Sephira, Season 2: Bloody December
Prologue Episode 2.00: Erebus
Sacrifice, wasted life, destiny redefined
Someone chooses you, lucky one
Close your eyes, your family knows you're here.
akira yamaoka - one more soul to the call
I wake up carried, my legs dragging along a cold metal floor, arms aching where they're bound and held up by guards. I strain my eyes into operation for just a moment before a sudden searing pain rises up in my head and I choke down a gasp. I let them carry me a minute or two longer (how far am I going, anyway?) and then begin to focus. An image forms in my mind of a snow-filled waste, driving sleet, and crystallized, frozen corpses scattered across the drifts. I can't feel the cold, but the guards obviously can. One of them says "It's waking up," and the next thing I know I'm on the ground being kicked in the stomach, pressed down by bodies, a long needle sliding into my arm. I reach out for consciousness and it slips away.
Some time later I can think again, and with the awareness comes feeling. I keep my eyes shut for a while, trying to picture a lack of pain, but something is fuzzing up my mind and I can't do it. I try to grit my way through the ache the old-fashioned way, by clenching my jaw as hard as I can, and it works just enough to let me see again. I'm hanging from a steel wall, arms and legs chained tightly by heavy manacles, in a large cell filled with unidentifiable laboratory equipment. Bodies in white coats and dark glasses buzz in front of me. They almost pass for real doctors.
"We are righteous." A voice from somewhere, loud, speaker-fogged, somewhere between mayoral and military. "We are victorious. We are freedom." Suddenly, I realize nobody's noticed I'm awake yet, so I shut my eyes again, carefully sag into my restraints, try to gather myself all in one place.
I step down into sand. West is running ahead of me, like he always is. Sunset bears down through a cloudless distance. I feel every hot grain crack and grind beneath my sandals. I don't need to look back to see the perfect random sequence of shallow prints in the drifts of ochre grit. There's a chaos of rocks and water down in the slow beating of blue against gray.
"Come on, we're almost there."
My mouth moves, but the sound is lost in fog.
"What do you mean, I talk too much? What's that all about? I'm serious. Where's that coming from? You really have to bring this up right now? I'm completely serious. If you've got a problem, can't it just wait?"
Here the beach is sloughed seaward and hollow. He slides and stops. The sand moves in time to his will. He is a shadow against the evening, the sun off the surface, the white line of the horizon, the sea, the sand, early stars, what else there is, below flux. He raises his arms high.
"These are your new gods!" he shouts out to the water. "This is what the future looks like!" He turns back to me and is blacker than the coming night. "You and me, we're going to rule the world."
"We are truth. We are justified. We are the future."
That voice jars me back into where I am, and I know now is the only chance I'll have, while I have the presence of mind to lash out, before the needles come again and sleep takes me. The snowdrift rises up inside, filling the empty space in my head, and I send it spinning outward. One of the "doctors" screams for a second before he dies. The last sound he makes reminds me of stained glass breaking and falling to the floor. My restraints are deathly cold against my skin, but it's been years since I've had to worry about frostbite, so I push until they start to crack apart.
"Move aside." It's the man on the speakers, in the flesh. I open my eyes and prepare for a slaughter, but suddenly I'm alone with him. He's tall and lean, with a face like a forgotten president.
"You have been chosen," he says to me. "You should consider yourself lucky that an aberration of your kind is allowed to continue its existence at all." His hair blows in a howling wind, little crystals of frost forming on his face. He doesn't seem to notice. "In pain you will come to serve this country. Be proud. You were human once. You were American."
"I am a god!" I scream, and he should become nothing, shatter and blow away on my wind. He grimaces.
"You are a lab rat," he says, "and nothing more." A red light burns into me, sirens of liquid agony winding through my brain. The doctors file back in and somehow through the fugue of pain I feel the stinging in my arms and legs as sterile metal enters my veins.
"We are righteous," he says, his speakers roaring from everywhere at the same time. "We are victorious. We are freedom. We are the future." I watch him turn and leave. The needles stay in, and I notice with the last of my bleeding attention that they connect to long, thin tubes of fluid running into the machines to my side. I almost understand what that means, and then I'm nothing at all for a very, very long time.
