Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

GRIFFIN TUCKER VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

MT DISCOVERY, PROVINCE OF ARAGONIA

Jessaline didn’t talk at all during their journey. He’d tried to engage her in conversation at first, but she’d smiled and shook her head. She never provided any other explanation than that and she never broke her silence. Eventually, he stopped trying to engage with her. Which is why he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard her voice speak directly in his head as if he were talking to himself.

This took way longer than I anticipated, Griffin, your brain is far more different than I thought. How is it that you have almost no common experiences or frames of reference?

The words had an alien flavor in his mind, with strange emotional undertones that took Griffin by surprise. He was feeling her feelings of shock and surprise as if they were his own while she was thinking with his thoughts, speaking with her words in his brain.

Griffin started to open his mouth to respond, then caught himself and tried thinking as hard as he could at her, Are you um, thinking at me… in my head?

Griffin, you’ve got to quiet the fuck down. You’re shouting at me! There’s so much psychic baggage in here, it’s incredible you’re not comatose and screaming in the corner. YOUR WHOLE WORLD was destroyed? Her thoughts in his head sounded shocked. Like I said, you’re not what I expected.

“Oh man that’s weird,” Griffin spoke aloud, unable to help himself.

His words were very loud in the wide tunnels. They echoed, repeating themselves over and over and each time Griffin heard his own voice, he winced.

Sorry, I forgot to think, um, at you. He “said” to her. He tried to moderate his volume and felt like an idiot. How the hell am I stammering in my own thoughts? And how do I be quiet in my head? Jessaline kept leading him through the darkness, never letting his hand go even for a second. And why are you here to help me? I mean, not that I don’t appreciate it and all.

Jessaline stopped and turned back to Griffin, facing him in the darkness. He imagined what he looked like, standing there in his DEEP suit with his helmet that covered his entire head. She didn’t seem even a little bit intimidated.

You sure do have a lot of questions, don’t you? Still, I suppose I would too if I were in your position. Her thoughts seemed a little hesitant somehow as if she were somewhat reluctant. I’ve got a little bit of your story through psychic bleedthrough—I couldn’t help it; you’re not exactly disciplined in your thoughts, but I think I need a bit more understanding before I can answer your question. I have a graft that can help, but it would introduce a degree of intimacy between us that you may not be comfortable with. Once again, her words were speaking with his inner voice, her alien emotions coloring his thoughts.

I think that might be good, Griffin thought back, a little uneasily. Uh, what do I have to do? Will it hurt?

Jessaline smiled, her third eye glittering eerily in the darkness. They were standing in the middle of a tunnel that stretched behind them for hundreds of meters and ahead of them for… well, he didn’t know how long it’d take for them to get out of the guts of this mountain.

It won’t hurt, she thought, her reflected reassurance echoing within him, and he felt like he was both reassuring him and being reassured. We’ll need to settle ourselves down here for a bit. The process can be a bit… intense. It’d be best if you weren’t on the move while we did it.

She took his other hand in hers and knelt on the rock, pulling him down with her so that they were facing each other, their knees touching as they sat on their heels, their hands clasped together between them. Now, all you’ve got to do is relax and look into my eyes. No, not my eye. My eyes. Wait, do you have a third-eye fetish?

Griffin had no idea how to answer that and decided to do the safe thing and look in her eyes like she’d told him to. Though she was silent, he heard himself laughing in his head at a joke he didn’t think was funny and thought that was probably the weirdest thing that had ever happened. The relaxing would have to happen on its own because he sure couldn’t make himself relax right now.

I’m just kidding! Now I’m about to begin so take a deep breath—ready? Griffin snorted despite himself. Jessaline smiled.

At that moment, his world exploded in kaleidoscopic colors. He felt like he was being sent on the world’s most insane roller coaster at insane speed—backward. At first, it was merely terrifying and disorienting; distantly, he felt his physical body react, his stomach heaving. Just when he felt that inevitable flooding of saliva in his mouth that happened right before he was going to puke—strange that he felt it in his head—and then he was abruptly still and the confusion was gone.

All the psychedelic colors and weirdness were gone and he was alone in a dark, empty place. He turned around, looking for anything familiar, more than a little convinced he’d been whisked away by some other portal to yet another magical world. Or maybe it was a prison. He was completely alone, silence pressing in around him from all sides.

Until he just as suddenly wasn’t alone. Jessaline was standing next to him, but she wasn’t dressed in her ninja combat fatigues. She was dressed in one of Sarah’s favorite outfits: her lime-green shorts and a faded old Humanoids band T-shirt with a stylized portrait of H.P. Lovecraft staring morosely out of the front. They were sitting at the tiny kitchen table in the apartment he and Sarah lived in back home… he abruptly felt an overwhelming wave of homesickness wash over him as he looked around the place.

You need to focus Griffin, jessaline said, her voice speaking in his head still. We’re still in the tunnels below Mt. Discovery. This is a mental construct I built from your surface memories. The reason I brought you here is because I thought I should warn you: my graft will allow me to understand you by experiencing some of your more formative memories. It won’t take as long as it seems, but there will be some…crosstalk.

It took everything he had not to walk away from this weirdness, get up from the kitchen table, and go into the bedroom, to see if Sarah was there playing on her phone or maybe taking a late nap. He could see the dishes needed to be done and he felt the wild urge to go and do them just to be doing something normal for once. But he looked into Jessaline’s eyes and took a deep, ragged breath.

He took a second, more steady breath and nodded once, as firmly as he could. Jessaline squeezed his hands and though they weren’t holding hands here in the kitchen, he could feel the pressure on his hands back in the tunnel beneath the mountain. Then, Jessaline’s Third Eye caught the weak kitchen light and flashed like a spotlight, blinding him. As he winced in reaction, he was thrown into—

He is standing in a rainbow world of chaos and noise. Everything is happening everywhere and it’s impossible to hear or think or get his bearings. He whirls around, seeking anywhere for an escape from the all-encompassing madness and suddenly she’s there.

She’s a blessed void. A 3-D cutout of sensory absence—imposed order where chaos is everywhere. It’s a relief to look at her and he instinctively reaches for her when she reaches for him. As their hands raise to touch, the chaos around them seems to at first redouble, almost making it impossible for him to continue to reach for her. He stumbles, feeling his will weaken. But he can’t let the chaos take him, he needs the peace that her empty form promises. He reaches again, desperate not to be left alone here.

They touch and he gasps as the chaos abruptly stops. While they maintain contact, her peace infects him and he nearly weeps with relief. The emptiness where her head is turns to regard him. A brilliant pink and green light spirals out from her forehead, right where her Third Eye is. The light engulfs him and suddenly, he feels her rummaging in his head, pulling various memories out and holding them up to the light. He gets the sense she’s trying to find something in particular.

She stops searching. She’s found something. She pulls it out and it sparkles in the chaos-light. It’s ephemeral and organic: a memory. It’s fuzzy but bright. She brings it to her Eye and suddenly they’re gone, they’re away they’re tumbling into the memory and they find themselves looking at—

—a calm, sunny day on the lake. A cool breeze blew through the cedar trees, wafting their sweet scent over the water. Golden flashes played over the tops of the little wavelets around the canoe.

It was a hot day, but the breeze on the lake made it bearable. Dragonflies skimmed through the air by the lakeshore while birds chirped and cicadas droned endlessly. He had a rough wooden paddle in his hands: rough because the paddle had been left out all winter and the varnish had cracked and chipped away. He’d left the paddle out. His mom was sitting across from him in a blue sundress, her big floppy sunhat leaving her face in the shade while he sweated and regretted leaving his hat at home.

Oh. It was that day.

“—going to live with me of course,” his mom said, then smiled and spread her arms wide, “And guess what? I bought the cabin! We’ll be able to come out to the lake whenever we want, not just on vacation!” She waited for his reaction.

He didn’t say anything, he just looked away from her, squinting out at the lake, all the beauty leeched out of the place now. “Oh come on Griffin, you know I’m doing my best.” The cheerfulness in his mom’s voice had also leeched away. She just sounded tired now.

He looked over at her, then back away across the lake, finding it harder to meet her eyes than to look at the bright flashes of sun on the water. “I know, Mom.” Some box turtles were sunning themselves on a sunken tree limb. One of them plopped soundlessly into the water while he watched.

“I didn’t plan for this, Griffin, you know? I didn’t—it wasn’t supposed to—look, I’m sorry, honey. Your Dad just decided that it was more important for him to—” Her voice got tight and angry and she cut herself off. She forced another smile that died before it fully lived. “I’m sorry, Griffin. This didn’t go like I’d hoped. Let’s just row back to the dock.” Griffin didn’t respond, but he also didn’t start paddling like he remembered he had done: in the vision, something had caught his mind’s eye.

There was a really weird flower on the shore of the lake. It was all twisted and covered in strange tropical blooms. Its leaves were shaped like a fanciful version of a fig leaf but with little windows and patterns cut into it with some incredibly precise tool like a scalpel or a laser.

It moved. On its own. It writhed, shifting and untwisting itself until Griffin realized it wasn’t a plant at all, but some kind of person. It stood up and reality shifted with a nauseating dolly zoom effect where the background whipped by and the plant-man-thing was suddenly right in front of him. Wonderingly, he reached out and—

Chaos-light engulfed them both, noise and heat and light invading their bubble of peace. He screams; she screams. Their screams blend and are lost in the cacophony. Her Third Eye pulses with light and suddenly they’re falling into—where? Not one of his memories. He tried to brace himself as he was suddenly thrown into a body not his own as s/he—

—tossed that stuck-up bastard, Amaur into the dirty, sap-spattered mat, keeping hold of his wrist. Perfumed breath exploded out of the ginpaari and Jessaline hauled back on the wrist, yanking as hard as she could.

She felt root fibers rip and break and suddenly she was stumbling away, Amaur’s arm clutched in her hand. She found that rather than her holding the arm, it had reversed the grip and now it was holding onto her wrist with bone-grinding strength.

Amaur’s arm continued scratching and clawing at her, the stump attempting to stab at her with frenetic energy. “Augh!” she shouted in surprise, guarding her face from the arm while trying to break the grip it had on her wrist. Meanwhile, Amaur surged to his feet, sending a surge of tensa through his body. Jessaline had managed to rip away the arm at the shoulder, hot sap splattering everywhere. Now though, the dripping sap dried up and Amaur’s stump surged with new growth, vines and leaves sprouting and seeking outward in disturbing fast-motion.

Jessaline finally broke the animate arm’s grip and tossed it away. She formed her Psychic Knife, the ghostly blade forming over her hand and burning with invisible fire. She dashed right at Amaur and attacked with as much speed as she could muster, but Amaur always managed to stay just a little too far away for the blade to threaten him.

“Keep control!” Master Valen barked. “Don’t let your opponent dictate the pace of the fight!”

Jessaline grunted and broke off her attack, circling with Amaur, both of them reconsidering their tactics. The rest of the class watched, silent and waiting. Their battlefield had narrowed considerably over the past hour, but Amaur and Jessaline were always the most competitive with one another.

“Give it up, Braedes,” Amaur taunted, “you’re from a nothing House—you don’t deserve to even be in the same class with the rest of us!” He surged at her in the middle of his taunt, crossing the distance in an eyeblink, razorwire whipping out of his fists in a cloud of deadly blades.

The problem wasn’t avoiding this attack, or even the inevitable follow-up. For Jessaline, it was easy to read her opponent. She was, after all, reading his mind the entire time, her Third Eye blazing with tensa as she leveraged every graft she had. The real problem was that Amaur—