((Salve all! This is my first attempt at web fic and one of my first posts here at the CoH/V forums!
Originally, I posted this under the Virtue forum, but felt it was more appropriate here and might find a wider readership.
So thanks everyone who reads this - please feel free to write feedback! And if you're on the virtue server and looking for some RP, PM Ikarios Saampati! Peace!))
[u]Ikarian Chronicles[u]
Chapter One: The Grind
The Grind Cover
The soft footfalls of the Herders slippers against the stone floor signaled another of the old man's mind-shattering Grinds. Ikaros, the boy repeated to himself, Ikaros. So long as he held onto his name, the old man could not completely erase him. Even if no one else ever knew him, he would at least know himself.
Ikaros. Ikaros. Ikaros.
A door opened in the darkness, though if there was light, Ikaros Saampati would not know it. Long ago, the slavers had covered his eyes from light. Wrapped his arms in binding cloth and rope so that he could not feel. All in an attempt to wipe clean his mind so they could remake him. Ikaros flexed his muscles constantly so that he would not lose them into the phantom darkness that had already taken so much of his original mind.
And up. The Herders lifted him and placed him on a rolling cart. The sound of the rusty wheels was loathsome and terrifying in its comforting familiarity.
Eventually the cart came to a stop in the room where the low, rhythmic hum rose from what must have been a thousand machines. Even the herders moods tightened when they entered that place - Ikaros could feel their apprehension even through all the layers of torture they had swaddled against him.
And then the old mans fingers, cold steel, slid underneath Ikaross blindfold and pressed gently against his temples. It was at that stage, every so often, that Ikaros could get a shower of light from the strain of the blindcloth. He searched frantically, but saw no cracks in the fold. He would have to go without, this time.
A true darkness overcame him then. Like a moth in the path of a coal train, Ikaros stood no chance in slowing the power of the old mans lightless soul as it overtook his mind and rattled its way into the very core of Ikaros's being.
Mirthless. Remorseless. Utterly impersonal.
The Grind.
Ikaros had named it so because in the beginning, the boy had felt he was a mountain and old man was a mining bore, a jackhammer, breaking a hole into him, grinding his dreams and his memories into dust. Over time, the mine shafts grew deeper miles deeper into his psyche. Into his very soul. Robbing him of eternity.
Eventually, the mountain of the self was criss-crossed with tunnels and passageways where even base instinct had once resided now gone. Great vaults were dug in the recesses where Ikaros kept the echoes of lifetimes passed. Eventually, the weight of the mountain pressed too hard in on itself and collapsed, reduced to rubble. Ikaros had been all but lost.
That must have been years ago, now. But while Ikaros was being destroyed from within, he had happened upon a secret - a salvation a way to rebuild himself anew during each Grind. He had chanced upon it when he realized he could reduce himself within the mountain to the size of a pebble. Or a million million pebbles to be more precise.
And all those pebbles and all that dust was swept up and taken in by the old man. Processed into a kind of psychic meal. And so long as Ikaros could occupy a million million tiny selves of himself, or at least thats how he thought of it all, then he could always find himself and rebind himself.
And more.
He could weave his own pathway into the old man - a maze of a hundred stolen souls. Ikaros could reconstitute his memories there, take from others, remake himself from shattered, forgotten pieces.
And so each time the old man came to Grind down into the core of Ikaross very being, to render him into that sick, psychic slurry, he was now unwittingly giving Ikaros the tools he would one day use to escape the island prison and make his way into the great unknown
Ikaros. Ikaros. Ikaros.