Chapter 101

Chapter 101: 101 The woman, with her arms up like she was about to change the weather, would have looked silly if I hadn’t felt the truth in her proclamation. "I do not deny my bestial nature but I protest the namelessness for I do have a name. I am Ch’lokoloccath, strider of stars and holder of Maloneer’s Dominion," she went on. Suddenly not feeling so intimidated, I walked up and stood next to her. "Can I see what you really look like?" I asked. The woman froze for a moment then lowered her arms. "My appearance frightened your Bran." "I’m sure it did." You seemed absolutely terrified at the memory of what you’d seen after all. The woman folded her hands together and glanced furtively at me. "You won’t... scream, will you?" For someone so all powerful she was rather self-conscious. "No, I promise I won’t." The woman deliberated a moment longer then held her hands out loosely and the scene around us faded. Gone was the meadow and the trees and the little river, now replaced by a large room filled with clanking machinery and breathing pipes. A large spotlight glowed down from above and lit up the body of the woman’s true form: a giant mass of flesh and eyes. Does it frighten you? she asked me mentally. "No," I replied. It was the truth. I don’t know why, but nothing about her appearance scared me. If anything, it felt... familiar, kind of like an ugly childhood teddy. Oh, well that’s good. The scene shifted and I was suddenly standing in the meadow again and the mass of flesh was the woman. "I’m not trying to be vain," she said severely when she caught my look. "It is merely easier for me to let my mind wander instead of hold it back." "You mean... this, all this, is from your mind?" "Indeed." She gave a superior smile. "I have a very positive and beautiful mind." I couldn’t help chuckling. "Sure." Far from being an evil being hellbent on world domination and/or destruction, this woman seemed much closer to a slightly unhinged older sister. "Ch’lo.... Uh, can I call you Choco?" "Choco?" "I can’t quite get my head around your name..." Her expression dropped. "It’s just because it’s a very high class name and I’m not a very high class person," I added quickly. A look of confusion crossed her face then she nodded. "Choco will suffice," she said, looking satisfied. "Thanks. Why did you want to see me, Choco?" "See you...? Ah, yes. I had nearly forgotten." An airhead as well as a big sister. "Of course I’d want to see you while I have the chance. We are family after all." I stared at her. "F-family?" "Yes." "...What? How...?" This time it was her turn to look confusedly at me. "What do you mean how? We are of the same lineage, both of the same stock, and you were once part of this Nameless Beast. Surely you have not forgotten...?" She stepped towards me but I took an automatic step back. Same lineage? Same stock? What did that mean? Did it mean what I thought it did? "Choco..." I said hoarsely. "I..." Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ling sitting on the floor with Mikhail in her arms. Except that it wasn’t Mikhail but a block of wood roughly the same size as the child. There was a movement by Choco’s skirts and I looked down to find little Mikhail looked up at me. "I was told that Ling is my mother," I said to him. Mikhail blinked then looked up at Choco. "Why is little brother Misha saying that Ling is his mother?" he asked her. She hesitated a moment then smiled warmly at him and produced a wooden horse from her sleeve. "Here, why don’t you go play with this while I talk to Misha, mm?" Little Mikhail pouted but took the toy and went over to play by a large tree stump some distance away. Choco looked after him then turned to me. "I... had not expected your knowledge to be so incomplete," she said. "Can you tell me who I am?" It wasn’t the most sequitur of questions but it was the one that was burning the hottest. Had done for a long time. Choco smiled. "I can do better. I can show you." "Show me?" The woman took both my hands in hers and began to turn us like we were small children dancing. "Ever taken a trip down memory lane?" she asked as we turned. "If you mean figuratively, then of ’yeah’, but anything else-" "Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!" Choco let go my hands and I stumbled backwards from the momentum... and into another world. It was hot the day the men with their metal rods that spat fire fell upon the palace. They smashed all they could, crushed antiques under foot, and did what they wanted to the ladies. I remember the pure terror that swamped the palace that day, no small part of it my own as I was shackled and bound and run through with a sword. I was a being of water, of sky, but there was nothing I could do for those that relied on me and nothing I could do for myself. And so I died. And was reborn, a part of a greater whole, a part of an amalgamation, a chimera, of beast, all teeth and claws and a will to survive. We all wanted to survive. I wanted to survive, for the ’we’ was also ’I’ as the ’I’ was now also ’we’. I rose out of the memory and looked around blearily at Choco. "You saw?" she asked. "I remember. How... how did you do that?" Choco held out both her hands, palms facing up. "Time and space are linear, from a certain perspective, and are non-linear from another. If you are able to shift that perspective, shift your... focus, where you are, then it becomes possible to travel to times and places far and wide." "That’s amazing. Could I do that too?" I knew the answer to this question as I asked it. "By yourself, it is unlikely. But with me..." she held out her hands again and I took them. "I want to know how I got to be like this. How was I born?" The woman’s eyes slipped sideways and I followed her gaze to Ling still cradling the block of wood on the ground. "For that, we must enter her memories." -- Trepidation. That was the overriding feeling of the day. Not only for Ling, or her team, but for the whole city. Today was the day of the handover, the city was to return to its rightful place. Of course, many did not see it that way and they feared and dreaded and chewed their nails as they worried about the future. Many had already left or were planning on leaving. Quite a few of Ling’s team were in that camp, all set to sail to Pretan as soon as the ceremony was concluded and the keys to the kingdom were handed over. Ling was not one of those people. She and her husband Artemis had been core members of the Chimera project now going on a decade and it would be some time before Ling could think about doing anything else. There was so much to do right now, what with wrapping up the different lines of research and shutting them all down, that she didn’t have time to think about much else, even that offer from Arthur Penn. But she should have given time to thought. She should have known, in the way a non-human knows, that she should not have brought her young to that last meeting, to that last day at work, for her son was also a non-human and thus eligible for assimilation. Ling had just received a note from her secretary that Artemis had wrapped up his end and was waiting to have lunch wit her when the attack began. Or rather, when the attack was first detected by the Merlin Club. In reality, the covert operators from Whale Toes had infiltrated the upper building hours ago and were already well on their way to taking control of the under building. If she had wrapped things up an hour earlier, if Artemis had called around an hour earlier, then Mikhail would not have become a memory. But he had. A warning siren blared to life, making everyone jump and stare in confusion. They’d had drills in the past, but of course none had been scheduled for that day which could only mean... Ling dropped everything she was doing and ran out of her office. Her assistant was supposed to be watching a kid’s movie with Mikhail in the break room but when she slammed the door open, there was no one to be seen, only cookies scattered on the ground. The mother’s heart hammered in her chest. She had already lost her son once. She would not stand to lose him again. She turned and ran to the security room. Surely she’d be able to find her little son in that plethora of cameras... And then the seal activated and she felt her son’s life force vanish from the world.