Elliria - Chapter One

Chapter One




Darkness, all there was around was darkness. There was no moon and therefore no light, even the brightest of lights would be swallowed up by this darkness. Screams echoed through, but even those seemed less intense from what they once were.
“The gods have forsaken us,” a women screamed as she ran for her life. A moment later a yellowish-green skinned goblin, small in size but vicious in power, attacked the woman. Attaching itself to her back it ripped chunks of flesh and meat from her bones with it’s claws. She collapsed and the creature stayed in it’s position as if riding down a felled tree, once the woman hit the ground the goblin scrambled up to her neck and sunk it’s teeth into her main artery. The scuffing of boots caught the goblin’s short attention and it knew what was coming, scrambling off into the darkness the goblin left the woman to gurgle and drown in her own blood.
The scuffing sound came closer and the sound of heel clicks could be heard, someone in high heeled boots was coming. Most likely a woman, perhaps a healer. The woman tried to call for help as she looked helplessly into the darkness where the sounds were coming from, but all that came out was a faint hum mixed with a gurgle of thick blood. From deep in the darkness came the slender legs of a fair skinned woman, dressed in black stockings and a long black leather skirt, her top was barely big enough to cover her fairly large chest, made of black leather, the right had no strap but the left side was designed as a tight fitting long sleeve. The whole ensemble was held together with a multitude of belts and ended with a pair of stiletto heeled boots.
“P-p-please,” the woman managed to gurgle out.
The fair skinned woman rolled her pale blue eyes and drove one of her six inch stiletto heels through the woman’s temple.
“Shut up, will you,” she scorned. “I can’t hear all these delicious screams with you making your pathetic plea for life.”
Looking down at her kill the woman could never pass up a good meal. Kneeling down she took a long, slow lick of blood from the human’s neck ending with a long kiss on the corpses lips in which she bit and tore out the tongue spilling a good deal of blood onto the street and in her mouth, being careful not to get too much blood in her long, straight black hair. Laughing with glee the vampyre swallowed the sweet nectar she craved and took her time and pleasure with the dead woman.
And so the world faded into the night and the darkness there in, destruction and despair ruled in this dark hell.

™

Rhaine awoke in a start, his sheets were soaked with sweat and his muscles ached. He wasn’t sure if it was from the training at school or from thrashing about in his sleep, but his shoulders and his thighs protested any movement nonetheless. Hitting a holographic cube on the panel above his bed the lights in his room slowly began to get brighter. They were on a timer that allowed his eyes to adjust before they went to full brightness. Getting out of bed slowly, so as to not upset his aching muscles too much, he walked to his closet and pressed a sequence of holographic cubes that allowed the closet to open. He admitted it was silly to have a passcode protection on a closet, but there were things he stored in there that were invaluable and precious to him. Things that belonged to his long missing father, things that he had accumulated through deed and reward.
He looked at the sparse selection of clothes and the copious stacks of trinkets, and memorabilia. Selecting a clean set of Academy uniform pants and jacket he turned to leave, not even giving the piles of month old clothes on his floor a sideways glance. His mother had been after him for several weeks to pick up his clothes and get them washed, but Rhaine had put it off each night after getting home from the Academy. If he wasn’t too tired he had too much homework, these last few years had seen an increase in the work that he had. His mother later found out from several of the professors that Rhaine had requested secondary classes, not to shirk his chores, but because he was pursuing a class title of extreme difficulty. Very few who chose the path, that of a Shadow Sword, would finish it, and fewer still are those that became it and lived very long. After that Aya had lessened her nagging comments about the state of her son’s room. She wasn’t surprised at his choice or at his excellence in the program.
The path to becoming a Shadow Sword is just as difficult if not more than the life one would lead after graduation. A Shadow Sword needed to know several types of combat styles, at least one type for each of the five weapons they had to learn. As well they were required to know and stay current with the techniques of stealth, tactics and knowledge of computers and technology. In summary a Shadow Sword is the ultimate weapon, but always for a price. And most often a steep one.
Rhaine took his clothes to the bathroom attacked to his room, laid them somewhat neatly on a shelf under the window and turned to the shower. He turned the power on to the control panel and the holographic cubes jumped to life. He entered a few commands and the computer read them back to him to confirm that the commands were correct.
“Shower, medium pressure stream, thirty-five degrees Celsius, is this correct?”
Rhaine pressed the cube for yes and let the shower turn on before he stepped in. The warm water ran over his still aching muscles and he closed his eyes, breathed deeply and slowly, and tried his best to relax. Final exams were approaching and the training was beginning to take a toll on even him. Now on top of it there comes the matter of his dream that evening. Rhaine wasn’t one to put much stock in dreams, but this one felt so real. His mother’s race, the Deva’s, a free willed cousin to the Angels, had a knack for premonitions and psycho-sensitive dreams, but could really have had a vision. He should have had earlier visions as a child if it was one of his abilities. Although energy sensitive, telekinetic, and telepathic, Rhaine had never shown and signs of being able to receive visions of any kind.
Shaking it off he finished showering and stepped out to dry off. Rhaine wrapped the towel around his waist while he prepped himself for the day. He glanced wryly at the comb on the side of the sink, a tool he had not used for some time. His medium weight black hair was cut to a short length so that it fell back in it’s natural place but was also long enough to be managed if needed. Mostly he just let it fall back into it’s natural middle part. He smiled at his reflection in the mirror, no facial hair would he ever see on this face. Much like an elf Rhaine was blessed with no bodily hair of any kind, other than his head hair and his eyebrows. He once tried to imagine what it would be like to be human and have to shave nearly every day, but that thought didn’t last very long. Being a half-Deva, half-Demon had it’s perks, but it also came with it’s curses.
Rhaine was looked down upon by many of the members of the city when he was younger. They feared him and felt that all he would bring to them was destruction and pain. No matter how many helpful or generous actions he took, they always shunned him. He remembered vividly the day that all of that changed.
A drifter Demon had wandered into town and was causing some small time trouble at a southern district tavern. Rhaine had been there enjoying a small and pleasurable chocolate milk. The Demon wasted no time in racking up a large bill by drinking nearly four bottles of Drow Crimson whiskey. He proceeded to feel up one of the waitresses, the human woman protesting multiple times before slapping him across the face, a mistake even if the Demon was sober. The waitress knew she had erred but it was too late for apologies, the demon was already shifting from his human-esque form to his true shape. Rhaine looked over in fascination at the action, but realized that non of the roughnecks in the tavern were going to scrap with the demon. He figured the drifter must be powerful, but he knew it wasn’t right to let bullies have their way.
“Hey,” Rhaine said, getting the demon’s attention. “Before you rip the good lady limb from limb, could you tell me…how many people have you killed?”
“I’ve destroyed towns and cities for their mistreatment of me,” the drifter growled. “I’ve ripped the limbs from Mythril golems as easy as you pull wings from flies.”
“Oh,” Rhaine’s only reply. He was little more than a young teenager in physical appearance but by this time he had lived nearly 40 years. Cracking his knuckles and his neck he slipped off the stool and walked up to the drifter, right between him and the waitress. The older demon was obviously confused, not only that this youth was doing what he was doing, but he couldn’t sense any fear from Rhaine. Rhaine simply placed a hand on the hardened abs of the demon and concentrated. For a moment all was silent, not even the chirps of the night birds could be heard for a while. In a split second there was a short humming noise and a rush of air that caused a thunder clap. At the end there was an eight inch hole through the drifter’s mid-section and a hole through the wall behind. Rhaine walked away calmly and went back to his milk, the waitress later rewarded the young “teen” with a big kiss on his cheek. The barkeep, less impressed due to the hole in his wall, gave Rhaine another chocolate milk on the house.
Putting on his black canvas pants, tucking the black cotton shirt in, and securing the dark brown double grommet belt. Grabbing the high cut black jacket with gold embroidery on the shoulders and cuffs, he walked down the stairs and headed to the kitchen. The house his mother and he shared wasn’t your average run of the mill house, sure it was powered by Energyst Crystals just like the rest, and it had all of the holographic control pad upgrades. But there was one thing there house had that most others didn’t, it was under constant protection by the spirits of the ancestors on both his mother and his father’s side.
Rhaine’s father had disappeared a long time ago, about the time of Rhaine’s thirteenth birthday. Being just a small child then it was hard to remember what his father was like now. But his mother had never seen her husband’s spirit around the house or property and therefore held strong to the fact that he was alive, somewhere.
Entering the kitchen he found a distant grandmother on his father’s side, a beautiful, yet mature, Demoness was snooping through the cupboards. She hadn’t opened them, but instead was floating about a two feet off the ground, so her short frame was even with the cupboards, and had stuck a good portion of her incorporeal body into them.
“Curious about our groceries, Alphillia,” Rhaine asked, quirking and eyebrow and leaning against the door jam.
“Oh,” the spirit squeaked, surprised she had been caught. “I just want to make sure that your mother is giving you good hearty food, to bolster the Demon strength in you.”
“I can assure you,” Rhaine replied, chuckling a little. “That the food we eat is just fine. I keep my strength…and don’t lose my stomach.” He had added that last remark because of the diet his distant ancestor had once told him of. A Murkaw’s heart, boiled in it’s own blood and fluids. Supposedly it was a favored pre-war meal for the Demon warriors. It was said that this meal would give you certain abilities that the Murkaw possessed like breathing underwater. Most that tried only managed to suck in a gallon of water before their lungs filled and they drowned.
“Hmph,” the elder spirit snorted dejectedly. There was a sudden soft wooshing noise and another spirit appeared. It was a same generation grandmother from his mother’s side.
“Still trying to poison my grandson’s body and soul, Alphillia,” she sneered.
“It’s not poison,” Alphillia retorted. “It’s the truth.”
“The truth,” the ancient Deva chuckled mockingly. “You wouldn’t know truth even if it spread your legs and screwed you!”
“Now listen here you pious twat,” the Demoness roared. “What I did in my lifetime was nothing less than what was expected of a young Demon girl.”
“Right, and I’m not really dead,” the Deva said sarcastically. “And name calling is really only for the living…bitch.”
“Why you..”
The two women lunged at each other and Rhaine put his hand up in the air, the action freezing them in mid lunge.
“Take this somewhere else ladies,” Rhaine said and snapped his fingers, forcing the two spirits to obey his wish to leave the house temporarily. It was always like this, at least with the women. They were always at each other’s throats, thinking that each side knew better than the other how to look after and protect the living members of the family. There was another woosh and Rhaine spun around from the cupboards in annoyance, a box of cereal in his hands, thinking it was Alphillia or Mellphina again. To his surprise it was another living member of the family, his father’s sister Lynae. Rhaine put the box down and gave his aunt a hug.
“Where have you been,” Rhaine asked, sitting at the table with her. “Mother and I have been worried about you.”
“I was following a lead I got on D’Jailo’s whereabouts, but nothing turned up,” she replied smiling at her nephew. “Sorry I left so suddenly, it was a spur of the moment thing.”
“I understand. What was this lead,” Rhaine questioned further.
“Well, an old contact of mine told me of a place he thought he had seen the briefest glimpse of your father,” Lynae answered, at the same time she was telekinetically making a cup of coffee. “It turns out, this contact, was on a planet doing a survey check to see if it was suitable for another Republic research facility. The planet was one that belonged to the Demons centuries ago.”
“Oh,” Rhaine pressed with a curious tone.
“Yes,” his aunt continued. “The planet was one of our stronghold planets during the Rift War. All of our leaders are buried there. At the end of the war we destroyed the surface of the planet and poisoned the air, to make sure no one ever got a hold of our leaders or our records from that time. But the poison didn’t last forever, as I knew it wouldn’t.”
“So you think my father was there to secure those secrets, or make sure they weren’t discovered,” Rhaine speculated, accepting one of the coffee’s that floated over to them.
“Possibly,” Linae said. “But really, I think, if he was there, he was there to confirm that something, rather someone was still buried there.”
Rhaine quirked an eyebrow at the statement.
“Our last so called king during the Rift War was a tyrant, not that we were any better at the time, but he took the cake,” Linae went on. “He was cruel to even his own people. That is why when D’Jailo fell in love with your mother and the Demon armies began to divide I went with my brother and helped in a ceremony to separate our leader’s soul from his body. His body was buried, deeper than the others and the soul was imprisoned in a sphere of obsidian and cast into the Nether Rift.”
“Sounds scary,” Rhaine said, sipping at the hot coffee.
“True it was,” his aunt said with a nod. “At first there were demon hunting parties that came after the deserters. D’Jailo and I were almost caught by one, but your mother showed up in the nick of time to help us beat them off.”
Linae looked at the clock on the wall above the refrigerator, 7:32 AM.
“Well I should get some rest and you should get to school,” she said downing the scalding liquid in one gulp and levitating the mug to the sink as she left the kitchen. Rhaine looked down pathetically at his half finished coffee and followed suit of his aunt, wincing a bit as the coffee burned it’s way down his throat.
Grabbing up his generic broadsword from the weapon rack near the door he strode out the front door of the mansion into the bright summer morning. His great-great-grandmothers were still fighting furiously. He shrugged it off knowing they couldn’t kill each other.
“You’re good little family is making the boy soft!”
“While your family continues to attempt corruption of his mind.”
“Violence is not corrupt, it is a way of life for our people!”
“It is…”
Rhaine hurried down the driveway to escape the noise of his ancestors brawl. Another glorious day was about to begin.

™

“Ladies and gentlemen of the joint scientific council,” Dr. Maximillion Faust said in his biggest and proudest voice he could muster. “Two thousand years of technological and mechanical science have finally produced results for a future without limits.”
Faust gestured to his assistants behind him. The assistants brought forward a small containment case and handed it to Faust. He motioned his volunteer to step forward, a woman whose left arm had been amputated from the elbow down.
He looked around the large, steel blue circular room at the delegates and council members that had assembled to see and hear his work. His amber eyes scanned nervously the faces of the scientists from all the races of the Republic. The room was divided into appropriate sections. Space technology was sitting in one section, indicated by the dark blue light strip on the lower wall just under the front row, environmental sciences was sitting next to them indicated by a green light, and always present was the military scientists indicated by a red light strip.
“As you can see this woman is missing her arm below the elbow, testament to our still limited medical advancement. She lost the arm because we were not able to save the damaged nerves and tissues when her unfortunate accident happened. But today I will give her back her arm, not a prosthesis but an actual arm.”
Dr. Faust opened the box and set it on the table, pressing a few command keys on his personal work pad he activated the holographic imager which gave a magnified hologram of his subject. He then put up another hologram of the sequences on his work pad. Entering one final command he dipped a syringe into the case, filled it, and injected it into the woman’s intact arm.
“I give you the foremost in nano-technology,” Faust said. “My nano-bots read the and collect the data from the intact limb and then spread to their target and replicate what is needed. Bone, muscle, nerves, and skin. Everything is perfectly restored. This same technology can even be applied to those that have no limbs, by drawing the limbs in a computer program the nano-bots will create the limb from the program. Also the robots will rebuild in organic matter, houses, business buildings, roads. All can be repaired and maintained with these nano machines.”
The room filled with riotous applause and cheer from the council members. Two hundred of the greatest scientific minds in the universe approved of his work. This was a dream come true for the young human. The woman hugged Faust and kissed him on the cheek.
“Now,” Dr. Faust asked. “Does any one have any questions?”
“What is the limit to the nano-bots regenerative abilities,” one military scientist asked.
“If you’re asking if it can regenerate a dead body,” Faust replied. “No. It is theoretical that if enough nano-bots were injected into a corpse it would reanimate, but it would require an external driver to operate it.”
“Can they destroy as well as create,” an environmentalist asked.
“Unfortunately yes,” Faust answered. “They have the ability to destroy as well as create.”
A brief mummer rippled through the council chambers, and for that moment Maximillion’s stomach tied itself in so many knots he thought he may lose his lunch. This is what you get when you tell the truth, he thought. One small condition and they freak out, as if it were the end of the world.
“Doctor Faust,” the council leader said. “Would you be willing to turn your discovery over to the council so that tests may be run to determine it’s safety value?”
“I must object and decline,” Faust replied. “I came here to show the council that I have already made it as safe as it can possibly be.”
“But creating a micro-organism that can destroy metals and tissues just as easily as it creates it, it leaves too many variables un accounted for,” the council leader argued.
“I have said no,” Faust reiterated. “If the council cannot accept that, then I will leave and take my work with me.”
Without a moments hesitation Faust closed the containment case and snapped his fingers, his assistants and his subject followed him out of the circular room and were gone.