Tales of the Shadowmancer

Chapter One

I woke up gasping in a cold sweat, my heart thumping faster than I was able to keep track of. I tried to move, but something caught me. I was strapped into a chair, leather around my thighs, chest, wrists, ankles and throat. I scraped the wooden arms of the chair beneath my fingers trying to understand where I was. I felt a sharp pain shoot through my hand from the movement. I strained my neck to see why. Clear thin tubes stuck out of every square centimeter of my flesh leading up to some strange contraption in the ceiling that reflected what little light was there.

I heard a sound so quiet it was barely there at all. I turned feeling every tube stuck in my neck busily readjusting in the most painful way imaginable. I let out a pained cry, a bloody taste in my mouth. My eyes were weak from the strain, but I made out the figure of a man in front of a large mirror. He was bound in a chair similar to mine, but with metal where the leather would be, tubes and wires wound around his seat leading up to the thing on the ceiling.

A voice that sounded like it was dipped in caramel came to life over a loudspeaker and spoke something that I couldn't quite understand. The only word I thought I heard was mint. I was opening my mouth to ask what was going on when suddenly there was a click. Pain erupted through every cell of my being. I writhed in agony as the sound of a whirring machine banged against my ears. I vomited blood. Through my haze I saw the other man violently shaking, foaming at the mouth and his eyes roll back, white and lifeless as his muscles spasmed long after he was already dead.

All at once the pain stopped and I slouched against my restraints gasping for breath. I closed my eyes wishing for it to all be over, but then I heard a small sawing sound against leather or worse the charred flesh of the man on in front of the mirror. I couldn't tell. Without any real warning all of my restraints broke and I fell forward, opening my eyes just in time to see the ever encroaching bloody laminate tiles of the floor. I hit my nose. I started trying to get up. I stood shakily on my feet trying to find my balance. I fell. To my surprise I didn't hit the ground but was instead caught by someone, or something. I looked up to see a thing unlike anything I had seen before, something that was almost human shaped, but wasn't. A creature that was completely black, like I wasn't looking at anything at all, just a big, dark, nothing. Two white evenly spaced shapes opened up, in what must have been a head. It's white eyes staring at me as if it was trying to figure out what I was. After a few seconds it sat me down and turned to look at the crisp of a man across the room. In a single step it strode over to the charred remnants of the man and began to inspect it. The thing looked distraught. I thought that I was hallucinating but I was sure that I could hear it cry in a soft way, like it didn't want anyone to know how it felt.

The caramel voice sounded over the loudspeaker, "Subject two five six has survived, but subject one two six has passed. Experiment failed. Terminate two five six and start again with subjects three one four and two zero five."

There was a loud buzz above the door and a squadron of people in white hazmat suits erupted through it. Each person carried what looked to be flamethrowers with the exception of one who carried a mop and a bucket, ready to clean the mess that their co workers were about to make. The flamethrowers began to turn on, just a few at a time. I closed my eyes, ready to die. I waited. I waited. I waited.

I felt a pressure on my skin. It was nothing like the burning I expected, it felt cool and sent a calm sensation into my body. I opened my eyes. I was standing, but I didn't remember getting up. I looked around and saw the hazmat people staring at me shaking, some dropped their weapons with a loud shuddering clang. I looked at myself trying to see why they were afraid. My jaw dropped. I had tiny blades that looked like shark fins rotating around my forearms. My arms were covered in black plates with spikes at the fingertips, they gave off a dark black steam that floated downwards. I began to view the rest of my body in a hurried panic. My chest was covered in some sort of plate armor, my waist in a robe, asymmetric plates on my shoulders and armor down to my toes.

One of the hazmats picked up a flamethrower and set the flames on me. Black mist greeted the flames snuffing them out before they had a chance to meet me. Black tendrils that looked like pieces of cotton bandages knocked aside his weapon and picked him up into the air, coiling around his arms and legs with an extra bit of the dark fabric around his neck. The wrapping strained against his arms and legs causing the man to scream in agony as a sound of ripping flesh filled the small room. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know how to stop it. His arms and legs came off. The tendrils dropped them and turned to dust. It's grip around his neck tightened and began to beat the dismembered body on the ground, like it was playing with it, as a cat would with it's food. A woman screamed no longer frozen by fear. The rest of the hazmat team broke into a panic running to the door, their boots squelching from fresh urine.

The shadowy figure appeared in my mind it was panicking, afraid, confused. I looked at my hands again and it struck me. The shadowy monster was my armor and it was terrified. My body moved on its own. My body was too weak to fight back as the shadow moved for me. A dark pulse erupted from my core, decimating everything around us. The hazmat group looked at me with fear in their eyes, begging for mercy. The pulse hit them. Their bodies twisted and contorted in a way that nothing ever should. They were strewn across the floor twisted and broken like discarded toys. Blood covered what were once white suits. The building shook bits of ceiling tumbling around the shadow and I. My body lurched forward, being moved by the shadow, we jumped at the mirror. I closed my eyes ready for an impact, but none came. I slowly parted my eyelids to see myself standing in my tiny apartment, in front of the standing mirror.

I looked like hell. My hair and beard was streaked with white and I had dark circles around my eyes. My skin looked pale against the dark blood seeping from my wounds. I had a thick layer of stubble that(in addition to everything else)made me look like a crazed homeless man, and the bloodied beige rags didn't help.

Then, things started going black. I fell forward only to be caught by a set of shadowy black hands.

End of Chapter One