Three Years Since The Eastwood Event, 10:00 AM
Mary had prepared him for this day. She’d explained how Daniel could assist in her research, something he alone could do. Dr. Adelaide confessed their interest in UE 000 was not purely academic. They hoped to unlock secrets and solve ancient mysteries for the benefit of all mankind. He’d said yes.
Finally, he’d use the plague of his life for good. A great purpose would surely make all the hunger-pain nights and dry-throat days worthwhile. Just as he’d fantasized the cool refreshment of water healing the cracked ache of his barren desert throat, he’d imagined Mary’s expression when he finally repaid her years of care.
Daniel stepped outside his room for the first time in three years. He followed her down the corridor, bony bare feet leaving cracked impressions in the concrete as if he weighed tons. Mary wore her hazard suit with the helmet off, the edge of a white lab coat underneath.
Soldiers whispered into their radios at each checkpoint they passed. The steel blast-doors slid away to admit them when Mary flashed her ID at the cameras. During the trip he watched the other UEs through the walls by their multicolored auras.
Then they came to a metal gate larger than any previous. Mary placed her hand on the scanning plate, put one eye to a wall-mounted camera, and spoke the word, “Minotaur.” The monitor turned green and beeped in approval after verifying her fingerprints, voice, and retina.
The great doors unbolted and parted. Mary and Daniel entered a high-ceilinged room easily mistakable for an aircraft hangar or industrial warehouse. He squinted his eyes against the rows of harsh white lights shining down and stepped from concrete to dirt. He wiggled his toes in the tight-packed soil, comparing the dense feel to the loose sand of his room.
He left a trail of fading dust as he walked. His eyes drifted to the far wall and, for the first time, he saw UE 000—a smooth, dark metallic pill on the scale of a cruiser-class warship. The floor sloped up to UE 000 in an odd way that ascended to near-vertical. The unique entity levitated, frozen in space with its latter three-quarters embedded in the hill. Ten feet of space separated its surface from the soil stratum encompassing its body, the Barrier at work.
UE 000 was a spaceship.
A vessel from some ancient or alien civilization uncovered after thousands of years sleeping underground. Fascinated by the idea, Daniel considered what the ship might say about such a civilization.
Spaceships on TV had complex shapes, decorative architecture, or colorful features. This one was striking for its minimalism, with not even an ‘up’ or ‘down.’ Its featureless ‘front,’ he assumed, was identical to its ‘rear.’ Why? He worked his way around to an answer.
Most of the speculative fiction Daniel had seen wanted a distinctive ‘look’ about their spaceships to attract viewers. This machine didn’t care what people thought. This machine was efficient without a square inch of wasted space, streamlined, minimizing the target presented to the enemy. It wasn’t made to entertain people—it was a weapon.
A station of monitoring equipment and a screen of bulletproof glass faced UE 000 on the upslope leading to the great ship. Two people stood behind the shield watching their approach, one in a pinstripe suit and the other in military uniform. The olive-skinned dark-haired woman in the suit observed Daniel with cool interest. The tall and heavily muscled man in uniform glared at the boy, legs anxious and arms stiff.
Daniel recognized fear from years of guards’ furtive glances. And the man’s eyes said he hated what he feared.
Dr. Adelaide formally shook hands with the woman. “Director Minos,” she said as each nodded to the other, then turned to the man, “General Smith, sir, you’ve decided to join us?” While at least familiar with the woman in the suit, Mary seemed on edge since spotting this man.
“It is my duty to protect,” his eyes meant Dr. Adelaide and the Director, “You can’t conduct such a dangerous operation without military representation.”
The Director defended the General’s presence, “Of course there are contingencies in place for,” Daniel saw the woman’s eyes flicker at him, “Unfortunate outcomes. General Smith and I are here to activate said contingencies if necessary.”
“It won’t come to that,” Mary reassured them. She turned to Daniel and knelt, looking up at him, “Don’t worry about them. Focus on what we practiced. Remember, this is a test run. We’ll coordinate with some of the other UEs if you can’t do it alone. Don’t push yourself.”
Smith leaned toward Minos, “A handler in action.”
“Contain yourself, General, the subject can hear you,” the Director replied with some acidity.
Daniel pretended not to listen; a trick he’d learned. If he ignored things, people thought he was too stupid to understand. He turned to the big metal pill of a spaceship and confidence surged through him, “I can do it.”
Wearing a plastic glove, Mary touched the side of Daniel’s face. He leaned into her hand as she whispered, “I know you can.”
The adults stood behind the blast shield as he climbed the hill towards UE 000. He stopped about fifteen feet away from massive hunk of metal’s tip. Daniel had been given an in-depth briefing on the results of the Facility’s experiments on the Barrier.
Light passed through, to a point. Lasers reflected off it, even laser pointers, but not flashlights. X-rays, infrared, and ultraviolet revealed nothing. Physical objects bounced off of the invisible wall, including bullets. Pressurized water, plasma cutters, thermite, and explosives all had little effect. Nothing attempted overcame the shield’s self-repair function. A nuclear detonation would likely breach the Barrier but destroy UE 000 as well.
Daniel’s ability was next on their list.
He lifted a hand, leveled his gaze on the spaceship, and exerted himself. The power traveled from his hand in a wave and the Barrier intercepted. Daniel’s awareness grasped the entire forcefield on contact, feeling its shape.
His power pressed on the square foot before him, deteriorating that part of the Barrier. However, the surface was rotating—invisibly shifting the face it presented him while spiriting away the damaged portion for repair. Incredible.
Nothing ever resisted his power like this, and the challenge was weirdly pleasing. He associated difficulty with reward from his time with Mary. Daniel stretched his area of effect to ten square feet, increasing the amount of damage dealt. The Barrier began rotating on its vertical and horizontal axis.
He’d established a dialogue. Action and reaction. The Barrier responded to his attack with defense. Daniel wasn’t dealing with a particularly tough wall; he was facing an adversary. He smiled. Like chess or a puzzle, trial and error would find a solution.
Prolonged use of his ability tired him mentally and left him drained. Yet he’d been applying his power for a continuous minute and felt better than he’d started. Strange, but it let him continue the game. He delved inside himself for strength like drawing a bucket of water from a well. Normally, when he hit the bottom, he was exhausted. Spent. Except, this time, there was no bottom.
“Daniel, what’s happening?” Mary called from behind the blast shield.
“I’m working on it,” he called back.
“Is he even doing anything?” the General grumbled. To them, his battle with the invisible might as well have been playing charades.
He returned his focus to the Barrier and hit a hundred square feet at once in a stream of destruction, causing a visible ripple in the shield as it destabilized. Daniel felt an ache behind his stomach, constant, painful, and relentless, making him clench his mouth shut and grunt.
Daniel could handle it.
Light refracted weirdly in the affected area like turbulent water shining in the sun. On the brink, the Barrier scrambled to spiral the damage away to the back of the ship where he couldn’t reach.
Ignoring the gasps from behind, he escalated the area again to clinch victory. As he reached for the power to continue, delving deeper, stretching farther, he felt his feet slip.
Daniel fell into the well.
He no longer drew power; he swam in it. The ground around him exploded in a dust cloud and he floated three feet above a newly formed crater. The pain in his gut exploded through his abdomen in veins of fire. He doubled over and clenched his sides.
Worth it.
The wave of destruction grew to span a thousand square feet. The Barrier could no longer hide the damage, and soon the entire forcefield roiled. Yet there it stayed—self-repair in equilibrium with Daniel’s deterioration—a hair’s breadth from breaking.
Subconsciously, he registered the broken crown in the golden sigil on his robe start to glow.
The threat of more pain gave him pause, but he was used to the stab of hunger. He could bear this for the second it would take to crack the shell. Daniel clenched his open hand at the churning face of the shield, grabbed hold of the barrier with his mind, and squeezed. He submerged himself in power so deep he couldn’t fathom its beginning or end.
He ignored the sensation of ripples in the depths… as if something massive approached.
Huge cracks ran through the Barrier, and it shattered under immense pressure. As the shell fell away, a secondary shield—visible to the naked eye by its glowing blue squares and far stronger than the first—sprang out of nothing.
“That’s not fair!” Daniel felt cheated, robbed of his victory by the sheer stupid stubbornness of the spaceship. He’d been unfairly denied the success he’d earned. He flushed with anger and resentment, “But—I won!”
Something vast beyond comprehension swallowed him.
Pain, dense and fluid, pulsed through his veins from the depths of his gut to the tips of his fingers. He tried to recoil, to cringe, to throw his arms over his head as if to protect himself, but paralysis gripped him. Unable to budge a toe, he felt his body straighten and saw his arms extend on their own. No, not on their own. Daniel sensed a presence, a foreign Will superseding his as it squeezed into his head.
His black robe changed. The velvety fabric became ratty with moth-eaten holes, its color a royal purple left abandoned in the desert for decades, torn by hot winds and bleached by the sun until it matched the sand. Its tattered tassels and shredded fringes declared it the robe of a forgotten king. He felt a tattered cloak sprout from his neck and shoulders; clasps held shut by rust. Even buried in the pain, he imagined how grand and luxurious its train must have once been.
Lifted higher by the strength of that other Will, he stared down the nose of the spacecraft. Eyes wide, Daniel watched as a hatch on the spaceship burst wide—revealing a complex cannon, its mouth broader than his arm-span. Red hot plasma shone from inside the dark hole as it readied to fire directly at him.
“Daniel!” a voice screamed from below. Mary’s, he knew. He felt helpless as his left arm swung to his right ear, hand open. Another scream reached his ears, so rich with fear and horror the spoken word was indecipherable.
The cannon fired.
Faster than any bullet, he perceived the ball of plasma’s path by its searing trace across his retina. The downward sweep of his hand should have torn his arm from its shoulder as his palm smacked the plasma directly. His skin felt the plasma’s heat dully as a warm breath, leaving him unharmed.
The shot deflected.
Speeding away to the left, it hit the far wall, vaporizing matter on impact. After a few milliseconds delay, red flame exploded in a shower of hundred-pound concrete chunks. Any shrapnel hitting Daniel annihilated to dust. He heard unintelligible shouting from below.
His outstretched hands slammed together, stopping a foot short of impact—Daniel saw this gap as the width of the spaceship from his perspective, his hands grasping air but holding the ship from his point of view. Except, it wasn’t his point of view. The handprints of an invisible colossus crushed the second Barrier.
As the foreign Will opened his mouth and spoke, dozens of cannons and weapons unfolded from the ship. The voice was Daniel’s magnified to shake the walls of the chamber.
Oh, You
Who Hath Endured Millennia In Silence
Behold, I Am Come
Despair Not!
Your Defeat Is No Dishonor
For In All Creation Nothing Can Withstand Me
I Am
The Broken King
Against Whom There Is No Victory
I Am
The Titan Perses
One Whom They Call
The Mad God of Destruction
I Am
The Ruin Of All Things
At My Word
You
Will
Fall
BREAK!
The ship’s defenses crumbled. The second Barrier shattered; its fragments swept away in a second. All the weapons aiming at Daniel suffered a fatal malfunction—a critical piece exploded to dust, the cannon fell off the ship entirely, an unseen error, or complete destruction.
Daniel felt exhausted. For all The Ruin’s infinite strength, it used his body as its living conduit—his mind to sustain its presence. And, for all the insane cosmic power coursing through him, Daniel was just a boy. Surely, The Ruin would release him once it wrung Daniel dry.
A strange force rushed into him, energizing and refreshing Daniel as the foggy edges of his tired mind cleared. He understood. The Ruin fed on devastation—was fueled by destruction—a perpetual cycle of obliteration drawing on every act of demolition. The Ruin lifted his hand, preparing to annihilate the spaceship and liable to turn its attention to the Facility once it finished dealing with UE 000.
It would hurt Mary.
No. Daniel thought, resisting The Ruin for the first time. The Ruin replied, speaking to Daniel, not in his mind, but his heart as a cold and sinking feeling.
No?
Was It Not My Power You Sought?
Was It Not The Frustrated Cry Of Your Heart I Heard Across The Cosmos?
Daniel,
You Summoned Me
I Came
I summoned you? All I wanted was… to win…
He realized that first intense pain had left him long ago and wondered how much The Ruin had truly controlled him. The Broken King’s grip on his mind and body, so irrefutably hard, simply let go. That’s it? You release me so easily?
Oh, Daniel
I Am Even More Patient Than I Am Powerful
And I Am Very Powerful
All Things Come To Me In The End
There Will Come A Day You Will Beg
Yes
On Your Knees
You Will Beg To Join Me In My Holy Mission Of Purification
Then We Will Cleanse The Universe Of Its Perversity
By Destroying It
‘Et In Pulverem Reverteris’
Existence Is Sick
Emptiness Is Pure
When You Have Witnessed This Truth
Call To Me
Till Then, Daniel
Try To Stay Alive
It Will Not Be Easy
Daniel climbed from the well as he fell from the air, The Ruin no longer levitating him. When his feet hit the ground a puff of dust dispersed the energy of the fall that should have broken his bones. He landed in an awkward but not painful position.
The cloak returned to his oversized velvety black robes. Rising to his knees, he stared up at the broken spaceship. Barely floating, shield fractured, cannons malfunctioning, UE 000 was a wounded gazelle unable to escape the wolves.
A gunshot cracked and something hit his head harder than a baseball bat.
Three Years Since The Eastwood Event, 10:00 AM
Mary had prepared him for this day. She’d explained how Daniel could assist in her research, something he alone could do. Dr. Adelaide confessed their interest in UE 000 was not purely academic. They hoped to unlock secrets and solve ancient mysteries for the benefit of all mankind. He’d said yes.
Finally, he’d use the plague of his life for good. A great purpose would surely make all the hunger-pain nights and dry-throat days worthwhile. Just as he’d fantasized the cool refreshment of water healing the cracked ache of his barren desert throat, he’d imagined Mary’s expression when he finally repaid her years of care.
Daniel stepped outside his room for the first time in three years. He followed her down the corridor, bony bare feet leaving cracked impressions in the concrete as if he weighed tons. Mary wore her hazard suit with the helmet off, the edge of a white lab coat underneath.
Soldiers whispered into their radios at each checkpoint they passed. The steel blast-doors slid away to admit them when Mary flashed her ID at the cameras. During the trip he watched the other UEs through the walls by their multicolored auras.
Then they came to a metal gate larger than any previous. Mary placed her hand on the scanning plate, put one eye to a wall-mounted camera, and spoke the word, “Minotaur.” The monitor turned green and beeped in approval after verifying her fingerprints, voice, and retina.
The great doors unbolted and parted. Mary and Daniel entered a high-ceilinged room easily mistakable for an aircraft hangar or industrial warehouse. He squinted his eyes against the rows of harsh white lights shining down and stepped from concrete to dirt. He wiggled his toes in the tight-packed soil, comparing the dense feel to the loose sand of his room.
He left a trail of fading dust as he walked. His eyes drifted to the far wall and, for the first time, he saw UE 000—a smooth, dark metallic pill on the scale of a cruiser-class warship. The floor sloped up to UE 000 in an odd way that ascended to near-vertical. The unique entity levitated, frozen in space with its latter three-quarters embedded in the hill. Ten feet of space separated its surface from the soil stratum encompassing its body, the Barrier at work.
UE 000 was a spaceship.
A vessel from some ancient or alien civilization uncovered after thousands of years sleeping underground. Fascinated by the idea, Daniel considered what the ship might say about such a civilization.
Spaceships on TV had complex shapes, decorative architecture, or colorful features. This one was striking for its minimalism, with not even an ‘up’ or ‘down.’ Its featureless ‘front,’ he assumed, was identical to its ‘rear.’ Why? He worked his way around to an answer.
Most of the speculative fiction Daniel had seen wanted a distinctive ‘look’ about their spaceships to attract viewers. This machine didn’t care what people thought. This machine was efficient without a square inch of wasted space, streamlined, minimizing the target presented to the enemy. It wasn’t made to entertain people—it was a weapon.
A station of monitoring equipment and a screen of bulletproof glass faced UE 000 on the upslope leading to the great ship. Two people stood behind the shield watching their approach, one in a pinstripe suit and the other in military uniform. The olive-skinned dark-haired woman in the suit observed Daniel with cool interest. The tall and heavily muscled man in uniform glared at the boy, legs anxious and arms stiff.
Daniel recognized fear from years of guards’ furtive glances. And the man’s eyes said he hated what he feared.
Dr. Adelaide formally shook hands with the woman. “Director Minos,” she said as each nodded to the other, then turned to the man, “General Smith, sir, you’ve decided to join us?” While at least familiar with the woman in the suit, Mary seemed on edge since spotting this man.
“It is my duty to protect,” his eyes meant Dr. Adelaide and the Director, “You can’t conduct such a dangerous operation without military representation.”
The Director defended the General’s presence, “Of course there are contingencies in place for,” Daniel saw the woman’s eyes flicker at him, “Unfortunate outcomes. General Smith and I are here to activate said contingencies if necessary.”
“It won’t come to that,” Mary reassured them. She turned to Daniel and knelt, looking up at him, “Don’t worry about them. Focus on what we practiced. Remember, this is a test run. We’ll coordinate with some of the other UEs if you can’t do it alone. Don’t push yourself.”
Smith leaned toward Minos, “A handler in action.”
“Contain yourself, General, the subject can hear you,” the Director replied with some acidity.
Daniel pretended not to listen; a trick he’d learned. If he ignored things, people thought he was too stupid to understand. He turned to the big metal pill of a spaceship and confidence surged through him, “I can do it.”
Wearing a plastic glove, Mary touched the side of Daniel’s face. He leaned into her hand as she whispered, “I know you can.”
The adults stood behind the blast shield as he climbed the hill towards UE 000. He stopped about fifteen feet away from massive hunk of metal’s tip. Daniel had been given an in-depth briefing on the results of the Facility’s experiments on the Barrier.
Light passed through, to a point. Lasers reflected off it, even laser pointers, but not flashlights. X-rays, infrared, and ultraviolet revealed nothing. Physical objects bounced off of the invisible wall, including bullets. Pressurized water, plasma cutters, thermite, and explosives all had little effect. Nothing attempted overcame the shield’s self-repair function. A nuclear detonation would likely breach the Barrier but destroy UE 000 as well.
Daniel’s ability was next on their list.
He lifted a hand, leveled his gaze on the spaceship, and exerted himself. The power traveled from his hand in a wave and the Barrier intercepted. Daniel’s awareness grasped the entire forcefield on contact, feeling its shape.
His power pressed on the square foot before him, deteriorating that part of the Barrier. However, the surface was rotating—invisibly shifting the face it presented him while spiriting away the damaged portion for repair. Incredible.
Nothing ever resisted his power like this, and the challenge was weirdly pleasing. He associated difficulty with reward from his time with Mary. Daniel stretched his area of effect to ten square feet, increasing the amount of damage dealt. The Barrier began rotating on its vertical and horizontal axis.
He’d established a dialogue. Action and reaction. The Barrier responded to his attack with defense. Daniel wasn’t dealing with a particularly tough wall; he was facing an adversary. He smiled. Like chess or a puzzle, trial and error would find a solution.
Prolonged use of his ability tired him mentally and left him drained. Yet he’d been applying his power for a continuous minute and felt better than he’d started. Strange, but it let him continue the game. He delved inside himself for strength like drawing a bucket of water from a well. Normally, when he hit the bottom, he was exhausted. Spent. Except, this time, there was no bottom.
“Daniel, what’s happening?” Mary called from behind the blast shield.
“I’m working on it,” he called back.
“Is he even doing anything?” the General grumbled. To them, his battle with the invisible might as well have been playing charades.
He returned his focus to the Barrier and hit a hundred square feet at once in a stream of destruction, causing a visible ripple in the shield as it destabilized. Daniel felt an ache behind his stomach, constant, painful, and relentless, making him clench his mouth shut and grunt.
Daniel could handle it.
Light refracted weirdly in the affected area like turbulent water shining in the sun. On the brink, the Barrier scrambled to spiral the damage away to the back of the ship where he couldn’t reach.
Ignoring the gasps from behind, he escalated the area again to clinch victory. As he reached for the power to continue, delving deeper, stretching farther, he felt his feet slip.
Daniel fell into the well.
He no longer drew power; he swam in it. The ground around him exploded in a dust cloud and he floated three feet above a newly formed crater. The pain in his gut exploded through his abdomen in veins of fire. He doubled over and clenched his sides.
Worth it.
The wave of destruction grew to span a thousand square feet. The Barrier could no longer hide the damage, and soon the entire forcefield roiled. Yet there it stayed—self-repair in equilibrium with Daniel’s deterioration—a hair’s breadth from breaking.
Subconsciously, he registered the broken crown in the golden sigil on his robe start to glow.
The threat of more pain gave him pause, but he was used to the stab of hunger. He could bear this for the second it would take to crack the shell. Daniel clenched his open hand at the churning face of the shield, grabbed hold of the barrier with his mind, and squeezed. He submerged himself in power so deep he couldn’t fathom its beginning or end.
He ignored the sensation of ripples in the depths… as if something massive approached.
Huge cracks ran through the Barrier, and it shattered under immense pressure. As the shell fell away, a secondary shield—visible to the naked eye by its glowing blue squares and far stronger than the first—sprang out of nothing.
“That’s not fair!” Daniel felt cheated, robbed of his victory by the sheer stupid stubbornness of the spaceship. He’d been unfairly denied the success he’d earned. He flushed with anger and resentment, “But—I won!”
Something vast beyond comprehension swallowed him.
Pain, dense and fluid, pulsed through his veins from the depths of his gut to the tips of his fingers. He tried to recoil, to cringe, to throw his arms over his head as if to protect himself, but paralysis gripped him. Unable to budge a toe, he felt his body straighten and saw his arms extend on their own. No, not on their own. Daniel sensed a presence, a foreign Will superseding his as it squeezed into his head.
His black robe changed. The velvety fabric became ratty with moth-eaten holes, its color a royal purple left abandoned in the desert for decades, torn by hot winds and bleached by the sun until it matched the sand. Its tattered tassels and shredded fringes declared it the robe of a forgotten king. He felt a tattered cloak sprout from his neck and shoulders; clasps held shut by rust. Even buried in the pain, he imagined how grand and luxurious its train must have once been.
Lifted higher by the strength of that other Will, he stared down the nose of the spacecraft. Eyes wide, Daniel watched as a hatch on the spaceship burst wide—revealing a complex cannon, its mouth broader than his arm-span. Red hot plasma shone from inside the dark hole as it readied to fire directly at him.
“Daniel!” a voice screamed from below. Mary’s, he knew. He felt helpless as his left arm swung to his right ear, hand open. Another scream reached his ears, so rich with fear and horror the spoken word was indecipherable.
The cannon fired.
Faster than any bullet, he perceived the ball of plasma’s path by its searing trace across his retina. The downward sweep of his hand should have torn his arm from its shoulder as his palm smacked the plasma directly. His skin felt the plasma’s heat dully as a warm breath, leaving him unharmed.
The shot deflected.
Speeding away to the left, it hit the far wall, vaporizing matter on impact. After a few milliseconds delay, red flame exploded in a shower of hundred-pound concrete chunks. Any shrapnel hitting Daniel annihilated to dust. He heard unintelligible shouting from below.
His outstretched hands slammed together, stopping a foot short of impact—Daniel saw this gap as the width of the spaceship from his perspective, his hands grasping air but holding the ship from his point of view. Except, it wasn’t his point of view. The handprints of an invisible colossus crushed the second Barrier.
As the foreign Will opened his mouth and spoke, dozens of cannons and weapons unfolded from the ship. The voice was Daniel’s magnified to shake the walls of the chamber.
Oh, You
Who Hath Endured Millennia In Silence
Behold, I Am Come
Despair Not!
Your Defeat Is No Dishonor
For In All Creation Nothing Can Withstand Me
I Am
The Broken King
Against Whom There Is No Victory
I Am
The Titan Perses
One Whom They Call
The Mad God of Destruction
I Am
The Ruin Of All Things
At My Word
You
Will
Fall
BREAK!
The ship’s defenses crumbled. The second Barrier shattered; its fragments swept away in a second. All the weapons aiming at Daniel suffered a fatal malfunction—a critical piece exploded to dust, the cannon fell off the ship entirely, an unseen error, or complete destruction.
Daniel felt exhausted. For all The Ruin’s infinite strength, it used his body as its living conduit—his mind to sustain its presence. And, for all the insane cosmic power coursing through him, Daniel was just a boy. Surely, The Ruin would release him once it wrung Daniel dry.
A strange force rushed into him, energizing and refreshing Daniel as the foggy edges of his tired mind cleared. He understood. The Ruin fed on devastation—was fueled by destruction—a perpetual cycle of obliteration drawing on every act of demolition. The Ruin lifted his hand, preparing to annihilate the spaceship and liable to turn its attention to the Facility once it finished dealing with UE 000.
It would hurt Mary.
No. Daniel thought, resisting The Ruin for the first time. The Ruin replied, speaking to Daniel, not in his mind, but his heart as a cold and sinking feeling.
No?
Was It Not My Power You Sought?
Was It Not The Frustrated Cry Of Your Heart I Heard Across The Cosmos?
Daniel,
You Summoned Me
I Came
I summoned you? All I wanted was… to win…
He realized that first intense pain had left him long ago and wondered how much The Ruin had truly controlled him. The Broken King’s grip on his mind and body, so irrefutably hard, simply let go. That’s it? You release me so easily?
Oh, Daniel
I Am Even More Patient Than I Am Powerful
And I Am Very Powerful
All Things Come To Me In The End
There Will Come A Day You Will Beg
Yes
On Your Knees
You Will Beg To Join Me In My Holy Mission Of Purification
Then We Will Cleanse The Universe Of Its Perversity
By Destroying It
‘Et In Pulverem Reverteris’
Existence Is Sick
Emptiness Is Pure
When You Have Witnessed This Truth
Call To Me
Till Then, Daniel
Try To Stay Alive
It Will Not Be Easy
Daniel climbed from the well as he fell from the air, The Ruin no longer levitating him. When his feet hit the ground a puff of dust dispersed the energy of the fall that should have broken his bones. He landed in an awkward but not painful position.
The cloak returned to his oversized velvety black robes. Rising to his knees, he stared up at the broken spaceship. Barely floating, shield fractured, cannons malfunctioning, UE 000 was a wounded gazelle unable to escape the wolves.
A gunshot cracked and something hit his head harder than a baseball bat.
