Awakening
Page 70
*
The sky burns, searing my mortal flesh. The dawn sun rises, lighting the world on fire. I stand, suspended in the air, watching the world burn. Far below, a desert expands; slowly enlarging its boundaries through drought and death. It feels as though years pass in the space of seconds, as the landscape below me slowly decays.
Suddenly, a bright light blinds me, outshining the setting sun in brilliance. It came from the south and, just as soon as it appeared, it vanished. A few seconds later, a strong wind blows through the area, contorting the dunes into strange nightmarish shapes.
Time seems to accelerate once more, and in the blink of an eye, a puzzling, zigzagging object appears in the darkening sky. It rolls and banks, appearing to drop and then rise without provocation. It trails smoke and fire, as large pieces of apparently important components fall to the earth. Its eccentric flight path begins to angle downwards, towards the black sand below.
I hear a high pitched screech emanate from the object, as it begins to buckle under the strain of staying airborne. With a truly terrifying speed, it hits the sand, fragmenting into countless parts, some flying on further, slaves to their own momentum. A solitary body hits a dune below me with a sickening crunch. It rolls for a moment, before coming to rest. It does not move again.
For some reason, pain starts to emanate from my right leg, as if resonating in sympathy with the man down below. Time passes, and the sun finally finds its resting place. Rising from the sand, a figure appears by the broken man. He appears to be a young child, wrapped in an earthly green cloak. He bends down slowly, reaching towards the immobile body. Even from where I stand, I can feel power rolling off him in waves.
The blond, green-eyed stranger lays a hand on the man's forehead, nodding and muttering to himself. Standing up, he turns and says, “He’s alive, if only just. I'll follow him for now and see if he has what it takes. If it looks like he won’t make it, I’ll intervene. But I have high hopes for him, seeing how much he’s been able to survive until now. Perhaps if he was a normal human… no, I don’t think anything would change if he wasn’t…”
The strange man stops speaking. He is now shaking his head, as if he was arguing with a ghost that only he could see. Suddenly, he moves his hand over to the boy’s right leg, while saying, “Yeah, it's broken. I could fix it, but this is a good chance to test him. If he makes it using his own strength… I take it that you'll be monitoring the girl? Remember, we'll need both of them alive if we want to have any chance of stopping Him.”
Once more he went silent, nodding every so often, before continuing, “I agree, whilst the old man and the machine were not planned for, they may have their uses. I'll check in on their progress tonight.”
His conversation over, the man begins to climb down the steep slope, moving towards an object half-buried in the sand. It rises to meet him, turning in the air until he reaches out and grabs hold of it. It is a sword of some sort, badly mangled by the impact. Even from here, I can tell that it is irreparable.
The stranger inspects its deformed figure, one hand seeming to pass through the blade at times. “Now, we can't have that,” he says, as he holds the broken chainsword up. A moment later, the fractured blade leaves his hand and rises high into the air.
An instant later, the metal begins to twist and turn, like a snake being charmed. Its black blade melts and reforms within a heartbeat, without flame or hammer to shape it. It seems to twist and rotate in ways which surely break several fundamental laws of physics, but the man does not seem surprised at all.
I blink, and miss the moment of transformation. Where there had once lain a useless blade, a perfect duplicate now exists. No trace remains of its destruction, and if I had not just witnessed it, I would never have been able to tell it had been damaged at all.
“There we go, better than new!” With little effort, the man throws the blade through the air, its black body piercing the moonlit-sands of a nearby dune. His work done, the man starts to fade away, as his body sinks back into the shifting sands...