Rieven turned to Big Red after looking at the worried faces of the dragons in the viewing gallery. His breathing still wasn’t steady and his heartrate refused to go down. I need somewhere private where I can release the void spectre, he thought, and recover from the inevitable fallout of keeping it up so long while using it to process unknown axiom from raw dragon organs. This is going to suck. “Is there a place I might rest for a time, to recover before we have our final conversation?”
The dragon observed him steadily, seeming to note the occasional trembling Rieven couldn’t prevent, and then said, “Yes. You may use the preparation room down the hall. It has workings to prevent observation and is sealed from the inside. I will leave an attendant outside of the room who can lead you to my location when you have recovered sufficiently. Unfortunately the naming of a new claimant to Rising Sun requires me to fulfil some duties and put other things in order. Your prize will be waiting for you in your new travel environment, and your shuttle will be waiting inside as well. I swear on mine honour not to allow anything negative, harmful, or invasive to be permitted to enter or to remain on either vessel.”
Rieven’s shoulders tried to sag in relief, but he forced them to remain. I can do this, he told himself, I will do this. “Thank you, Heat Death Virabdhara. That is satisfactory. Please introduce me to your attendant and I shall retire to the preparation room.”
Big Red made a clicking noise in the back of his throat and a dragon barely taller than Rieven approached. His wings were just starting to grow. Big Red spoke, “This is Darhi, he will guide you for as long as you remain within the Paradisiacal Halls. Till we meet again, I take my leave.” The dragon turned around and left.
Rieven flipped to the squad channel and said, “I’ve got to process axiom urgently. This dragon Darhi will guide us. Let’s go.” He looked once more at Blind-eye’s corpse. What a thing. He had won. The knowledge was still trying to settle in his mind, fight or flight was dominating his instincts. Threading this axiom in a permanent manner should settle it down some, and sleep would do for the rest.
He made for the door and saw that Darhi and his squad were already outside waiting for him. Looks like I’m slower than I thought, he said to himself. He noticed that Dragon Tooth was holding the standard again, but Ono was holding the shredded remains of Blind-eye’s standard.
Ono laughed, “We get to keep this. Our host shredded it as he left. It’ll look lovely next to his mounted corpse, don’t you think?” Rieven rolled his eyes and gestured for Darhi to lead them on. They walked down the hall and came to a door with no face plate next to it. The dragon pushed it open and stepped aside. Rieven saw it was an empty room with high vaulted ceilings and fluted columns around the wall. The floor was tile of a soothing black and grey pattern. The atmosphere in the room was calming.
Darhi spoke, “If you will permit me, I shall take your banner to be refreshed with the victor’s metals.” Dragon Tooth looked to him, waiting for permission. Rieven spread his hand wide in a gesture of acceptance. The standard passed hands and Darhi said, “I shall await your pleasure in the hall my lord.” He bowed his way down the corridor.
Ono called over the squad channel, “I want eyes on every corner of that room. I want it clear.” The squad passed through the doorway, their lasguns shouldered and ready. Shouts of “Clear!” came in over the comm. Once the last ‘clear’ was announced, Ono and Rieven entered, Ono closed the door behind them and engaged the locking mechanism.
“Just a moment Captain,” he said. Private Onslo pulled out a small device from his back and set it on the floor in the centre of the room and switched it on. “There,” Ono said, “now we are most definitely not being observed, though I had to halt the broadcast. We can resume it later if you choose. Please thread your axiom at a minimum distance of six metres to maintain the field’s effectiveness.”
Rieven nodded and marched to the far side of the room as various members of the squad took up positions around the room. He knelt until his rear rested on his heels and breathed in deeply once, then dropped the void spectre working as he exhaled. The effect was instant. He faded back into three-dimensional colour and a raging headache assaulted his brain, blood roared through his veins – he could hear it rushing in his ears, his body trembled and threatened to throw him on the floor.
Quickly he retracted his helmet and began to thread the axiom he had shunted into his Bass Vault throughout his body, cell by cell until he was completely saturated. Then he threaded it from each cell simultaneously into his Baritone Vault, where it rested happily, no longer bursting to escape. He repeated the process eight more times, completing a single thread-note. Each time, the burning in his eyes increased and the strain on his axiomatic pattern was greater. The pain became a constant radiating, rather than an intermittent pulsing.
Those who were more traditionally inclined would call the pattern a soul, it wasn’t – the soul was something else, this was more like the will of consciousness made manifest through the medium of axiom. It was what he was without his body, a representation in axiom of the bounds of his will spread throughout his body and was essentially the axiomatic DNA of his being. Without it his body couldn’t thread axiom, and with it he could transcend humanity’s limitations. Strange that the dragons had one too.
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Something was wrong with his, though. He could see that the eyes of his body’s axiomatic pattern were out of sync with the rest of the whole, as though they were vibrating at a different frequency. That fight must have been more insane than I realised, he thought, if it damaged my axiomatic pattern. That is absurd. How did I even hurt my eyes? I never threaded axiom through them more than any other part of my body. He mentally shrugged. That was a problem for future-Rieven. His attention had to remain focused now that he had started the processing of the foreign axiom. If he stopped part-way though, he would lose all accumulated gains and be unable to thread axiom for any duration in the short-term. That was unacceptable.
He continued the cycle of threading his body with axiom gathered from his Bass Vault and then pulling it back to the higher Baritone Vault. By the time he had completed nine thread-notes, he could tell that if he continued, he would permanently damage his axiomatic pattern. He couldn’t stop to allow it to heal, because axiomatic patterns couldn’t heal naturally. If left alone they would scar and the damage would become permanent and limiting. He also couldn’t continue or he’d be blind forever; damaging his axiomatic pattern would damage his physical body. He had to solve the issue now, and he had to solve it quickly, time was running out; every moment he wasn’t threading axiom out of his Bass Vault was another moment that the foreign axiom would build pressure and threaten to burst the vault. Diminishing the volume did not dilute the threat, it concentrated it until it was eliminated. This was the danger of altering the frequency of your body with axiom, no stopping, only going forward. Victory or brutal punishment.
As he observed his eyes in the axiomatic pattern he could see they appeared denser than normal. Why was that? He looked closer and heard two different tones. There were two patterns vying for the same space! How was that possible? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this problem before. He listened more closely as he watched and the tones began to become clear to him. It was two separate chords, A-Minor and G-Minor. A-Minor was the frequency humanity had vibrated at historically. Their molecules vibrated at one note, the axiom at another, and then when the two mixed it produced a third note, forming a chord. The G-Minor must be from the unknown axiom, right? Where else could it come….from…oh. Dragons must be G-Minor. I ate that eye and that heart. If that’s the case, why doesn’t my heart hurt?
Then he had a memory of Big Red talking about how he had consumed a portion of Bline-eye’s axiomatic pattern. I didn’t pay much attention to that because everyone in the empire knows that’s not possible. You can’t devour a part of another’s axiomatic pattern. Can you? I was maintaining the void spectre working which altered the way my body interacted with reality. It partially combines my body with my axiomatic pattern, then I ate the heart, which I then used axiom to help digest. Wow. I don’t think anyone else ever had this problem. That could potentially cause my axiomatic pattern to attempt to manifest the stolen pattern. I ate a dead heart, not a living one, that must be why I didn’t devour the heart’s axiomatic pattern. I need to get rid of one of the patterns. How? I don’t relish the idea of ripping out a part of my axiomatic pattern, new or old.
What if instead of replacing one part of the pattern with another, he combined them? A-Minor and G-Minor were complimentary chords, they were capable of playing nice. All they needed was a bridge between them. He isolated his eyes in his axiomatic pattern, and began humming, allowing the vibrations of his throat and chest to begin to affect his axiom vaults. Soon the bridge he was humming between the minor chords was flowing throughout his body. While the eyes in his axiomatic pattern remained as dense as they were moments ago, the axiom could now flow freely between the two. Rieven continued humming, focusing on threading the axiom traveling between the two patterns together, into a complicated whole.
It was rather like composing a fugue. Each change he made in his attempt to bind the two patterns spawned a new question which required a new answer. To make complicated matters more complex, the pressure from his Bass Vault was growing painfully sharp. It was maddening. He found his mental control slipping. Just as he was about to lose all sense of cohesion in his efforts, he felt a hand on his back between his shoulders. Axiom, pure and useable flowed into his body. Rieven took to it like a drowning man to air. He threw open all his protections and allowed it to go wherever the person helping him directed it, probably Ono. It was all sent straight to his brain, removing much of the fog and numbness that had accumulated during his efforts.
His control instantly sharpened. A moment later his new fugue snapped into place, the pattern changed as the new frequency vibrate throughout his body, allowing him to continue threading the axiom. He completed three more thread-notes, using the last of the foreign axiom. The new chromatic chord the twelve thread-notes made hummed throughout his body and began to settle into him, relieving his Bass Vault of the harmful pressure.
Now came the real; danger, he had to harmonise his new body with his new axiomatic pattern. He began humming his fugue and affixing it to his axiom threads through sympathetic links he created throughout his system. Once all were in place and the patterns appeared to harmonise, he released his control. His physical eyes exploded, blood spraying the air as pain flooded his mind and became all he knew, he and fell to his side, unconscious and bleeding on the tiled floor.
-x-
Master sergeant Ono cursed violently when Rieven’s eyes exploded. He gently turned him on to his back as private Charger ran over with a medkit. Ono began wiping his commandant’s eyes of blood and marvelled at what he saw. Instead of raw, gaping wounds, Rieven’s eyes were growing back. It was something that usually only happened in a regrow tank. His lids automatically closed, and Ono brought his hands away from them. He didn’t want to unintentionally interfere with whatever healing process was going on here.
Rieven began to breath steadily and deep – the sleep of a man exhausted by his labour. Ono gently wiped the remaining blood and handed the gauze to Charger for disposal. He turned and addressed his men, “Not one word gets out about what happened here. The only explanation will be the captain’s. If word gets out I will find the rat and together we will discover how many fingers a man can do without and still clean every head in the ship.” The marines merely saluted. They were uncomfortably aware that the threat was all too real.
Ono settled in for a good wait. He began reviewing messages on his HUD. He grouped all the ones detailing his earnings in a folder to be reviewed later. His time was better spent now that he knew they were getting a new ship and a new shuttle. They needed to prepare.
Hours passed in this way before Rieven began to stir. He groaned loudly and sat up half-way, clutching his face. Ono turned to him and asked, “Sir, is there anything I can get you?”
Rieven groaned out a ‘no’. Ono waited. Soon enough Rieven dropped his hands and sat up the rest of the way. He looked up. Ono froze.
The captain’s eyes were strange and different – like the stars had been before all the death.
They were the same dull blue they had always been.
They were the eyes of a dragon.
