Chapter 13 -- Crimson

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It was all apart of the plan it is apart of the plan everything is apart of the plan you are apart of the plan your friends your family your loved ones your acquaintances are all apart of the plan you will become one with the plan you will become one with the ether's of this universe you will feed the starving underbelly of the Hells and Heavens and Purgatories and The Nothingness that we all are consumed by everyone feeds it and soon you will become the one to be the devoured prophet the harbinger of events yet to come and soon you will become one with all and one with Everything everyone takes for granted and you will witness eternal oblivions of suffering and dissipation of every molecular atom that courses through your soul and you will be torn apart and reconstructed until the end of Father Time when Father Time implodes and we all implode and we all become nothing and we are reborn again by the great Lords of Everything and you will be seen soon and born soon and ended soon...

He was dead.

He's dead.

My father was dead, killed, slain like some kind of ravenous human who wasn't capable of controlling themself. He was executed in front of everyone as some kind of martyr to show the city that everyone within it didn't amount to the ground they stood on. They amounted to where they'd end up below the paved grounds or the free air that whispered through every square inch of this godforsaken, treacherous, hell hole.

Without remorse...

He was shot before my eyes and his life was ripped away from him as quick as it was given to him. The place that he sought to protect for as long as he was alive was the ultimately the one in the end to murder him in cold blood without a second thought. All of the people he worked so painstakingly for to make sure their lives would be everything they could ever hope for would all look upon his death and mourn for the rest of their lives. Our family he created and put together by pouring his heart out into the molds of something that could save him from himself and the life we've been birthed into after years of building from nothing: to the constructs of a loving wife and two daughters that would be left without solace. Left without ever knowing the truth of why our foundation was ripped away so soon. Left not by choice, but by the will of our life force of this city, Zykard, by the hands of those who he brought up.

All of the things I never got to say to my father, everything that would be left unsaid by both him and I. I took him for granted. I took the very being of his life for granted because I always adopted the notion that he would be alive forever. That there couldn't be a life without my father. But I let my childish ignorance cloud the clearest fact that anyone could ever know.

Everyone dies.

Nobody was exempt from it. No matter the significance or the impact they brought to the world would deter from the inevitability of all of our deaths. It didn't matter what life you came from, how well known you were, how you were as a person...

Everyone truly dies, and it took my father's death to let that fact finally sink in and take hold of how I thought of things from now until the end of my time. From this point everything truly changed for better or worse, whether anybody was ready for some kind of monumental change was beyond their control. Beyond my control.

My sister...

Gods, especially my mother, she'd be absolutely devastated by the news of him getting murdered. She couldn't probably ever move on from the thought of a life without him again. She'd be stuck in a purgatory of eternal torture to her heart, eternal pain striking through her heart as I would suffer with for as long as I breathed.

And what was even worse was that Madelyn and I were now officially legal adults of Zykard, we'd be permitted to leading our own lives and getting our own homes and begin families of our own. There wouldn't be as much time to spend with her as we would if we were still kids. She'd barely ever see us again, and for that she'd grow ever so recluse and maybe even...

Even die by herself. Die alone.

It was a terrible thought to even consider, but I couldn't take back my words now of thinking those closest to me were invincible, because they're not. It was the cruel way the world we've been born in worked. But now I've been forcefully pushed into the reality of it and now ever so desperately I wanted to caution my own life as well as the lives of others.

As much as I don't want to leave my family ever, as much as I never wanted to leave my mother or my sister now for we needed each other more than ever, it was inevitable that the divides began to take hold and we'd be forced out of that choice. The divides, the rifts between all of our lives, had now began to envelop everyone of us.

The helios would rise and set as it always had for as long as man existed. But not under same pretenses and not under the lives it once established in the great beginning of our universe. In the beginning of Zykard's stomach of life.

My father, Shawn Toxi, was murdered in cold blood by him. Murdered for no justification of fair prosecution in such cases. My heart was shot and killed the moment my father dropped dead becoming lifeless. This city took away the one and only true people I could turn to and trust no matter what. I would never forgive this city, nor Zoe or the council or Thrree.

No one should ever have to bear the sight of their own family's murder. I would never wish anyone this hell...

Being conscious within my own brain I could take notice that the world around me was still shrouded in a engulfing dark void of my own mind. Everything within me and outside of my body coexisted in a cleared state, but was also clustered with too many thoughts mashing into each other. For once any attempt to try and meditate was proven ineffective against all of the unconscious feelings I had.

There was only so much I could remember from whatever happened to me previously. They came in brief and vivid images. Images of suffering, the gray torrential downpour of rain, faces, a face... lots of red and... and...

My eyelids gingerly flickered themselves open to reveal a purity of white light to make my eyes flinch in the sudden brightness of the light. I took a second attempt to open up my eyelids more cautiously this time considering the brightness that could fry my retinas. My eyes slowly adjusted to the room's angelic atmosphere before clarifying the space into a more ivory white hue.

Pain flourished throughout the entirety of my body, from my arms and legs to the innards of my brain. I could feel the front portion of my brain swell in an agonizing headache. I groaned as I began to arch up my upper half of my body. I shifted my body around to sit upright to realize that I was placed on a surface that was elevated from the rest of the normality of height. My legs hung over the edge of the assumed bench as I rested my back against the wall behind me. I rubbed my face rhythmically with the palms of my hands, trying to rub out any drowsiness built in my head. The sensation of rubbing my face felt soothing and therapeutic enough to clear my mind well enough to try and let some more concise thoughts present themselves to me.

I took in a steady inhale before exhaling through my mouth.

That serum. That serum did something to me. Those damned injections did something mentally to me. I could feel it stir subtly in the back of my mind, feeling it was some kind of forming storm that grew within. It was only in the beginning stages of a storm, in that it was a cloud formation to become something immensely catastrophic.

And for once I actually felt fear. Fear of myself. For some disturbed and inexplicable reason I feared myself and who I may become from this. I couldn't put a finger onto why precisely I felt this way about a bad feeling in my brain, but whatever it was...

It terrified me... It made me dread being alive.

How could this have happened? How could the city just allow for this injection to go out and be tested on anyone? I thought the city was more orderly than that, enough to blindly use this wildcard serum on an unsuspecting faction member. Truly if they glorified themselves on never making poor decisions and only the best for the people: then how could they explain the sudden implementation of the injection?

Speaking of the injections, I surveyed the room to realize that I was actually in a room, instead of remembering last of being on my knees in the Honorary Circle. I could hear all the noises of that courtyard again, all the screaming, the drowned out chatter of factions looking on to me in horror, and...

I surveyed the room more to see there was a small pool of blood below the bench I was laying on, realizing now that there was the now cold slivers of blood that ran their course along my nose and mouth before ending at my jaw. I raised up my hand and looked at the palm of my hand to see there were also warped streaks of blood from before when I rubbed my face. I wiped my face with the back of my hand to see smears of the drying blood be stained onto my skin.

I looked up to see there was an entryway to the small cubic room I was housed in. The entry caught me off guard as it flickered a ghastly white aura of a dense mist on and off. Small apertures helped emit this strange field I was faced with, only to realize upon closer inspection that some of the placeholders of where these apertures would be had been missing, probably resulting in the malfunctioning of what I now presumed to be an electric-field.

And if that meant that was a electric-field then what I must've been in was a holding cell.

But why?

There were a couple of reasonable assumptions to conclude as to 'why' I was here in the first place, but all of them had their sadistic nature and outcome of what may arise from the why.

One of those possibilities being that Zoe or the council could be detaining me for the reason that I was given the injection and reacted so violently to it. But that didn't make any sense. Would they proceed with giving other factions the injection even after seeing what happened to me? If they didn't that would mean that... I would've been the only one to receive it, and the only one to suffer from its effects for however long I lived. That would also mean they detained me to perhaps do any research on my body as to what exactly happened to me.

Because it was clear the serum didn't result in the way they intended it to.

It was a far-fetched idea, and I almost felt silly even conjuring up such a irrational scenario as such, so I scrapped it for the time being unless more evidence suggests I was right.

I started to become more clouded in my thinking, realizing there was no way I could start theorizing 'what's' and 'why's', and what I really needed to focus on now was getting out of the holding cells and somewhere safe. Nothing good could come from staying here too long.

The only way I could get out of the holding cell would be to run through the malfunctioning entrance of it. I had heard about the electric-field from word of mouth that they weren't necessarily the type of thing you wanted to mess around with, as they tended to incinerate the object coming in contact with it. That and they forced you away from it with some kind of deflective force of a normal force-field. If I was lucky enough and timed it just right; I could pass by it unscathed.

But that was just it: if I was lucky enough. I stared at the damaged electric-field to see if there was any pattern to when it flickered on and off. The problem was that there was no rhythm to it, and I'd have to take a gamble of running through the split second switching of functionality. Hence a deadly risk of even trying to get through in the first place, I could be mortally wounded if I wasn't quick enough or the broken entrance decided to erratically activate.

It was my only way out though, I couldn't wait around any longer for some Xultants to show up and haul me wherever I was needed next.

I stood up, wobbling in place from the disorientation of standing up so suddenly. The serum seemed to affect me more than I had previously anticipated, and I held my head as the headache pulsated more deeply than before. It took a moment before I could finally stand on my own with the headache seemingly dissipating.

The cloud's growing.

The storm will rage.

The rain will come.

The deaths will commence, and the hail of metal will rip up the heart of Zykard.

And the rain will come... and the wave will come. The wave will come the wave will come the wave will come the wave will come the wave will come the wave

I cautiously walked up close to the entrance, staring at the malfunctioning flashes of the electric-field.

It was now or never, I couldn't second guess myself once I hurled myself the path through it. If I hesitated for even just a millisecond of time I'd most certainly die from it, or be seriously injured. Either way I just had to psych myself out and do it. I needed to get out of this place and figure out what to do from there.

Without me consciously knowing about it; my legs launched forward, darting through the electric-field. And in a brief moments notice I had crossed the threshold to the other side. My feet then slipped out from under me, and I sporadically threw my arms in whichever way to catch my fall. My back slammed against the white wall across from the room I escaped from. My back throbbed in an immediate pain from the fall as I landed on my bottom and rested up against the wall.

I took a minute to fully catch my breath from the fear that laced my fingertips from pulling a dangerous stunt as such. There was a warm and irritable film of saliva that had built up in the back of my throat and mouth that turned my taste sour, and I hawked up the throaty spit to see a whim of blood coalesce with it. I looked forward to the floor in front of the holding cell I was in to see that I had actually slipped on...

...I twitched my head to the left and right subtly with a chilling feeling seeing the substance...

On blood. I slipped on small pools of blood which was indicated by the wiped streaks that were launched behind the puddle and a singular shoe print that came from me. There was a slightly cold liquid that I started to feel soak into the back of my longsleeve shirt as I rested up against the wall. I flinched off of it quickly to see...

Blood. It was more blood.

'What the hell happened in here?' I asked to myself, like I was going to expect an answer in return. Who the hell's blood was it anyways? It was like there was a large and bloody fight that took place in front of my cell. Which might also explain why the electric-field was damaged, but didn't give the full answer to what and why this area was like this.

A sudden urge built inside my gut telling me to get out of there as quickly as possible. I couldn't tell if it was because of the damage electric-field or the pools of blood around me but I knew waking up in the holding cell could mean only so many things. And for that reason I needed to leave.

I stood up hastily and began to head towards an exit that I saw around the corner from the elevator that was to my left. There were separate corridors and elevators that had been spread out branching from the hallway I was in. But the exit, as clearly advertised, was the most surefire way of me leaving this damned place. I walked towards it, approaching the door to have it automatically open as it sensed my presence.

All the airflow from the outside rushed inwards to the door and blew up against my face. I could feel my hair flap around in a frenzy from the sudden pressurization of the wind. With the wind came the refreshing smell of rain that had clung onto everything it touched. The storm had long since carried on since I was last outside and conscious at the Honorary Circle. Everything was shaded a slightly darker hue from the rainwater, small and large puddles remained in the middle of streets and in trenches. The loud hush of water flow could be heard from afar from the irrigation system which were probably eager with the influx of water that ran through them.

I took in a deep breath of the pungent aroma of rain that emitted from the dew that freckled most flat surfaces. I always loved the smell of rain, the liberation and overwhelming sense of freedom that it carried...

But there was something about the smell of rain, there was something about seeing the storm's aftermath that made me want to crawl inside my own skin and hide away from the weather forever. This wasn't the same type of weather I had once come to grow fond of as a child. The raindrops carried their own searing pain of remembrance and the fragrance of dew that was adopted with the phenomenon had a scarring weight to it.

It didn't resolve my brain to any extent in my efforts to clear my conscious of the hell I experienced before.

I shook my head of any encroaching horrors to better focus on other important problems I was faced with.

What now?

Where did I go from here?

I thought for a moment, rationalizing on some sort of plan for...

'For what Crimson? What is that we really need a plan for? What in the hell is going on to force us into making on-the-feet-decisions to save our skins?' I thought to myself. There was this strange engrossing feeling that told me there was some kind impending doom on a collision course with my own fate, and that I needed to figure out what to do with myself before anything worse happens.

The more reasonable idea was to find somewhere to hide for the meantime. There had to be a good reason as to why I was in the holding cells in the first place, and if the council or Zoe needed me for anything that serious then surely they'd be on the hunt for me after they learn of my escape. I couldn't go back home now... that would be the first place they'd check, and if I went there I would be found within the day.

Besides my home there weren't a lot of favorable options of where to go into hiding until I could clearly come to my next step in what in the world I was suppose to do. Hiding in the farmlands may be formidable, it was out of the way from most of the public. But the farmlands were out in the open and the weapons factory was nearby it teeming with Xultants and Forbids and possibly some officials, all of them up past the mountain.

The mountain.

The apartments.

'The apartments!' I almost wanted to shout out in joy at the revelation. A joy I thought I'd never feel after what transpired today, but it was joy nonetheless. The abandoned apartments where Anthony was housed, I doubted anyone would truly consider the apartments as a factor for a hiding place for me. I had no doubt that Anthony would understand why I was there and why I needed the help. At least, I hoped he'd

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