A/N: Apologies for the delay, but it's come to the point where I wanted to have my next chapter ready before posting the current one. However, due to con season throwing me into overload (I'm not only making my own costumes but writing our sketches and building our props... I'm looking forward to making a Box O' Communism for our MGS3 sketch at Otakon!) I've got more to do at work. See, kids, working in corporate America means you're doing the jobs of two people for the pay of 3/4ths of one person. Moreover, I'm trying to reallocate my funds so I can move out of my parents' house (I'm 22 years old, 23 next month, and still living with my parents. It's that damn car I had to buy in October (Read the first few chapters of my Comic Party fic, Deeper Water, for the shpiel there) but to do so, I still owe about $16,000 in student loans and the car.

It's basically the whole "real world" excuse interfering with my writing, but still, I apologize for not posting this sooner. I was waiting to hear back from more of my beta readers, but I'm assuming that they were similarly embroiled. In any case, many thanks to Lakewood and now Wild Goose 01 for their help in beta-reading this chapter. Enough babbling!

On with the show!

"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot, fourth canto

"The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men."

12: In This Valley of Dying Stars
Somewhere over Iran
September 10th, 1981
2:30 PM local time (Eighteen hours after SIGNET CARVER, eight hours after the battle in the desert)

"Mom? Mom!"

The gunfire was sudden, unexpected, and it tore through the terminal with a brutal swath.

"Mom! Wake up, Mom! Dad, please... please!"

The young boy was only fourteen years old, the worry on his trim, expressive face mixing with the thin trail of tear-streaked blood on his cheek from a glancing bullet. The chiiing of a ricochet off of a cement column caused him to flinch in reflex, and he buried himself in the heaving, labored breaths of his mother beneath him.

"Tell your father..." a whisper, tainted with the gurgle of a sucking chest wound. "Tell him to take you and run..."

"Dad is..." The boy sniffled and looked over to his father, whose torso, once proudly toned from hours upon hours of judo, was evilly stitched with bullet wounds. "Dad is already dead, Mom..."

She coughed, placing her weak hands around her son's hand and meeting his almond eyes with her own. They were obviously tearing up from pain, but the fading brightness in them echoed with an untold source of joy. "I'm very proud of you, my dear..." she said, her breaths turning into weak wheezes punctuated by vicious coughing. "I'm glad that... so glad we got to see you win today..."

"Mom!" He grasped her hands holding his tightly, his protests drowned out again by gunfire. "Mom, don't leave me! I'll get help!"

Her dark almond eyes were already glazing over, the tears of anguish in her eyes slowly drying out amongst the clotting blood that was chaotically splashed on her face. He held her hand with his as her grip lessened, pressing it to his face.

"Mom!" he cried out. "Mom... please!"

The sound of boots stepping on shattered glass behind him made him flinch again, and he turned to the source of the sound. A tall, thin man with dark almond eyes and matted black hair, bearing an assault rifle at his side and disguised as a mechanic, looked down at the boy apologetically.

"This had meaning," he said in clear, literate Japanese. "It won't make up for it... but I'm sorry that we had to do this."

"You killed them!" the boy shouted back. "You killed my parents! You killed all these people?" He spread his arm out in the direction of the countless other dead and injured people, some fleeing from the man with the gun, others moaning with pain.

He shook his head. "I hate this. I hate doing this. But this is how we make progress..." He trailed off. "This is how things are done for the greater good."

"What are you doing!" another voice, speaking rapid Japanese as well, yelled out. "Come on! You've got to get out of here! The army is on its way!"

With a sudden twist and drop to a knee, the man with the gun fired off a three-round burst at the source of the shout. The boy turned to see a man, dressed in similar mechanics' coveralls, fall to the ground with a scream.

"For what it's worth..." the man by the boy whispered. "It was not for nothing..."

"MOOOOM!"

Kenji woke up in a cold sweat, his entire body tensing with the return of the nightmare and his throat dry and hoarse from his half-asleep cry for his mother. He tried to reach up to rub the sleep out of his eyes, but his hands seemed to be bound behind his back.

"Kenji? You okay?" he heard someone call out.

"Mark? Is that you?"

"Thank God!"

As Kenji blinked the sleep out of his eyes, he looked left at the source of the voice. It was completely dark, but a line of artificial light crept through a small crack behind him. He heard a scraping sound, and Mark's silhouette broke the light coming through the crack. "Are you all right?" Mark asked.

"My head hurts," he reported after stretching his neck muscles. "Other than that, I'm fine... what about you? Where's Gef?"

"Dunno," he replied. "I've been shuffling around here for a few hours since I regained consciousness. I guess bein' knocked out got us the extra sleep we've lost over the past few days." He chuckled nervously.

Kenji felt around his bound hands. "We're tied up with plastic zip-ties," he mumbled. "Damn. No way to break through them without something to cut 'em."

"They already got our weapons and gear." Mark shuffled a little closer to Kenji. "I don't feel my combat knife on me anywhere, and the bastards even took my hide-away nine."

"Wonderful." A series of sickening popping noises came from Kenji's wrists as he tried to force his own joints out of alignment, a common trick amongst escape artists, but to no avail. His wrists were bound tight enough to cut off circulation.

"I think I'm glad you can't get out," Mark joked. "I hate that sound, man."

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to use your teeth to get these undone?" Kenji joked. Mark couldn't see his wry grin in the darkness. "So where the hell are we?"

"We're in the dark, of course," Mark joked.

"I know that. I don't suppose you have any cyalume sticks on you?"

"They took everything, Kenji. Be thankful we've still got pants."

"Great. Can you stand up?"

There was a rustle of noise and a few thunk noises as Mark balanced himself against a dark wall. "Okay, I'm up."

Kenji took a moment to struggle to his feet; they too were bound with a zip tie. He tossed his legs under himself and wiggled his toes to the floor, eventually coming to a standing position.

"At least we can hop around," Mark ventured, his boots clanging against the floor of their apparent prison. "Feels like metal."

"So do the walls," Kenji added, knocking on the wall. It gave a similar metallic sound.

"Maybe we should look around." A few more clangs from Mark's boots echoed through the darkness, followed by a hollow thunk a moment later.

"There's somethin' solid in here!" Mark protested. "Ow, that shit hurts!"

"Yeah, that did sound painful." Kenji carefully hopped over to where Mark's noise had emerged, and after turning around, he bent forward so he could get a feel on the solid object.

It was far bigger than Kenji for sure; his hands kept running up the smooth, metallic surface. When he flicked it to test its consistency, it gave off a low, echoing tock, more like a hollow piece of plastic rather than metal.

"Hey, this feels familiar..."

Mark hopped his way a little closer, still mumbling curses under his breath, and let loose a knock on the surface. It responded with a louder thonk that echoed through the dark space.

"Let's try and figure out what the hell it is," Mark ventured. "I'll go this way, you-"

Mark was interrupted as he hopped off; his movement obscured by the clink of glass.

"It just keeps getting interesting." Mark shuffled around to feel the object. "Feel like a drink?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

There was another shuffling noise, and then the tink tink of a fingernail on thick glass.

"I think we got ourselves a few bottles of wine here, Kenji."

"Wine?"

"Feels like it."

"As in bottles?"

"You think they'd put wine in a box?"

"Let me get one of those. Hang on, I'll come to you." Kenji hopped gingerly in the darkness, not wanting to bang his head or worse, and eventually ran into Mark.

"Here, feel for yourself." Mark bent down a little, lowering himself to hand the bottle off to Kenji. Despite his bindings, he could feel it: a smooth, thin neck with a wider bottom, culminating in the traditional dimpled punt at the bottom.

"Yeah, it's a wine bottle all right..." Kenji's voice trailed off in thought. "Wait right there, Mark."

"Huh?"

There were a few more hops, and then a sudden, loud smash of glass breaking.

"Jesus Christ, Kenji!"

"There's no water to work with here, Mark, just the wine." There were a few grunting noises, then an almost imperceptible snapping sound. "Got it! Stay right there."

"Clever bastard..." Mark shook his head as Kenji walked over and cut his hands free with a large shard of glass from the wine bottle. He flexed his hands, restoring the blood flow, and the two sergeants peered through the crack of light in their prison.

"Cargo boxes!" they exclaimed almost in unison.

A ten-foot high wall of green-painted steel that bore white-stenciled Hebrew and English letters obscured their view. Though their range of vision was limited by the tiny crack, they were able to see that theirs was one of at least two large airborne freight containers inside a dark green aircraft hull. The faint, distant whirr of jet engines could be heard through the crack.

"So maybe we just waltz out and jump?" Mark asked.

Kenji pushed the door of their cargo container/prison outwards. A jangling of chains stopped him short. "No dice, my friend. We're chained shut."

"So what do we do now?"

Kenji felt his way over to the corner where he had found the wine bottle; after a few shufflings in the dark, he found an intact bottle and brought it over to the opening in the cargo container.

"'Drifting Snow Vineyards Cabernet-Sauvignon, 1973 Reserve," he read off of the label. It was simply decorated with a stylized blue snowflake adorning the label on the right side. "St. Helena, California. You know anything about wine?"

"Sorry, my brotha', but I only drink Colt Foty' Five," Mark remarked, throwing his ebonics into full. "I don' know 'bout wine unless it's Thunderbird."

"Mark..."

"Sorry, Kenji," Mark shook his head. "I don't know much, just that there's red, white, and Champagne."

"I know even less." Kenji narrowed his dark brown eyes, halfway puzzled by the presence of wine in their impromptu prison.

A door opened somewhere out of their visual range, and voices spoke in a rapid-fire language that neither was familiar with. The MITHRIL agents quietly crept away from the break in the container, hiding in the darkness, just as two sets of heavy footsteps approached.

"Ktal vara?" one asked, the tension evident in his voice. "Torlar kotor varz con'tvandar!"

"Taklor utarava," a rough response came. A set of keys jangled and quickly undid the lock and chains. The two sergeants tried to meet each others' eyes, but in the darkness, they couldn't see anything save for the shadows of two men with AK-47s silhouetted against the lights of the military cargo plane they seemed to be held in. Only then did they notice the trail of red wine dripping down through the grooves in the container's floor, slowly leaking out of the cargo box...

The Helmaj base
Somewhere in northeast Afghanistan
That same time

It had been a sleepless night for the soldiers. The dishes from their earlier meal still sat, collecting dust kicked up from the cold night wind, and they had long since depleted their canteens.

"It's like they're waiting for us to talk," Private Kuyvishev whispered to Sergeant Kadashvili in subdued Georgian. "We haven't even been separated, let alone interrogated yet."

"Don't think like that, Kuyvishev," Kadashvili shot back, his whispering voice edged in iron. "Paranoia is the last thing we need in this situation."

"But comrade sergeant," Kuyvishev protested. "The only way we can even communicate is in Georgian. Lieutenant Kalinin and Private Danilenko can't even understand us. If you weren't from Tbilisi and I didn't grow up near there, we wouldn't even be able to do this."

"Don't worry," Kadashvili patted the young man on the back. "We're not leaving anyone behind and the Helmaj won't learn anything from us."

Kalinin eyed the two soldiers speaking quietly in their native language. Open up to each other, he silently urged. We were never meant to be this deep in Helmaj turf. There are only four of us, and we must all band together if we're going to-

The tent flap opened, flooding the dark canvas shelter with the burning brightness of the sun rising at the far end of the valley. Kalinin turned, shielding his eyes, as Rashid entered and sat down, two armed guards taking up position outside. They closed the tent flap as Majid crossed his legs and cleared his throat.

"I have spoken to Helmajin Helmaj," he pronounced in careful, slow Russian, intoning the last two words in an unfamiliar accent, separate from his heavy South Asian inflections that he normally carried. "He will be back amongst his people soon, and he will then decide what is to be done with you."

"What has been done with others in our place?" Kalinin asked as neutrally as he could muster.

"Most have joined us of their own free will," Majid casually responded. "We save our strength for the battlefield, not recruitment. It is a waste for my men to torture prisoners. The only Soviets and mudjehedeen we have had die on us were those who wandered out of the camp, trying to escape on foot. It is usually the mountains that claim them."

Majidsnapped his fingers. Another tray was brought in; there was a steaming pot that smelled like fresh herbs, some old flatbread, fresh milk, and a milky block of cheese.

"We have eaten the same food since long before the Soviets came," he remarked. "Even before the British, even before the Moghuls and the Persians clashed with the Afghans. I like to take my meals with as many people as I can who have little knowledge of the Helmaj."

"I think we know all we need to," Private Danilenko mumbled. Kadashvili and Kalinin simultaneously shot him angry looks. The last thing they needed was to provoke their captors.

"You sound as if you have fought against a Helmaj," Majid tut-tutted. "You should count yourself lucky to be alive."

"Your boys shot some fireworks at us earlier," Kadashvili chimed in. "You shot down our helicopter and killed the flight crew. I owe you one for doing this number on my arm." Kadashvili patted his left forearm gently; a sling had been fashioned from a torn-off strip of his field jacket.

"We have little in the means of medical supplies," Majid said as he maneuvered the tray of food in the middle of the soldiers. "We will fashion a better fixative for you later. Please, eat. There will be very little for you to do until Helmajin Helmaj returns."

"Who is this 'Helmajin Helmaj' person?" Kalinin asked.

"It is hard to explain," Majid said after thinking for a moment. "In the Helmaji language, it would mean 'king of kings.' Helmajin Helmaj has proven himself worthy of being Helmajin Helmaj by defeating the one who came before him, all the way back to Khaur'on Helmaj – the Dragon King – who first led the Helmaj from the caves to their first conquests in the mountains."

"Let me get this straight. Whomever is strong enough to defeat a 'Helmajin Helmaj' becomes the new leader of all the Helmaj?" Kalinin inquired, raising an eyebrow. "That doesn't seem like a stable way to ensure your people's leadership."

"It is effective for our causes. The Helmaj have survived only by the constant raiding and banditry of ancient times, but each Helmajin Helmaj has ensured that he will be the best in what we require. In order to survive, the Helmaj must fight and expand until the call of Khaur'on Helmaj is heard through all the world."

"Quite a daunting goal," Danilenko joked. "Who is this 'Khaur'on Helmaj,' and what did he do that's so great?"

"Comrade private, why not shut the hell up?" Kadashvili shouted down his subordinate.

"Khaur'on Helmaj was the first Helmaj," Majid ignored the younger man's remark. "In time immemorial, he was the first to conquer the sun itself and force it to retreat in the darkness. He unified the Helmaj as a people and set us forth upon our destiny. He was killed in a great battle, but it took thousands of demons in orange robes and golden armor to sway his sword, and thousands more to strike him down. His last breath was our battle cry. 'Helmajin tarook!'" Majid harshly whispered the last line, making Danilenko wince with the force of the rallying call. "It means 'Helmaj shall conquer.'"

Kalinin hesitated to ask him about the golden dagger that had been confiscated along with their equipment. It took him some willpower to remember the prisoner that had given it to him, the ferocity of his eyes even in captivity.

"I do not know how many Helmaj you have fought," Majid quietly remarked, standing back up, as if to mourn his fallen warriors. "But every single one you have fought would have happily died in what they have done."

"For what?" Kalinin quietly asked.

Majid did not reply. Instead, he turned around, opened the tent flap, and made his way out.

"To fulfill the words of Helmajin Helmaj," he said as he faced away from the soldiers. "His words were 'conquer all that stands before you and claim the entire world in the name of the Helmaj.'"

To be continued...