Post by Woofy on Feb 7, 2011 13:14:15 GMT -5
The swirl of opaque, dark mist in the night was accompanied by an absolute lack of sound. The pressure wave swept through, like a solid slap in the face by nothing more than super heated air, all humidity gone, leaving the air that pummeled him with the distinct tang of ozone.
Then the sound came back, filtering in like a man emerging from water; the distant echo of things in another medium, ripped apart by the sucking and sliding gurgle in the ears as the surface tension looses the fight against his rising, and that last moment of rush of noise as he takes his first breath, the air filling around him.
The light was red and it permeated everything. Blinking could never filter the hot, invasive light that drowned the world in oppressive, dry, heavy, particle heavy air. He raised a hand, vainly, to block the glare and stare around him, the sound and heat bearing onto him with physical force.
He gasped, as his foot twisted on something gooey. Looking down brought a wave of vertigo, after-images in his vision making his head spin. It was an act of will to banish the sense of imbalance, but the boy brought his wild senses back into focus. Every instinct in him screamed that he was in danger, and his first thoughts were of his mother and his new friends.
When he could trust his own equilibrium again, he looked down, trying to make sense of the world. He wished he hadn't. Under his foot, in fact lapping at his boot heels like a gentle tide was a massive pool of blood. So much blood that some of it had congealed and the top surface of the liquid actually moved in waves, as might the waters of a lake.
In his growing horror, his eyes adjusted to the harsh red glare, which he realized wasn't the sun or moon, nor any celestial illumination. Gazing around, in the middle distance, he could see heaps of bodies. Stacked eight and nine persons high, the bodies were blasted and hacked, opened to the sky, burned in places, broken and ripped in others. All of them dead, dead, dead. In the further distance he could see hundreds of similar stacks, many of them on fire.
He couldn't help it, and inhaled in shock. He turned quickly and vomited, his body violently shaking. The greasy bile flooded his nose and throat, working its way through to the outside, where the cloying smell of burnt flesh, toxic air and the coppery tang of hundreds of gallons of blood all mixed.
Trembling, he forced his cramping tummy muscles to relax. It was at this point that he realized he was in battle armor, although the suit was not only unfamiliar to him, but was practically useless for its intended use. Holes were burned through the chest pauldrons large enough to shove a pumpkin through. The mesh weave that should have protected his groin and midsection was a tattered fray of alloy rings and wires, barely holding on and nearly entangling his legs. The armor of his right thigh was completely missing, with three fresh, angry red slashes in his flesh there a testament to the kind of battle that must have happened.
He wore no weapons, and could see none around him. Only the bodies and the blood and the stench of industrial burning lay about him in the oppressive heaviness of the reddened sky. He cast his eyes around, looking for anything, anything at all he could use.
He couldn't remember how he'd gotten into the battle, but he knew that it had been a rout from the start. The numbers were simply against him, against all of them. And now the massive piles of the dead stare at him in mute accusation.
That's when he began recognizing faces in the piles. His new friends were there. Silvie, the bounty hunter, laying face up, her rib cage split open and the contents lying about her in a pile of burnt tissue, the look of shock and pain twisted eternally into her face. So too was Elexorien, the Cyber Knight sword master. His head lay separate from his body in a different pile, partly hidden by a large, heavily blasted mound of flesh and scales that the boy quickly identified as the dragon form of LG.
Spinning from the horror before him, the boy trips and falls face down into the blood. He quickly pushes himself up only to stare into the locked open eyes of Anna, the pirate captain, where she lay at the bottom of a spike, impaling through her pelvis and rib cage. The boy looked up, shaking in terror as he recognizes the others also impaled on the twisted hunk of steel. The warrior Jeff, his wrists impaled on the stake behind his back, the point soaring up through his body and emerging from his mouth, where the shaft continued up into Aliza, who's flesh was mashed and twisted about, barely recognizable.
He hastily regained his feet, recoiling from the sight in front of him. He backed away, his feet bumping against various floating body parts as he tried to escape the vision of pain and torment that had become of his new allies. The boy tries to turn again, looking for some path out of this unholy place, his mind swimming in horror as if he were still face down in the blood that covered the land. He starts to run, letting the panic rule him and flood his body with adrenaline. His mind is a blank, completely overloaded by the smell and feel and sound of the place and the inconceivable horrors that his eyes bring to him.
As he runs, a section of the sky grows brighter. Despite his urgency to leave, the boy looks up, hoping the break in this cloud of smoke and ruin will shed some light, give him some hope in this sea of chaos surrounding him.
His feet stop as he stares up, realizing that he's been running up a hill and now has a commanding view of the horizon. The parting of smog overhead has revealed something other than hope to him, however. In the red skies above he witnesses an armada of flying vessels, unlike any aircraft he'd ever seen before. The organic, insect like shape at first confuses him. But the thing that impresses him the most is the shear numbers of the flying war machine/creatures. They fly so thick in the air that they blot out light from the sun. The only reason he can see them now is that their shiny hides reflect the hellish glow of the hideous pyres all around him.
His gaze drifts down, over the vast plane before him, dotted here and there with groups of smoking piles of corpses. But there is more in that plane than just the abominations of dead beings. Thousands of hulking things stand in neatly ordered rows. Silvery and crimson in the hell-fire light. Their structure is low, built on powerful looking legs which are bent as if the creature/machines are excellent jumpers and runners, waiting the signal to move. They have weapons mounted to their large, sculpted forms, and armor plates that have seen combat, marked by blasts and blades.
A sound behind him forces the boy to turn, on instincts he's honed through years of training to fight. One of the metal beasts from below has landed on a column of fire and smoke, its small head swinging his way, its black eyes soulless. The thing makes a fist with one hand, a psi-blade larger than the boy is tall springing up. Its other hand reaches out, the fingers twitching in wards in challenge.
The boy brings his own psi-blade out, his weapon of mind force shimmering bright blue, but seeming insignificant beside the metal thing's. The terror gripped him to his core as he backed away from the advancing menace. Three other of the large metal creatures descended, surrounding the boy, each one seeming to grin with long, fearsome teeth.
He bolts, turning and slashing his way past one of the machine beasts, parrying a counter-slash and nearly falling over from the shear power of the hit. The boy feels searing heat flash past his left side, and he dodges as a blast of white-hot plasma erupts on the ground. He tucks and rolls, regaining his feet as he splashes through the mud soaked earth. More blasts follow, dogging his heals.
He panics, turning, and sees the four he had been running from were now hundreds, and the sky held hundreds of the flying machines. He's surrounded. He's panicked. He's hideously out numbered. The smoke and blood and heat have seeped into his mind, turning him into an animal. He growls, his psi-blade flashing with power and fury. He charges at the nearest enemy, determined to make at least one of the things pay for the carnage around him.
The boy strikes, his training and skill and emotion all focused and driven by his fear and anger and grief. The battle is short, but fierce. His first strike was easily parried, but his follow up, completely reversing direction, flies fast and strikes true, burying the blade deep up under the creature's chin. With a savage war-cry, the boy pulls his blade free and spins in place, bringing his weapon around to decapitate his opponent.
And then the beams hit him. Shot after shot of laser pumped death, burning through his body, blasting bone apart from the inside out, bursting organs and letting his hot blood spill out into the damp ground, mixing with the blood of the creature he slew and the blood of the millions already soaking the earth.
The boy begins to fall, his eyes locked open in shock and pain. He feels his body crumple, descending backwards like in slow motion as the ground creatures close in. His last image as the shadows close in is the horde of air creatures flying in the sky, ruling it through sheer weight of numbers.
As he falls, he feels the sound leave him. The air, heavy and dank, rushes away, replaced by cold fluid. This is death, the boy thinks, as the blood rushes to cover his eyes and the evil machines above continue to pummel his body with energy beams.
He wakes with a start, hearing a scream he knows is his own but still finds foreign. His skin is soaked, but only in his own chilling sweat, not the blood of thousands. He pops his psi-blade, still feeling like his body is falling, and swings it wildly in self defense. But the silence of the room is deafening. The only light and sound are his sobs and the blade his mind conjured for him.
It was all a dream, he thinks, his rational mind coming back to the front. But the images haunt him. The smell, the feel of the air, the burning forms of his friends. The miles of endless blood lake. The psi-blade vanishes in his hand as he leans forwards, his arms encircling his bent knees, and cries silently in frustration.
Will these nightmares never end? he thinks, as the faces of his friends appear again in his mind, tortured and dead. Or worse, will these things come to pass?
It is many hours and many tears before the boy can sleep again. His disquiet fueled by the questions in his mind and the dread in his soul. Whatever else these dreams mean, they are a warning, he knows. And he is not ready for what that warning might actually mean.
No one is.
Then the sound came back, filtering in like a man emerging from water; the distant echo of things in another medium, ripped apart by the sucking and sliding gurgle in the ears as the surface tension looses the fight against his rising, and that last moment of rush of noise as he takes his first breath, the air filling around him.
The light was red and it permeated everything. Blinking could never filter the hot, invasive light that drowned the world in oppressive, dry, heavy, particle heavy air. He raised a hand, vainly, to block the glare and stare around him, the sound and heat bearing onto him with physical force.
He gasped, as his foot twisted on something gooey. Looking down brought a wave of vertigo, after-images in his vision making his head spin. It was an act of will to banish the sense of imbalance, but the boy brought his wild senses back into focus. Every instinct in him screamed that he was in danger, and his first thoughts were of his mother and his new friends.
When he could trust his own equilibrium again, he looked down, trying to make sense of the world. He wished he hadn't. Under his foot, in fact lapping at his boot heels like a gentle tide was a massive pool of blood. So much blood that some of it had congealed and the top surface of the liquid actually moved in waves, as might the waters of a lake.
In his growing horror, his eyes adjusted to the harsh red glare, which he realized wasn't the sun or moon, nor any celestial illumination. Gazing around, in the middle distance, he could see heaps of bodies. Stacked eight and nine persons high, the bodies were blasted and hacked, opened to the sky, burned in places, broken and ripped in others. All of them dead, dead, dead. In the further distance he could see hundreds of similar stacks, many of them on fire.
He couldn't help it, and inhaled in shock. He turned quickly and vomited, his body violently shaking. The greasy bile flooded his nose and throat, working its way through to the outside, where the cloying smell of burnt flesh, toxic air and the coppery tang of hundreds of gallons of blood all mixed.
Trembling, he forced his cramping tummy muscles to relax. It was at this point that he realized he was in battle armor, although the suit was not only unfamiliar to him, but was practically useless for its intended use. Holes were burned through the chest pauldrons large enough to shove a pumpkin through. The mesh weave that should have protected his groin and midsection was a tattered fray of alloy rings and wires, barely holding on and nearly entangling his legs. The armor of his right thigh was completely missing, with three fresh, angry red slashes in his flesh there a testament to the kind of battle that must have happened.
He wore no weapons, and could see none around him. Only the bodies and the blood and the stench of industrial burning lay about him in the oppressive heaviness of the reddened sky. He cast his eyes around, looking for anything, anything at all he could use.
He couldn't remember how he'd gotten into the battle, but he knew that it had been a rout from the start. The numbers were simply against him, against all of them. And now the massive piles of the dead stare at him in mute accusation.
That's when he began recognizing faces in the piles. His new friends were there. Silvie, the bounty hunter, laying face up, her rib cage split open and the contents lying about her in a pile of burnt tissue, the look of shock and pain twisted eternally into her face. So too was Elexorien, the Cyber Knight sword master. His head lay separate from his body in a different pile, partly hidden by a large, heavily blasted mound of flesh and scales that the boy quickly identified as the dragon form of LG.
Spinning from the horror before him, the boy trips and falls face down into the blood. He quickly pushes himself up only to stare into the locked open eyes of Anna, the pirate captain, where she lay at the bottom of a spike, impaling through her pelvis and rib cage. The boy looked up, shaking in terror as he recognizes the others also impaled on the twisted hunk of steel. The warrior Jeff, his wrists impaled on the stake behind his back, the point soaring up through his body and emerging from his mouth, where the shaft continued up into Aliza, who's flesh was mashed and twisted about, barely recognizable.
He hastily regained his feet, recoiling from the sight in front of him. He backed away, his feet bumping against various floating body parts as he tried to escape the vision of pain and torment that had become of his new allies. The boy tries to turn again, looking for some path out of this unholy place, his mind swimming in horror as if he were still face down in the blood that covered the land. He starts to run, letting the panic rule him and flood his body with adrenaline. His mind is a blank, completely overloaded by the smell and feel and sound of the place and the inconceivable horrors that his eyes bring to him.
As he runs, a section of the sky grows brighter. Despite his urgency to leave, the boy looks up, hoping the break in this cloud of smoke and ruin will shed some light, give him some hope in this sea of chaos surrounding him.
His feet stop as he stares up, realizing that he's been running up a hill and now has a commanding view of the horizon. The parting of smog overhead has revealed something other than hope to him, however. In the red skies above he witnesses an armada of flying vessels, unlike any aircraft he'd ever seen before. The organic, insect like shape at first confuses him. But the thing that impresses him the most is the shear numbers of the flying war machine/creatures. They fly so thick in the air that they blot out light from the sun. The only reason he can see them now is that their shiny hides reflect the hellish glow of the hideous pyres all around him.
His gaze drifts down, over the vast plane before him, dotted here and there with groups of smoking piles of corpses. But there is more in that plane than just the abominations of dead beings. Thousands of hulking things stand in neatly ordered rows. Silvery and crimson in the hell-fire light. Their structure is low, built on powerful looking legs which are bent as if the creature/machines are excellent jumpers and runners, waiting the signal to move. They have weapons mounted to their large, sculpted forms, and armor plates that have seen combat, marked by blasts and blades.
A sound behind him forces the boy to turn, on instincts he's honed through years of training to fight. One of the metal beasts from below has landed on a column of fire and smoke, its small head swinging his way, its black eyes soulless. The thing makes a fist with one hand, a psi-blade larger than the boy is tall springing up. Its other hand reaches out, the fingers twitching in wards in challenge.
The boy brings his own psi-blade out, his weapon of mind force shimmering bright blue, but seeming insignificant beside the metal thing's. The terror gripped him to his core as he backed away from the advancing menace. Three other of the large metal creatures descended, surrounding the boy, each one seeming to grin with long, fearsome teeth.
He bolts, turning and slashing his way past one of the machine beasts, parrying a counter-slash and nearly falling over from the shear power of the hit. The boy feels searing heat flash past his left side, and he dodges as a blast of white-hot plasma erupts on the ground. He tucks and rolls, regaining his feet as he splashes through the mud soaked earth. More blasts follow, dogging his heals.
He panics, turning, and sees the four he had been running from were now hundreds, and the sky held hundreds of the flying machines. He's surrounded. He's panicked. He's hideously out numbered. The smoke and blood and heat have seeped into his mind, turning him into an animal. He growls, his psi-blade flashing with power and fury. He charges at the nearest enemy, determined to make at least one of the things pay for the carnage around him.
The boy strikes, his training and skill and emotion all focused and driven by his fear and anger and grief. The battle is short, but fierce. His first strike was easily parried, but his follow up, completely reversing direction, flies fast and strikes true, burying the blade deep up under the creature's chin. With a savage war-cry, the boy pulls his blade free and spins in place, bringing his weapon around to decapitate his opponent.
And then the beams hit him. Shot after shot of laser pumped death, burning through his body, blasting bone apart from the inside out, bursting organs and letting his hot blood spill out into the damp ground, mixing with the blood of the creature he slew and the blood of the millions already soaking the earth.
The boy begins to fall, his eyes locked open in shock and pain. He feels his body crumple, descending backwards like in slow motion as the ground creatures close in. His last image as the shadows close in is the horde of air creatures flying in the sky, ruling it through sheer weight of numbers.
As he falls, he feels the sound leave him. The air, heavy and dank, rushes away, replaced by cold fluid. This is death, the boy thinks, as the blood rushes to cover his eyes and the evil machines above continue to pummel his body with energy beams.
He wakes with a start, hearing a scream he knows is his own but still finds foreign. His skin is soaked, but only in his own chilling sweat, not the blood of thousands. He pops his psi-blade, still feeling like his body is falling, and swings it wildly in self defense. But the silence of the room is deafening. The only light and sound are his sobs and the blade his mind conjured for him.
It was all a dream, he thinks, his rational mind coming back to the front. But the images haunt him. The smell, the feel of the air, the burning forms of his friends. The miles of endless blood lake. The psi-blade vanishes in his hand as he leans forwards, his arms encircling his bent knees, and cries silently in frustration.
Will these nightmares never end? he thinks, as the faces of his friends appear again in his mind, tortured and dead. Or worse, will these things come to pass?
It is many hours and many tears before the boy can sleep again. His disquiet fueled by the questions in his mind and the dread in his soul. Whatever else these dreams mean, they are a warning, he knows. And he is not ready for what that warning might actually mean.
No one is.
