kagablog

‘In the land before sunrise, rumbles a cord. Youth vanished like a medieval dream that can haunt even heads that rise to touch foliage on dazzled branches.’

The body. The Self. Projection.
The thoughts raced to kiss his mind.
“The man. He seemed to have been listening in on my thoughts prior to his dramatic entrance.”
Awaking from sleep.
“I must take the body with.” He thought hard and even considered teleporting the whole molecular structure to the winter upside.
The pallid arena was still as he recalled, vast and coldly un-minding of its vain size.
There is glitch in the flow. Any human mind is believed to transmit and receive data, stimuli almost simultaneously; this he was taught once.
But his carrier seemed to only transmit an echo of what he fed without generating any internal response.
A cold silence of a corpse.
The bloated insides calling back with its walls and muscle.
His brain was being sucked out.
Psychic lobotomy.
”The savages and the lengths they would go to for victory.”

In thought-speed he’d returned to the body, jerking it up from the table and thrashing its anaesthetized bones to the cold floor. Eyes shot open and shadowy light increased the urgency in the carrier. Khah knew that interface cables would be stuck to the skull, and prepared for the severance pinch and scarring pain.
He held the carrier’s hand behind the occiput and pulled whatever imaginary cable injected into custom data ports every clone had implanted in the heydays of memory enhancement techniques.
The field of vision began to morph, and he felt faint but kept courage.
The pallid arena and its fluorescent mirage faded like smoke before his eyes.
He was standing clothed in black rubber combat suit, strapped to a ruggedly tattered chair which would pass for a couch in happier times.
Monitors glared at him, pallid men nervously punching digits into buttons.
He was himself again, he felt it. A warrior.
As rage seethed like bile through his throat, the colossal arms of a menial wrestler tore the straps from their hinges. His feet rummaged the console tightened around his ankle.
Khah rose frantically before security personnel could secure an attack with electrocution rods.
He was human built for brawls. Brown skinned with brawn and brain now intact.
Monstrous events followed what he perceived to be seconds, finding his acumen for molecular disintegration as prescribed by the combat attire.
He shot through equipments, monitors splattering on steel floors with wires sizzling in the after-heat of his light-speed motion.
Phantom warrior dismantled the place.
But as soon as he took a breath outside the cage bolted door to the experimentation laboratory, he became furiously confused.
It was pitch black. Ghastly winds summoned ash towards his gaping mouth, coal dust from scotched forests and grass-lands lain waste by sulphur of molten blazes - a Venusian clime of burning shadows.
He hammered about rowdily with the electrode rod he confiscated from the assailants, leather cloak symbiotically folding about the crevices of his terse figure - and found that there was nothing.
Poking behind him, he felt a hard surface that clanked to the impact of the rod.
Upon running his palm on the surface, he made it out be a wall.
A colossal wall; a wall of a fortress.
He was free.
“This was, or must be the Panopticon.”
Rushes of memory flickered inside, horrible recollections of imprisonment, countering the eminent realization of the danger of his imminent surroundings.
And it was soon that he realized a pair of flame red eyes approaching from a distance, shrouded in the blanket of blinding darkness.
Another pair loomed from behind the first, then a multitude waltzed rhythmically towards Khah.
They must have stood no more than his knee height.
They were Plutonian.
“Tok!” Khah screamed in the direction of the advancing mob of crimson eyes.
“It is us Master Khah,” said the Plutonians in chorale unison, sending a belch of relief through Khah’s taut belly.
“We have come to take you to The Highlands.” Tok spoke alone.
“The highlands? But, I thought they were still unsafe. How is Master Motk?”
“He’s well, sending regards to you. And beckoning you return god-speed.” Tok responded.
One of the members of the throng handed Khah a pair of infrared spectacles for better vision, which he clumsily accepted.
The spectacles had been designed by the Plutonians, excruciatingly modeled after their own eyes.
They had no difficulty navigating any kind of darkness.
Tok always boasted that there is not darkness like his days - telepathically that is.
“We have seen the copper sky, Master Khah.”
Khah was aghast.
That would mean the storm-clouds were letting through sun rays.
Illumination.
This meant yet another struggle for adaptation and survival. No-one knew what remaining resources still lay among the ruins of a collapsed civilization.
And it meant the first expedition would have to be his clan’s.
He was content with the knowledge of the danger time would usher forth, but he felt much relieved that the eternal night had ceased.
He had never gone silently into this night, and now was his opportunity to defeat its scepter.

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