The Odyssey of One
They killed Hilde. My Hilde. I can't hardly breathe as I stand up and lurch away from her fallen body, searching for something to prop me up. How could they! Haven't they taken enough!? They're just here for me, for my legacies, really. I'm a nobody to them, honestly! I haven't even trained reliably for the last few months!
The air is hot a moist all around, my hair sticking to the sides of my head. Malaysian summer- I've come to hate it.
Outside I hear commotion. I'm not sure what's going on but I know it's the Mogodorians- those almost fictional creatures from my past- and I get angry. Er.
They killed my Hilde. My Hessu.
I can't let them get away with this. I can't.
I throw myself out the door, wood splintering everywhere. The Mogs don't even look surprised to see me, turning in an instant and charging. Not even using their blasters, just charging.
I tear into them with pure fury. They killed my Cepan! They killed her in cold blood!
I take the first one by his collar and plunge him into the river. He hits so hard the splash rains down on us from over here and I hear a resonating crack from his direction. Good.
More come. They don't try to hurt me, which is weird at first, before I realize. They don't know who I am, which Number I am in line. That's my sole advantage.
They try to encircle me, but I don't let them. I flick my wrists at two and they fly off into the sunset; I pick two more up and het them into the jungle.
Die! Die, you sick bastards! You child murderers! You vicious murderers! They try to maneuver around behind me, but any and every Mog that closes the distance, I pluck into the air and toss sloppily away, to their own fate.
"DON'T TOUCH ME!" I scream at them, and they laugh. Laugh. Laughing, at me.
That's it.
Something in me snaps. I've never felt it before. Almost solid, but shaky… I don't recognize it. I just tear at the ground underneath them, rocking them up into the air. It splits into a fissure and swallows half of them whole, into the Earth.
I work on pure, furious instinct at my new power. I don't even know what it does, what it doesn't, but I lunge and pull anyway, feeling the Earth below me, cooperating. I thrust out at their retreating group, and a crack ripples its way across the now coarse and splintered ground at them. It quakes beneath their feet and sends them flying.
I rip across the sky with my mind, pulling every one of them along for the ride. They sail off into the sky like the rest of them.
Spitting on my ground, I look up and behind their line. There are trucks of them pouring out on a hill across the way- can't have that. Without even thinking, without looking, almost, I bring my hand upwards like a backwards swimming stroke, sending a crack fly at them.
The hill nearly splits in half as I half scream, half laugh. It takes two of their trucks out with it as it encases back roughly, and another is wedged into my new hole in the dirt.
Suddenly, from my right. Thump. Thump. Thump. I don't know how I know to do it, but I turn sharply there and blast three rouge Mogs off their feet and into the Jungle behind them.
The Earth is shaking and trembling like a wave pool at this point, rippling out from me and destroying all in its path. Our little hut is ripped to shreds and thrown backwards, off its wooden foundation; dirt and roots and even trees are tossed up and into the air and water.
"COME ON! THAT'S ALL YOU GOT!" I Schreech at the platoon pulling towards me, now just four SUVs and a cadillac. I wonder who's in the Cadillac, and more importantly, what the actual fuck they're doing with it in the jungle. But none of that matters.
I reach out with my mind, feeling around…. Looking for the hard metal of the fancy car… ahah. There.
I wrench it up and into the sky, almost seeing the Mog's faces inside it as I toss them like I toss the rest.
Their caravan comes crying to a halt, pouring out at least three dozen more Mogs. But they don't advance. They observe me with their big, black, soulless eyes and nod silently. One by one, they all raise their hands in surrender.
Too late for that, now. I grab ahold of the one that began it with my telekinesis and rush him towards me with the force of a hundred trucks. He almost teleports into me, but I stop him just in front of my face.
I spit into his wide, helpless eye.
"You see what happens when you mess, with me?" I cry, spittle flying into his hole of a mouth.
"Yes… Yes, Loric! We understand!" His voice rises an octave at the end of the last word, seeing the look in my eyes.
"You won't come back here. You won't follow me," I pause, taking in what's happening. "Or you'll be like the others…," I trail off for a little while, looking into space.
I didn't only just kill my first Mogodorians, I killed dozens of them in a few minutes.
Deep breaths, One. In, and out. In, and out. I almost forget my pale friend floating in front of me, trembling as I hold him upright.
Shoving him viciously back, onto his knees, I give him a message. "Tell your commander, whoever that may be… Don't mess with us," I look up from his eyes, at his troops. "Or you know what happens."
I push him away one final time, send him skidding on his white knees torn through black fabric. The scrapes ooze a black liquid that might be blood in another universe. "Fear me," I whisper to him, and then let him go.
I let a Mogodorian go.
He sulks, very quickly, I might add, back to his troops, who are already half back in the SUV's by the time he arrives. From here, I shove him hard on the back, sending his face into the glass of the vehicle, marking it with black smears.
He deserves it.
They drive off into the sunset, over the hill and away, dust and dirt trailing up from behind their envoy as they move.
Good riddance.
Turning back around, I finally take in the full scope of my wreckage. Trees lie, fallen, all around. I seem to have diverted the course of the Rajang River by more than a few feet, as it now runs through a gulley four or five feet to one side that I was throwing rocks into earlier. Before.
And the shed. It's not exactly a shed- more of a hut in the jungle. My home in the jungle, blasted to smithereens, laying ripped up from its foundations.
My chest, my loric chest, is tossed ungracefully to one side, while Hilde's body lies in a dried pool of blood in one of the only untouched areas of the destroyed floorboards. I wonder if I did that on purpose.
Hilde…
She was always looking out for me. She never let me down, like I did to her on more than one occasion. I'm the reason she died, here on this vicious planet a billion miles- no, far more than that, I know- from home.
I trudge back to the shack's disembodied floor and slump down onto it, running a finger through her hair, her graying hair. The wound in her back doesn't even look so bad- it's swollen and covered in blood, maybe all in all, the size of, say, a dollar bill.
Alright. Maybe it is a little bad.
I should dig her a grave. But a real, grave. Not one of those pits I make with my new legacy, an actual, hand dug, grave.
She earned it.
If I just had a shovel.
I walk over to where my chest lays. Picking it up, I run a hand over the delicately carved surface, the symbol for one- a circle with a single, ornate dot in the very center- is carved into the top of the lid. More organic swirls of cobalt and black flow down its warm surface. It's still very much alive, whatever that entails.
I place a hand on its lock, feeling it shake underneath a gentle hold, and ping off. That's the first time I've been able to do it alone.
Maybe there's a shovel in here. Hilde never let me see more than a few things- a Macrocosm, that I know. I can know the locations of the other Garde, once their legacies develop and they open their chest. But that's it.
There's two or three sleek-colored smooth stones, and four or five more smaller, grainy, white and red colored stones sitting to one side. To the other, filling up almost a quarter of the chest, is a pair of some kind of alien leather boots, swirls the like of my chest working their way up their heels. And there's a tiny vile of an unkown liquid resting in the very back. It almost beckons to me, drawing my attention, but I divert it t what lies in front of it.
Some kind of blade.
I pull it out of the box and it lights up green instead of blue, casting its warmth onto my hand. It almost activates at my touch, its handle curling and wrapping itself around my wrist like a snake, the blade itself growing almost three feet.
Now this is inheritance.
I slash the air with it lightly, hearing it woosh against the air somewhat unnaturally. It doesn't make that loud a woosh at that speed, I know. Mostly from slashing sticks around, but still.
Nothing to use as a shovel, though. I sigh, removing the sword. It shrinks back up, the blade shrinking, the handle darkening and unwinding.
I'll have more than enough time to play with everything, later.
For now… I have other matters to deal with.
There's not really any good burial sites around, so I lug the chest and Hilde's body along the bank of the river for a couple hundred yards until I come to a relatively clear patch without trees. Right alone the river.
Serene. Just like Lorien always was.
I make scooping motions with my hands, using my mind as a shovel. I dump the excess dirt to the side gently, not wanting it to blow away.
Hilde's face is already losing color, her hair looking whiter than it's ever looked. I can't bear to look at her for too long. My Cepan… No, my surrogate mother, almost. I do remember my mother, a little. Some of the memories come back to me as I dig along the bank of the river, here.
She was always very beautiful. She had black hair with steaks the color of my yellow-blonde hair within. She looked like me, too. Same heart-shaped face, same smooth features.
I don't remember my father. That's probably the thing that upsets me the most. I can't form his face anymore. I used to be able to, on the ship here I would have nightmares and his face would appear to me in my dreams. But no longer.
When the hole is dug, I lower Hilde's body down softly into it. "Long may she rest," I whisper into the wind and darkening sky, kissing a finger and pressing it into her lips. Then I push the rest of the dirt over top of her.
Dammit Hilde, why! You had to give me one last curveball, didn't you? You had to throw one more loophole at me, one more chink in my training. You always wanted to make me stronger. Look at me now.
As her face goes into the dirt, my head lowers out of respect. Respect for the dead, maybe. Respect for her soul, absolutely. Whatever it is, it overwhelms me and I shed a few tears. They fall onto the grave and sink into the dirt. My final message to her.
With that, I grasp the chest in my arm, balancing it on my right hip, and start down the river in the other direction; the one I know leads somewhere. There's a village we got supplies from a few days ago few miles to the west, and Kuala Lumpur squats a few miles beyond that.
I walk into the rising moon, sensing something.
The beginning.
They killed my people five years ago, slaughtered them like dogs. And now they've taken the one closest to my heart.
I won't let a single one get away from my grasp now.
I am Number One
I am the first.