Murmurs carried through the hazy air. Mindless whispers pulling me forward.
“Save them. I need to save them. Failed them. I failed them. Failure… Help them. Help me…”
The man was crouching within the ashes of a fallen world, smoke and smoldering corpses reaching as far as the eye could see. He wore a soldier’s armor, weapons fallen next to him, and head buried in his hands.
“Too late. Did nothing. Failed them. Couldn’t save them…”
More voices picked up, the dead chanting around him.
“You killed us. Left us. Didn’t help us…”
He was me, and the planet was the first of the main worlds which had fallen. Even centuries later, this scene would always haunt my dreams. Never in such clarity, however.
Over the years, it had been muddled by booze and shoddy mental alterations. Yet now, revisiting it like this, I realized that it was…wrong?
Staring down at my older self, kneeling there in the ruins of my worst nightmares, a sharp pain drilled through my skull.
I was never—
The ground beneath me split apart, leaving golden chains to burst forth as I staggered backward. Woven by layers of flowing code, they wrapped around the older me, pulling him into the earth.
Never once did he rise to his feet to fight them off. Never once did he stop murmuring those same words as the memory dissolved from around.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
The old house was dead quiet. It was worn down, gray, and weathered. Everything was still. At least until I took that first step across creaking floorboards.
Like an ancient film reel that had started playing in flickering resolution, the window shutters around me violently flapped in the wind as strident doors creaked upon their hinges. There was rain and thunder outside as well, but my feet followed a single sound — that of faint sniveling.
The bright-haired child sat in the corner of an ugly bedroom, clutching a book tightly to his chest. The pages were read to ruination, and the boy kept murmuring those same words as he rocked back and forth, “No, please don’t. I…I just want to become strong, too. Mom, I…I’m not useless…”
Another sharp pain drilled through my skull.
No, my childhood was never—
The golden chains came from the wall this time, wrapping around the boy’s throat and dragging him into the wall. He was still murmuring those same, pained words as the building turned into mist around me.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
The ship creaked upon cosmic winds. The old man, weathered and graying, stared out across a galaxy that’d long since died. “We failed. We were weak. In the end, we couldn’t save anything…”
“I was weak,” I said, cutting the man’s mad ramblings short. “But I was never a whimpering old fool. What is this? Who are you?”
Hollowed out, soulless eyes turned my way. “The main worlds. Our comrades. Our crew…”
“That wasn’t me,” I objected even as that pounding ache in my head only got worse. “That was—”
This time, it was my leg that the golden chains wrapped around, yanking me straight through the hull of the ship.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
I saw a young child strapped inside a carrier, his surroundings thrown into chaos. He had known this was coming, yet he’d done nothing. He just blankly stared ahead where he clutched at the harness.
“Don’t do anything. Do something. You’re useless. Can’t save anyone. Must save everyone. Will only make things worse…”
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
The rain was falling. I was on my knees, and my superior towered over me.
“Just obey orders! Don’t think for yourself. Every action that you’ve ever taken has only hurt people…”
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
A sterile medic’s office. A bright lamp slowly swaying before my eyes. Blinking. Mesmerizing.
“Many soldiers experience your pain. We understand.”
I struggled against the bindings holding me in place, trying to see where the voice was coming from as the buzz of drills and saws filled my ears.
“These mental mods will help with that. It will make your burden easier to bear…”
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
Screams. Endless screams around me. Countless innocents fell as I squeezed my trigger. Millions of lives, erased in a day.
“Kill them! Kill them all! They’re infected! Don’t listen to their screams. They’re trying to warp your minds!”
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
The room was trashed around me. Furniture was smashed to pieces, and bedclothes ripped to shreds. My knuckles had turned bloody beating against an unyielding wall, and tears of frustration burned in my eyes. “Why? Why, why, why…?”
Just forget. It’s easier if you forget. If you just follow orders. Don’t think. Follow. Obey…
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
On7y Y0u Hav3 Seen…Error…End Th±│ Mu↕t Be…Error…
A feeling of being strung along. Too many coincidences piling up. Decisions that barely felt like my own.
A truth I’d been running from.
Questions I’d been too afraid to ask.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
I was drenched in sweat, down on my hands and knees within the swirling dark and heaving. The golden chains were no longer wrapped around my ankle, but even so, I could tell this wasn’t real.
Was anything real? What could I even trust?
My head was spinning. There were too many things vying for attention. Too many impressions, images, and distorted memories. All until a single droplet of water fell within the hollow chamber, silencing my chaotic mind.
I blinked, only to clench my fists with a click of my tongue. “Not a whimpering old fool, was it?”
I got to my feet, stretching out into my full height as I stiffly took in my surroundings. This place wasn’t a memory, at least. Not an entire one. At best, it was an amalgamation of a dozen different past experiences, if even that.
It was an alien tomb, but unlike any of the alien tombs that I’d seen in my past life.
The stones of its wall and ceiling were dilapidated, damp and worn down. The entire design of the chamber was simplistic, forgettable in all but that black mist swirling around my ankles. It twisted and moved along the smooth floor, concentrating in the middle of the chamber. In the same place where disaster had always been contained before.
There was no screaming, gaping maw reaching down from the ceiling here, however. No swirling orbs or cursed relics. Only the face of death and ruin itself stared down from above, weeping more of those swirling shadows onto the pillar of darkness ahead of me.
Something stirred within it. Trapped and chained and watching. A something that had recently become part of me. That had brought me here, and that had wanted me to see those memories.
I was no longer alone. Maybe I had never been.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
By the time those golden chains finally emerged, they moved far slower compared to before. They came as if passing through dense tar, painstakingly enveloping my legs. Even so, I made no attempts at fighting them.
I just kept gazing into that pillar of darkness, and it gazed back at me.
It wouldn’t be the last time I encountered it. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, however, I had no clue.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
Arus was still shivering as he got to his feet.
His entire mind had been rattled, and more than once did he crash to the floor before he found his balance. Even the lights on his armor had taken a hit, leaving several of them blinking and flickering, and only two to successfully pierce the darkness up ahead.
It left everything in a dim haze as he, coughing and staggering, began trailing down that tunnel. By all means, he would have been a shame to his brood if he didn’t have some curiosity towards the explosion that had nearly killed him.
Just that, once more, the longer he walked, the more he realized that the shockwave he’d felt was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.
There was no damage to the tunnel walls. Even as the floor ahead of him started to get littered by dead insects, there wasn’t a single crack or scratch to be seen. Even those dead, oversized bugs didn’t show any signs of external injury, even as they lay there, stone dead.
In many ways, it seemed their minds had simply stopped working. Like his own nearly had.
It was an ominous sight, and if there’d been even the slightest sign of poison or radiation in the air, Arus would’ve turned around without hesitation. He was a curious mind, not a fool.
But there was nothing to tick off his senses. Not even as he let his mask slide back over his face was there any sign of harmful substances in the air. Nothing to tell what had happened here.
There was only traceless death, getting more prominent the further he walked. By the time he saw the corpse of that massive monster that’d initiated this entire debacle, Arus was stepping on dead insects more often than stone floor.
His first glimpse of the jagged carapace made it look more like a giant bolder where it lay, blocking off the tunnel. It took him a second to realize it wasn’t, yet before the Ruskel could set off in a screaming escape, murmured words had reached his ears.
“I was weak. But I was never…”
Relief washed over him.
His human meat shield was still alive. Arus wouldn’t have to get out of that place alone.