Requiem
Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 6:11 am
[NOTE: This takes place after the Third Hub. I’m simply putting it up now to keep me writing.]
“Everyone has a predator born within them. How big that predator grows depends solely on how much blood you feed it.”
-Conner “Zan” Sunderland
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There was a silent fear within the heart of the player that appeared in the underground of Carmina Gadelica - a whispered cowardice that all come to face in the moment before they take that final step off of the high dive or the fifty-story skyscraper. Siberian Husky blues could hardly take in the pass of fellow Freedom Fighters as they slipped once more through the archway into the only place they could possibly call home in The World. Too much occupied his thoughts; too much occupied his future. As much as he would have liked to join them, the trenchcoat-bearing Heavy Blade knew that the time to face his demons was upon him. Zan, face scarred and slinking back to a childish anxiety as he turned to face the giant whir of gold and blue that was the Chaos Gate, could delay saving the girl he cared more about than anyone else in the world no longer. How he had managed to ignore the inevitable thusfar was a question who’s answer could be found again in the dark, bitter shelter of fear and a flurry of panicked questions.
Where was she?
Could he get to her?
Was her mind gone from the torture, from the isolation?
Did she remember loving him?
They scratched the surface of the chaotic wonderings, such questions, but they didn’t really get at the heart of his internal struggle, of his true reason for having put it off so long. It came down to one pleading: Would he die? The idea of true, final death had been lost on him since he first became trapped in the game. Threat of deletion was minimal if one knew where to walk, which back alleys to take, and what group to follow. Dying in battles was only met with a hasty resurrection and pain could be killed with mumbled incantations. A hand lofting up to wrap around the silver metal of the full moon necklace about his neck, Zan knew that his first real fright of the possibility of death came when he realized he’d have to go back to the real world and break Lowen out of an underground compound that, for all intents and purposes, was hidden from the public by a very powerful, very large company.
As he activated the key code in the necklace with but a thought, phases of the moon shuffling rapidly before him like a locker combination in an ethereal green that was photosensitive for his retina and his retina alone, Zan realized he hadn’t even thought much about how hard it might be to go back. Something in him was certain the Knights of Revelation would have his answer. Call it instinct, call it foolhardy blindness, but he knew.
It was with this supposed knowledge that he shoved down the frantic uncertainty of his mortality and let the oblivion of transportation into the Shadow (a name given to the game’s world of deleted code) overtake him.
The nothingness was a kiss of peace.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The asphalt of the junior high school’s parking lot had become the boy’s new bed. One eye fought to stay at least half-open, to keep conscious, while the other had already swollen shut. The copper tang of blood as he swallowed made his stomach turn. His nose ran free of the liquid, mingling with the puffy split of his lip to fill his mouth with plenty. The sudden shift in gravity and the flood of beating sunlight into his vision as he was helped to his feet made him groan. Adrenaline that had flooded again through him at the prospect of another round of getting his ass kicked thinned when one of his arms was slung over the mystery kid’s shoulder. A pained look sideways revealed the short, smoothly combed blonde hair of his best friend.
“Damn it, Conner. You don’t always have to be the hero. Why do you keep getting yourself into this crap?” Said as Leo hoisted the bruised and battered teenager a little more firmly upward, leading them both back towards the school and what was assumed would be the Nurse’s Office.
Because, Conner thought, the beaten face raised to the original target as they passed him, no visible signs of trauma apparent beyond the broken glasses that still shook in his small hands, he suffered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zan found himself unshaken by the chaos of vertigo, timelessness, and the overwhelming feeling of a great fall. He had long since gotten used to what it felt like to go from the main file of The World into its sea of cookie files. The Umbra, a server crafted by the technological genius of Michael Grahm and deleted ages ago (seen as ‘unfit’ for the for the ‘age-friendly’ audience of the game by CyberConnect Corporation), fell around him as the spinning void finally came to a halt and left Zan sprawled upon the ground without the impact he always felt should have come. Grateful just the same, the Heavy Blade rose to his feet and brushed the stray gray gravel from his dark green shirt, his glacial eyes taking in the Root Town around him. Great banks of fog rolled around, obscuring his vision, obfuscating the crack-ridden concrete ground. All about him the sound of old and long-forgotten Chaos Gates screeched their metallic, rusted songs through the air like a chorus of aged playgrounds. Why Grahm had programmed a place Zan knew only as ‘the Gauntlet’ to have an aging dynamic was beyond him, but there was a lot the werewolf didn’t understand about how the Shadow as a whole functioned.
The trick to navigating the cold bite of the city air was luck and memory. Sometimes it sounded as if there was only a single Chaos Gate, something that made finding the nearest (and the one he currently sought) much simpler. Other times, like now, the several that were spread about the Root Town all sounded as if they were but feet from him. In the back of his mind the lycanthrope knew that each of the city’s different Chaos Gates had access to a great myriad of fields, some beautiful while others bloomed terrifying and others still as both, but that didn’t matter to him right then. All that pressed upon him in the immediate sense was finding the one gate that could take him to Shifting Lupul Moor; the once home of the pack.
Closing out sound, hushing the bustling stimuli, Zan tossed out his olfactory sense like a net. It was towards the aroma of familiarity, of echoed remembrance that he walked to then, leather coat pulled tightly to him in the chill. His brief trek saw an end through the monotony of fog and mountings winds, of crunching rocks beneath his boots as the Chaos Gate he had sought came to block his path. Golden rings having rusted and cracked, the blue waters of its center muddied with the same sickening red hue, the Heavy Blade was almost hesitant to call upon its use. Before his doubts could get too firm a hold on him, however, the name of the field was spoken and the world around him began to shudder.
Be it because of malfunction or the programmer’s own creation, no golden rings ever took the lycanthrope away. Rather, the very air about him trembled and rattled, slow at first until it grew violent and more violent still. Only when Zan thought he’d go insane from the motion did it cease, the pixels surrounding him sloppily rearranging from the image of the Gauntlet to the field like a scurry of frightened ants.
It hadn’t changed its rotating (and oftentimes senseless) seasons since his last visit, a heavy blanket of snow crunching beneath his presence as more fell from the night sky above. Through the winter clouds Zan could see the blazing white disk of the full moon and the thick sheet of stars that decorated the remaining blackness. Blinking away a flake that had landed gingerly upon his eyelashes and wiping another that had settled upon his cheek, the lycanthrope turned in a slow circle to take in his location. Like his previous visit, he had been placed at the edge of what was otherwise a canyon but which now was filled with unthinkable amount of white powder. Through a blatant defiance of logic and balance, the snow had packed high until it was even with the ground that Zan stood upon. Instead of questioning it, the Heavy Blade chose instead to close his eyes and take in a deep breath that made him momentarily forget the freezing cold he had landed in. This passed, of course, and it wasn’t long before the thick trenchcoat was drawn tightly about his muscle-toned frame. Usually Zan’s lycanthropic blood, which ran constantly hot, kept him warm even in such conditions, but he found his nerves taking away that small comfort.
Turning around, he smiled at the sight before him. While the would-be canyon of snow behind him appeared to be an almost endless plain, in front of him stood the entrance to a massive, moonlit forest who’s heart, Zan knew, contained the old home of the pack and the temple to the revered weapon known as the Umbral Tear; a weapon that the Heavy Blade had burned as glass-black, metal cuffs around his wrists. Its original purpose as an offensive tool had been lost in the transfer from Shadow to The World’s main file and the energy it took to bind Nulus to it, but its legacy was not forgotten.
Taking a step towards the trees who’s inner sanctum was silent except for the random owl’s hoot and cicada’s chirp, Zan was paused by the sudden flare of scents and sounds behind him. The Ghostdancer’s branched metal blade was called into his hand before he could take the time to identify what he had sensed, his body whipping around in a defensive stance to eye the individuals who had appeared. Zan’s last trip had started with a similar, unseen appearance and resulted in being knocked out and eventually tortured and scarred…so his caution was understandable. The tension in his body and the creaking leather of fingerless gloves as knuckles whitened around the grip of the weapon left ounce by ounce as realization dawned upon him: it was them.
“My Liege.” Words spoken in a greeting tone from Truth, a knight clad in armor as cracked and gray as the ground of the Gauntlet Zan had just left. To his right stood Salvation, a woman hidden beneath gilded pearl armor whose stiff stance made her almost statuesque. To his left stood a third knight, Decadence, clad in obsidian scale-plate that was outlined and crimson and full of magma-filled cracks that pulsed with promised power. They looked out of place in the forest of snow and moonlight. All bore helmets that hid their faces and their expressions, Decadence’s topped with charcoal-black horns that curved upward, and it made being in their presence all that more disquieting.
“Don’t call me that.” Zan commanded, exasperation in his voice.
“As you wish, Zan.” When no objections were met with that, the knight continued. “Why have you returned to us? What is it we can do to help?” Despite the question, the tone with which he spoke seemed to hint that he already knew, that he had been expecting this for quite some time.
“I’m here because I need to get back. For Lowen.” The werewolf paused at that, eyes narrowing in the snow-drifting light of the full moon above. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
Though Truth had no face to draw an expression from, his shift in posture yelled guilt. “We have known this time would come, yes. I…realize I should have told you that we could get you back, but-”
“You can get me back?! You knew this all along, knew this while I suffered trying to think of a way to get her out of that hell?!” The anger in his voice was scorching upon his tongue, human eyes flaring to wolf, glowing like twin amber jewels.
The knights, to Zan’s dismay, didn’t cower in the least as he bellowed his fury. Truth seemed to fidget a bit, sleek, albeit dented metal creaking in the process. “Though we can get you back, it would be the final use that your data scar has. When it vanishes, when it fixes itself, your personal firewall will have gained an immunity to such tampering further. I’m afraid that, if you do choose to go back, your last gateway to the real world will be severed. We’ve kept it from you because we’ve been trying to find a way to wake you permanently through it, but if you go back now…” The sentence trailed.
“Then I’ll get rid of the chance that that hope can ever be realized.” Zan finished the implication with his voice soft, distanced. Selfishness threatened to overwhelm his desire to save her. “Which means I’ll be putting all of my proverbial eggs into the Freedom Fighter basket. And if they fail, I fail. I’ll be stuck.” His voice had become a ghost, a whisper ridden with realization.
“That is what we fear, yes.” The pause that followed was uncomfortable for both parties, but the Lycan could tell something else was off. They hadn’t told him everything. “That isn’t all, I’m afraid…” Bingo. “Back when we first met you, when we showed you your Big Lie, I felt something else. I saw something else. I didn’t wish to show you then because a revelation like the one you had can leave the mind fragile. To unravel the rest of your dillusions at such a crucial point would have been…dangerous.” A deep breath rattled the metal helmet a touch. “But now…you realize the kind of threat you face if you truly wish to infiltrate an underground CyberConnect building?” Zan nodded, eyes suspicious once more. “The likelihood of them letting you get deep enough to find her or even you getting out of their alive afterwards is-”
“Slim. I know, Truth. I’ve thought about that a thousand times and I’m still here, standing before you.” Zan interrupted, voice full of hollow defiance, just as terrified about the prospect of his death as Truth was.
“It is because of this that I believe it time I showed you what before I wouldn’t allow myself to. A man should not die believing his own lies.”
The depth to the last sentence made Zan stop, made him come to terms with the extent of what he was about to willingly enter himself into. “Then do it, Truth. If there’s something I need to know, show me.” A nervous glance was shot to Decadence, the memory of that knight’s silver sword scorching his stomach to make him remember still bitter.
Truth noticed this and, with a quick shake of his head, continued on. “No, I do not believe my comrade’s blade will be necessary. The virus it contained was necessary only for the Big Lie. What I hope to show you is but a series of small ones that unravel into a bigger picture. If you don’t want to know, if you think it better to-”
“Stop. You’re right, I shouldn’t go off to a place believing something about myself that isn’t true. And besides, if I go now and don’t hear you out, it’ll be a distraction later.” Zan said, interrupting again. If Truth minded, he didn’t show it.
The knight nodded. “So be it.”
The next thing Zan knew, the gray knight’s chainmail glove was lifting towards his head. There was no cliché ‘clear your mind’ or ‘let your thoughts blank out.’ Rather, the moment the rough fingers touched his forehead, there was a moment of piece…
And then his world came crashing down.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a flash of insight, Zan knew that his occult obsessions had taken his online lycanthropy and painted it over his memories; fictional tales plugged into his thoughts, recalls tainted with the insanity that, at the time, still lived and breathed like a healthy cancer in his brain.
Flash. Conner talking to the Tarot Card reader, the supposed psychic. She had been real, if only as a person, but when he turned down the street that night, what he ran into wasn’t a makeshift exorcism. The shouts had been of joy, not pain, the Freshmen drawn to their noise in curiosity. When he opened their apartment door, mistaking the sounds for distress, the sight of the stacks of money and kilos of narcotics had halted him in his tracks. There, on the left, sat ‘Dust.’ Zan knew, like he knew that one plus one equaled two, that Dust was no supernatural head of a balance game. He was a gang leader and a drug lord and he saw something in Conner’s eyes that night. Rather than shoot him, as his partner had hastily suggested, Dust had chosen instead to work with the greed he recognized and initiate the boy into their circle.
Conner had been wary at first and, though he refused to take part in the actual consumption of the drugs themselves, in the end his poverty and his father’s constant verbal abuse weighed heavily in his decision. High school, rather than filled with fights between ‘Uppers’ and ‘Downers’, angels and demons like he originally believed, became four years of drug distribution and degradation. Like so many who joined gangs, Conner did so because his family was gone, because his father was hardly a father at all. He found solitude with them. He found purpose. The late night memories of being an enforcer of sorts were true, but rather than chase down ‘Downers’ that broke some sort of mystical protocol, he had spent those nights making bloodied examples of those who didn’t pay what they owed.
This went on for four years, Leo’s displeasure with Conner’s new life growing larger and larger still until, early on in their junior year of high school, the two no longer spoke. The wealth and respect of his ‘family’ were too much to give up. It wasn’t until, not too long after his graduation, after ‘Dust’ asked that he kill someone who had ‘fallen’ to their rival gang that Conner knew it was finally time. Without hesitating, without giving it a second thought, Leo accepted his friend’s pleading apologies and helped him devise a way to finally get out. If Conner had simply tried to leave, the rule of ‘Blood in, Blood Out’ would have had him killed. It was with this in mind that Leo convinced him to go to the police, to help orchestrate a sting that took down all the major players of New York’s ‘Ace Kings.’ No one able to pin it on Conner, the boy arrested as part of the charade with the rest of them and released with a few others not long after without due evidence to hold them, his freedom opened up a new life. Next followed college. And The World. And the Freedom Fighters.
Zan snapped out of his trance, blinking away the cobwebs, mentally gasping for breath through the revelations when he was drawn back in.
Flash. Memories of real werewolves, of a lycanthropic biological father. Lies too, Zan knew. Through his tie with Lowen, he saw her blood memory of a meeting with the man his mother had had an affair with and Lowen’s own parents, a room cramped with more and more individuals. When the false memory melted away into the real one, a recall that left only both of their parents and a lone, strange individual Zan couldn’t name, it was then he realized that his once-tainted recollections had coated Lowen’s memories as well as his own.
Jostled once more, Zan watched the mold of his lies dissolve. The truth, the life he had lived, seemed more hollow than it should have. Questions still lacked answers just the same. How had Lowen’s parents known his own? Why was Wolfsbane holding her as a lab rat, believing her to be a werewolf as she was convinced they did? Why did they experiment on someone who was as human as anyone else? Zan couldn’t see the knights, couldn’t hope to ask them why, until…
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Snap. The reverberation back into the here and now made Zan groan, fingers rubbing the spot that coarse gloves had just vacated. Blinking back at the three staring statues of metal, the Heavy Blade couldn’t remember why he had thought it a good idea to find his answers in them. If he didn’t know, certainly they’d be just as lost.
“I…” Did he thank them? Did he yell at them for showing him things he wished he now hadn’t seen? No, that wasn’t true. It was nice to know the world was, in its own convoluted way, still normal and sane. So he simply…moved on. What else could he possibly do with the information? “Is that it, then? Will you let me go back now?”
Truth shook his head at the question, hand lofted out. It made Zan flinch. The lycanthrope could practically feel the gray knight frowning as ones and zeroes began to form a simple, silver goblet. Though along its circular surface curved the ornate image of a wolf, it was otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. Well, not if one ignored the fact that it was practically filled to the brim with blood.
“There is yet another thing we must give you, before you go.” Truth’s tone seemed to indicate a significance that Zan wasn’t able to catch a meaning to.
“Er…blood? I appreciate it, I think, and all of that…but I’m not sure this is the appropriate time...”
“Not just blood, Zan. In this is all of the memories Michael Grahm left for the Alpha he knew his tamperings with Twilight would one day create. I was instructed to give it such a person and I believe it to be you.”
Feeling awkward and more and more confused, Zan absently batted away the snowflakes that sought to litter his face. “I don’t know why you…but, Lowen. Why didn’t you give them to her? And, a better question, what could I possibly have to learn from the man that imprisoned Lowen and her friends and had them eaten alive by the First?” The lycanthrope had almost said ‘Nulus’, but he simply couldn’t associate his mentally bonded ‘friend’ with the mindless animal of raw Twilight that he had once been. The Shade was a royal pain in his ass with a dark sense of humor, but even he deserved that much credit.
Truth responded to the initial question first. “Our Maker, Michael, told me that I’d know the real Alpha when I saw him. Lowen was admirable in her leadership and it was true that she cared for the pack, but she held her throne precariously. She didn’t want to be here and any moment she would have had a chance, she would have left the Shadow to its own fate. I respect her, as did we all, but the Maker’s Blood was an item I didn’t wish to bestow upon her.”
Zan laughed, he couldn’t help it; the guffaw disbelieving and dry. “I killed the pack, Truth. I destroyed it completely. How, in God’s fucking name, does that make me worthy of this glorified Alpha? Besides, if I were in her position, I wouldn’t have second guessed leaving here either.”
“Yes, you destroyed the pack. In your eyes. Did you believe they were living here? Did you really believe that being trapped in a routine of repetition day in and day out was a life any of them wanted? Though you did so through rage and self-pity, you freed them of their bonds through the gift of death. Lowen you granted, if only through chance, freedom in the real world. Yes, she was taken away, but you showed her love. A sappy, stereotypically wonderful accomplishment, yes. But I saw her suffer even when Gemini was here to keep her company. So in this I believe you have served the pack more than they could have ever dreamed, more than the Maker could have ever hoped for.” Taking a pause, the gray knight moved on to address the second statement. “You say you’d leave and never come back, but what do you keep doing?” Truth lofted a hand to silence Zan’s retort. “Yes, you come back for help. But have you ever wondered why you never go to Raine or Sheena instead? Why you never pursued any of your other avenues when the PVM plagued you with sickness? You are drawn to the Shadow of The World. You seek answers here because this is where you are meant to find them. Everyone in this game has their own path and, though you’d deny it, you have found yours merging here in coupling with the Freedom Fighters. Though you have used your power in this place as Alpha to make decisions with death, and with the love you hold for Lowen, you are drawn here. To the sentience of the Shadow, you are its Warden.”
The werewolf hated the truth he heard, the undeniable reality of the words. Frustration showed through as he gestured in the cold, hands speaking almost as loudly as his voice. “So I’m some proverbial watchman of The World’s cookied world. Big fuckin’ whoop, Truth. Even if what you say is true, I still find no reason I should drink the digital blood of a man I’ve never met…and yet still hate.” Defiant to the very end despite the creeping certainty that he would indeed taste of the goblet’s ruby insight.
“You will drink this, Zan, not because I ask you to. You’ll do so because to drink the Maker’s Blood is to drink the answers you seek about why Twilight took the shape for you it did. Lowen said it called out to the Source and grabbed the nearest string of code it found, code that was lycanthropy locked in a blanket of the Plures Vultus Mortis. Though this convenient fairy tale would be nice, easy, it goes much deeper than that. He knew you, Zan. The maker knew you. When I touched your forehead, I saw that memory of your parents and Lowen’s sitting with-”
“…that other man. That was…no way. No way.” Disbelief invaded his expression like a disease.
“That man was Michael Grahm. He has played a more integral role in your life than you could know. Though I am aware of the contents of the Blood, I am unable to speak it. You must take this trip for yourself and, in doing so, learn the last truth I have to give you.” There was…sadness in his voice.
“You mean, if I drink that…when I come back, you’ll-”
It was Truth’s turn to interrupt, his cracked helmet nodding in the moonlit darkness and the shade of the great trees before them. “I will be gone. I was only ever to serve the true Alpha. Delivering the blood was my last task. Though I regret being unable to see how you grow and discover the true intricacies of your kingdom, I am proud to say that I’ve known you at all. I am an AI, so where I’ll go to when even The World’s cookie files will not have me…I do not know. Maybe I’ll simply cease, but I am at peace with it. My purpose is served.”
Zan started to object, barely able to get out a word. “But-”
The goblet was lofted to Zan’s lips and, despite himself, despite the burn of his lips against its metal, he couldn’t help but drink it all down. Red rivulets falling from the sides of his lips, the werewolf hardly seemed to notice. “The knowledge will come to you in time; through nightmares, through dreams and daydreams, and even through random thought. I cannot tell you anymore than that.”
Again Zan tried to stop Truth, to halt the advance of time and the inevitable. “Wait, Truth, I-”
“No more stalling.” And with that the familiar gloved hand pressed fingers for the second time against Zan’s skull. “Wake.”
And so he did.