The Justiceers - Part Two: Chapter One
the next chapter in my forthcoming novel
The Justiceers
by Daphne Garrido
Part Two - Wave of Mutilation
2.1
Persephone Station; long-thought abandoned Iathium dig site, hidden deep in the gloom of Grammaton’s dark side, would fail to appear in its data. Mapwork and comm-logs acknowledging its existence had been strategically eliminated from the phasenet Periphery-wide.
Carrigan Marks had owned this place for dozens of cycles.
This whole planet was his and not a soul was aware. Working from his home of shadow, herding the masses like livestock, he’d taken whatever he wanted from Grammaton and its citizens.
He was no longer just a man — Carrigan become the devil.
The evil he wielded was from a source of most egomaniacal intention, thriving in darkness by ways which exploited the masses propensity to be hypnotized by the light, freely creating cruelty which matched his own in the shadow.
His strength was that of self-immolation. Offering his heart to flame, he’d bought practical abundance which would never feel enough. The heart of this man was ever lost to seeking, an insatiable need so thrust upon him by evil itself that had consumed all he once was.
Ash Ūnderlìk had been under Carrigan’s thumb for years. They weren’t much of thinker, but they were easy to control, believing themself infallible, often confusing others with a well-worn mask of false grandeur they’d built upon unwillingness for honest self-reflection.
These were the kinds of fools this devil would make their prey.
Around Carrigan, they were putty.
Every one of these conscripts had been unknowingly gifted integration with his technology. It would twist the will of person. Through the bestowed means of this dastardly psychological weapon, along with honed skills of manipulation, and the help of a most powerful ally, Carrigan controlled every move these people made, twisting them into empty vessels of his own design.
His intent for control was holistic, taking conscripts their bunks at night, pervading so in their dreamscapes. Yet, in physical presence of his commanding omniscience, they’d cease to be people at all, becoming tools of purest obedience.
He liked it best that way.
An enormous chamber lie at the farthest depths Persephone Station, embedded within the crust of Grammaton. Its centerpiece an upright ring of carboned-locked polymer composite four times the height of a man, that most indestructible material, mounted at its lowest reaches to the center line of an arched bridgeway extending over top a circular precipice.
Grammaton’s shimmering heart-light was beaming from this cavernous borehole at the center of the room, intermingling with netted technologies fit along the outermost edges of this upright ring’s structure, empowering the device itself; a portal.
Ash stepped forward from beside their master. No other in this place, except they alone, would move a muscle for those next few moments.
Carrigan had built towards this for so long, countless souls having died at his directives to make it possible. Nothing would be the same. Not only for Carrigan and his company of brainwashed simpletons, nor upon the planet of Grammaton alone, he was about to transform the galaxy itself.
Ash was stabilizing in the observation chamber.
They’d made it through without disintegrating, so that’d been excellent news. Carrigan couldn’t care less that this shell of a person had survived. It only meant they were getting closer. They might even be the one.
Doctors were looking over their body, Carrigan himself on the far side of the station, ensuring if another disaster were to befall them he’d be nowhere near it. The first few people he’d sent through had been vaporized instantaneously.
The next couple actually made it, but one of them exploded in a storm of outward flowing electrical current which killed five alongside her, the other had done just the opposite, and imploded. That pathetic twat was just a pea-sized black ball of condensed matter resting in a jar upon the desk before him.
Part of him worried it had been a mistake to keep it there, enjoying the sight with such twisted glee, unknowing if more unexpected changes were yet to come. Regardless, it was a keepsake he’d felt oddly compelled to hold close.
After those initial failures he’d gone back to the drawing board with the help of his most industrious ally, retooling and refitting the portal to try again, never looking back. Since that time there had been failure after failure. More than three-hundred people had walked through Carrigan’s gate now, every one of them turning to dust.
It was Ash, ironically, who’d been the one to finally make it through.
Carrigan had thought then; if they didn’t survive this, he’d kill them.
This was not a part of his process that Carrigan enjoyed, but it had to be done.
Within his bed-chamber was a small pool, built into the ground at the farthest corner of the space, saturating the room with its constantly gentle burbling and wafts of effervescent vapor, speaking an ominous warning to those in the know.
Carrigan had stripped himself bare, those longest hairs from his head dangling about his shoulders, and stepped down into the water.
This was a life bath.
Though appearing and thriving in such vital youth, by the estimations of time, Carrigan was nearly three-hundred cycles old. Far beyond lifespan-limits so recommended by spiritual advisors within The Periphery, supported by this technological ritual which made it possible, he’d not care one bit.
Souls were not meant to live on this plane for such lengths , it was a greatest burden, most often severing one’s connection to heart and soul for petty extensions of physicality. No man had ever lived this long.
There were monotheistic monks and members of The Justiceer Conclave who lived twice the length a normal human lifespans. Yet, so overseen that would be, such a rite of honor and courage to undertake, a sacrifice for the benefit of discovering newfound wisdoms of the universe.
Here, in this room, it was an act of blatant sorcery.
Carrigan allowed himself to sink neck-deep, arms floating beside, feeling those strangest tingling sensations across his body.
Inside its liquid were colors of strangest variety, muted by darkness, swirling with its spinning current — blood red to mingle with gold of brightest sun, indigo in such harmony with stokes of emerald, viscous violet veins of submerged lighting so striking throughout.
He’d taken a deepest breath, losing himself in the psychic pain wrought from these wicked energies he harnessed, letting go of his anxieties surrounding the successful construction of his portal, and Carrigan submerged himself entirely.
Ash was screaming, rightfully.
Their arm had fallen off like a mis-sewn doll, their hair fibers were spontaneously combusting into flame, and their guts seemed to be crawling inside them like larva. Carrigan could have reached inside, through devious micro-particles injected into the blood streams of his conscripts, now embedded within their brain stem, and simply turned the pain off.
He couldn’t care less about Ash’s torment.
The sound of their cries was only a lesson to his mind, unfeeling the brutality he inflicted, focused only on the science. Mistakes would be teachers, the truth of that suffering they wrought would only be known in his deepest unseen places. There was a layer of shame held so incredibly obscured, an unacceptable notion to a man of such ego, he was entirely unaware of its existence within him.
Since Ash hadn’t exploded in the last hours, Carrigan getting that chance to rejuvenate, he’d come to the observation room and was now overlooking their ongoing examination by half a dozen of his most expendable scientists.
Carrigan was not a man of knowledge. He was a manipulator. He’d taken the graces of others and twisted them to his own purposes. When he’d been known as alive to the world, a most prominently shrewd and renown businessman, he’d taken credit and reward for every work produced by his colleagues. The only gift he had was an insatiable lust for power.
Those he’d work with would became intoxicated by it, drawn like moths to flame, mistaking his wielding of darkest source for some profound knowing of truth. His false-abundance was a clarion call to the lost.
Carrigan Marks had been stealing souls long before he’d done it such literal ways.
The Arbor Room Carrigan’s most sacred place, his church. This unholy chamber — a perfectly shaped dome, its smoothest curved ceiling of engineered perfection, that soft azure luminance pervading from a seemingly unknowable source — no one stepped inside it but him.
It was Carrigan’s alone, that place he would make his plans and find insight. That darkest source feeding off him was not conversational. It left him entirely to the devices of his demeanor so broken by its dismantling of his heart. He’d made every step forward blindly, always, acting upon hatred borne from this darkest place beyond which had become him.
So lost was his own mind to the constant pain he found himself operating within. When knowledge was needed he couldn’t tear from the minds of his subordinates, this was where he’d come.
Walking towards and then beneath the centerpiece of this chamber — its lone structure, the Arbor itself — Carrigan was bathing in its scarlet down pouring of light. There would always be a moment here, were he’d wonder if they’d show.
Carrigan couldn’t help but project his own anxieties into anticipations of other beings, unable to see beyond himself, no empathy for other modes of existence. This alone defined his root psychosis.
Its voice came through then, as puzzlingly opaque in emotion as always.
“Hello Belial.”
