Slow Burn (Deep Darkness Book 0)
Page 13
I could never forget the feeling of drowning. Every single time it happened. I stood steadying a launcher against my shoulder. Firing as a dropship moved closer to my position outside a colony. I recognized it from some of our archives. It was the planet Shear. A small civil war in the early days of our exodus from Earth. Humans were fighting for two very different ways of life. I exhaled and fired.The explosion sent the dropship into the ground burying it six feet deep into the soil. A few guards jumped out of the back hoping their superior armor would protect them. It didn't take long. A mech came up behind me and tore them apart. Whichever side I was on they were winning. Waves flood over me. Sometimes the visions would jump. Sometimes I was stuck in one body, sometimes it would jump from one to another in seconds. The visions were always random. I could see someone now screaming, "she killed everyone. That bitch. The boss thought he had control but he was playing the game with the wrong person. She was cunning. She was smart. She was a master at defense and offense. She and the others. They all left." I knew what he was talking about. There was a young woman long ago named Elyse that had killed a man named Kal. Kal had been the leader of one of the groups in the war between humans on Shear. "They must have thought they were being spared us when they left us to Shear. They were sentencing us to a slow slaughter," a voice whispered. Shear was a graveyard of a planet destined to get cooked up by the Skrav. It took them half a year to salvage anything useful from the junk the Trinity had left behind.
"What the fuck do they know. They think their New Eden will protect them but they haven't seen the whole picture. The truth we have been fighting to protect. The war is coming to the entire universe. They haven't seen it yet. What happens after we reach Eden. The horrors that come to life because of humanity. The resurgence of the Cicatrix, the fall of the Aggregate, they haven't seen the terror of the gods," the voice whispered in the darkness. I still felt like I was drowning. Different voices were saying different things. How did they know about the Aggregate? The Cicatrix? I was hearing whispers from the past of a future that wasn't. "It took us fifteen years through the immer but we made it to the the Relay, our new home," the voices continued.
I soon found myself back in the realm of the real. The egg before me. I had more important things now to think of then what the shards had shown me. I made a quick note of it. We already knew there were other colonies, other humans out there among the stars. Maybe the Relay was one of them. The colonists that had managed to escape the destruction of Shear, remnants of humanity from the early days. People living on Eden-3 barely mentioned them. It made most uncomfortable. The guilt of abandoning our own. Either way we were here now, one of the other reasons we had left Eden-3. We were searching for survivors. Pockets of humans from all over had survived the collapse and were being hunted by the Skrav.
Somehow I feel like the egg was reacting to me. The feeling I had. The guilt. The pledge of loyalty I had to my friends, my species. I could hear its heart beat from several meters away. I crouched beside it on the ground and then there was a light.
The creature that appeared looked like a cross between a dragon and an angel. It glowed with white light all around it but it was surrounded by a black silhouette. It had an elongated face with sharp teeth that looked like they were made of white porcelain. It had six eyes, three on each side that flowed red. It had arms and legs like a human but it's fingers were long and clawed. I could see it's ribs as it moved breaking free from the shell that surrounded it. Perhaps it was I that awoke it. The shards in my blood? The alien element that coursed through my veins. When it's shell began to fall around me I felt like I was being transported across time and space. I was back against the cavern wall. The battery to my rifle had been drained. I felt like I was moving in slow motion. I was reliving the same events from before but this wasn't a vision. This wasn't the Nexus. I was in control. I was in my own body. I swapped out the battery as soon as I remembered but Aira, always a better shot than me, killed the Skrav with one blast.
A wave of light appeared behind us. The creature appeared before me again. This time it's dragon like features melted away to that of a young woman. She stopped and brushed her hand against my cheek. The others stared in disbelief. Her white exterior soon turned gray and black. She turned away from me and transformed into a creature that resembled a hellbeast. She tore through the Skrav that had been sealing us in and we were free. When we explored the caverns we found no trace of the egg only the Skrav terraforming technology. I shared my experience with Aira and when we reached the surface we found no sight of the entity only video footage of a light appearing and disappearing at the entrance of the cave. We destroyed the asteroid along with any Skrav remains fulfilling our mission. When we returned to the Aggregate on Kreios they classified the events telling us that we must have suffered some kind of mass hallucination because of the minerals being dug out from the asteroid.
Lost and found and gone again. The Entity was something important. I felt it reach inside of me. I felt it pull from me my past, my present, like a living embodiment of the Nexus itself. I have no doubt in my mind that I awoke it. No doubt that it was somewhere now not in this world or the immer.
The End.
Inspired by video games, anime, science fiction, survival horror, Stephen Landry is a scifi survival horror and gamelit author living in Nashville, TN. Besides writing Stephen Landry is a graphic designer with credits in film and spends most days working in a lumber yard when not spending time with family and friends.
Other works by Stephen Landry
Deep Darkness Series
Pull (1)
Trigger(2)
Wound (3)
Convergence Series
Sleepers
Glimmer, A Throne of Souls
Devour, Moon Fire
Croon, A Bards Tale
Promised Dawn
Other
Project Aspire
Small Dragons - A Secret Santa Initiative
Brave New Girls Stories of Girls Who Science and Scheme
Nial Parkinson's No Sight for the Saved
An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires
Beyond The Horizon
WWW.SXCORE87BLOG.WORDPRESS.COM
Insta: stephen.landry
Email: sxcore87@gmail.com