* * *
Eric Grayson hadn't had many hangovers in his life, but he'd had enough to know that this was worse. His head lolled from one shoulder to the other like a medicine ball as he propped himself upright against the examination bed, as he felt for his dangling legs and then carefully braced his feet against the tiled floor before trusting them with his weight. He still nearly toppled over again, just barely catching himself on the edge of the bed and lifting upright.
...shadows in the starwind the universe races faster than the clock in formless black...
He groaned aloud at the dizzying blur of thoughts, the world spinning around him as he almost lost his balance again. He managed to grab onto a counter a few feet away, more by blindly throwing himself at it than by walking or even stumbling his way to it, and he leaned back against the empty shelf as he looked around at the sterile white room. It could have been an operating room, except a little smaller, surrounded on three sides by windows covered on the outside with rows of lime-green curtains and the fourth leading into a short hallway and a pair of electronically sealed doors. He guessed this must be the SERAPH lab, and began to open each of the cabinets lining the room, dragging himself from one handle to the other as the feeling gradually returned to his legs. Empty, save for a few snacks in one of the drawers.
He glanced down that side hall, wondering if he dared stumble his way down its length to test the doors. They must be locked, though - and if they weren't, would he want out?
...energy ebbs and flows like rivers cresting their banks across the midnight sphere...
Eric grabbed his head between his hands, balancing himself atop his quivering knees as he fought to block out the maddening babble, and then sighed as he looked around at the darkened examination room again. Silence filled the building and for a moment he imagined that he'd been left alone in here, locked away and forgotten. Of course not, he shook his head to himself, the windows are just soundproof. He could probably get someone's attention by banging on the door, maybe even talk to Shadowstar herself. He didn't feel inclined to test that theory, though, and stumbled his way back to the examination bed to sit down.
...time blossoming outward through endless tributaries hearmecanyouhearmecanyou...
The DATA technician blinked at the thought that crossed his mind, listening for a moment to the ringing silence and then closing his eyes. He'd almost heard a voice speaking to him, a voice like a young woman, calm and measured despite her youthful timbre.
"Can you hear me?"
It could almost have been Shadowstar's voice. Maybe it actually was her, and she was trying to reach him. Maybe this was part of some plan to free him from the Nictus, something that meant her mind joining with his so they could battle the creature side by side.
"Yes, I can hear you."
"Will you stop talking out loud," that voice suddenly hissed through his mind, "the crazier they think you are, the less likely it is that they'll let either of us out of here!"
"Oh," he sighed and then muttered dejectedly, "it's you. Well in that case, I'll just talk even louder, to make absolutely sure they don't let you go anywhere."
"Idiot," she snapped back, and then went silent.
"You sound like a girl," he finally said aloud, mostly to distract himself from actually thinking about the parasitic thing inside him, "I didn't know your kind had genders."
"I don't have a gender," the Nictus's voice glowered through his thoughts, "your damaged hypothalamus is releasing oxytocin in response to the merger. Your brain's mistaking that reaction for a pair bonding experience, and it's interpreting my voice accordingly."
Eric couldn't help but suddenly give a sharp, hollow laugh.
"So you think if you sound like a woman, I'll be more willing to bond with you?"
"I don't want you to bond with me," she snarled back, "you're the one who tethered me in this body, and it's your brain that's giving me this voice! This is all your fault!"
"My fault? MY fault?! You possessed me and you tried to use me to overload the portal generator beneath City Hall! How can you call any of that my fault?!"
"You weren't in any danger," she muttered petulantly, "I would have saved you. We were almost out the door before you took over and dragged us back downstairs."
"You think," he shook his head with bewilderment and leaned back against his arms across the examination bed, "you think I did that to save myself?"
"Then who," that voice in his head asked after a moment's pause, "the Peacebringers? You don't owe them anything. They don't even belong on your world."
"Technically, neither do you," Eric mumbled to himself, and then he spoke more firmly to the Nictus, "besides, if it'd gone critical, that generator would have killed a lot more than whatever Peacebringers happened to be in City Hall. The event horizon alone would have wiped out most of Atlas Park. You would have killed thousands of people if I hadn't stopped you."
Silence answered him, a ringing, empty stillness that lasted so long he began to wonder if the bizarre conversation had ended. And then the Nictus spoke into his thoughts again.
"It couldn't be helped," she said softly, and her bodiless voice gradually rose into a steadier, more defiant tone, "we're at war. There have to be casualties."
"We humans aren't at war with you," he leapt back to his feet as he snapped at her, "at least not yet - and maybe if you weren't trying to blow us up, it could stay that way!"
Silence filled his thoughts again, and this time it didn't give way to an answer. He stared down at his khaki pants and gray work shoes in a seething haze, his fists tightly gripping the metal railings of the bed behind him. And he sighed to himself and finally spoke again.
"So what's your name?"
"Beyond your human comprehension," came a surly reply.
"You're a bundle of joy," Eric rolled his eyes, running his fingers back through his hair and then glancing over at the cabinet full of snacks as his stomach rumbled slightly, "well, since I skipped dinner on account of being possessed by you, I think I'll grab some food."
"Oh really," her voice asked him with a sudden, malevolent lilt, "perhaps I'm not hungry. And maybe I won't start feeling hungry until you start doing what I say. I can't keep control of you, but I can keep you in stalemate until you either starve or start taking directions."
"You're going to make me go without dinner," he answered her with a dismissive snort, "what are you, my mother? Besides, what's the point? You'd just starve too."
"Then maybe I could jump away afterward."
"I can't help but notice the word maybe," he countered, "and besides, it's not like we're really alone in here. You think SERAPH's going to let your little hunger strike last? They'd probably just gas this room, strap us down and hook up an IV drip."
She didn't answer him, but he didn't have any trouble walking across the examination room, sliding the snack drawer open and picking out a granola bar. He'd already unwrapped it and taken a bite when the Nictus's sulking voice rang through his thoughts again.
"Fine," she muttered, "you can eat."
"You're too kind," he mumbled through a mouthful of food, and took another bite.
"You'd make a good Nictus."
This brought such a sudden laugh to his throat that Eric had to cover his mouth and swallow hard to keep from spraying the counter with half-chewed granola.
"Flattery will get you nowhere."
"I'm serious," she said quietly, "the way you used my powers to absorb the generator's energy so it wouldn't overload? I didn't even know that was possible. You're strong-willed, creative and you clearly have an affinity for our powers. Why not give it a try?"
"Is this the part where you say we could rule the galaxy together," he quipped with one last gulp of the granola bar, and then he shook his head, "look, I appreciate the thought, but I'm not about to 'try' being a mass murderer. Wouldn't it be easier for you to try our way?"
She didn't answer, and after waiting a moment he crumpled the foil wrapper and tossed it into a wastebasket across the room. He'd begun pacing along the hall, wondering if he should knock on the door and ask how things are going outside, when she spoke again.
"Hibernal Dusk," her voice soft, almost confessional.
"Huh?"
"The image that phrase creates in your mind," she spoke again, "and the emotions it makes you feel, that's your brain's analogue to my name. Hibernal Dusk."
He nodded wordlessly and closed his eyes, letting the words paint their own picture. Hibernal dusk, snowflakes twirling and fluttering against a star-filled sky still tinged orange by the setting sun, a trail of soft white snow winding its way through a crystal forest, dipping low between the gently sloping hills and up toward the mists and the cool gray darkness of the eastern sky, into a winter untouched by sleds and crunching boots. An endless fairy tale winter...
"It's beautiful," he said as he finally opened his eyes again.
"Hm," her voice hummed a little, as though lost in its own thoughts.
"Well, my name's Eric," he smiled sheepishly as he introduced himself, faintly wondering if he should be offering his hand to the empty air to shake, "Eric Grayson."
"I already know your name," she muttered curtly.
"Yeah, I guess you do," he grunted under his breath, the moment broken, "well, I don't know if you Nictus need sleep, but it's late, and since there's not a whole lot for me to do except keep enjoying your pleasant company, I'd rather turn in for the night."
Eric actually felt a little grateful for the sullen silence that followed as he rolled onto his side across the thin mattress of the hospital bed. He draped his jacket around his shoulders and, in spite of everything, quickly found himself sinking into an exhausted slumber.
* * *
A twisting, dizzying dive through the perpetual storms of a gas giant, lightning flashing behind the swirling clouds like miniature suns igniting and fading into the void as they dipped out of the sunlit expanses of the upper atmosphere. They raced faster through the ebony currents of those lower depths, swimming downward with jellyfish bodies woven from diaphanous strands of hydrocarbons, a body that would billow away like vapor into the relative vacuum of a terrestrial breeze. Yet down here it swam with the sleek feral grace of a shark, plunging into an atmosphere that gradually thickened into an ocean, deeper and deeper until the darkness began to give way to the shimmering, crackling heat of the planet's core, the energy that drew swarms of Hulnanim out of the drifting clouds overhead into a twilight realm the Mefnanim could never know...And they wandered across another world, the smoothly polished surface of a dead star, a place so alien that its atoms aren't even atoms as humans know them. The sky raced overhead with countless stars swept into streaking white arcs while the northern horizon blazed with a fiery pillar of light streaming from the north pole, a pillar matched by the incandescence glowing faintly beneath the smooth round lip of the southern sky. Here and there cracks twisted along the mirrored ground, each one glowing millions of degrees, searing the cosmic gloom and casting the hulking shapes of the Ruktur into stark relief against the star-streaked sky. The cadence of their thundering footsteps shuddered through the elemental crust, distorted by a gravity so powerful that time itself curves and drags around the tiny sphere of their world...
Then they stepped foot on yet another world, a world far beyond even those imaginings.
She stood by the shores of the Seine, the river glittering as deep and blue as the sky in the morning sunlight as she stepped back into the shadows of a lush green grove and silently watched the crowds gathering in Paris. They'd come to witness the consecration of the High Altar of the Notre Dame de Paris, though she didn't know the meaning of the ceremony or even the name of the building being consecrated. She only knew that these tiny mammals in their funny robes and garments, some of them riding larger and stupider mammals with manes and swishing tails, had defied gravity with nothing but their ropes, scaffolds and stubborn will. They'd spent a generation erecting vast stone arches and spires against the sky, beings of flesh and matter fighting so hard against their own nature to reshape the world around them, their whole lives devoted to the act of transforming it into something still more beautiful.
The year was 1182 and she'd hardly been on this world a week. A few of the boys among that thronging crowd had idly glanced through the linden groves beside the river and noticed the raven-haired peasant girl standing alone and silently watching the ceremony. Had they looked closer and discerned the faint red glow of her eyes, they might have thought her a demon, and they wouldn't have been far from the truth. But as she stared that morning through the crowds at the half-finished cathedral, catching snatches of choir hymns in the spring breeze and listening to the way their voices mingled with the chirping cicadas and the rustling leaves, she fell in love with the world and the wonderful dreams of those strange creatures, and she whispered a breathless promise to herself that she'd never let anyone take her away from this place...
* * *
When Eric awoke half an hour later to the dim glow of the fluorescent lights overhead, he had to close his eyes again to remind himself that he had arms and legs, and that he should already know how to move them. He slung himself upright across the side of the bed, kicking his legs a little and scuffing the soles of his shoes against the floor tiles to reassure himself before hopping to his feet again. He stretched his arms over his head, took a shuddering breath and then finally broached the conscious, painfully awkward silence filling the room.
"I think I dreamed about your life."
"I know," the Kheldian answered quietly, and then after a long pause, "the bond's getting stronger. I'm fighting it as hard as I can, but all I can do is slow it down."
"What'll happen once it's finished?"
"I don't know. You don't want to be a Nictus and I can't make you," and then she stopped, the silence hanging between them for so long that he thought she'd given the full answer, only for her voice to continue with a soft, trembling apprehension, "so... I don't know..."
Even without a bond, he instantly understood the quiet fear in her voice.
"I don't want you to die," he said softly, "anymore than I'd want the Peacebringers to die or anyone in Atlas Park dying. There has to be some way to separate us. You've been at war with each other for thousands of years - this sort of thing must have happened before."
"Sometimes," she replied, "but then we'd just kill the host and keep fighting."
"Oh."
"Our hosts aren't usually sentient," her voice continued in a quietly reassuring tone, and then it sank into wistful reflection, "that's what makes your world special."
"We have to stop this," he suddenly exclaimed, running one hand back through his hair and then pacing through with a quick, nervous energy, "if we're fighting it every step of the way, we're going to drive each other crazy. And I don't mean in the old married couple sense, I mean, literally, whatever's left of us afterward is going to be hopelessly insane."
He took a breath and closed his eyes to brace himself for what he had to say next.
"If we go into this willingly," he said, "if we both accept the bond, then it makes sense that we'd come out of it a lot better than if we're resisting it the whole time, right?"
"But it won't work," her voice small and forlorn, "you don't want to be a Nictus."
"I'm not so sure you want to be a Nictus," he replied, and his voice quickened with a torrent of memories and knowledge not fully his own, "I saw how you felt that first week in Paris, when you crossed through the Shadow Cyst the Path of the Dark had planted beneath the city and arrived on Earth. And I'm starting to understand why you were so gung-ho about attacking City Hall. In your mind you were defending your home from invaders. You weren't really thinking about the people who'd die, just the Peacebringer envoys. I don't think you even knew how big the explosion would have been - when I told you, you felt guilty about it."
"This is my home too," she said quietly, "it's been my home for centuries."
"But you don't know anything about it," he snapped back, "you ride people around like horses instead of experiencing the world through their senses. You think you love this world and its people, but all you've done is watch it from a distance. No wonder it's so easy for you to brush us off as casualties. We're like shooting stars to you, here and gone in a flash."
She didn't give a reply, and for a moment he let the heavy silence hang between them.
"Let me make a deal with you," his voice softer now, "when we bond, I'll take you on a backstage tour of the human race. You'll actually see what makes us tick, why we do the things we do, what drives us, who we are, all those things you've wondered about for so long. If those things don't outweigh all the things you believe as a Nictus, if, despite all that, it'd still be better to use us as cattle for your own kind... then I'll accept that, and I won't resist."
"You're telling the truth," she finally murmured, and then her voice rose to fill his thoughts with a worried reproach, "you're taking a big risk, making that kind of promise."
"It's the same risk you're taking. We'll both have to trust each other."
No answer. He looked slowly around the examination room, the curtained windows and empty cabinets, then back down at his nervously trembling hands. He tried to imagine Shadowstar beyond those windows at her computer, running one frustratingly useless simulation after the other, or perhaps some team of heroes arriving and bracing themselves for a fight with whatever monster they assumed might come bursting through the windows. He tried, but instead he could only imagine this room and its ringing silence all alone, hanging in a void.
And then her voice rose into his thoughts again.
"Okay," she answered with a trembling mixture of fear and relief, "I mean... yes."
In that instant, all of it became real again, the world behind those curtains, the Warshade arguing with the FBSA about what to do next, a SERAPH team pouring over his medical data, all of it, and he and she were part of that world again, and about to step out into it. He smiled deeply, a broad silly grin of both profound relief and utter panic, and finally let himself exhale.
"So, what does this bonding thing feel like," he asked aloud with a light, half-joking nervousness, "are we talking booster shot painful or struck by lightning painful?"
"It's different for every bond," she reluctantly answered, "each one's unique."
"I guess we'll just have to find out," he shrugged a little, and took a deep breath.
Then he took another deep breath. And then another.
"Okay," he finally spoke again, "how do we find out?"
"Close your eyes," she said, her voice soft and vulnerable.
Eric nodded and closed his eyes - and the world dropped out beneath him.
* * *
"Brain activity just skyrocketed! He's going into a seizure!"
He'd never fallen in love before, at least not so deeply in love that he felt sure of it even after the relationship had given way to memories and regrets. Now he fell in love, and through love, and out the other side and still deeper, into something no poet had ever written a name for, into something he would never be able to put into words or even remember properly. He held her as she held onto him and they plummeted downward, upward... space makes no distinction between the two, and the aerial sea they plunged into together made no distinction between light and shadow. Both are energy, both are life, and it immersed them completely...
"Don't try to restrain him, just get him clear and get that jacket under his head!"
They dissolved together into a million glittering sparks of light, into fireflies dancing in the summer evening, into cherry blossoms fluttering through the moonlight, each one a separate day, a memory, a dream that found its mate in the other, tangling together, losing themselves in each other a million times over, each pair a single chord, a note in a cosmic sonata. And he whispered her name, and she whispered his, and each of them had breathed the same name...
"It's the Nictus! It's trying to kill him!"
"No, I don't think that's it. I think it's more like a rebound effect..."
And they fell away into that endless sea of light and shadow, fading into it, becoming as much one with it as with each other. The whirling stars of all those countless dreams and memories began to gather once more, spinning faster, a universe coalescing into a galaxy, and then the galaxy into the blinding radiance of a quasar. All the infinite possibilities of Creation shimmered for a moment in that light, and then it gradually began to cool into form and substance again, into thought and words and a mind born of two minds surrendered joyously to one another, mother, father and child become one as he opened his eyes for the first time...
"Brain waves are stabilizing, and... the readouts confirm it. They're bonded now."
He glanced weakly up at the SERAPH workers crouched around him, at the pallid Warshade watching over him, and then he drifted to sleep, his eyes gazing up for a moment at the ceiling lights as the night sky beyond them whispered his name like a lullaby.
"Now, I'm not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design using pictures of rats in a Skinner box."
* * *
"This is Field Agent Keith Nance," Shadowstar gestured toward the trenchcoat-clad man in sunglasses sitting on the other side of the conference table, her voice dripping with polite, subtly condescending irritation at the newcomer's presence, "he's been sent by S.A.M., Superpowered Activities Monitoring, to assist us in reviewing the events over the past day."
"Actually, she's assisting us," he briskly interrupted, and quickly began to talk over the young woman's attempt to correct him , "we have an interesting situation here. On the one hand, you saved the city from a Nictus attack yesterday. On the other hand, you're the Nictus who attacked it in the first place. You can see the conundrum this puts my superiors in."
"I've already explained to Agent Nance," Shadowstar jumped into the conversation as soon as the field agent took a breath, "that a Nictus possession and a Kheldian bond are entirely different things. Hopefully we can clear that up for him with a few questions."
"Of course," their subject nodded, gazing distractedly at his right hand as he flexed his fingers and then shaking his head a little and focusing on the interview. Beams of morning sunlight streamed through the windows of the upstairs conference room, dancing across a large polished oak table set against the beige walls and carpet. He stared into the dust motes swirling through the slanted beams for a moment, imagining infinitesimal worlds drifting through the cosmic gulfs spanning the length of the table, and then looked back up at the pair.
"First off, let's get the formalities out of the way," Agent Nance said as he briskly shuffled through his files and searched his pockets for a pen, "can you tell us your name?"
"Hibernal Dusk doesn't exactly roll off the tongue," the younger man quipped, "so..."
His words died away as his gaze gradually shifted past the humorless agent to stare through the conference room wall, lost for a moment in silent thought. Then he suddenly snapped himself to attention with a quick shake of his head and continued where he left off.
"Eric is fine," he said in a smaller, faraway voice.
"We have SERAPH's assurance that your brain scans show a Kheldian bond," the federal agent studied the young man intently through his shades, "but that doesn't tell us anything about your loyalties. So, Eric, let's get to the point: where exactly do your loyalties lie?"
"Well, with this city," Eric shrugged with a soft smile, "with everyone in it, with this country and the rest of the world. I share your loyalties, Agent Nance... conditionally."
"On what condition," Agent Nance asked as he scowled harder at the DATA technician.
"So long as the world's worth it," he quietly answered.
"I see," Shadowstar jumped in diplomatically, cutting off the outraged retort rising to the special agent's lips, "how much do you remember about what happened yesterday?"
"Not much," he shook his head and frowned apologetically, "I was working in the DATA lab yesterday afternoon, and then something changed. There was a presence... and then I woke up in a hospital early this morning and you told me about the rest of what happened."
"That's actually normal," she reassured him, with a sideways glance at the S.A.M. agent to make sure she also had his attention, "that's when your human and Nictus memories started to overlap, and right now the two perspectives are canceling each other out. Tell us about the rest of your memories, though. How much do you remember about Eric's life?"
"I remember most of it," he murmured distractedly, and then flashed a wry smile, "at least, if there's anything I don't remember, then I don't remember remembering it. All of it fits together, but it feels like... like I've read about someone else's life, like it's an autobiography I've read so many times that I can imagine the details. It doesn't really feel like I was there."
"How about your Nictus memories," Shadowstar gently asked him.
"They're sort of a mess," he answered with a small laugh, shaking his head and trying to make sense of the sudden barrage of visions, voices and feelings the question evoked, "there are moments I can remember clearly, but they don't seem to fit together into any order. And there's this sense of eternity, that they stretch back further than I could ever trace them."
"Your human half is having trouble conceptualizing the Kheldian lifespan," she explained, "that's also normal, and the confusion and disconnect will pass to some extent."
"To some extent," Eric asked her with a worried tilt of his head.
"You won't feel as deeply connected to either set of memories because neither Eric Grayson nor Hibernal Dusk is entirely you anymore. You're much more than just the sum of your human and Kheldian parts. When Agent Nance asked for your name, you hesitated. You said it was Eric, but tell me - what really came to mind when he asked that?"
"Shadow Ecliptic," he quietly admitted with a downward glance at the table.
"A shadow chasing the Sun," she smiled a little, "it's appropriate."
"Yes, well," Agent Nance muttered brusquely and then he spoke louder, "more to the point, what do you want to do now that you have these Kheldian powers?"
"I'd like to register with SERAPH. I'm a better fit for them than DATA now, and I'm sure I can be of more help to people as an FBSA-registered hero than a mechanic."
"We'll sort that out tomorrow," Shadowstar said as the field agent silently scribbled down a few more notes, and then she rose from her chair, her gloved fingers lightly brushing the polished edge of the table, "you'll have to be kept under medical observation and armed guard tonight, but we can at least have you moved to a private room. I'll stop by later too."
"I understand," he nodded cordially to the Warshade and federal agent, and had begun to turn toward the pair of PPD officers waiting by the door when she called to him again.
"One last question," she asked, "what's your opinion of me?"
"I think you're a traitor to the Nictus," he answered with a backward glance over his shoulder into the wispy gray smoke of her eyes, and then his icy voice gave way to a quieter humility, "but I also think you had reasons I'm only beginning to understand."
"Fair enough," she nodded, and he turned back toward the policemen and slipped out the conference room door, their clicking footsteps gradually fading away into silence.
"He said he thinks you're a traitor," Nance asked the Warshade as those footsteps receded down the hall, "that doesn't do much to make me think he's on our side."
"I am a traitor," she calmly replied, "and I've been a symbol of treachery to the Nictus since your civilization was young. I'd be more suspicious if he'd tried to compliment me."
"I still don't like it," the chisel-jawed field agent grumbled after a moment, "what was all that nonsense about 'conditional' loyalty and whether or not our world's 'worth it'?"
"It was tactlessly phrased," Shadowstar answered as she paced slowly along the windows and gazed out at the crowded city streets below, "but is it any different than what you or I do each morning when we wake up? We all choose our loyalties based on our own values. You've also heard the audio recording from the SERAPH lab last night. We could only capture half the conversation, of course, but what we did hear sounded very encouraging."
"Maybe it was tricking him," Agent Nance adjusted his shades and rose up from his chair as well, leaning both his palms against the table to look across the room at her, "maybe it made him think they'd have a willing bond, only to take over at the last minute."
"A Kheldian bond doesn't allow any room for deception," she glanced back at the field agent with a slight shake of her head, "nor does it allow conflict. Shadow Ecliptic is everything Eric Grayson and Hibernal Dusk want him to be, each of their own free will."
She smiled softly to herself, shaking her head again in wonder before continuing.
"Despite all the odds against it," she continued, "they managed to find a common thread, something they both cared deeply about. And they wove that into their bond."
"Sounds like self-help mumbo jumbo to me," Agent Nance muttered to himself, and then he closed his notes and began to push his chair back under the table, "I know I'm going to end up regretting this, but we'll leave this matter to your discretion. If you think he'd be an asset for the FBSA then I'll see to it that S.A.M. drops all charges against the Nictus."
"I'm just an adviser with SERAPH," she replied as she turned away from the window and moved toward the door, "but my judgment on Kheldian issues is highly regarded. I'll review the data once more and interview him again before my final report this afternoon."
"One more thing," he called out as she opened the door, and he hesitated a moment before continuing, "all that stuff last night, the fighting, the crazy conversations with himself, the seizure. Is that what it's like when a Nictus turns? Is that how it was for you?"
"No, these were unusual circumstances. Mine were very different," and then she paused, "but emotionally, I suspect it was quite similar. Good day, Agent Nance."
"This is Field Agent Keith Nance," Shadowstar gestured toward the trenchcoat-clad man in sunglasses sitting on the other side of the conference table, her voice dripping with polite, subtly condescending irritation at the newcomer's presence, "he's been sent by S.A.M., Superpowered Activities Monitoring, to assist us in reviewing the events over the past day."
"Actually, she's assisting us," he briskly interrupted, and quickly began to talk over the young woman's attempt to correct him , "we have an interesting situation here. On the one hand, you saved the city from a Nictus attack yesterday. On the other hand, you're the Nictus who attacked it in the first place. You can see the conundrum this puts my superiors in."
"I've already explained to Agent Nance," Shadowstar jumped into the conversation as soon as the field agent took a breath, "that a Nictus possession and a Kheldian bond are entirely different things. Hopefully we can clear that up for him with a few questions."
"Of course," their subject nodded, gazing distractedly at his right hand as he flexed his fingers and then shaking his head a little and focusing on the interview. Beams of morning sunlight streamed through the windows of the upstairs conference room, dancing across a large polished oak table set against the beige walls and carpet. He stared into the dust motes swirling through the slanted beams for a moment, imagining infinitesimal worlds drifting through the cosmic gulfs spanning the length of the table, and then looked back up at the pair.
"First off, let's get the formalities out of the way," Agent Nance said as he briskly shuffled through his files and searched his pockets for a pen, "can you tell us your name?"
"Hibernal Dusk doesn't exactly roll off the tongue," the younger man quipped, "so..."
His words died away as his gaze gradually shifted past the humorless agent to stare through the conference room wall, lost for a moment in silent thought. Then he suddenly snapped himself to attention with a quick shake of his head and continued where he left off.
"Eric is fine," he said in a smaller, faraway voice.
"We have SERAPH's assurance that your brain scans show a Kheldian bond," the federal agent studied the young man intently through his shades, "but that doesn't tell us anything about your loyalties. So, Eric, let's get to the point: where exactly do your loyalties lie?"
"Well, with this city," Eric shrugged with a soft smile, "with everyone in it, with this country and the rest of the world. I share your loyalties, Agent Nance... conditionally."
"On what condition," Agent Nance asked as he scowled harder at the DATA technician.
"So long as the world's worth it," he quietly answered.
"I see," Shadowstar jumped in diplomatically, cutting off the outraged retort rising to the special agent's lips, "how much do you remember about what happened yesterday?"
"Not much," he shook his head and frowned apologetically, "I was working in the DATA lab yesterday afternoon, and then something changed. There was a presence... and then I woke up in a hospital early this morning and you told me about the rest of what happened."
"That's actually normal," she reassured him, with a sideways glance at the S.A.M. agent to make sure she also had his attention, "that's when your human and Nictus memories started to overlap, and right now the two perspectives are canceling each other out. Tell us about the rest of your memories, though. How much do you remember about Eric's life?"
"I remember most of it," he murmured distractedly, and then flashed a wry smile, "at least, if there's anything I don't remember, then I don't remember remembering it. All of it fits together, but it feels like... like I've read about someone else's life, like it's an autobiography I've read so many times that I can imagine the details. It doesn't really feel like I was there."
"How about your Nictus memories," Shadowstar gently asked him.
"They're sort of a mess," he answered with a small laugh, shaking his head and trying to make sense of the sudden barrage of visions, voices and feelings the question evoked, "there are moments I can remember clearly, but they don't seem to fit together into any order. And there's this sense of eternity, that they stretch back further than I could ever trace them."
"Your human half is having trouble conceptualizing the Kheldian lifespan," she explained, "that's also normal, and the confusion and disconnect will pass to some extent."
"To some extent," Eric asked her with a worried tilt of his head.
"You won't feel as deeply connected to either set of memories because neither Eric Grayson nor Hibernal Dusk is entirely you anymore. You're much more than just the sum of your human and Kheldian parts. When Agent Nance asked for your name, you hesitated. You said it was Eric, but tell me - what really came to mind when he asked that?"
"Shadow Ecliptic," he quietly admitted with a downward glance at the table.
"A shadow chasing the Sun," she smiled a little, "it's appropriate."
"Yes, well," Agent Nance muttered brusquely and then he spoke louder, "more to the point, what do you want to do now that you have these Kheldian powers?"
"I'd like to register with SERAPH. I'm a better fit for them than DATA now, and I'm sure I can be of more help to people as an FBSA-registered hero than a mechanic."
"We'll sort that out tomorrow," Shadowstar said as the field agent silently scribbled down a few more notes, and then she rose from her chair, her gloved fingers lightly brushing the polished edge of the table, "you'll have to be kept under medical observation and armed guard tonight, but we can at least have you moved to a private room. I'll stop by later too."
"I understand," he nodded cordially to the Warshade and federal agent, and had begun to turn toward the pair of PPD officers waiting by the door when she called to him again.
"One last question," she asked, "what's your opinion of me?"
"I think you're a traitor to the Nictus," he answered with a backward glance over his shoulder into the wispy gray smoke of her eyes, and then his icy voice gave way to a quieter humility, "but I also think you had reasons I'm only beginning to understand."
"Fair enough," she nodded, and he turned back toward the policemen and slipped out the conference room door, their clicking footsteps gradually fading away into silence.
"He said he thinks you're a traitor," Nance asked the Warshade as those footsteps receded down the hall, "that doesn't do much to make me think he's on our side."
"I am a traitor," she calmly replied, "and I've been a symbol of treachery to the Nictus since your civilization was young. I'd be more suspicious if he'd tried to compliment me."
"I still don't like it," the chisel-jawed field agent grumbled after a moment, "what was all that nonsense about 'conditional' loyalty and whether or not our world's 'worth it'?"
"It was tactlessly phrased," Shadowstar answered as she paced slowly along the windows and gazed out at the crowded city streets below, "but is it any different than what you or I do each morning when we wake up? We all choose our loyalties based on our own values. You've also heard the audio recording from the SERAPH lab last night. We could only capture half the conversation, of course, but what we did hear sounded very encouraging."
"Maybe it was tricking him," Agent Nance adjusted his shades and rose up from his chair as well, leaning both his palms against the table to look across the room at her, "maybe it made him think they'd have a willing bond, only to take over at the last minute."
"A Kheldian bond doesn't allow any room for deception," she glanced back at the field agent with a slight shake of her head, "nor does it allow conflict. Shadow Ecliptic is everything Eric Grayson and Hibernal Dusk want him to be, each of their own free will."
She smiled softly to herself, shaking her head again in wonder before continuing.
"Despite all the odds against it," she continued, "they managed to find a common thread, something they both cared deeply about. And they wove that into their bond."
"Sounds like self-help mumbo jumbo to me," Agent Nance muttered to himself, and then he closed his notes and began to push his chair back under the table, "I know I'm going to end up regretting this, but we'll leave this matter to your discretion. If you think he'd be an asset for the FBSA then I'll see to it that S.A.M. drops all charges against the Nictus."
"I'm just an adviser with SERAPH," she replied as she turned away from the window and moved toward the door, "but my judgment on Kheldian issues is highly regarded. I'll review the data once more and interview him again before my final report this afternoon."
"One more thing," he called out as she opened the door, and he hesitated a moment before continuing, "all that stuff last night, the fighting, the crazy conversations with himself, the seizure. Is that what it's like when a Nictus turns? Is that how it was for you?"
"No, these were unusual circumstances. Mine were very different," and then she paused, "but emotionally, I suspect it was quite similar. Good day, Agent Nance."
"Now, I'm not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design using pictures of rats in a Skinner box."
Edit: I didn't think to post any pictures, but after Friday's news it makes sense to add a few in this thread, and to split the story up into three posts due to its length. I'm incredibly shy, log in unpredictably and I'm more of a solo player, but still, if anyone ever wants to meet Eric, he and the rest of my characters are on Guardian. I haven't had time to play him much, but being a Warshade was turning out to be a lot of fun.
Shadow Ecliptic: Promise
"I've got his arms! You two, get his ankles!"
"Keep him subdued, don't let him get his arms loose," one of the Longbow technicians barked as he scrambled down from the overhead catwalks into the heart of the City Hall sub-basement, toward the swirling, crackling lilac glow of the portal and the small crowd of security guards wrestling with a single lanky-haired figure, "if he gets loose we're dead!"
"You're already dead," the blonde-haired man snarled at the elderly scientist, nearly twisting one arm loose from his military jacket and casting a glowing, crimson-lit gaze across the steel-plated basement, the tangled mass of pipes and conduits overhead and the burly guards fighting to pin his wrists behind his back, "all of you are dead! You sealed your fate when you sided with them! We'll slaughter every last... oh god, what's happening to me?"
His voice sank into reeling confusion, the burning red glare fading away into the frightened, wide-eyed gleam of his own brown eyes, and his arms went slack for a moment as he gave a bewildered look around the shadowy DATA laboratory, the spinning gyroscopic rings of the dimensional portal on the far side of the room and the crowd of researchers and agents swarming around him, their faces ranging from pity to fascination to white-knuckled fear. Then his stare shifted to another presence in the room, a lithe young woman clad in leather armor: the black buckles matched her dark shoulder-length hair, her pale white skin contrasting the fiery gray wisps of her eyes as they met his own fearful stare with a focused, conscious steadiness.
Shadowstar, a Warshade. They'd met once before, briefly, when he had to drop off a research file with SERAPH. Her implacable calm seemed a little creepy then, and he'd made a quick excuse and retreated back to his own job in the basement, keeping the Longbow portal calibrated and running smoothly. That was last week. A lifetime ago now.
"You've been possessed by a Nictus," Shadowstar's voice calm, soothing even through the undercurrent of tension twinging each word, "it tried to take control of you and sabotage the generator, but you fought back. You've saved many lives today, and..."
"Traitor," he suddenly screamed at her, yanking both of his arms free of his jacket and lunging across the room for her as the guards dived uselessly for his shoulders. His eyes glowed crimson again, a hellish blood-red light streaming through both his clenched fists.
"You turned on your own kind," he growled, "you led them here!"
The disheveled man stopped short hardly a foot away from her, his raised fists trembling above her head, his body quivering with electric tension... and then his glowing eyes faded back into their ordinary brown hue again as he flung himself sideways across the floor to surrender himself to the guards. Two of them quickly snatched his shoulders again, a third one snapping a pair of handcuffs around his wrists and lifting him upright for the team of paramedics mingled with the technicians and military officers. The cold green light of a scanning laser swept across his face, then another beam flashed harmlessly across his eyes, casting the young doctor holding the neural scanner into an emerald silhouette. She turned toward the woman in buckled black armor and the two of them began to talk in quick, hushed whispers he couldn't make out.
"Talk about your splitting headaches," he muttered with a wryly apologetic smile to the wary guards around him, and then he shook his head clear and tried to focus on those two whispering figures, on the hand-held device in the doctor's hands, the tip projecting a glowing green hologram of a human brain with several fuzzy dots blinking within its lobes.
"We'll need to get him sedated," Shadowstar was saying to another one of the paramedics as she gave a distracted glance at the hologram, "once he's secure in the SERAPH lab we can isolate the Nictus's energy signature and begin a quantum extraction..."
Then the Warshade stopped in mid-sentence and looked back at the image.
"Oh," she whispered under her breath as she stared at the blinking dots, "oh no..."
"What," his voice trembled with badly-concealed panic as he tried to make sense out of the rotating, translucent hologram of his brain, "why 'oh no?' You can fix this, right?"
"Yes," she suddenly answered him a firmly reassuring voice, lifting her face to make herself look into his eyes in spite of herself, and his heart instantly sank into his gut. He knew that look from the way the doctors had made themselves look into his eyes two years ago, while telling him that his father might live a long healthy life. It's the look of a terminal diagnosis.
"I promise we'll find a way to help you. Just relax and let us take care of the rest..."
"I don't want your help, Warshade," he suddenly snarled, ruby light flooding his eyes again as he frantically twisted his arms against the steel handcuffs, "treacherous filth!"
"I wasn't talking to you," Shadowstar coldly answered that crimson glow, and then she nodded to another one of the paramedics standing beside him. A needle shot into the man's left arm, plunging deep into a hidden vein, and in another moment the woman in buckled leather, the steel basement and the crowd of guards, technicians and attendants all twisted together into a kaleidoscope blur and then faded away completely into unconsciousness.
"Of course I know he's dangerous," Shadowstar paced back and forth among the marble panels and mahogany bookshelves of the otherwise deserted SERAPH office, her voice tense and impatient as she lifted the cell phone closer to her ear, "I of all people know that. But we're also the only facility within a thousand miles, maybe a thousand light years, that has any chance of helping him. We'll keep him under lock and key, and I'll be here day and night."
"Somewhere more secure," she asked after listening for a moment, stopping to look through the soundproof windows lining the hermetically sealed laboratory that occupied the bulk of SERAPH's office in City Hall, silently studying the unconscious figure draped atop an examination bed within, "where would you suggest? ...the Zig? Tell me you didn't just say that."
The office intern who'd stepped into the room with a clipboard full of papers in hand knew better than to interrupt, and waited wordlessly as the Warshade stepped away from the window and leaned over her desk, bracing the phone against her shoulder as she logged into her computer and began clicking back and forth between several neurological charts.
"It's already 10 o'clock," she muttered into the phone, "so no matter what we decide, he'll have to stay here tonight anyway. We can figure out the rest of it tomorrow."
She hung up the phone before the voice on the other end could begin a counterargument, and closed her eyes for a moment, the ethereal gray light of her eyes blinking away for a moment before opening again on the freckled SERAPH intern, a boy working on his Master's degree at an age when most wouldn't even be thinking about where to go on their senior trip.
"I can't believe they'd attack City Hall," his voice piped nervously, "possessing a DATA technician and trying to detonate the Longbow portal? That's... well, that's big."
"The Nictus are scared," Shadowstar answered quietly as she set the phone on her desk, "for thousands of years, the Peacebringers arriving on Earth has been the one thing they've feared most. Now that it's happened, they're desperate, and very dangerous."
"Guess so," he replied, rubbing the back of his head with one hand as he glanced over her shoulder into the sealed white laboratory. He looked down again and then suddenly remembered the clipboard still clutched in his left hand. He handed it to her.
"I pulled up his personnel files like you asked," he shrugged a little as she flipped through each of the pages, "his name's Eric Grayson, one of the mid-level portal technicians with DATA. Twenty-eight years old, never married. No family, no criminal record, nothing unusual about his resume, his education or his work history. As far as I can tell, he's just a nobody..."
"That 'nobody' saved thousands of lives," she grimly cut him off, "including everyone in this building. I would think you'd talk about him with a little more respect."
"Of course," the intern nodded apologetically , "I didn't mean... it's just, there's nothing in his records to suggest he'd be especially resistant to the Nictus. But we're lucky he was. If it'd possessed anyone else, like, if it was me... I don't know what would have happened."
"We were lucky," she said softly as she zoomed in on one of the images on her computer monitor, pulled up a calculator in another window and and typed in a quick flurry of numbers, only to mutter a soft curse at the results flashing on the screen. They'd spent the last few hours scrambling to strip the interior laboratory of its surgical instruments, equipment, anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon, and even now Professor St. John-Smythe was busy upstairs, stuck in a conference call with his own FBSA superiors in Washington.
"I just wish," she continued as she watched their captive patient through the window, his breath quick and ragged even in his sleep, "we could say the same for him."
"Can't we just extract the Nictus? You've done it before, right?"
"This is different," she shook her head a little and turned away from the laboratory window, yanking shut the pale green exterior curtains they'd been hastily adorned with as she turned back toward the young intern, "Eric used the Nictus's own powers to siphon off energy from the portal generator. That's what gave him enough time to fix the damage. Forcing the Nictus to use its powers in spite of itself, actually using them himself - attempting such a thing would have broken many people's minds. It didn't break his, but he didn't emerge intact.
"He connected too deeply with the Nictus. The neuroelectric barriers that normally separate a Nictus and its host collapsed. He triggered a Kheldian bond."
She gave a hopeless glance back at the swaying curtains before continuing.
"This isn't just possession anymore: they're becoming one. And once the process has started, I don't know if there's anything in this world that can stop it."
"Now, I'm not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design using pictures of rats in a Skinner box."