The BloodStone Brane: Prologue

Prologue

“Nothing!” The cacophonous bleatings of his voice rang through rubble and the darkness thereof, dissipating across the crumbled tunnel entombing him. “That's what I care for! Naught's all you're worth! It's all your-... No. Never have your words mattered to me, nor're they likely now to start, you didactic dick!”
  The hate behind his charnel screams had stemmed from a tortured mindset laboring under fury, expressions of which left spit dotted upon the interior of his helmet. Sweat poured down his cheeks and forehead. Immobile as he was, he couldn't clean it; which only pissed him off more.
  I'll not have it! Do not fluster... do not! he then thought. Distresses wrought of anger's a fault in others... others! Anyone but him, or so he failed to assure himself. No matter the fervor truth did not abide therein.
    “Energy is a precious thing, Alreno. Do you find shouting worth the breath?” The loudest source of Alreno's sour temper replied to him in its signature unisex tone. The voice that spoke oscillated with a silvery, rebarbative, hollow sense of broken emotions, stumbling through the sounds of the words and weaving all but proper inflections.
    “Alreno... please die,” it continued. “This has long become a waste of both our time, and the solution is basic – well within your power. One KR grenade's pin pulled is all that need's be. Forg-”
    “Shut! The! Fuck! Up!” Each syllable stretched and snapped with the rhythm of imagined punches connecting. “No more! Enthuse another word in this vein and all from me you'll have's a fain to see all your frame and remains maimed! Leave the conceiving of ideas to those capable of thought, you worth-aught, ought-be-shot bot!”
  A short silence swept over them after his loudest of insanities, but only to be broken.

      “Please, Alreno,” the voice repeated with disinterest. “Self-sacrifice is now and for most of history has been considered an honorable service when preformed during times of war. Whether or not it be your first as well as last, carry out an honorable deed.”
  “I said shut the fuck up, you squalid stercolith!” Alreno screamed louder and faster. “Give me time – in silence! – to think without your otiose opinions on my ears! Take this to heart: They're shit! Shit! The meanings of all you've to say sums to nil!”
    “Opinions are subjective.”
“Fu-...” Alreno forced himself to inhale through angry, vertiginous shudders, only narrowly making the refrain from screaming another epithet. Calm and clarity parted company with him when his troubles began, and they weren't apt to return until solutions arose which was, at its best, farfetched.
  Problem after problem and threat after threat had goaded out all his wits' worst, a new one for every day with accumulation having begun months ago – if not years. Good things never lasted, and bad ones heretofore all lingered until something worse came along; as with nonce.
  Lying high atop him in pile after pile was a mound of industrial rubble – massive parts of the tunnel he'd been in, pinning him in place. A suit of complex robotic armor wrapped his entirety, and yet not even that possessed the strength to pull him out from the multitude of strange rocks, stranger crystals and the strangest of metals. Not a limb could be moved.

  I don't know how or what's churned this stern dissent to have it've turned to the bedrid mess of fogged, corrupted nous it's now...
    Putting adynamic rhymes to semi-coherent thoughts helped him to relax somewhat, but the rage he had to quell wouldn't surrender to his usual mellow stupidity. This anger was a breed far too new to him, unbecoming of his norm and feeling somehow too frustrating to be real. A strain pulling at his psyche. A madness imposed as opposed to one possessed.
  “Alreno...” Again the voice spoke out to him, but there was a change in the tone. A polite one. A blatantly fictitious one. “I extend to you the deepest of my apologies. Are you alright?” it asked him. “Are you experiencing some poignant pang? Are you bleeding? What should be done to ameliorate your state? Surely there is some way to persuade you of fulfilling no less than one heroic deed. How are you feeling? What would sufficiently elevate your mood to accommodate emotions required for necessary self-termination?”
    “I descry... the skin of Nyx alone,” he replied slowly, challenging the peak of lividity. “The collapse trapped me, just as you, only worse – supine, with my helmet unlit, now unpowered and stifled by this... air. Beyond that, and you, and being forced to cope to some spandril slope, I'm... just... fine.”
  “Unfortunate,” it said, disregarding most all of his turtle-paced tirade.
    “What..?” he had to ask, disbelieving his ears.
    “To repeat, I said: How fortunate.” The lie was impressively terse.
  “... I'll take from all your maunderings and assume you're much the same,” he continued. “Now parcel the shell of this field-expedient billet and suggest solvents devoid of death.”
  “I cannot,” it stated plainly.
  “Well, ain't that just fuckin' wunderschön; your mercy's a marathon of choices. Felo de se or brook verbal sodomy – both to serv...”
  A noise came and he shut himself up as fast as he could, tightening his chest, mouth and throat mid-sentence. As he was speaking something had moved atop the rubble, something that had heard his bellows below. Alfresco what wrappings of pitch-black he vided it made the sort of sounds none could welcome. The first few were tiny taps, and yet they quickly morphed into dissonances akin to footsteps; one lumbering after another. Yet footsteps they were not. What followed was a series of all too confidant scratches, clicks, tosses and slams which resonated throughout his prison of debris. It was digging.
A friend? A Solian, at least? Alreno could only listen, wait and wonder in dread to, for and about whatever it was. But some facts just had to be faced.
  Friends were always fomites for one malicious force or another, and he wasn't all that likable. With such a delicate balance of knowledge and personality his friends numbered in the negatives. There weren't any looking for him. Just as well, he could hear no hint of any tools being used. The rescue had not been prepared for, and was thus not an effort undertaken by the Sol.
  As suddenly as they'd started the sounds changed pace and shifted to be louder, longer-lasting, more grating and more course. Large concrete pieces were being cleared and clawed away, sending smaller rocks skating across metal beams, bouncing off of stone debris and down through open water pipes intermingled with the tunnel's remains. His suit responded more to movements, becoming unburdened with an ever-minifying weight. It was by no coincidence that tiny rays of flickering light started to cast through and into the mound weakening around him.
  Shines shone more and more like a force against the black so strong that Alreno had to squint at the brightness breaking the dark to adjust his eyes to what at first seemed a kind of incandescence reflecting from the surface of a distant pond. Slowly, and thankfully, the muddy blur of his vision cleared. Though not a single fear was strengthened when he made out what the sight really was, neither were any hopes.
  What more would there be? he wondered.

  Dancing far away in an elegant blaze was a tall and tempestuous orange-red fire, rising and falling in erose flames, coiling through a massive skyscraper looming on a tier high above. The conflagration burned in view, but he forgot it immediately. More deserving of Alreno's attention was a dark figure, a thing wandering across the bands of light. It showed itself as nothing more than a silhouette, ghost-like, shrouded by a decaying mist with black grains swirling and curling around its source and all else it crossed. He assumed that the trail was dust kicked up from the residuum and thrown into the city's warm winds, but something about that assumption seemed... wrong. The gilings did not appear to fall to the ground or disperse into the erratic gales. Rather, they were fading away just as strangely as they were appearing: From nowhere. Whatever the dust was it looked too large to be floating, too akin to clumps of sand and tiny pebbles.
  Oh shit, he thought.
    Following the remotion of another concrete rock the bulk slid down and off the pile as if all else under one side had been taken away for just that purpose – which it clearly had. The weight entrapping his armor had attenuated, and he could move ever so slightly. The digger knew where he was, which meant for better or for worse, it was time to leave. His twisted position kept his legs from his full control, as more cleared he was able to shimmy his arms and torso free by using his armor to his advantage. Protected and strengthened he punched through rocks and pulled upwards, no longer tombed to the tonnage. But all his efforts took him only to the top.
“Lady Luck's a fickle whore...” he grumbled.
  As soon as he became half exposed and half free, some sort of fallen metal support reacted to his displacement by sliding down and striking him in his side, pinning him again. Why me? He had to wonder in willing vain.
  After taking the time to look around to see where he was; as if it mattered or as if he'd even know, all he saw was rubble spilled onto a street populated with corpses, craters and scattered pieces of other damaged structures. Such was the sight of freedom.
  “Hello?!” Alreno shouted and waved. “Whoever it is you are, I'm Private Alreno of RB1–3, A.E divis-...” A terror gripped his heart. Twenty feet away, just ahead of the shattered crystal bricks and broken dark stone remnants his savior's silhouette lounged as would a black mirage now in clear view; as clear as shadows could allow. Captivating, haunting, intrusive, horridly large and wide, bright-red eyes shone like molten rubies through the night. And on him fixed the gaze.

    One's been I, benign, ever to bade your elegies silent, it thought.

  The creature amused itself by pretending to take a cynical pride for saving the soldier's life. Curiously, it mused over him and the armor he wore, but from a safe distance of course. The suit was impressive and far beyond this world – a thick contraption made of plated blue and teal painted steel and osmium robotics, keeping the wearer from sight and atmospheric exposure. Only after it looked carefully at the heavyset gloves for any signs of weapons did it make a move. It shifted forward, readied its legs and lunged towards him on all fours, crawling like a salamander. The gap between them closed in moments.
  Rocks small and large struck his suit as the alien stopped just short of his reach, not that he would have tried to touch it first. He tensed up, inhaled and then raised his arms, recoiling in fear much like the coward he was.
  Alreno's flinch was quickly concluded and he opened his eyes to find himself face-to-face with a long and snake-ish head adorned with its species' equivalent of a mask; but all below its eye-line was visible until the crumpled fabric of a thick black robe.
  Most all of his attention went straight to the lizard's enigmatically mephistophelean stare, but he didn't ignore the penumbric field around it; nor could he have. Alreno became so lost in the sanguine wells of its eyes and the ethereal shadows its body was shedding, however, that he almost didn't notice what it had been – and was still – doing.
  Two creepy limbs gray of skin and pronged with three outstretched spidery fingers tarried in his view in such a way that they each knew he could see them. An offer. To the slightest of Alreno's delight it endeavored to be nonthreatening. However... at the ends of those long, boney fingers were large, powerful talons stained with blood, immediately killing what little delight there was to have. There would have been far less concern had the blood stopped at its claws, but that was only where it started.
    He still had some courage reserved that kept him from breaking out into a fit of screams and punches, though, and it was by that and what little sense the moment gave him which let Alreno reach towards the monster's claws to take the first 'hand' it offered. That was his minor folly. It wanted only to get a hold of the armor, not to be held. The creature pulled one arm back and snaked its other around his gauntlet, avoiding fingers and grasping the upper side of his wrist, just out of immediate reach, safe from the palm of his hand. That was a precaution it knew to take, and one that Alreno understood.
  Its sickly gray coloration and disturbingly coriaceous skin was made a sight more vile by the inspection of the blood upon it. Some was fresh and left smears on his gauntlet, but most of it was dry, coagulated and cracked to thin flacks. And it wasn't white, purplish or black. The blood was a distinctly red and human hue. He knew how sharp those talons were, he knew what they could do and, to some extent, what they had done. He was far too aware that the lizard could burrow itself elbow-deep into bodies.

  Be calm, he had to tell himself. Be calm! Make a wont of sharing ubiety. You're not to die. It's not to kill you.
  Deep, nebulose and lancinate fears overlaid his mind, but the alien had no intentions of hurting him. To his shock it was genuinely trying to help him. The coldest, most inimical, scarred and subfusc claws of the most ferocious and apathetic slayer he'd ever seen was trying help him.
  After the contact was established, both of its taloned, three-toed feet were positioned firmly around where the mound met Alreno's waist. All the while it said nothing and made no sounds beyond those transferred kinetically. He couldn't even hear the creature breathing and its mouth never opened to speak as it raked at the rubble. Shadows flowed from its body, building up a thick mist all around them like smoke without a fire, or black water moving in the wrong directions against both wind and gravity. Something was beyond wrong. All that he could clearly see within the darkness were its bright red eyes. They had purpose, but seemed unfocused, resembling those of a corpse; looking through Alreno or perhaps the space he occupied. But not at him. From the neck up it gave off the impression of being unaware. Peculiar, Alreno thought.
  A tail tipped with a black spike slid out from under the robe it wore, wrapping itself around the shoulder of Alreno's armor. “Drahh!”
  He yelped a pathetic scream and the alien moved slower because of it, but it didn't flinch; and Alreno quickly recovered from the sight – though his trepidation persisted. Together they held on to one another in the strangest hug either had ever been involved with, touching with a mutual compulsion to stop. They pulled and wiggled and climbed and pulled again without anything that remotely resembled coordination, but eventually their work paid off, and Alreno was free.
  The rubble under them gave way as he left it, and upon dislodge they both fell tumbling down from the weight and momentum, rolling and spinning at the mercy of the mound. Alreno was safe in his armor, but sharp pains hit the creature one after another, teaching it new ways to hurt as it slid and rolled across the jagged cement rocks. Its robe did little to protect it, and as it stabilized and controlled its fall as best it could there still came bruise after battered bruise, accompanied with cuts from chipped fragments of broken crystals flying all around.
  Just as it stopped and landed upon the flats of the street Alreno came falling right behind, rolling over his savior as he, too, found the ground.
  The little lizard took on a bad posture right away in a display too sad to witness for long. On its side it lay slowly curling up into a fetal ball and clutching different parts of itself.
  And yet it gave not an unary utterance of anguish, nor a single smirk or grimace of distress. It didn't even close its eyes. A quick assessment of its own injuries and it rose to its feet again without so much a yell, a whimper or a groan. Remarkably, nothing had been broken. New bruises, bleeding cuts patches of sheered skin and gemstone splinters were present – and painful – but they meant next to nothing to the alien; as far as any real matters of well-being were concerned.
  “Ah... I...” Alreno tried to speak, but trailed off to a mumble. Best be gathered...

  He stood up, trying to collect and to center himself. You owe it... You. Owe.
  Lucid thoughts seemed to freeze around it. No matter how deep the guilt ran or how close they'd just been, he couldn't take a step towards the short and cloaked, pitiful, hurt, hunching and wrothful fiend. It still brought him a horror he'd never known before, regardless that he had managed to keep following it for hours on end. Whatever it was it had become his last-ditch hope, the only semblance of urbane sanity and the only guiding force worth being led by. Any yet he found himself an unworthy companion.
    His savior – weak and little as it was – suffered an operose venture to clear the rubble's weight on his behalf, only to be rewarded with many new pains that were commingling with its fatigue. He got his freedom, and the one who'd granted it received only wounds in return.

    As soon as he had more or less pulled himself together he came to realize that the black-misted lizard was just... staring at him. And that was all. He met its eyes, but in them were self-debarred adumbrations. There were no twitches of the head, no nervous swallows, no arduous panting, no pointing, no threatening movements of its tail, no subtle gesturing and nothing but lifeless eyes. Meekly, he looked away.
  “I'd not of opined endearment to become you,” he said, wearily wasting his breath.
  Not a drop of gratitude in his tone was apparent, or present, but he was thankful nonetheless. And yet before the phrase “Thank you” could be said his savior swiftly stepped further away from him in as hostile a posture as one could imagine; almost as if responding to his words by trying to deter him from letting out any more of them.
  By no means did he want to contend with the creature, but he too retreated further away and went back up the collapse to where he'd been buried. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he wouldn't find his rifle, but he went to look anyway.
  As he started to dig, the voice spoke up to him. Alreno nearly pretended not hear it. “Now that freedom's found you,” it said, “the use of KR grenades is no longer required.”
  “Really?” And just like that his anger had returned. “First 'twas best I died for you, were it not?” he asked. “What of my own reasoned volition warrants empathy for you?”
  “Should I be left behind, they will find me, and through me, you will be found.”
  Alreno knew that the point behind the threat was moot. As long as he was near the alien there was nobody and nothing that could find him. Not that he was aware of, at any rate. Still, he was a bit shaken and not entirely in the mind he'd like to have been, so out of what compassion he could not show to the alien he chose to help the machine. It wasn't that he did not want to help the alien, he just didn't know how.
    It had receded away even farther from him as he dug through the rubble, and when he spotted it from over his shoulder again it had taken to walking on all fours, piquing his interest and pausing his venture. His attention got a little more focused and he cared far less about its health when witnessing it take large, disgusting, gormandizing bites out of a bullet-riddled corpse lying in the street. The creature tore at the muscles and eviscerated the abdomen, devouring whatever it could. Jagged fangs lined its enormous mouth, its jaws opening and closing as wide as a snake's and as strong as an alligator’s. The width was staggering, and with each bite it clamped onto the corpse and shook its head from side to side, ripping it apart, lapping at the exposed tissue and drinking up the blood.
  “Ugh... urg!” Alreno gagged on the sights of it and had to look away. His savior tore into the dead man's face, licked an eye and then forced it out with the forks of its tongue. He nearly vomited when both prongs slowly and almost erotically curled around the eye until it broke.
  After a few minutes he at last placed his hands around his most talkative possession. “Better?” he whispered, pulling it from the mound and wiping dust from the reflective armor.
  “Yes...” The semi-spherical drone lied and shook itself from Alreno's grasp to hover freely. “Operational, anomaly notwithstanding.”
  He turned back around and was surprised – for whatever reason – to see that the space once occupied by the gray creature had been filled by ash, burnt skin and grains of dust blowing in the wind. It had left, but wasn't gone. A silhouette shrouded in speckled shadows walked down the street, oblivious to the hundreds of bodies left by the wake of the Sol's war machine...