Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

THE GRAND CANYON, NORTH AMERICA, 100 BCE

“Stop!” A familiar voice commanded from the other end of the box canyon, maybe two hundred meters away, the voice high and clear.

August stopped his convulsive reach for the tensa with a massive effort. His voice only sounded a little strained when he said her name, “Cerise.”

“August.” Even though she was so far away, her voice came to him clearly. His enhanced eyes could see her clearly, too. They both fell silent for a long moment, neither knowing how to continue.

The years had not touched Cerise Tekara at all. Her lavender hair was cut short now, and she wore a complex headpiece made of beads and golden charms. She had affected a sheer golden veil that she wore draped over her nose, leaving only her bright blue eyes exposed. She had on a complex set of bronze-colored silk robes with hand-painted flowers adorning them. Despite the complexity, she moved freely enough in them as she flashed across the distance between them to stand in front of August, those bright blue eyes he remembered so well narrowed with suspicion.

“You look…” Cerise started, but August cut her off.

“Desperate. The word you’re looking for, Cerise Tekara, is desperate.” He pulled in a ragged breath of the heavily perfumed air. His eyes tore away from her face, drawn back to the walls and the delicious flows of tensa he could sense surging in the air around him.

Cerise frowned. “This place isn’t for you, August. This is my life’s work and I will not have you ruining it by sucking up all the tensa energy I’ve worked so hard to cultivate over the centuries.”

He took a faltering step forward, eyes sweeping across the walls hungrily, “Centuries, Cerise? You’ve been gorging yourself on tensa for centuries while I’ve been chasing around the world, hunting for every hint of the extraordinary so that I could just eke out another few sparks.”

“You never understood my work, August,” Cerise said, voice heavy with disapproval. “If you would take some time to actually pay attention, you might find that I’ve been achieving frankly incredible results!”

August cocked an eyebrow at her, barely able to restrain himself from simply knocking her down and taking what he needed. “Results, Cerise? What are you talking about?” He managed to keep the desperation out of his voice, but it was hard. There was life around him and he was dying; his self-control was not infinite.

Cerise gestured to the profusion of plants growing everywhere around them. “My tensa experiments have been able to produce some truly remarkable results. None of these plants are native to this place! With my techniques, we could make deserts flower!”

August sighed and squared his shoulders, “Enough, Cerise. These experiments are all well and good—I’m sure they’re very impressive—but this tensa… It’s more than I’ve seen in hundreds, no thousands of years! I’ll be polite, I won’t take more than half, but I will be taking it.”

“Don’t act like you haven’t had a supply of tensa, August. I know what you’ve been doing these past centuries. It’s an abomination.”

August shook his head. She dared to talk to him about ethics? “An abomination? You were the one who discovered the truth and revealed it to me! Who would have ever guessed that our used tensa would recycle itself here, attracted to the plants and animals! I never was able to cultivate tensa from plants—clearly, you have!—but I’ve been able to recapture what I could from the animals here. Now…there’s almost nothing left out there. Now I see why.”

Cerise cut in, “They’re not animals, August.”

“Oh stop it, Cerise!” August shouted in sudden frustration, “Not this again! I’ve only been holding myself back from absorbing every last spark in this place out of respect for our past. But I will have my fill, Cerise. Why, even if I were to completely fill myself, I think there will still be tensa left for you. I would even extend to you that courtesy, though there’s been little enough courtesy from you over the centuries.”

“You will not have anything from here, August Vasilias!” Cerise’s voice was hard, harder than he ever remembered hearing it before. “I will strike you down, no matter what we had before!”

The air in the box canyon became brittle and tense. These arguments were old and had been hashed over and over before Cerise had left. There was only one thing he had wanted to know since she’d left, but now that they were here, facing one another so unexpectedly, he found himself at a loss for words.

August stared at her for several long moments. She stared back at him her eyes unblinking in the light of her artificial sun. “Why did you disappear, Cerise?” He asked quietly, the pain he had thought buried long years ago resurfacing.

“The mission was never real to you, August. It was always just another stepping stone for you. A way to get what you wanted. For me it was different.”

“Different!” He scoffed, “It was about our Ascension, Cerise! That’s what the mission has always been about!”

Cerise shook her head, and August decided to send out a small probing thread of his anima out to test Cerise’s reaction. He would need to use a light touch to avoid alerting her, but he had to know. If he could keep her distracted, keep her talking, then maybe she wouldn’t notice.

“Then tell me Cerise, what did the mission mean to you? What could possibly be worth this endless, deathless existence without the gifts that we were Reborn to possess?” He gently wafted his stronger probe toward her, watching her face for a reaction.

“The Herald isn’t just some monster, August, it never was. It was a self-contained Cataclysm—maybe the last Cataclysm Nolm would ever face.” She didn’t seem to be reacting to his probe. Strange… she was always quicker than him to detect any kind of probe with anima. Come to think of it, why hadn’t she been crushing him with her anima as soon as she saw him? She always had been free with her use of it as a tool to manipulate conversation before. What changed? “The mission meant that Nolm wouldn’t have to face that Cataclysm. It was worth it.”

“Worth it?!” He exploded in frustration, not bothering to keep the disgust out of his voice, “We were going to Ascend, Cerise! That’s the whole point of it!” He narrowed his eyes as his anima swept through Cerise encountering…absolutely nothing. It was as if she didn’t have her anima at all.

Strange. Despite claiming centuries of cultivation, her tensa pool was even lower than his own. If what she said were true… “Why are you lying to me?” he asked softly.

“What?”

“Don’t play the fool with me, Cerise, I don’t believe it!” August couldn’t control his temper around her, even after all this time. He wanted to lash out, to confirm his suspicions, and be done. But he could not afford to be wrong. She was his equal in every way that counted—his superior in several others. “Well?”

She drew herself up, not intimidated by his looming. “My work here is none of your concern. You said so yourself when we last parted. I have no desire to continue our association and I owe you nothing.” He opened his mouth but she forestalled him with a raised hand and a dangerous look. “Your…harvesting methods of obtaining tensa are disgusting and they’ve made you weak. You are a shell of what you once were, August. And no matter how many people you kill, you will never attain enough tensa to get back home.”

He chuckled, shaking his head, “No, see, I’ve thought of that, Cerise. You know I’ve made a study of the sky these past five thousand years? I’ve looked at it through every kind of lens I could grind and I’ve been searching and searching and you know what? I can’t find Vil. I’ve wasted megasparks on these observations, Cerise. And I’ve come to one conclusion: we are lost. We are so lost, that we shall never, ever be found. And that dead thing on the moon, it’s lost too.”

He started walking in a calm circle around her, a shark circling its prey. His probe had gone right through her and Cerise had made no reaction at all. Her anima was entirely missing and she was sputtering at the dregs of her tensa pool worse than he was. “But I’ve been pushing these primitives. I’ve been pushing them and pushing them and they’ve been learning! When they aren’t blinded by superstition or gaping at obvious truths, they can be taught some rudimentary principles. One day, I’ll find Vil. And when I do, I’ll have the Gate constructed, I’ll take the batteries out of the Vuoita Carserai and let The Herald have this disgusting little world. It will destroy it, you were right about the danger to Nolm.”

He stopped his circling, standing directly below the artificial sun where he sensed the most concentrated focus of tensa energy. He stretched his anima up like a net around the sun, not quite daring to pull it to him yet. He didn’t trust Cerise’s apparent complacency. She was never complacent. Keep talking.

“But while the cinders of this planet cool in the depths of space, I will be back on Nolm, far away from this cursed place and The Herald will have no idea how to find me and no way to get there even if it could. Without tensa energy, even an entity like the Herald cannot cross the gulf, and—as you so succinctly put it—there is none here. That will be doubly true when this place is so much rubble strewn between the second and fourth planets.”

Cerise’s face paled as he laid out his plan. “But what about the people here, August? What you’re talking about… it’s genocide on a scale that’s simply…” Her voice failed her. She looked at him like she’d never seen him before.

“Listen to yourself, Cerise!” August scoffed, “You’re talking about fodder. It’s why we put The Herald here, remember? This primitive backwater was at the furthest extreme of our ability to reach with our Gates. We would toss The Herald in a place that could not possibly matter and forget it ever existed!” His probe still showed nothing and he began to feel a little unease. “If we had more time, we would have brought enough tensa batteries to return!”

She shook her head in disgust, “We’re supposed to protect these ‘fodder’. It’s what we’ve always been meant for!”

“Meant for!” he growled, “What we’re meant for is to Ascend. By any means necessary. Get out of the way, Cerise. I won’t ask again.” He already has his Destructive Nexus prepared in his mind, just waiting for a momentary distraction for him to pull in a portion of the loose tensa here and unleash its fury like he hadn’t in thousands of years.

Cerise drew herself up, shifting slightly into a relaxed but ready stance. “You don’t want to do this August. It won’t end like you think it will.”

August frowned, hesitating. He still felt no evidence of her anima anywhere. This was useless; she was bluffing. He shaped his anima into a defense configuration, all hard planes, and strange angles. She still stood there, relaxed but unmoving. August breathed out and at the end of the breath, he did several things at once.

First, he moved. He dodged to his left, then jumped up onto the cliff wall, running rapidly through the tangles of plants. At the same time, he drew in on the tensa energy shimmering freely everywhere as hard as he could, taking in as much tensa as he could. Instead of feeling the wonderful rush of power, the energy flowing into him felt wrong. It was tensa but instead of giving him life, it turned his stomach.

At the same time, he tried unleashing his Destructive Nexus on Cerise, hoping to distract her long enough for his gambit to work. Instead of an instantaneous rending of Cerise’s body into atoms, the Destructive Nexus flickered and fizzed, refusing to fully activate. Then he lost focus as his entire body was wracked in sudden pain, focused around his center. He gasped and curled up on himself, eyes going wide as the pain built and built.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t do anything due to the pain. Even through the pain, though, he couldn’t help but keep drawing from the vast wealth of tensa. The power poured into him, feeling like liquid lead as it hit his tensa pool. He screamed and heard Cerise scream with him.