open. He was dripping with sweat, panting
profusely. All of his nerves tingled, like the pain he remembered had flooded back through them, if only for a millisecond.
As he settled himself and stood up, he slowly walked around the room. Did it work? Was that it?
He didn’t feel different. He looked down and saw a stray vein or two that could look discolored in the right light. He peered into the floor and found one, maybe two microscopic flecks of blue among the sea of gray.
Whirling around, he drove his fist into the allium tank, then cried out. The noise was loud, and his fingers throbbed. He shook out the fresh pain and peered at the spot he struck. A dent, but only a hair deep. He remembered how he’d pummeled the allium walls of his cell into jelly back on Sora. This, this was nothing in comparison. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
“That was everything!” Lucas yelled into the empty room. It was a lifetime of the worst physical pain imaginable. “And this is all I get?” He gestured at the tiny dent. “It’s not enough!” He realized that he was trying to summon the Desecrator to explain, but the creature didn’t appear.
“Goddamnit!” Lucas yelled, almost hitting the tank again, but thinking better of it at the last moment. He collapsed to his knees breathing heavily once more, almost on the verge of hyperventilation.
What was he doing wrong? What had the Desecrator suffered through that he hadn’t?
Really, how had the Desecrator suffered at all, other than the horror of the initial transformation process? The creature was practically indestructible. Lucas had seen him shrug off what should have been fatal injuries like he couldn’t even feel them. What pain was he drawing from then?
“Pain is more than a feeling of physical discomfort,” he’d said. “Pain is eternal. It is not a simple cut of the knife. It builds over time.”
Cultivated pain. What sort of injuries don’t heal?
“He is the one who sacrificed my brothers and sisters in pursuit of the perfect warrior. Killed my mother with grief.”