Post date: Oct 21, 2017 2:26:29 PM
Caradorynee:
Kin #13
Star attacked the creature to her right first.
Embedding her weapon into the side of the shaggy fur near the creature’s neck she was shocked when her entire arm disappeared and her weapon struck only air.
The creature was a mirage. Nothing but a false guard.
Were all the guards fake? If so, where was the original?
Star glanced around.
No longer was she in amongst the tall vegetation she’d been climbing. Nor was she near any vegetation whatsoever. Yet she was hovering.
Void. She was in a void, some kind of vacuum. Weightless and solid at the same time.
Star rushed further to her right.
If the guards were not real was the space between them not real as well? Was she caught in some crazy simulation that she could easily escape?
Star slammed into a barrier.
The barrier absorbed the impact of her body. Took her briefly outside of the diamond shaped box her sentries had made around her and then shoved her forcibly backwards. Air gushed out of Star’s mouth as if she had been severely punched in the stomach.
She brought her hand to her chest and took a deep breath. The goo’s vibration surrounding her body slowed. Then the translucent goo brightened and shimmered to a pale orange.
Star took another breath. The barrier had not only absorbed her impact but had also absorbed some of her goo’s energy.
Star felt weak yet she returned to the space between two of the sentries. She reached out and pressed her left hand to the invisible barrier. It flexed when she pressed harder. The goo turned a vivid orange and separated from her body to hover slightly above her skin. The vibrating sensation that was once tingling along her nerve endings diminished until it was almost gone.
Star raised her weapon and sliced at the barrier diagonally. No incision or visible line appeared. Nor did the barrier split.
Star removed her hand from the barrier. Star quickly backed away until she was in the middle of the four sentries. She took a couple of deep breaths. She was suddenly thirsty and an ache at the back of her head started to throb.
Obviously the barrier had some form of negative effect on the goo that now glowed bright orange. The question was would the goo restore itself or was the energy boost it offered her lost?
Star knew her options were limited. She needed the goo to keep her body hydrated. Without water even if she could escape this vacuum-like state she would have no hope of surviving.
The only option she saw was once more the human blood that coarsed through her veins. It had helped save her on many occasions in the past few days. Could it possibly save her again?
Star slashed her weapon across her left wrist. She knew it was dangerous to try and open up a vein but what choice did she have? One way or the other she was on the verge of death.
The gash widened and a gush of bright red blood surged upward from her wrist.
Star’s vision immediately blurred and her stomach heaved. What was left of the tingling sensation burst through every pore in her skin. The goo clung to the ends of the fine hairs on her body. Her mouth went dry. Her heart sped up.
The gush intensified. Star’s blood flowing from her body in a long streak that arched and then fanned out, in spider-web fashion, toward each of the four sentries.
Through a haze Star watched as the sentries absorbed her blood then the shaggy creatures that were nothing but a mirage began to vibrate.
They continued to absorb more of Star’s blood until they were vibrating at lightning speed. A few moments later the four sentries suddenly dissolved and Star’s blood began to rotate around her in a circular motion.
Star’s gash closed up and her vision cleared. Her stomach settled.
In fascinated horror she watched her blood coagulate into a solid mass that continued to circle her in perfect unison to her now overly accelerated heart beat.
The vibrations in her body abruptly stopped and the orange goo snapped free of Star. It floated around her in undulating globs and then formed into an orange orb with her in the middle.
From nowhere pinpoints of light appeared. Hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands.
Star’s eyes widened as she watched the lights twinkle like her namesake.
Were those twinkling lights actually stars? Had she been transported out into the universe?
Star would never find the answer for before her next thought streaks of intense energy shot from the lights, jagged and piercing like lightning bolts. They impaled her body with searing force.
Star screamed and screamed and screamed again.
Star’s anguished cries sliced through the heart of Lark with blinding pain. To hear his child, no matter how distant a child of his the young woman was, was excruciating.
Rage drove Lark forward. The injustice of the Dueanian elders exiling him for the crime that wasn’t a crime at all but an act of love. Of their arrogance in ripping him brutally away from his wife, his family, and everything he’d ever loved. Of the hundreds of years of being stranded on Caradorynee. The hardships and toil. And now Star. The beautiful, fierce, and warrior-like woman, with her feisty spirit. All festered in him until it threatened to boil over.
No more, his mind hollered. No more separation. Star was his kin, his blood, and nothing in any plane of reality had the right to harm her.
Lark doubled his mass and then doubled it again. His fury stretching his mass outward to suck all that came within his reach and even beyond.
His mass moved faster and faster. Star’s cries grew louder as he neared.
Then he saw her.
A human Tesla sphere with her body’s aura shining a brilliant orange.
Lark’s human heart skidded to a halt as he watched her naked body jerk violently as jolts of energy, from hundreds of pinpoints of light, transpierced her flesh to exit and join hundreds of others in a web of tangled light and energy.
The savagery of the denigration to his kin stoked Lark’s outrage and spurred him into action.
His mass flew to Star, sucking the light and energy into his mass as he went.
Lark’s mind brushed aside the barrier that held Star transfixed and he banished the jolts of energy as if they were no more than strands of her red hair.
Taking his human form for an instant, Lark grasped the weapon Star miraculously still had clutched in her hand.
He gathered her shattered body to his and whispered in her ear, before slicing the weapon across his jugular vein.
“It’s time I took you home, child.”
©Human in Inhuman Worlds by Janet Merritt