The Rising Sun: Episode 4 (2 page)

The image of him in the poster was far from
him. It was a gruesome, terrifying version of him.

A scary version of him. With glowing red
eyes, and pale skin.

Ion realised the states of the inner spectrum
had obviously had it painted, and that it was just a vague
depiction of him, which was all they could come up with.

“You killed them.” rasped Eol, his weak voice
now hardening with contempt like no other. “You killed our parents
… you killed what they stood for … what they taught us.”

Ion’s hands slackened as he held his
brother.

Eol’s orange eyes drilled into Ion. “You
destroyed everything they raised us with … and took the life of a
fiend
.”

“No,” Ion croaked, his own throat bone dry.
“Eol, I didn’t-”

“You’re not my brother.” said Eol, shaking
his head feebly. His eyes were drooping … He was losing the fight.
“You’re not Ion … you’re a monster. And I needed to avenge my
parents …”

“No, no, no, Eol, no!”

But with a final, scorching imprint left on
Ion with his orange eyes, Eol let his body loosen … His head rolled
sideways. His eyes lay shut halfway, leaving a small gap open at
the bottom. His wild crimson hair lay still by the side of his
head.

A small, glistening bead of liquid landed on
his chest, dropping from Ion’s left eye.

No … no … no … What have I done?

Ion shook his brother’s limp body feebly, but
Eol lay as still as a pillow. And Ion knew he would move no
more.

“
You killed them … you killed my parents
…”

Anguish and disgust like nothing before
welled up within Ion, so that he could hardly breathe as he knelt
there by the ground, holding his brother’s dead body in his
hands.

And then, shaking with grief and rage and
pain, Ion threw his head back and let a writhing scream of anguish
drown the air around him, carrying for miles across.

The present

The Naxim was in chaos.

Three of its high council members were dead,
one of which was the leader himself. And another was kidnapped,
also quite possibly dead. And the culprits for it all were the same
ones responsible for the two earlier attacks. The same
mystics.

Haxor quelled his giddiness and kept himself
steady. As the newly elected leader of the high council, he knew he
was the only one the spectrum had to rely on for this crisis. He
gazed past the table that the rest of the high council members were
now seated around, trying to find a solution to this mess. Which
was taking their world to the teetering edge of disaster.

The entire table shared a silence filled with
heavy foreboding, all faces masked with the same tense
grimness.

Haxor rose from his desk, walking over to the
other side to scan the scene outside of the window. He could feel
the others’ eyes on him as he stood there quietly, weighing their
options. And they didn’t have a whole lot of options as of now.

Turning around, he let his eyes travel over
the table of suited men, meeting some of their gazes, while others
were absorbed in their own thought filled trances.

“The culprits are still out there somewhere.”
He announced, placing his hands behind his back. “And they’re
clearly far more dangerous than we could imagine.”

One of the men forced a humorless chuckle.
“You could say that. They killed Evander and two others of the high
council. And they kidnapped another, Derigor.”

Another one, a Brownling named Voreno, sat
straighter on his seat, bringing his attention to Haxor. “But it
doesn’t make sense.”

“What?” asked Haxor.

“What have they kidnapped one of us for,
exactly?” asked Voreno, shaking his head. “It doesn’t add up at
all. Killing would at least make sense. But the fact that Derigor’s
been kidnapped by them leads to a lot of loose threads: What do
they want him alive for? What do they want with him?”

A tight silence came over the air. For this
was a question that none of them could answer, but which tormented
them just as much.

“And why Derigor? What did he have to make
himself their target?” asked another of the councillors. “And why
did they kidnap him, when they could have as easily kidnapped
Evander, the
leader
of the high council and the head of the
entire Naxim?” He scowled as he looked about the rest of the men.
“What they’ve done doesn’t seem to make sense!”

“And that’s exactly what makes them so
dangerous.” said Haxor.

Some of the high councillors nodded gravely.
Others exchanged looks that boded the same mixture of confusion and
suspense.

“Whatever their reason was,” Haxor said. “One
thing’s certain. They have a plan in mind. They’re after a certain
something. And we can’t know what that is.”

The rest of the suited men were watching him
with the same intensity, their attention undeviated at this hour of
crisis.

Haxor took a deep breath and summoned a tone
of supreme seriousness.

“As of now,” he continued. “The situation has
spiralled well off bounds. We’re now witnessing a threat unlike
anything we thought the Naxim would face before. And as the leader
of the high council, and as head of the Naxim, I am now going to
take the appropriate measures to fight what we’re threatened
with.”

“What do you plan on doing, sir?” asked
Voreno. “Whatever it is, it seems we’re running out of time. The
longer we wait … the more disastrous the string of events seems to
turn.”

Haxor couldn’t help but agree.
And I fear
this may be just the beginning.
“The Naxim has already been
placed on a high alert. Our crews across the spectrum have already
been taken to a heighten vigilance and seriousness. And whatever
we’re now facing, we’re probably going to have to brace ourselves
for it. Because nothing at all can be said for certain until we get
a track on the mystics responsible for this.”

Minutes later, as the meeting disbanded,
Haxor found himself lingering in the office, staring out of the
large window in front of it in silence. He knew that whatever
happened, they were all just puppets to a greater force at play. A
force that had been playing with them all for too long now.
Sighing, Haxor slowly turned and walked out of the conference room,
hardly able to hear himself think.

__________

The time has come.

Zardin strode across the cave to where a
small black heap lay on the floor. Arriving before it, he sent a
swift kick to the centre of the heap. Derigor gave a muffled
squeak, gagged and with his hands and feet clasped in irons. Zardin
bent down over the Naxim official and plucked the gag from his
mouth. Derigor gave a long contained gasp, and let his gaze slowly
rise over Zardin.

“What do you want with me?” Derigor
breathed.

“Just a
little
favour.” replied
Zardin.

Derigor held his eyes for a long moment, and
a rush of defiance arose from the depths of his eyes.

“Favour … to
you
?” he asked softly.
“I’d rather
die
.”

“You undoubtedly will.” said Zardin. “I’m
here to make sure of it.” He patted the Naxim official gently by
the back. “In the meantime, we thank you for your assistance … in
helping us with something we’ve
long
been after.”

He heaved Derigor’s body up and slung it over
his shoulder.

“What – what’re you doing?” the man squealed,
thrashing helplessly over his shoulder.

“It’s time for a little trip,” Zardin said,
while Derigor struggled over his shoulder “Oh, and believe me,
we’re gonna have some fun.”

He turned and boomed down the dark chamber of
the cave, “Men, suit up, and get the ship ready. The time’s
here.”

Derigor felt his heart pound within him as he
lay in the small enclosed space, bound and helpless. The mystics
had left him here, at the back of the ship, and had then taken off
with him in it. He had no idea where they were going, and why.

The stream of events that led to where he now
was left him utterly perplexed. He couldn’t digest anything of it.
Whatever had happened across the past few bewildering hours.

But through the panic and dread choking him
from within, there was a heavy sense of confusion. What did his
captors want with him? And for what were they keeping him alive?
None of it seemed to make sense.

Getting a hold over himself, Derigor tried
calming himself. He drew in rhythmic, slow breaths, letting his
tension drain slowly. After almost a whole minute of deep
breathing, a sense of composure found him.

He was a man with a stern resolve and he
refused to lose control now. Whatever be the odds. Derigor embraced
the possibility that he might not live through this. But his
concerns, as of now, were not for his own self…

Somewhere far away, Martha and Garen would be
stricken with panic, undoubtedly having heard that he had gone
missing for a few hours. He felt a lump grow in his throat as the
faces of his two loved ones flashed past him … He only hoped that
they had the strength to move past this. But nesting in a deeper
layer of his mind, more terrible than his concern for his two loved
ones was a far, far graver concern – concern for the world he had
worked to protect all these years. The evidence suggested that
these men, the ones holding him captive, were moving down a path of
mayhem like no other.

Their worst fear had now come to life, and
Derigor was witnessing it before his very eyes: the Xeni were back.
Derigor couldn’t imagine being a part of whatever twisted plan they
held in store. As he had honestly admitted, he would rather die
than help them with whatever they were going towards.

The rumble of the ship’s engine was mild, and
a slight shuddering sensation came from the cold metal ground he
lay against. He craned his neck slightly, and saw a bunch of
cloaked men seated around the circular hull of the ship. Zardin
stood upfront beside the pilot, watching through the window ahead
as the ship soared through a massive sea of black.

Derigor let his head rest on the ship’s
floor, submitting to the train of events: he accepted whatever had
come, and whatever was waiting to come … A sense of peace crept
over him as he did, and before he knew it, he was asleep…

He might have had a series of hundred or so,
different dreams, all of them borrowing from all faces of the life
that he knew. He glimpsed Martha and Garen, his wife and son. He
saw Naxim officers that he had worked with all his life. He saw
childhood images flash past him, broken strings of imageries that
carried little logic. He saw friends he had known from long back,
buried deep in his subconsciousness, long forgotten.

And the dreams slowly turned unsettling…

He heard devious voices whisper through the
darkness. Some of them made sense, others didn’t … He saw strange
disorienting patterns run through his mind, forming and dissolving
in a rapid blur. He heard gunshots, Sparkler shots … and the orange
light of a mystic’s blade as he ignited it.

And then, they became too unsettling…

There was chaos, destruction, and bloodshed.
Explosions, mayhem. And suddenly the streets were thronged
screaming people who ran with their arms flailed madly. And at the
very end of it all, he heard a laughter. A laughter that seemed to
shake the world, like the sound of a thousand hyenas shrieking as
one…

“Rise and shine.” came a familiar voice,
piercing through veil separating reality and the dream world. His
insides squealing at the sound of that voice, Derigor jolted awake.
He sprang upright to find Zardin standing over him, the same
unpleasant smile on his face.

Feeling the grogginess of sleep drain in an
instant, he tried to pull himself up, only to find his body in the
same bound state they had left him in. “Where … am I?”

They were no longer in the ship. They were in
the middle of a wide open space. Derigor craned his neck slightly,
trying to get sight of his surroundings. And as he saw where they
were, his mouth dropped open in alarm. They had reached whatever
unknown destination they had been travelling towards. And the place
couldn’t have given him worse creeps…

He was lying on a solid brown ground, inside
of what looked like the interior of a large mountain. The ship they
had arrived in lay parked across the large chamber. A minute hole
could be seen at the top of the mountain, evidently through which
they had entered here.

But it wasn’t the place, but what lay inside
of it that made shivers race up Derigor’s spine.

Cluttered all over the solid earthen floor,
covering the vast sprawl of land, were
coffins.

They were in some sort of a tomb carved
inside of a mountain. In any other situation, wandering into such a
place wouldn’t have affected him much. But now, as he lay bound
here, he felt a sense of prickling
wrongness
. As his eyes
flew over the coffins spread over the ground, his nerves tingled
uneasily. There were two coffins by either side of him. And if
Derigor’s ears didn’t deceive him … He almost thought he heard
something, something faint, emit from inside of the two of
them…