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Hazeraze

Prologue 3: Ray Dance

Mar 30th, 2018
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  1. “There is no place for the Thread in the future of this galaxy!”
  2.  
  3. The words are clear, and it is refreshing to be heard by a captive audience. The crowds that gathered around you were a shield; surely the Empire could not dispense violence on the hundreds that had gathered at its capital, even if it must dispense with you. It was a meticulously organized attempt, for certain—swathes of thousands of people stretched in all directions, with you at the helm. The golden and white tower before you cast an intimidating shadow over your demonstration, still.
  4.  
  5. “Not as we are now, anyway. We are all examples of what the Empire wants; we were branded creatures of peace, pure and unsullied by the violence of the galaxy, and yet they expect us to fight on their behalf? They expect that we would be willing to shed blood in their name, when we were not even willing to shed blood for our own survival?”
  6.  
  7. The crowd punctuated your impassioned words with cheers and encouragement, even as the stalwart guards glare you down. There is no activity from within the capital, no activity from the mechanical guards, only dead silence, but you knew that someone had to be listening.
  8.  
  9. “You force us to enlist, to give ourselves to a violence we never believed in, and we—” As the words flowed from you, it all came to a dead halt. Something was happening.
  10.  
  11. For a long moment, it felt as though time suspended; although you were aware, you could not move your eyes, you could not speak further, everything had come to a halt. The thoughts swirling in your head suddenly flooded away, replaced by an emptiness you’d never felt before. You felt your intellect begin to slip away from you, but all your surroundings held still nonetheless.
  12.  
  13. The world changed in a snap, like a light turning on in a pitch black room. You staggered on your extempore podium and retched violently, doubled over in immense pain, although nothing came out. A blinding, searing pain bounces through your head, and as you drag yourself away from the support of your podium, you looked.
  14.  
  15. The underpinnings of the universe were laid bare within you. Inconsistently corporeal, you dragged your fingers along yourself, and felt them often dip below and move nauseatingly against your insides, although they felt distinctly still. It all whirled with a strange energy, sometimes as though it was unfolding or unspooling, and beneath the flesh and bone and whatever else was the core of the universe; although it, to you, appeared as nothing more than two-dimensional darkness, there was something more unsettlingly arcane about it than could be described. All of this distracted, if only for a bit, from the confusing nature of your appearance; you had taken on traits you did not recognize, and occasionally your features seemed to shift and transform chaotically.
  16.  
  17. You saw a figure appear next to you, and as you quickly looked up, you met eyes with yourself, who quickly blinked out of existence. You began to notice flickers of yourself appearing all around you intermittently, whether small sections like floating arms and parts of your skull and even organs, or your entire visage.
  18.  
  19. And as your dimensional doppelgänger pried your attention away from the horrific new realities of your form, it settled instead upon the devastation around you. You stood on a raised platform, with a perfect view of the thinned crowds of Threaded that had once rallied behind you. There are thousands of missing people; perhaps one for each hundred that vanished into thin air, and a nauseating cloud of energy hung over the streets.
  20.  
  21. The strange beings all looked quite like you do: unstable, fresh wounds in the universe. Even the air seemed infected by whatever plague had brought this crowd to this state, rippling with energies and at certain angles presenting similar spatial wounds that peered into a depthless darkness that immediately and unquestioningly registered in your mind as the ‘bone’, the structure, of the universe, the flesh and substance flayed away by whatever this was.
  22.  
  23. You barely managed to drag yourself off of the podium without falling, and gently touched one of the others on the shoulder—although your hand phased through it at first, and you had to quickly pull it away before space solidified again and they began to intersect properly.
  24.  
  25. “H—hello?” you spoke, your voice drained of the righteous confidence it felt like you were rife with just moments ago.
  26.  
  27. The creature turned to you, and regarded you with vacant white eyes. It leaned towards you, and inspected you for a moment, before turning away. Your brow furrowed and you issued a more insistent “hey!” but elicited a distressingly identical response, as if it had forgotten you were there in the three seconds between you losing its attention and you trying to get it back. It simply drifted away from you, stumbling towards a nearby building.
  28.  
  29. You tried, and tried again, but to no avail. You scoured blocks in a desperate search for just one other coherent being, but they all looked at you with the same expression of distant and empty wistfulness. The look in their eyes was chilling; like they were looking at a strange animal in a zoo, or taking in a piece of art as detached observers, even as you begged for a response.
  30.  
  31. As you stopped to collect yourself, you noticed something else. The Thread had always been bound together by a psionic network, but one that most did not feel in their day-to-day lives; it was simply a quiet background hum of activity, used to support internal computers and the interstellar network. But here, the network had an overwhelming presence: it is as though it breathed in your head, and as it pushed and pulled at your mind like the tides, the wounds in space around you expanded and contracted. Shimmering, barely noticeable cracks of light sparked through the air with the thrum of the network, and each push seemed to send the beings forward in a strange and unsettling rhythm.
  32.  
  33. You heard speech, too, you swore. It was like whispers, or like distant speech.
  34.  
  35. “The Thread abides no violence,”
  36. “Only the pure will,”
  37. “The galaxy is dying,”
  38. “What is this?”
  39. “Where are we?”
  40. “What happened?”
  41. “Hello?”
  42.  
  43. Just as you took a moment to collect yourself, drowsily sliding down against a wall and cradling your scrambled skull, you peeked through your fingers at the sky above to notice a small storm of inbound Argent pods, streaks of distinct fire in the sky. You quickly pulled yourself back to your feet and began to withdraw into one of the alleys, but linger just long enough to watch as one of them touches down in the middle of the populated street.
  44.  
  45. The impact kicked up dust as the pod dug into the ground. The Threaded in the street all turned their heads to regard the pod in much the same curious manner, but as the pod’s door opened to allow a small squad of drones to pile out, something unusual occurred. The Threaded slowly meandered towards the Argent, who showed no immediate aggression, themselves inspecting the displaced creatures.
  46.  
  47. You felt something tug at your mind; the distant ringing of a calling bell somewhere in the network, that urged you to action. Your fists clenched and your body flooded with an inscrutable and visceral anger, but you resisted in the knowledge that trying to fight the Argent hand-to-hand was suicide. The others, however, proved incapable of such resistance, and the harmless and vacant curiosity became instead a hollow and feral, but silent, rage.
  48.  
  49. The Threaded all piled onto the small group of Argent, who opened fire wildly into the crowd. The cascade of bodies was horrifying; the Threaded stretched and wound in eldritch fashion, intersecting with each other frequently and almost seeming to coalesce into one disjointed mass. The gunfire did almost nothing to stagger the determined creatures, and in a flurry of blows, slashes and bites, the Argent fell quickly.
  50.  
  51. As though nothing had occurred, as though the event passed through their minds like wind, they simply began to disperse. In shock and confusion, you simply took off into the winding paths of the city, in search of any vehicle that might be able to liberate you from this world, and hoping to avoid the other Argent that had landed in the city. Yet the further you went, the more twisted and bewildering the paths grew; you felt as though you'd gone in circles repeatedly, or like you'd passed through the same area to different effect multiple times.
  52.  
  53. You'll find your way out of this place, you thought.
  54.  
  55. Eventually.
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