01 – The Lightsbane

Deep in the uncharted reaches of the Forest of Perpetual Dusk, there once was a tower. Nobody knew what it was, or how long it had been there: some even went as far as say that the tower had always been there, from the dawn of the world itself. It was known to the explorers and the adventurers of the time that the tower was an impenetrable fortress, in fact the tower seemed to be the main element of a great deal of stories: tales of darkness and terror, told around fires at night to scare off gullible children. Nobody, this was the constant in all these tales, had ever come back alive from the tower.

These tales, however, were not ordinary tales. These, everybody who lived at the outskirts of the Forest of Perpetual Dusk knew, were true stories. There was nothing to joke about Lightsbane, this was the name of the tower in these tales and stories, for it was said that its influence extended well beyond the forest, into the city itself.

Time passed. The tower remained. Impregnable, unknowable.

The city crumbled to dust, its mighty walls sanded down by the implacable winds of time, reduced to nothing more than a fading memory in some dusty old book somewhere in a moldy dungeon. With time, even that book was bound to disappear, and with it, the memory of the frightful tower.

For ages the tower remained undisturbed.

Until…

***

Edmund Hume woke up with a start. He felt like his whole body was trembling, his muscles bulging with fresh blood being pumped by a madly beating heart, eyes focused and mind sharpened by an ungodly amount of adrenaline being released into his system. He was in a fight or flight mode, he knew, and even before asking himself why he was in such a state, he pushed himself up from the floor, and inspected the room.

He was in the control room at the top of the Fischerbach Pylon, in the heart of the Black Forest in Germany that now, unknown to him, was know to everybody else as the Forest of Perpetua Dusk. He remembered coming here to check the reason behind some unusual values being reported by the internal sensors, nothing to worry about but worth checking before they could turn into something particularly annoying to fix in the future. The last thing he remembered was being offered a coffee and a report by one of the engineers, containing the information he needed about the issues the Pylon was experiencing. Of what happened afterwards, he had no recollection.

The room was dead silent. The consoles were dark, and a dim light was filtering in through the stained glass windows from a setting sun, bathing the silver metallic surfaces in a deep orange. He could hear his own heartbeat, for there were no sounds coming from the other rooms in the back either, leaving him suddenly aware of his ragged breath, and the blood rushing through his veins.

His eyes were attracted by the fallen over mug of coffee and small tablet on the ground. Very odd, he thought distractedly: there was a dark stain on the floor close to the mug, but it was completely dry and flaked. It was definitely coffee, or had been coffee long ago, but so much time seemed to have passed that the remaining substance staining the steel floor wasn’t even sticky anymore. Close to it, the cracked tablet was dead, like all the other electronics. There was a small note on it that read: Sensor 2B reports Containment Field crack - need to check with Dr. Tormunds ASAP.

However, this was but an afterthought, because it was right at this moment that Edmund realized the actual source of his panicked state.

He felt the second rush of adrenaline through his body. While the first time it felt like being injected with a full dose all at once, this time it hit him like a mounting wave, steadily increasing in a crescendo as his conscious mind was becoming fully aware that something was very, very wrong. And at the climax of it all, it finally occurred to him.

“I… I can’t feel it. The Hume field, it’s gone!”

His words echoed in the empty room. For a moment Edmund was still as a statue, while his mind was racing madly in an effort to formulate hypothesis, plans, explanations, courses of actions. Then he sprung like a coiled spring towards the closest console, and his fingers begun to madly tap at the unresponsive glass.

Nothing. He felt his vision swim, sweat was pooling on his forehead and dripping down from his nose. He was hot, and uncomfortable, and while once upon a time he would have been able to just wave it all away and make the discomfort end, this time he waved and nothing happened, another reminder that what he was experiencing was not a figment of his own imagination but the actual reality of the situation.

He turned around, staring at the door with wide eyes. His breath came in short, ragged breaths. He swallowed, hoping to relieve some of the pressure that had built up inside his body, but only found that his throat was completely dry and constricted into a knot. One after the other, he took unsteady steps towards the door. When he pushed the button, it didn’t open, and it took him all that he had to push down a third wave of panic he felt was rising from within.

“Okay,” he let himself slide down to the ground, resting his back against the cold metal of the door. “Deep breaths.” He closed his eyes. “There is no immediate danger. Everything will be okay.”

He felt his breath slow down ever so slightly. His heart was still beating like a crazed animal, but it was no longer hurting him with how fast it was beating. The sweat of his face felt cold, colder still when, with every movement of his head, the still air of the room was disturbed and started swirling around him. Sitting perfectly still, he focused inward and tried to reason himself out of the panicked state.

“Edmund, now calm the fuck down.” He told himself. “Every problem has a solution.”

He exhaled. Somehow, he felt much better. He was still feeling like a wretch, but nowhere as bad as a few minutes earlier. He was weak, powerless, confused and in pain, but he was thinking somewhat straight now.

Let’s take note of the situation. My connection to the Hume Field Network is still active, but I am receiving nothing. This means that, by all means and purposes, I am back to being a normal human. I need to be careful. Shit… this sucks big time.

Focus Edmund, focus. It’s not the end of the world. I am still alive, and as long as I live, I can recover. I used to be a normal human once upon a time, after all. Let’s use this opportunity to reconnect with my humble beginnings. Yeah, good idea. Let’s do that.

Now. Active Network but no Hume Field. All electronics are dead. This means that there’s no power, and with no power the Pylon cannot draw more Hume Energy from the void to power itself. I need to go down to the machines room, and see if the whole thing is still intact, and if it is, if I can kickstart it.

Good. A plan. I like plans.

First step: open the damn door.

Opening the door was easier in his mind than in practice. To aggravate the situation further, the sun had by now completely set, and the glass of the window was stuck to its day setting, which filtered out most of the very little light coming from the outside. There probably was a flashlight in the room, but it was pointless to even bother to look for it, given that it would probably be dead like everything else.

Luckily, Edmund knew this place like the palm of his hand. He recalled that there was a small toolbox under the console by the rightmost wall, in case they needed to do some small repairs and didn’t want to bother going all the way down to the machines room. Feeling the place with his hands, he opened the small hatch and pulled it out.

He smiled. There was a big and solid wrench sticking out of the toolbox, too big to really fit inside of it. It was interesting, he thought as he pulled it out and approached the door, how the tool he least expected to use in this room, a wrench, was exactly the only one out of the whole toolbox that was going to actually going to see some action. Yes, because all the other tools had been summarily ignored all the time they had been there, on account of Edmund just waving his hand and fixing anything that was broken with his Reality Bending rather than bothering with the tools, and the engineers growing so lazy as to actually call him to fix their problems from afar even when he was away. Which, funnily enough, he always did, because he had a soft spot for the team who one way or another had helped him put together the very first Pylon he ever built.

As the fond memory faded, Edmund put the thin end of the wrench in the small fissure where the sliding door met the floor and yanked hard. It didn’t budge, except for a muted creaking noise coming from somewhere within the hidden mechanisms. This was another one of a long series of problems, he realized with a sigh, born of his own laziness.

He didn’t know whether to curse or to laugh, to be honest. He had just handwaved this door into existence one day when he had decided to redo the internal layout of the Pylon, and at the time he hadn’t paid any mind to the inner workings of the mechanisms, letting the Bending part of his Reality Bending figure out exactly how to make it all work. Now it came back to bite him in the ass. He chuckled.

I’m hungry, though. With a frown, he acknowledged the long forgotten sensation coming from his stomach. It had been a long while since he had last felt hunger, and he wasn’t fond of it in the slightest. For now, he decided not to dwell on it. Doing so would mean acknowledging the fact that he had been lying on that floor for who knows how long, certainly long enough for his coffee to turn into a stain and nothing more, with no food or water, and no supernatural powers to keep him alive either. Not good food for thought, so to speak.

Instead, he refocused on the matter at hand, and pulled even harder on the wrench while also making use of one of the chairs for leverage. Eventually the door slowly slid upwards, groaning as if in pain, until there was a gap barely narrow enough for him to crawl under. He put the wrench between the door, which was still trying to close itself shut, and the floor. Looking through it, he saw only darkness.

For some reason, he thought as he shook his eyes away from the ominously dark corridor, he was acutely aware that this door had enough power to bisect him should the wrench fail to keep it from closing. He eyed it warily and breathed out slowly. This wasn’t easy. He felt like procrastinating, but hunger and discomfort got the best of him. He didn’t want to feel like this for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. He angled himself and shot through the narrow gap with a strong push of his legs that sent the desk flying backwards in the control room towards a console.

Behind him, the wrench was firmly stuck in place by the pressure. A small, wicked part of his mind just wanted to poke it, to see how much strain was being put on it and wanted to check if maybe just a small push was enough to dislodge it. What if it was? Then he really had risked his life going through that gap.

He resisted the urge. Back then, he wouldn’t have, but now he found himself in a position where he had to. The last thing he needed was the door suddenly shutting itself close, cutting the control room off from him potentially forever, and maybe even taking a finger or two in the process.

To his surprise, he realized that resisting these urges was much more difficult than he thought. He just wasn’t used to it. Back then, he could just do whatever, and wave a hand and fix all his mistakes…

Focus.

The corridor was pitch black. Once again, he had to use his memory to navigate it.