Shade of Exposure (Three)

Ten

Ten:

Skylar tapped her toe so forcefully the entire floor shook. She had promised her beloved and often obnoxious, bestie Hannah she would not rip the former reaper limb-from-limb. Sometimes, her nix sense of honor and loyalty seemed to bite her tail!

Nadia stood cautiously before her still smelling of Hannah. If not for that secondary reminder of Hannah, Sky might have been forgiven for losing her cool and slicing through the woman like butter.

“What are you planning?”

Nadia asked her, and Sky gave her a measured look and cleared her throat.

“What do you know of a dragon mind-dive?”

She asked, and Nadia’s eyes widened in shock.

“That it is almost unbearable and that it exposes the nix apex to every memory and life experience the recipient has ever endured.”

Sky nodded in confirmation and said, “For the record, it can prove fatal to one or both participants. This is magnified many times if either one fights the joining process. If you cannot handle the pain, tell me now, so I don’t risk our safety.”

Sky warned her, and Nadia looked her in her eyes unflinching and said, “No, I can handle any pain no matter how great. There is nothing they have yet to visit upon me.”

Her tone rang of truth, and Sky ground her teeth at the thought of Nadia being a victim. To her, Nadia was the boogie woman, someone who came around snatching up wayward nix children.

“So, how does one perform a mind-dive?”

Nadia asked in a guarded voice. She framed her question carefully as not to sound like she was fishing for information. She knew that if she was to pray for a possible future with Hannah, she had no other way forward, but through Skylar. Sky was the most influential person who was not firmly on any particular side or faction. Nadia’s survival outside of the Architect’s control hinged on convincing the young apex that she was not her enemy.

“I need your word, that you will not repeat the details of my life to Hannah that are visited here. There are many facets of my existence which I would never wish shared.”

Nadia pleaded softly, and Skylar’s dragon slit eyes glowed and scrutinized her features as if to decern the level of her sincerity.

“Fine, I will not share your life with her, but if I discover a threat to her or any of us outside the Architect’s control, I will consider this promise forfeit.”

Nadia nodded vigorously and said, “I can live with that.” Skylar found her confusing, and frustrating. She was either the best liar that Sky had ever met or else she was being completely sincere.

“Open your mind completely to me, and I need you to take my hands. We will tether ourselves physically, so that we may form the expression bridging our minds as well. Know that if you share this sacred technique with anyone, I will murder you and all whom you have shared it with.”

Sky said, and Nadia was hardly shocked by this declaration. Skylar might be sweet as sugar to Hannah, but she is as ruthless and protective of her people as her mother, she just does a better job at reigning in her aggression. This is surprising, considering how many times over Sky eclipses her mother in raw powers and expression. Usually, the more powerful the nix, the more aggressive their apex nature makes them. It is part of the reason the nix species had worked so hard on control, and they typically abstain from technology outside their most imminent needs. They focus on controlling the pungent animal aspect of their two-phase-shift form lives. The ability to harness the primal powers of their evolution makes them partially slaved to the instincts of the other half, the animal half.

“I’m ready to begin, and I dare not utter anything that happens here.”

Nadia said, and Skylar swallowed back the rage of touching the hands of the murderess who has held countless nix in her hands, snuffing their flames out of existence.

“Close your eyes and embrace my expression. No matter how much it hurts, you must keep welcoming it or we could both become lost or mad.”

Nadia nodded and gave Sky a puzzled look.

“Why do you do this?”

She asked, mystified at the risk the apex was willing to take. And Sky gave her a slight smile and said, “Because, I love Hannah, just not the same way as you.”

Her words rattled in the air, as Nadia closed her eyes and she felt the power raging down her esophagus, and into her gut. She felt as if a leaf blower had been pushed down her throat suddenly. Sky’s essence moved like an ephemeral ghost inside Nadia, burning like the azure flames of her dragon’s fire.

Nadia felt as if engulfed in the fires of a thousand nix flames, yet she held still. Pain rolled through her body, searing her mind with white-hot agony and pure unbridled suffering. Sanity was a matter of relativity at this point. Her world seemed to expand; her entire universe of experiences seemed to playback from her birth.

Nadia herself felt a wide-eyed shock as they witnessed the year of her birth, over three-thousand-years before the estimated time she had believed herself to have been alive.

“We’ve tamed this one thoroughly. Broken from the age of ten. She not only survived the initial transmutation, but she appears to have taken on partial shade-like abilities from the ethereal essence used in the transmutation process. She’s immortal now, not even remotely human. The procedure was a success.”

The cold tone of the science advisor and one of the Architect council members spoke to many large and varied figures. They all radiated with powers unimaginable to Nia.

Nia—if that were still her name—could still recall the farm of her father’s small clan. He was blessed with fertile fields, and he was fair, even to a woman child such as her. Instead of sending her off at ten, to prepare to have her groomed off for a wedding to a neighbor, he had given her a job on his lands, tending the animals.

Being the child of such a powerful and fair man, Nia could wait until a suitor caught her eye. She was promised her father’s protection until that time. In the savage world, this was more than almost any girl could hope to ask of their father. Most saw the women children as future s*x slaves or for their ability to make the men more sons.

Nia’s lands were at the very edge of winter’s touch. Her fertile farms fed many mouths for as far as legs or beasts could carry people to come to them. She was poor, but she was well treated, and she even owned more clothing than most of the girls in her area. She might not have the favor of a man child, but Nia was favored highly for what she was.

Her world was broken to shambles the day the strange gods descended from the sky and dined at her father’s table. The stone-like bodies began to rampage through her village, slaughtering her people, and when the gods came to her father for the second time, not only did they eventually kill him, but they butchered him while he yet lived.

Nia could still hear the roaring pleas of her father, begging to be killed as they cut and butchered him as if astounded by his resilience.

“This one is young enough, if he can endure so much, I am certain his seed can provide answers to the enigma of our transmutation formula.”

The stone god told the smaller lady goddess. She wore long white silken threads so pearly and shiny that they were almost magical to Nia’s eyes.

“Then take her if that is your will. I tire of this. Unlike you, I do not revel in this waste of life.”

She said, and she flicked a casual wrist at the heaping stack of dismembered corpses and defiled dead all once souls who had been in some part of Nia’s life. She saw the hunters, the field workers, and she saw the wives of her father’s friends all dead in a gory heap, all as if merely rubbage to be disposed of.

Nia took up the weathered scythe used to maintain the grassy field around her home, and she charged the stone god in a deadly rush of unparalleled anger and outrage.

It looked down at her, as the scythe clanked off the stony skin and bounced out of her reach. Nia clamored for the melee weapon, and a hand crushed her small left hand and yanked her up like a turnip from the ground.

“Soul of a warrior in this one. If you survive, I will make use of that spirit, after I have properly broken you, of course. No manner of vile torment will be withheld from you for your insolence. You will die in your filth begging like the cur who spit you into your mother.”

The blinding pain buzzed through Nia like the crashing thunder from the heavens. Blinding pain was all she could feel for what seemed like an eternity.

***

Nia was nude curled in a large slick and almost clear-like bowl. She had never seen such a massive dish in all her life, and she suspected the gods planned to devour her very flesh. She soon began to learn that would have been preferable to what she witnessed inside the other large dishes. She watched as glowing magical liquids poured over the other children around her, and they screamed, and their bodies were melted like snow in the springtime.

The stone god would search the dishes after, pulling what remained of the disfigured people out, cutting them apart as he had her father. Then he spoke to himself, making strange notes about his observations on the thing he called alchemy.

Nia seethed, and she swore to herself, even if it took ten-thousand lifetimes, she would see him and all his kind fall. She would become the god-slayer even if it were a curse to bear! Her solemn vow to herself was all she clung to as her crucible filled with the green mixture and the unimaginable pain engulfed her as the silver veins began to spread along her body like spider webs.

***

“You saved my life homunculus; I could free you of your slavery in thanks.”

The ethereal said to her, and Nia shook her head and said, “I have something much more pressing to ask of you, emperor of Ethereals. I wish for your kind to block off the earth from all dimensional travel.”

He studied her for a long second, and Nia almost feared he was going to refuse her request since the earth was a popular and vital planet in the universe.

“I will, but that is no small request. I must ask something of you in return, homunculus.”

She nodded vigorously and she gave him a desperate look.

“Anything you name, I will do it!”

He smiled at her in a sinister look.

“You will allow yourself to be captured, and you shall be bound with all manner of geas, this time you will not break them yourself. You will trade more of your life for the future fate of your entire world, and you will pay the debt to isolate your taskmasters from all known space-time outside earth.”

Nia’s mouth gaped at the cost, but she closed her eyes and still saw her bloody and butchered father in her mind’s eye.

“You can deliver me to them yourself if that is your will. I am but one being in this universe, and the Architects are planning to breach many worlds.”

***

Skylar barely managed to dislodge herself in time, as the soul-sundering torment of Nia’s capture split her memories of the past three-thousand-years from the version of her at the time of the exodus.

Sky hit her knees, and Nadia collapsed beside her shaking in a seizure. She could not stop herself from reaching out and helping her once deadly foe.

“You, you sealed the rifts…”

Sky had never been able to learn how the earth had been isolated. The Ethereals were the only fifth-dimensional beings who could muster such absolute power over an entire planet. Hidden capitalized on this and sealed off space travel from above with a planetary blockade.

“Don’t you die on me, Nia!”

Skylar exclaimed, calling Nadia by the name she had not heard in thousands of years.