18th Day of Fall, 514AV
The Military Complex
Just after dawn
The Military Complex
Just after dawn
He had never been so long without the green. Taloba was a city, true, but it was one always amalgamated with wood and vine and leaf and water. To a bird flying over, only the tall, thick walls that ringed the city would bear any proof that it was, indeed, a location designed for habitation. The myriad of rivers and ponds and copses scattered around it would suggest otherwise. Myrians were never far from the jungle; even the towering ziggurat of The Palace was hemmed in by trees.
Now Tarukko was cut off from that. Bare stone, slick with condensation and dry with decades of dust, was his whole world now. For one so attuned and accustomed to the raucous freedom of Falyndar, it was... almost painful.
But the grinding, ceaseless solitude was far worse.
The male had paced out his cell (sixteen paces long, five paces wide). He'd counted the bricks in the walls (seventy-two large blocks, one hundred and forty-seven smaller ones). He'd measured the tiny slit of a window that looked out over the Training Yards below (roughly eight feet off the ground, one foot wide, half-a-foot tall, three steel bars inside it).
He'd exercised until he collapsed. Pushups and situps, on and off his bare cot; awkward pull ups hanging from the tiny bars; punching and kicking and lashing out at invisible foes until he threw streams of sweat with every blow. He'd strained and pushed himself until his limbs were lead and he'd purged himself into the bucket that served as his toilet.
He'd prayed. Silently and out loud. Sometimes requests for mercy; other times, in the later days, for justice. Whatever that may be.
Eight days, by his reckoning. Syna and Leth had shone through the bars eight times. His meals had been pushed through a hinged slot at the bottom of the door sixteen times. But no-one had come to see him. Not kin, not Army, not Council peons nor priests.
He had been thrown into his cage like the mad dog he was, and left until his travesty was worthy of attention. Until then, he was forgotten.
Now the male sat crosslegged on the floor, watching his hands pulse and shift with the power he projected through them. Dark, tapered fingers morphed and relaxed into the claws of a jaguar, the scaly feet of reptiles, even the feathered legs of birds until-
He winced and clenched his hands as the backlash of his wyrd pounded through his veins. Muscles cramped from fingers to shoulder as his limits imposed themselves. He screwed his eyes shut and bit down on the pain, letting time pass until he could breathe normally.
Time. He seemed to have much of that, now. But all of it stretched out in a dark line of a future that ended only in disgrace, and probably death. None of it could be spared to go back, to reverse that bare handful of furious seconds...
Taruko took his head in his hands and when he closed his eyes again, Enak was there. That proud face would never let him sleep sound again, he was sure. He saw the sneer that pushed him too far; heard the words that gouged him and tore away years of self-control.
Then the blur of his hand, lashing out and tipped with blackened claws, so much like his namesake that the shame crushed him into himself and the floor like a weight on his shoulders.
Enak's eyes, popped open and disbelieving, choked with shock and terror. His hand flying to a throat already a red, gushing ruin. Tottering, tumbling, collapsing down and Tarukko standing there, righteous rage flaring bright as a nova for two selfish ticks... and then blown away with the enormity of what he'd done.
Myrians do not kill Myrians. Their oldest law. Their Goddess-Queen's most sacred command. The barbarian races had never grasped the psychology of the Children of Myri. They saw them all as primitive, cannibalistic, warmongering monsters, bereft of sophistication and intellect. But they were a race, a people, bound by Myri and loyal unto death and beyond it to her commands. They loved her as sons and daughters did their mother, and she returned their love.
Betrayer. Murderer. Traitor. Animal.
Barbarian.
Footsteps beyond the reinforced door. Sandals. Military-issue. Marching in lockstep down the row of cells, no words spoken... at least half-a-dozen. Morphers were always treated with caution, of course. Bad enough dealing with one trained to fight since they cold walk, let alone one who could shift into something with claws or fangs or scaly armor to boot.
Tarukko raised his head and listened closer. The clank of chains. Manacles. Shackles. Fitting adornments for an animal.
That is what you are now. What you chose to become in your anger.
"Blessed Myri," he whispered into his cupped hands, the footsteps drawing closer, "Forgive..."
The words halted. Would she? Could she? And if not, would his last words in her name be in futile desperation?
He sighed again, shoulders slumped, as a key slid into the lock.
"Watch over my kin. My sisters. My brother. My parents. And the kin of... of the one I took from thee." He let a trickle of djed course into his index finger and a claw grew from the nail. Face as stoic as he could manage, he cut into his palm and wiped it from the top of his head to his chin. "By blood, I beg this of thee. For my own life... is no longer mine to control... nor worthy of your favor..."
The door opened, and his hands flew up to guard against the tepid light that was still blinding to him. Shadowy figures like Dira's messengers themselves waited for him.
"Time to face Judgement, skurak."
