“Why? Why do you hate us?” Julieth asked it. “Why would you choose to live a life like this? Surely there is consciousness and morality somewhere in the makeup of your race.”
The dying man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head as he convulsed violently, choking on the blood pooling in his throat.
I will put you out of your misery, whatever you are, Julieth thought. She leveled her weapon at its chest and fired a long blast of electricity, decimating its core and charring the blood that had been liquid in its extremities.
Searing bile rose in her throat as Julieth turned away from him to walk into the red illuminated chamber. It cannot be worse there in the unknown than here with his corpse. As she entered, another blast shook the chamber, causing her to drop down and brace her arms. She looked up to see a horde of beasts attacking what appeared to be Riad and another man a good distance away. Is that Ivanus with him?
Her feet landed heavily as she moved, eager to join the battle and assist the men. Then, with a pulse, she beat her wings and took to the air. The beasts looked up as she flew above them. Riad picked them off in pairs, illuminating them with UV light from his weapon and then blasting them apart before eliminating more.
She leveled her own guns at the mass and ripped electricity into them at random.
A beast charged for Ivanus and he thrashed away its claws with a sword. It howled as he ran it through and before he could remove his sword from its gullet another beast ran at him.
Julieth’s heart raced as she redirected her fire and blasted the thing, thrusting it aside so that Ivanus could withdraw his blade in time to hack into the thing’s arm and deal it a death blow to the skull.
Battle raged for what seemed an eternity as beast after beast attacked them. When the enemy’s number dwindled, more appeared from the tunnels. The enemy had no way to attack above, however, and so Julieth had the upper hand. Riad continued to explode light and fire grenades as they fought them off, and as only a few remained, Julieth dove down and stood with Riad and Ivanus. The final two beasts fell as Riad illuminated them with light and then reduced them to ash with one blast from his weapon.
Julieth looked to her companions, their faces gashed, bloody and sopping sweat. She sucked in a deep breath before clasping her knees with her hands and pulling her wings tight to her back.
“You know that is not all of them,” Riad spoke coldly. “We will not have rest until we are away from this place.”
“Where are Bayne and Andral?”
“In a cell along that wall.” Riad pointed to the far left wall.
Julieth ran in that direction. “Bayne! Andral!” she shouted, relief rejuvenating her as she saw the two boys running towards her. She quickly hugged both boys, kissing their foreheads.
“Thank you for protecting my brother,” Andral spoke. “Thank you for coming for me.”
“I would not leave you with these beasts. If either of you would die, it would only be after I gave my own life,” Julieth assured him.
“Look!” Bayne pointed to the tunnel Julieth came from. Something moved in the red-lit dark.
“The people of Olan have arrived.” Julieth led the boys back to Riad and Ivanus. “Come, we need to meet with them and see if they know of a way out.”
Then a human voice rose above the rest of Olan’s people’s clambering noises, shouting unintelligible words that the rest of the group repeated.
“No…” Ivanus gasped nearby. “My sight has returned. Olan’s people will eat the beasts.” A look of nausea washed over his face.
“It must have been the beasts that blocked the abilities given you by your essence.” Riad walked quickly toward the mass of humans. Olan’s people grabbed at the limbs of fallen beasts, dragging them into the darkness away from the larger group.
The sound of cracking and grinding bone sent an eerie shiver up Julieth’s spine. The sucking noise of muscle being torn from bone came to her ears as moist whispers. “Why are they like this?”
“Perhaps the beasts began the change in Olan’s people, turning them into beasts themselves, before we ever saw them. Possibly this is the way it manifests. Whatever the reason, beneath Olan is not a place we want to remain.” Riad looked back to Ivanus. “If your abilities have returned, then that must mean there are few beasts left in this area, though I am certain they reside in other areas beneath Solaris’s crust. We should be safe to leave the way we came if Julieth has the strength to fly us out of the temple’s roof.”
“I can do that.” Julieth lifted into the air, aiming her guns at Olan’s people as she flew above them. The others of her group moved along the wall and into the tunnel they came from. She looked at Olan’s people’s eyes as she dipped into the tunnel, haunted by their glossed-over stares and the tears dripping down their faces.
Julieth closed her eyes as she flew. Darkness consumed her. She blocked out sound and emotion. She always knew the world to be cold, but this… Her skin was chilled.
Then heat swam over her, growing warmer and warmer until her wings filled with it and she began to lift higher. She opened her eyes to the inferno of the temple’s fire.
As she landed on the floor of the chamber, a young man lying in a beam of sunlight moaned, dirt caking his face as he looked up at her. She looked back to the tunnel, not seeing Riad or the others yet, then went to him.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, placing her hand on a weak muscled shoulder.
He turned, looking quickly into her eyes. They were a royal, crisp blue. “Yes.” He stood slowly, looking up at the sky as if he had come from there.
There was something strangely familiar about him.
“You do not look like the others. What has happened to them?”
The young man stood silent, looking blankly at her. Then, after many moments, he came to her and spoke. “Kaskal.” The rasped word licked off his tongue.
“How do you know where we’re from?” she called to him as he ran, leaping from the sunlight and into darkness before morphing into the form of a beast and quickly clawing his way up the temple’s wall. He did not look down, but moved frantically upward.
She pulsed her wings, soaring up near him and leveling her weapons. “How did you know?” she shouted. She could not fire. It had done nothing to harm her.
As they reached the temple’s destroyed top she burst into the sky, watching as the beast morphed back into the form of a man in the sunlight and ran away as fast as he could.
It might be a trap. What if I am lured away and the others cannot escape? With a deep breath she swooped, plummeting into the dark, inferno lit temple, thrusting and crouching to the ground just as Riad and the others emerged.
Chapter 12
The wind hit her harshly as Julieth emerged from the mouth of the destroyed underground temple one final time. She had flown Riad to the surface first, and then Bayne and Andral, leaving Ivanus for last.
“My sight has returned to me,” Ivanus spoke as she flew him down toward the rest of the group, already moving across the sweltering desert terrain. “And yet I did not see the manbeast you discovered in the temple chamber. You said that it said ‘Kaskal’ to you?”
“Yes, I am afraid of what that means. He holds a connection to us there.” Julieth swept lower and Bayne looked up, waving at them.
Ivanus released one hand from her grasp and reached to position a cloth above his brow. “When we first camped in the desert I feared something I could not sense following us from Kaskal. How or why a were-beast would have tracked us from there is beyond me, but I fear that is exactly where this thing has come from.”
As Julieth set him on the ground and then landed, a great quake rocked the earth. She knelt low, bracing herself with her hands on the reverberating sand, and then looked up to witness the mountain range between them and Olan break apart and begin to be swallowed into the planet. “Run!” she shouted over the loud roar of earth swallowing earth. The hollow underground devoured Olan whole.
She turned,
her feet hitting heavy on the shaking desert as she moved away with the others as fast as she could. After a few strides she remembered her wings and lifted up, soaring and continually pressing onward.
Cracks ripped through the desert before them, swallowing sand and stone into their jaws, but somehow not blocking the route they ran.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, the roar and the quaking stopped.
Julieth allowed herself a breath, curling in the wind and looking in awe at the massive, shadowed crevice in the distance. The city and mountains were gone. All that remained was a swarming plume of earth and a view that led to more barren sand. “Where should we rest?” she called down to the others.
“We must soon, even if it is out in this heat,” Riad responded. “But I fear we will have little rest in coming days as we move. Yourself, Ivanus, Bayne and I are protected from starvation by the essences, but we are low on stores and Andral will need sustenance or he will become weak.”
As the suns set in the distance they made camp beside a large, flat stone jutting up from the ground. They did not set out one of Riad’s heat orbs, for fear of being discovered, but instead lay on the bare sand, chilled in the coming darkness and giving in one by one to the night because of exhaustion.
Julieth was the last, shivering and staring out into the pitch-black night. She feared the voices in her head would return. The thought haunted her. Then a searing sensation pressed from her palm, up through her right arm. She looked to it, touching dark marks that moved, a labyrinth of boils leeching up her skin. She brought her fingers to it, her flesh setting on fire with the touch. She watched as puss bubbled up from beneath the darkened flesh. The scorch mapping has begun. As I use my abilities it will increase and I will slowly die. She looked to Bayne, snoring softly nearby. How long until the boils appear on Bayne or Ivanus? Will we even make it to Samuel in time?
Chapter 13
Dirty water rolled over Samuel’s hands as he lifted them from the bath. It ran in streams down his arms. The water had not been replaced in months, but he remained the only person he knew of with water to bathe in. If more were discovered beneath the planet’s crust, his followers would bring it to him. He stared out his window at the light of a vast moon. His army stood vigil and alert beneath its light.
Samuel touched the marking the essence made, imbedded in his chest, feeling its harsh lines. The voice has been silent for days. He breathed and allowed himself to relax, sliding down until his head was all that was not submerged.
“Sir,” the voice of one of his servants broke the silence.
Samuel lifted a boil-seared arm from the water, bracing it on the ivory tub’s side. He did not turn to see the man.
“The Raols are attacking the edge of our territory again. Marcin has sent word from his camp. He says it will be handled shortly. He only wanted to keep you informed.”
These are more that will serve us. The essence gripped his mind. Go to them and claim them.
“Send word to Marcin that I was told.” Samuel sank back into the bath, submerging his head in effort to block out the essence’s prodding.
Pain seared through his chest, forcing him to emerge, gasping for air.
After drying the water from his flesh he tossed the towel into a fireplace in the hall beyond the chamber. Its moisture evaporated into steam as the towel charred and blew as ash through a chimney. Samuel walked to his chamber and dressed in a light robe. A sword braced on the far wall of his chamber caught his sight and he went to it, lifting it in his hands and measuring its weight.
As he walked down the hall he was determined. He would give the essence its followers, yes, but he would show the thing he was in control.
Torches flickered in sconces as he walked. He came to the main doors of the holy temple. His servants pushed them open and he strode out beneath the moon, taking one step after another down the stairs to the desert soil. The lava ocean resembled blood in the moonlight.
“Sir, will you be needing your transport tonight?” a man standing post nearby asked.
“Yes, gather one at once.”
The man hurriedly left to return moments later with six strong men and himself carrying a platform with a chair positioned in its middle.
“Set it down here.” Samuel pointed nearby. He stepped up onto it and sat, watching his people as he was carried past them. They stood in unbreakable formation, their hollow stares fixed on some point in the distance.
As the night wore on he was carried toward that point in a steady, unbroken pace. He passed thousands of his soldiers, standing erect and ready to defend.
And then the first of the two suns rose in the sky.
The loud noise of steel meeting steel and the shouts of men in his army came to him in the distance as they moved. The death screams of his enemy filled him with warmth somehow. But that was not what he came for. He came to satiate the essence, and now the essence demanded souls to follow them.
Samuel sensed the men and women not yet under his control. How easy it was to possess them and have them follow him in any way. One moment shouts and clashing metal filled his ears, and then as he took control a second later, there was silence except for the sound of one lone man shouting loudly.
“Set me down here,” Samuel instructed the men carrying him. Sunlight draped over him, spilling a vast shadow before his form.
Samuel walked steadily on the earth, his tone muscles tensing as he moved and his thin robe rippling in the wind.
“You! My people will kill you!” an armored man with his arms held firm by people wearing his same garb shouted, spitting toward Samuel. His spittle evaporated as it hit the ground.
Do not do this. Take him. Make him follow us, the voice of the essence spoke.
“No, if I am to serve you, then you must allow my whims.”
Did you have these whims when you served your God and not me?
“You proved to me that there is no God, after all these ages of forced life. At first I looked at you as a gift, as a way to bring worshipers to him, but if there was a god then he would have purged my body of you long ago.”
The soldiers around him did not look at Samuel. They did not flinch or flex, but instead stood motionless where they had been in battle, their hollow eyes gazing blankly at the horizon. Only the non-possessed man moved.
“Who do you speak to?” the man asked. “You surround yourself by followers and yet none hears your words.”
“I do not need to speak to them.” Samuel grinned. “They follow me with a thought in my mind.”
He looked out at what he had taken. At least one hundred new warriors joined his force from this skirmish. He would not need them, he knew. He only kept them to appease the essence. “What is your name?” he asked one of the new men under his control that held his companion’s arm.
“Pax,” the man responded without emotion.
“Pax, kill this man for me, to prove your loyalty.”
“Brother,” the restrained man pled, looking to Pax with tears streaming from his hardened eyes. “Do not give in to his control. I know you are there inside somewhere.”
Pax drew a dagger from his side. He held it to the man’s sun-worn neck, pressing its tip into his quaking flesh and tearing through the soft tissue from one side to the other.
Blood gushed from the wound and the man choked on it as it gurgled up from his lips as well. Life soon left his eyes.
Pax stood there with the others holding his brother’s bleeding carcass, emotionless and calm.
“You have proven yourselves, my servants.” Samuel turned from them, walking casually back toward his escort. “You may release him now.”
The lifeless vessel of flesh thumped to the ground.
Chapter 14
Julieth’s company traveled through the heat of day wearily, exhausted and yet on constant watch for an enemy attack or food of some kind. Andral consumed their last container of food that morning. Though the rest of them could survive without food, hunger still
tired them quickly.
“I see the essences have begun scorching your skin,” Riad remarked without looking to Julieth. The two of them led the others.
“Yes. How long is typical until it kills?”
Sunlight radiated off Riad’s metallic limbs. “One never knows. I have seen people crumpled days after the markings began, and though I am marked, my health is seemingly never affected. Perhaps that is because my essence is in my cybernetics, and not in my flesh.”
“Do you hear your essence’s voice?”
Riad turned his head slightly and gave her a half grin. “Yes, but not as you do.” He tapped his hand on his leg where Vrax connected to him. “The essence has taken over my repair bot. It speaks to me through it.”
It made sense. It also made her nervous when she thought of how Vrax had connected with her skin and spoken through her thoughts in the temple. “You said you would explain your past. The others are not that close to us, now. We seem to have the opportunity and the time.”
“I will share some.” Riad reached out his hands and cracked his bone knuckles in the one. “I am not from Solaris, or really any planet. A long time ago I was birthed on a space vessel in this galaxy. My parents and my people were soldiers stationed in that place. I grew, learning to fight and defend. When I was a young man there was a battle on a planet near us. My limbs and face were irreparably scarred as a group we thought were our allies ambushed us. I threw myself on a mine to protect my company. That day it was decided for me, as I was unconscious and dying, that the cyborg program would be run on my body.”
He paused. Walking on without word or emotion. “A meteor was discovered on the edge of the galaxy after the races of that planet were defeated. We detected a life in its core, and a strange energy surrounding it. Then word came from our home planet that we were to investigate.
“That day we left with a company of fifty, half our stationed force, and months later arrived in our star-fighter to Solaris.
“While nearing your planet an asteroid collided with the back of our ship, partially destroying landing gear. Flames writhed over our ship’s hull as it plummeted in Solaris’s atmosphere. A blast that must have shaken the planet itself exploded as our ship thrust into Solaris. Then it all went dark.”