The woman swung from hand to hand, mindful of the river flowing beneath her feet. It trickled upstream, denying the gravity forcing it downwards. The lights, though present, did not work at all, this darkness creating only a minor inconvenience as the power consumption for her ocular enhancement increased by 10%. Using her small flashlight was also slightly troublesome as she also had to use both hands to move. It took a long time to get to any noticeable landmark, and even that one landmark took a long time to be noticed with the limited visibility. The liquid pooled around a metal box that imposed upon the hallway. Drips fell from the ceiling with a distinct synthetic rhythm. It sounded like a quick tapping of soft feet. Still attached to the ceiling, she shivered at that thought.
She watched as the last pieces of what she could only assume was the fat beast entered the box. She waited. A shimmering explosion shredded the metal cube with a symmetrical blast. The thick metal sheeting was pried open like the egg of a newborn chick, if a newborn chick possessed hundreds of crystalline feathers. The inside of the “egg” was filled completely with the liquid and it held its form, for only a moment as a particularly viscous yolk, before spilling out of the metallic remnants of its shell. Within the shredded and cracked metal debris, a man was suspended, hanging by his shoulders from a massive canopy of shimmering, feather-like, crystals. They were layered, each upon another, making the appearance of luscious wings.
An angel, she thought but blushed internally at the brief flight of fancy. Her face remained hardened and invisible under her mask. The man was angelic, however fanciful the term may seem. That was not to say that he was perfect. He gave the impression of someone that was of a different species, a foreign creature that was distant from the world in front of him. That perhaps looked down on it from the clouds. It certainly helped his image that he radiated light under the shine of the woman’s small flashlight. No doubt this was due to a very long time without sunlight or rather any light at all. His shimmering, shoulder-length hair was made from the same substance as his “wings” and fluttered about him even in the absence of wind. The man was, however, not unmarred. Multiple muscled apertures symmetrically gouged his skin and leaked a small amount of liquid. There were scars around each aperture and the woman judged, with the eyes of a hunter, that they were made from nails or claws. And, judging from their context, probably human ones.
Medals of his forced removal from humanity, she thought, I can almost forgive him for what he has done to my people. She readied a blade in one hand as she hung, hoping that she would not have to fight. As a vapor shimmered around the newly excavated semi-human, his eyes shot open, revealing dull blue eyes, clouded icy diamonds that could not observe their surroundings. He inhaled deeply and coughed out clear liquid with a sputter. The substance dribbled down his chin, over his wincing visage. *Crack* A wispy thread ran along the wings behind the man’s back. He had lost control. The wings liquidized, feather by feather, before splashing to the pool on the ground, the man falling with it.
The liquid swirled around the man; a large spiral that left him completely untouched in the center. It gathered the liquid from beyond the bunker and condensed it into an even more viscous fluid. The woman waited for hours, her arms getting more and more tired, but she did not dare move for fear of the growing hurricane-like swirl beneath her feet. Surprisingly, the floor began to dry up, as the river that flowed outside was presumably condensed within the coil that was only the breadth of a body or so. The woman, in an attempt to get closer to this anomaly, finally jumped silently from the ceiling to the recently dried tiles.
She paused, worried that the liquid would detect her, or perhaps worse, the man. Better to assume the worst and be wrong than to be hopeful and dead. There was no longer any liquid on the floor, and she wondered how an entire river’s worth of liquid could fit in the scrawny body of a young man. She stepped forward and heard a crunch.
Flinching, she looked under her leather boot and saw the partially-powdered bone pile from some ancient rodent that had yellowed with age. It was picked clean like all of the others but was much closer to the source of its demise. As her eyes trailed upwards and her head moved towards a forward position, she saw a wall of thin needles pointed directly towards her face and head. She imagined a porcupine turned inside out. When she had stood up completely, the needles repositioned around her neck in a perfect circle, like an inverted necklace. She shuddered and the twitching led to small cuts all around her neck that slowly trickled blood.
She waved her eyes about the room to the man and the floor he rested upon. The floor once more glistened with liquid that poured from the man's back. He lay on his hands and knees before the liquid from his back hardened to form long spindly legs. The woman had seen similar legs on transparent arachnids that scuttled in the deepest of caves. He’s blind too, from the look of his eyes. The protrusions behind his back raised him in the air, though he remained limp and weak. He hung there, hair hanging over his face like a curtain as the spikes began to lift and push, stumbling, towards the woman.
As the spikes pushed, the man’s arms and legs swayed to the motion like a pendulum. The motion of the insectoid legs was reminiscent of a deer from an old-world cartoon, if that deer had legs that, instead of splaying or sliding, seemed to soften or crack, even at some points melting. The movement was jittery and could be considered frightening to any normal human. In shock, the woman released her grip on the dagger she had forgotten she was holding. With the clatter of metal on tile, the needles receded about an inch and the woman gasped for breath.
“Wh….re...ou? Who……you? Who are you?!” A weak voice leaked out of the man suspended above her head before getting stronger to a yell. “I cannot see… WHY CAN’T I SEE! I can’t remember…darkness…water...red....” The man shivered and that twitch traveled through his many arachnoid appendages in waves, as though it was not a solid. The woman took pride in her name and found no issue in vocalizing it, even to this unknown creature that could kill her with a sudden wayward thought. “I am Seeker. And I have found you,” she said, with a prideful puff of her chest. The gesture was lost on the man, as he could detect only a faint silhouette of a person through some form of feedback from the fluid.
“Hmm...That is a title, not a name. I may as well call myself Scientist, Professor, Subject, Lost...Found.” The man continued to ramble, ignoring the aura of irritation that emanated from the woman now known as Seeker. “I am Seeker. That is the name bestowed upon me for my occupation by the Church, even if I might not agree with their teachings,” she was clearly irritated enough to disregard the looming threat above her. “Even with the appearance of an angel, you have no place to disrespect my name, others have been called Smith or Hunter, why must Seeker be so unfathomable!” She huffed in indignation at the apparent disregard of her rant by the only other living being present.
“An angel you say?” The man laughed, thoroughly ignoring the important parts of Seeker’s little speech. Seeker pursed her lips beneath her mask, knowing that he could not see. Why does he focus on the embarrassing bit, she thought, as the tense situation somewhat dispersed. “Well then, oh great angel, might this humble one inquires upon your mighty name with which you use to insult me?” Seeker would have bowed to accentuate her point if the man proved ignorant of the nuances of sarcasm, but the needles barred her path.
“You know what? I like you,” he said as the needles melted to the floor, “I hope the threat to your life is not what makes you so funny!” His sense of humor did not seem to have survived his rebirth, if it was present to begin with. She relaxed her shoulders only partially because she did not yet trust him not to skewer her. “I have no name that I remember,” he said, “I remember my past life as only snippets of information, no emotions. I see images and family, but I feel nothing. My brain might be severely damaged!” He laughed once more, as if his brain was not the most important part of his entire body. Maybe that is the reason he laughs so much, Seeker thought. The man muttered something that Seeker could not understand about lobes and the amygdala. Seeker had already cemented certainty of his brain damage theory.
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“I have decided that I should be named something monarchical. King, Emperor, Monarch, König, Roi, Rex, anything that rules. I was subjected to tests in my previous life and thus I shall be a ruler in this one.” He paused to think about his choices based on his rather limited knowledge of ancient or even extinct languages. He was glad that the language Seeker used had not evolved so far as to make his completely obsolete, although he had detected an odd accent on some of her speech. “Rex, I think, will be my name, from a language that should by all rights have been dead and lost to the passage of time, even when I was a kid. Quite fitting for one such as I.” Seeker shrugged. She had heard nothing of this name, but she deduced that this was the point.
As Seeker was lost in thought, she heard a scuttling sound. When she looked up, Rex was inches from her face with an odd grin. She could only see his curtain of hair and his oddly jolly smile. He was quite a bit closer than she would have liked but she assumed that a long time in a dark cave would lead to little ability to remember how to interact with beings that didn’t scuttle or slither. This had little to do with it as Rex was conscious for almost none of this time, but this erroneous assumption helped to ease her discomfort. He seemed to have felt her attention, so he patted the side of her mask and motioned with his hand to move forward. She moved forward with a shudder as Rex’s arachnid appendages stomped on the bones of the prey in his way with a snap or a crack. He seemed to notice the sound but paid it no mind and continued on his way. The bones had been picked so clean that there was not even a scent for him to pick up on. He probably just thought they were pieces of broken tiles or other inorganic substances. Seeker wondered if he would have cared if he knew what he was stepping on. She tried to gather enough resolve to stop shivering or shuddering at almost everything that was happening to her. She failed.
As each crystal arm clacked against the tile floor and cracked against bones, the duo made their way closer to the exit. Sometimes, Rex would get a little too close to the sides of the straight tunnel and the legs would scrape on the sides of the walls, clearly not used to having to travel blind or with appendages that could only loosely be called his own. Each time the glass legs dragged against the walls, Rex would cover his ears with his actual hands and shiver as the sound waves echoed down the long hallway. He looks so harmless, like a baby animal, Seeker thought, although she knew it would take him no time at all to gut her. How could he do such horrible things to my town and to the ecosystem.
“I smell the grass,” Rex muttered under his breath, “It has been a long, long time.” He looked up due to reflex but sighed when he still saw nothing. With the hatch now empty of all the liquid, Seeker noticed a ladder and the light from above rather than the endless dripping waterfall that accompanied her entrance into this underground. In fact, the whole entrance was completely dry, almost as if the liquid was never there in the first place.
The extra limbs lowered Rex down to the ground that was directly shone upon by the outside light and he slumped gently into a pile with his back facing outward. The diamond legs shot from their stationary position and rocketed to the distant opening, completely disregarding the ladder that was adjacent. Seeker saw Rex’s body twitch briefly upwards and the legs began to act like a pulley system, jerkily yanking the limp body up in brief bouts. It looked similar to a group hoisting a corpse out of a cave after a wayward spelunking expedition. Seeker looked at the sight with dead eyes and simply took the ladder.
When Rex pooled over the top of the hatch, he retracted his additional legs back into himself and shivered in a manner similar to a dog with wet fur. He grasped moist dirt in his real palms and raised it to his nose to take a deep breath.
“I don’t know how I even survived down there, without sun or food or anything,” he addressed Seeker who had just recently climbed manually from the hatch. “I suppose I should thank you, for getting me out of there, rocky first meeting aside. I must not have been in there very long though, for me to be able to survive out of my capsule.” He was in the recently dried streambed, surrounded on all sides by towers of bones that, if he was able to see, would have answered his query, while also raising quite a few more.
Rex sighed in relief and rolled his shoulders with a cracking noise. I wasn’t fully conscious before, but what on earth is coming out of my back. He would have looked at his back by reflex. A fountain of viscous liquid spit out and hardened into a spine.
It grew five little spines and waved at him. I guess I can control it with more than just instinct. Rex could clearly feel each finger undulating as if it were his own. It was his own.
It looked, to an outside viewer, as though it was a separate entity, but he could control it just as well as he could his other limbs. Better, in fact, as his false limbs did not atrophy, and they were much more dexterous than any human could ever hope to be. And this was without any practice other than his frantic escape from his capsule. Who knows how powerful it might get with a little more time? Instinct carried it far farther than he could have guessed.
“I guess this was what the doc… no wait, what I was working on before I…” Rex muttered to himself as he pondered how far his colleagues had taken his mind.
Seeker did not like how he looked, vaguely human shaped arms coming from his back, a handful of dirt up to his face, on his knees amidst piles of bones. He looked innocent to the destruction he had caused. She wasn’t sure how he would react when he found out. She hoped that he would react.
Seeker hoped that someone else, preferably someone who she didn’t like very much, broke the news to him and that she had enough time to run far away. Just in case. She also wanted to make sure that he stayed far away from any cute animals or children. She put her hands on her hips and figured that this was very similar to training a young puppy of some kind. What a hassle.
As Seeker was contemplating the comparisons of a canine and this particular human, a bird, that looked like a misshapen sphere with comically undersized wings and beak, flew a bit too low and made a cheep. Rex shielded his head with his arms and turned his face to the side. His other “hands” did quite the opposite.
With a silent swish, his newly created hands elongated to the point where the bird was just in between them. The palms snapped shut.
The bird was now only a pinkish mixture of blood, gore and the liquid with the bones and fine feathers now indistinguishable. That pinkish soup quickly made its way down each arm with the bones and feathers remaining in the transparent palms up above.
Seekers facial muscles tensed without making any noticeable change to her expression. She made her own approximation of a grimace when the apertures on Rex’s back twitched open and then shut to accommodate the nutrient shake. Rex simply tilted his head at the foreign sensation of sucking something through one’s back. Seeker almost vomited.
The bones and feathers clattered on some rocks at Rex’s feet. Slowly, fluttering down, a single red feather slid gently across Rex’s face, painting a grim streak behind it. It lay at rest, like a little waving flag, upright amidst some mud at Rex’s feet.
Rex dragged his finger on the wet side of his face before rubbing it against his thumb. He sniffed. “Iron? No. Blo- “
“No! We are going! Let’s go! Follow!” Seeker sharply cut Rex off, favoring one disregard of safety for another. The forest froze. A droplet of sweat meandered down Seeker’s cheek. Rex whipped his body around to face her. His emaciated skeletal frame shook as he let out sharp breaths.
Seeker blinked.
A noise of swift air displacement tickled her ears. A claw stroked her neck. Her eyes that were closed gently, no, fearfully eased open to reveal the figure looming in front of her. Rather than the “cheerful” threats that had occurred from what she assumed to be brief delirium underground, the aura that dripped from Rex was a cold gleaming knife.
He stood, hands tipped with crystal claws, hanging above her. His head was positioned so that his frigid sapphire eyes, one highlighted with a brushstroke of red, looked down from beneath his hair and pierced Seeker’s own. One hand was pointed at the middle of her neck, ready to skewer at any slight provocation more.
“Why?... WHY did you command me? I am NOT your GOD-DAMN FUCKING SLAVE!” Rex voice was an avalanche; loud, strong and bold but with a chilled and deadly current, as each word and each enunciation was carefully deliberated, even as they flew from his mouth.
Huuh. Huuuh. The forest was silent except for the long exhales from the half-naked, muddy-kneed figure, hanging loosely from a wiry, crystalline frame.
Seeker could hold her breath no longer and fell to the ground to her knees, inhaling deeply. I should not have gone so far. I apologize. Rex thought to himself. He turned around, from the shivering heap of Seeker, and said nothing.
After he had skittered on four spindly legs for a few steps, he dropped to the ground, thinking that his atrophied musculature might need the exercise. He waved to Seeker, still on the ground, and commanded, “Take me to your leader!” He giggled at that.
Seeker pushed herself up in several halted movements. She was wrong about comparing Rex to a cute puppy to be trained. He was more akin to a feral, rabid wolf, with torn, matted fur and sharp, dripping fangs. And she was going to have to take him to a town filled with sheep.