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A Chronicle of Lies - Chapter 16
🕑 Added 2024-04-08 02:53:06 +0000 UTCIt was a strange thing to awaken in the middle of The Fractured Meadows, surrounded by bipedal dragonoids getting ready for the day ahead. He could already feel a migraine forming at the sight. A low-hanging fog slowly poured over the jagged geometry of the meadows and curled along the Misan Strait.
The silence persisted. There were still no voices to greet him, not even a faint whisper, other than those uttered by Vincent’s inhuman companions. Without his schizophrenia, he felt oddly alone and abandoned. But that feeling was a fleeting sentiment, as the presence of the relos seemed to be another form of madness.
He watched silently as they stoked the fire, reviving it from the coals left over from the night before. Yesterday, he had no trouble speaking to them but now, he dodged their questions and deflected inquiries. Perhaps it was because he had once more expected to wake up on Earth instead of this surreal nightmare. Or perhaps it was because he shat all over their beliefs the night before and felt a bit guilty. Either way, he said little. They spoke of events beyond his understanding, referenced names and places that had no meaning to him.
It was all too alien and yet too familiar, trapping his brain in a perpetual state of explosion. These things could not be real, yet like Xalix and his children, they stood right in front of him. He could see the creases in their skin, subtle nuances of their body language. The more he watched, the more he recognized the expressions that crossed their faces, they were almost human.
When they were ready to go, he climbed up onto Tuls’ mount and then they were off. As the sun rose, the fog fled from its light. Vincent looked around at the broken land around him. Sharp pinnacles upheaved from the soil and isolated plateaus harbored isolated iridescent fields.
There were small canyons spreading left and right, carving their own paths through soil and stone. Vegetation grew between these crevices, as if the land were trying to cover up its scars. It was an illusion made more vivid by the red flowers which seemed to favor the dark shadows cast by the crevices. The Fractured Meadows were bleeding. This was all a dream.
As they neared the mountains, they turned away from the river and headed toward a pass in the distance. It was one thing to view these monoliths from Lorix’s Observatory, but now that he was within a mile of them, Vincent could truly appreciate their beauty. They were less like mountains and more like colossal chunks of obsidian which had thrust their way through the crust.
Centuries of dirt and dust had been deposited in the pockets and fractures of the mountains’ stone, patches from which small trees and shrubs grew. They were small specks of green against a canopy of black glass. As The Fractured Meadows disappeared behind them, sheer walls of obsidian rose on both sides as the trail carved its way through the mountain. A subtle warmth radiated from their blackened stone. The escort's fractured reflections hopped from one facet to another as they navigated through windy passages.
“Hold!” Clayde brought his mount to a stop. Ro’ken’s and Tuls’ mounts followed suit. There was a closed wooden gate blocking the path. Two signs with Falian writing hung from the middle of it. “Malogers and Crawlers,” he read. “Dammit...
“Infestation?” Tuls asked.
“Infestation,” Clayde repeated, “this is supposed to be Trenton’s thread. He will owe us for doing his work.”
“We don’t have time!” Ro’ken said, shooting a sideways glare at Vincent.
“We have time, open the path for us,” Clayde said. Ro’ken chuffed, slid off his mount and moved the sign out of the way. As Tuls brought his mount forward, Clayde addressed Vincent. “Outsider,” he said, “We are about to cross a thread.”
“Okay...” Vincent said, trying to imagine what stitching capable of holding continents together would look like. It was preposterous, yet he could not deny that he was eager to lay his eyes on it.
“Will we need to protect our eyes?” Tuls asked.
“We shouldn’t have to,” Ro’ken answered as he climbed back up onto his mount. “Trenton seeds the threads often.”
“Why would we need eye protection?” Vincent asked. He also wondered what Ro’ken meant by seeding the thread.
“The threads have their own gravity, remember?” Tuls said, “the reason we wear protection for our eyes is because of the dust. The canyons are windy. When the wind is caught in the thread’s gravity, it picks up dirt and dust and blows it around. Instead of blowing off like it should, it just orbits.” He traced a circle in the air with his wing.
“Those signs back there,” he gestured, “were left by a scout. They warned that this thread was closed due to malogers and threadcrawlers. It is our job to regulate them.”
Artificial gravity was the stuff of science fiction. But then again, Vincent supposed in this world, anything could be possible. Falius took the rules of logic and threw them right out the window. So instead of thinking about the preposterous notion of artificial gravity, he wondered what malogers and threadcrawlers were. He was about to ask such when they took a wide turn. He forgot the question when he saw what rose from the ground in front of him.
Up ahead, the obsidian walls of the mountain continued to flank the trail. However, jutting from the ground was an odd structure. A stone cylindrical construct seemed to have burst forth from the soil millennia ago, rising into the distance, arcing away from them. Its material was light gray and it was devoid of erosion or cracks.
“That’s the thread,” Tuls said, pointing ahead. “You can’t tell now, because most of this section is buried in the stone, but its sides are round...like a thread’s. You will see when we enter the canyon.”
The angle the construct made with the ground was steep, forty-five degrees at least. There were no stones for the landriders to climb, no footholds for them to secure. If they tried to climb it, they would just slide right back down, which was why Vincent’s brain did a somersault when Clayde’s mount ran toward it and leapt up onto the slope. It ascended the incline of the construct without much effort and stopped. Vincent expected it to slide back down, but it stayed there, its posture perpendicular to the slope in defiance of gravity.
“That fool!” Clayde grumbled, “Trenton said he would have this paved. The landing is rough, be careful.”
Ro’ken moved his mount forward until the last few yards, then it charged the incline and leapt up to it. Like Clayde’s mount, it appeared to defy gravity, “sticking” to the slope. It was Tuls’ turn.
“Vincent,” he said, “I will lean back as we approach the thread. Put your hands on my kalcs and brace yourself.”
“Put my hands on your 'what'?”
“My kalcs! Here...” Tuls pointed over his shoulder. “Where my wings join with my back.”
“Uh...right. Well, I can’t move close enough because your...your tail is in the way.”
“Just sit on it,” Tuls said with a little impatience to his normally cheerful voice.
“Uh...how about no? That’s too weird. Just go ahead, I’ll hold on tight.” Vincent gripped the cord.
“Hey!” Clayde hollered at him “Hold onto Tuls or you will fall into his back. This is a rough landing.”
“Fine. But I’m not sitting on your damn tail...”
He reached forward and placed his hands at the base of Tuls’ wings. He was thankful they were covered in short leather sleeves, but he shuddered when he felt the limbs move beneath them.
This is weird as hell, he thought.
“Now...when I lean back,” Tuls said, “you lean back as well. When we enter the thread’s gravity, it will feel as if we are running down toward it.
“Right.”
Tuls moved his mount toward the construct and began to lean back. Vincent followed his lead. From one blink of an eye to another, gravity seemed to shift. He was now looking “down” at the structure. They trotted toward the incline and leapt onto it. Vincent jerked forward with the impact, almost slamming his head into the creature's back. Now he understood why Clayde wanted him to brace himself. He let go of Tuls’ “kalcs” and looked around.
Every living creature knew which way was “up” and which way was “down” because it could feel the effects of gravity on its body. However, when Vincent entered the thread’s gravity, everything changed. Though he knew he was on a slope, it felt like level ground. Instead, the trail behind them now, the one they entered from, appeared to be the incline. The shift was so jarring and it made him dizzy.
The passage widened as they approached the opening into the interstice. Vincent could hear wind blowing and he could feel a damp breeze waft against his skin, carrying with it the smell of wet stone. When they passed into the interstice, he felt as if he had been transported into another realm where the laws of physics ceased to follow tradition.
The interstice was a gargantuan canyon whose depth and majesty more than rivaled the Grand Canyon. Arcing over the canyon to his left and right, were more of the alien constructs, the “threads”. Their gray shafts spanned the chasm at regular intervals in both directions, weaving in and out of the cliffs. Just as Tuls said, their sides were round, curving before dropping off, forming a radius that followed the structure all the way around.
It really was as if they were walking on massive stitching, used by some giant to hold the land together, with nothing to keep travelers from sliding off if they traveled too far to either side. Wind-beaten swirls marked the dirt on the thread’s surface and revealed the stone underneath. Vincent looked closely at the material, which hinted at translucence, but it was far too thick to see through. Small trees and shrubs radiated outward wherever dirt allowed them to grow.
Birds traversed the threads in irregular flight patterns, orbiting each structure as they hunted for bugs or simply chased each other. The wind whipped at the front of his face before abruptly shifting direction and whipping at his back, as though unsure of what weather pattern to follow. The relos were having some sort of discussion, but Vincent was too enthralled at the sight to catch any of their words.
He thought back to the fire when Clayde was pointing out the Goraia Interstice. “The Patchwork Continent”, the title given to Admoran. Continents sewn together like tapestry, floating on an orb made of water. He reeled with the implications proposed by such a reality.
Ro'ken and Tuls pulled alongside Clayde, who was holding a diagram of some sort in his hands, with a generic sketch of the interstice thread scrawled upon it. After marking the diagram with a piece of charcoal, he rolled it up, put it away, and led his landrider toward the thread’s side. His beast should have slipped off the side of the structure and plummeted to its death, but it didn’t. It clung to the surface, in full defiance of physics. Ro’ken and Tuls followed his example.
“Whoa...wait!” Vincent protested, clinging to Mola's fur and leaning away from the fall, “What the hell are you doing?”
“What?” Tuls asked, “we have to go to the thread’s underside to tackle the crawler nest.”
“You’re going to...” Then he remembered what Tuls said about the thread’s gravity.
“Never in the history of the Landweave has a thread failed to hold its travelers,” Tuls assured him.
As he moved forward, tackling the thread’s circumference at an angle, the world slowly began to pivot around them. The canyon’s plunge rose before to Vincent’s right and the sky fell to his left. The verdure that grew along the thread's length appeared to be growing sideways. It sprouted out from the shallow dirt and reached to the left where sky now was. It was as if the entire world had lost its balance and decided it could no longer tell where the ground was. “Down” was now to Vincent's right while up was parallel to the planet. The sky was to his left. As they orbited to the thread's underbelly, Clayde made things worse by pointing out the Misan waterfall.
It was a gentle cascade that fell “up” towards the canyon with a peaceful drizzle, since it was caught in the planet’s gravity, not the thread’s. A large arch of rock stuck out from the cliff side opposite it. Attached to this protrusion's face were gargantuan barnacles with quartered beaks. Extending from around the beaks were what appeared to be hundreds of orange streamers which twitched like cilia. They floated forth with a buoyancy that allowed them to probe the air. Vincent noticed how a group of small birds maneuvered to avoid them. One, however, flew too close and brushed against one of the streamers.
What happened next almost made Vincent fall from the mount. A tentacle shot forth from the barnacle, snatched the bird, and sucked it back into its beak within seconds. A plume of feathers was all that remained of the bird. He dropped an expletive.
“Malogers,” Tuls said, “they will kill you instantly.”
As the group passed into shadow, the temperature dropped noticeably, lacking the warmth of sunlight. A gust of wind brought the smell of water and sediment. The looming darkness “above”, the canyon, seemed to indicate a bottomless fathom which extended into the center of Falius, where he would fall should the thread's lore fail. Yet Vincent also had the impression that if he traveled too far to the right or left, he could fall into the bottomless sky “below”. His brain hurt.
The landriders trudged in raw dirt, in which very little vegetation grew, being devoid of sunlight. He guessed it was from this dirt that thread dust was created. Where the warped winds had hit it, spiral patterns had been gouged into the soil, with the occasional puddle of rainwater filling in between.
At the apex of the thread, Clayde brought them to a stop and dismounted his landrider. He withdrew a crystal identical to the ones Xalix had used to illuminate his home. This crystal was secured in a series of leather straps so that it could be hung from the user's hand. He used this lantern to inspect something in the dirt, poking at the soil with the claws on his feet. Eventually, he struck some sort of cord that was hidden beneath. Setting the lantern onto the ground, he squatted over and took the cord in his hands. He held it with one hand while using a finger to strike it. The dirt fell off to reveal an elastic substance which resembled the strand of a large spider web.
“If they made it out to here, then this is a large infestation,” Tuls said.
“Nope,” Clayde said, “I believe this was from the last seeding. See, look.” He pulled the strand up and chased its length. The strand pulled with it a network of other hidden bands of elastic strands, many of them were parallel with the one Clayde held.
“Ah, yes...you're right.” Tuls said, frowning.
“This is not Trenton’s work,” Clayde grumbled, “whoever did this did not know how to lead the hive.”
“Uh...” Vincent could not shake the image of colossal spiders scurrying down the thread or leaping out of the dirt, “a ‘hive’, huh?”
“The threadcrawlers,” Ro'ken said, “vermin. This hive burrowed into the cliff ahead of us.”
“See those strands?” Tuls pointed at the cord in the dirt. “They use those to sense prey and come rushing out. But we use this to our advantage. We lure them out and lead them around the thread. They lay down their webs as they give chase. The strands mix with the dirt and reduce thread dust. We ‘seed’ the thread. When we wear them out, we kill them, only leaving behind enough to repopulate their hive.”
“Weaver-fire...this is not competent work,” Clayde said, “they tired the swarm too fast. You have to read the hive, know how to provoke them, to squeeze every ounce of energy from them in order to coat as much of the thread as possible. But...I can see a few fresh trails up ahead. Tuls, time to test your friend’s new conduit. I wish to see this.”
“Vincent,” Tuls said, “I need you to move aside so I can get something from Mola’s flanks.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He realized he had been clasping tightly to the beast’s fur, as if letting go would send him careening into the canyon “above”. He forced himself to let go anyway and got out of the way.
“You said a friend of yours made these for you?” Ro’ken asked. He’d already climbed back onto his mount and pulled it up, watching as Tuls withdrew an ebony bangle and clipped it around his wrist. He reached into the bag and pulled out a glass sphere, dark green in color.
“Aye!” Tuls said, “he is practicing at the alunary in the red district. He is quite talented, he does not get time to test his inventions, so he gave these to me. I have not had a chance to try them...oh!” He seemed quite startled by something.
“Tuls?” Clayde said.
“This,” Tuls laughed, “allows me to ‘see’ the crawlers. So I know it works, but to call this an infestation is a bit of an understatement. There are a few crawlers on the thread at the far end, but I see seventy of them inside the cliff.”
“Seventy?” Ro’ken raised a brow. “Clayde is right. Trenton would never allow a hive to get this bad, even if he planned to seed the entire thread. The bastard’s probably been sniffing flameworms again...”
“Are you able to hit all seventy, Tuls?” Clayde asked.
“We will see...” he said, “the conduit requires imaging.”
“Imaging,” Clayde spat, “I always hated imaging. You almost have to be a damn prodigy to do it. You just want to make both of us look stupid, don’t you?”
“It would be nice not to be the fool for once.”
“Take charge,” Clayde grumbled. “Tell us what to do”
“I doubt I can hit them all,” he said, “but, most of them are in their nest and a few scouts are laying traps. See?”
At first Vincent could not see what Tuls pointed to, but then he noticed something moving along the thread. The creatures resembled oversized slugs with a length of seven feet and a height of two. They were held aloft by ten spindly legs, five on either side. Tuls held the orb in his hands and stared ahead at two holes in the cliffside. Hundreds of cords hung from their openings like the strands of a funnel web. He seemed to be counting something silently.
“Just lead them out,” Tuls said.
Clayde took his mount and headed toward the scouts. The webbing clung to the beast's pads and snapped back into place as she proceeded forward. Tuls tightened his grip on the orb and concentrated.
“Ro’ken,” he said, “you are in the way.”
Ro’ken moved his mount. When Clayde got close enough to the crawlers, they whipped around and skittered toward him with frightening speed, wriggling like leeches. But his mount must have been used to this kind of attack because she casually stomped them under her enormous weight, spraying the thread with yellow-white guts. He brought his mount to a stop and barked a command. She lifted her right paw. The pad was covered in strands. He gave her another command and she gave the paw several light tugs.
“What is he do–” Vincent began, but Tuls raised a wing in a gesture of silence.
Threadcrawlers poured forth from the holes in the cliff face. They raced toward Clayde like ants coming out to repel a threat. There was a loud “pop” and Vincent watched as three small, but jagged shards broke away from the sphere in Tuls’ grip. They rose into the air, where they hovered in defiance of gravity. As they bobbed gracefully in front of his landrider, they began to glow with a minty green light before catching on fire. They sizzled with harsh flames and launched toward the crawlers likes speeding bullet. All three of the projectiles missed their target and hit the ground.
But Tuls already summoned another trio of shards and launched them forth. This time, two of them struck true; the crawlers they pierced ruptured, spewing a fountain of guts and entrails into the air. The third struck the thread and did nothing. Tuls didn’t wait to see the results, as three more stars hurled their way toward the crawlers he missed. This time they all hit their targets.
“To Clayde’s right.” Ro’ken warned, pointing at a threadcrawler approaching Clayde from his right.
Tuls grunted and launched another volley toward the incoming swarm, more explosions of flesh and guts ensued as he took out 10 of the creatures. Vincent could only watch in awe as the green missiles dazzled their way through the air. But he noticed Tuls was not keeping up. The crawlers were closing in on Clayde, who calmly began to retreat. Another volley rained down upon the disgusting creatures, taking out seven of them. He continued this until only a few were remaining, which he left to Clayde to kill. When the obese Falian returned, he was laughing.
“When we get back, tell him I wish to buy your friend a drink.” He reached over with a wing and slapped Tuls on the back.
“We were lucky the nest had only two entrances,” Tuls said, “we were able to funnel them so it made it easier for me to hit them.”
“Then practice,” Clayde said, “I want you to master that thing until you can do it in your sleep. Ask your friend how much he wants for another.”
As they headed toward the end of the thread, Vincent got to see Tuls’ handiwork up close. The threadcrawlers were not slugs, as he had thought, but they had a very thin carapace covering their soft insides. Some of them were pierced through the head. The others, which had been pierced in their abdomens, looked as though they had been frozen in their eruption: a milky white fountain spewed forth from their shells in suspended animation.
But Vincent quickly surmised what was happening. The creatures must have secreted chemicals which, when mixed, must solidify into the cords. Tuls’ green missiles must have caused them to mix prematurely, resulting in the rubbery steaming mess protruding from their corpses.
“How does that work?” Vincent asked, staring at the glass sphere which now had a few pieces missing from it.
“I am not an aluntai, Brother.” Tuls said, “I don’t know how one is made. But I do know false conduits like this use the natural properties of liacyte to emulate the conditions of abnormal reality. Which is why those shards were able to float in the air without being affected by the thread’s pull. My friend said the bangle is tuned to the 'signature' of the threadcrawlers, which in turn, made imaging easier.”
It was a confusing non-answer and Vincent was about to say so when he found his attention drawn to a small gap in the canyon wall. It was like the fixation he had experienced when he was in the meadows. He thought he saw something move but he decided it was his eyes playing tricks. Shaking his head free the sensation, he turned his attention back to the thread. He was disoriented enough without having these dazes.
Vincent relaxed when they navigated back to the thread’s apex and headed toward the pass between cliffs. He had not realized how tense he had been until they exited the canyon and he allowed his muscles to calm down. The slope on this descent was much more subtle, the thread deposited them on a shallower grade which had been paved to curve toward level ground. It made it easier for creatures to escape the artificial pull of the structure. When they came upon another sign warning travelers of the thread’s closure, Ro’ken hopped off his mount and changed it.
The pass opened up to more of the disheveled terrain. The iridescent grass took on a crimson tinge as it continued to grow from the fractured chaos that cracked the land. The mountains surrounded them in the distance, holding them inside of a shattered bowl. The miniature canyons radiating left and right seemed to whisper hints of cataclysmic trauma in eons past, of devastation long forgotten by the vegetation that grew within their crevices.
The pinnacles of obsidian stood tall like sentinels watching over this massive valley. A herd of kelta flowed over the plateaus in the distance before disappearing into the streams. Vincent could lose himself in this place.
Noon turned into evening and evening bled into twilight. The strange blue fireflies began to wink into existence, scattered into flight by the landriders’ strides. They reminded him of Micah and Theomus. Clayde found another upheaval of land to protect them from any possible kelta cascades, and then he brought them to a stop.
As they set up the camp, Vincent was caught in yet another trance, staring off into the distance. Something had to be there, he could feel it. Was it the Stalker again? Had it followed him here? No, this felt different. He didn’t know how, but he just knew it was different than his captor. He was being watched.
“Vincent,” Tuls said, breaking him out of his reverie and handed him a rolled up sleeping mat. “Here.”
“What you did back there,” Vincent said, “Was that supposed to be magic?”
“Magic?” Tuls scoffed, “no. Artificial conduits aren’t magic. You are a strange man.”
“Touchy subject?” Vincent asked.
“I’m not familiar with the saying, friend.” Tuls said as he prepared his own mat.
“You’re not comfortable talking about it?”
“I'm just tired,” Tuls said, “Imaging is one of the most difficult arts. Holding that many paths in my mind...I am walloped!”
Vincent sighed and tried to assume the position Tuls had taught him the night before. He stared up at the stars. A few thin clouds streaked across the sky like gray, whispy, fingers. “Magic,” he mouthed before he closed his eyes. The whispers of his strange companions devolved into meaningless jibberish as he drifted off into slumber. His dreams were but fleeting images of half-formed ideas, glimpses of his home and of a brilliant white light.
His sleep was disturbed in the middle of the night by another fixation. For a few moments after opening his eyes, he simply stared into the hill in front of him. Something in the mountains continued to hold his attention. No, whatever it was, it was not in the mountains. It was in the meadows. It was moving toward him.
Moving quietly and masked by Clayde's snores, he got up and decided to investigate. The blue fireflies were winking around the broken terrain, scattering like dust as he stepped through the grass. One of the sleeping landriders moved its proboscises in his direction. Could it sense his presence? If it could, it did not seem to care. Having no discernible eyes meant it was difficult to tell the creature's state of consciousness.
Only a hill stood between him and the source of his fascination. Fascination? What was he so fascinated by? Was this some new form of delusion? No, his mind still felt clear, yet it also felt like a conspiracy. Something was on the other side of the hill. As he ascended, the wind blew waves along the grass, nudging him along. He had to climb a few fissures in the land, but before long, he made it to the top.
The purple celestial stood on the horizon, casting its indigo gaze onto the meadows like a foreboding accusation. It painted the land with the profiles of jutted terrain. Silent streams shimmered and chattered as they gently trickled over rocks and stones. The Fractured Meadows, under the veil of night, hinted at melancholy. Surely if the place had existed on Earth, it would be a harlot to tourism and National Geographic. But he could not behold the beauty for long. For the object that drew his dazed fascination seemed to be right in front of him.
Ideas of a shape seemed to evade his perception even though it was clearly within his line of sight. It was both there and not there, an anomaly that seemed to be refusing his gaze. If he moved his eyes, he could see it. But as soon as he tried to focus on it, the object disappeared from his vision, as if hiding within a blind spot. It had been a Falian figure, of that he was certain. He walked carefully across the meadows, drawn curiously by this odd phenonon. When he was within five feet of this figure, he stopped.
“W-what...” he said, “what are you?”
Before he could react, it thrust its arm forward and plunged a blade into his hip. Gasping in surprise, he stumbled backward and clutched at the hand that had stabbed him, but it was too late. He cried out and braced for the pain, but the agony he expected never came.
“What...” he muttered.
Instead of pain, he felt something cool spread along his hip. He looked down expecting to see blood but instead, he saw an argent metallic substance pouring forth from the handle of the blade.
“What...”
The figure rose, still obscured by the mystical field that hid it from perception. Vincent clutched the handle of the knife and tried to pull it out. Wherever the metal spread, it coalesced into a solid and froze him. He cried out and tried to run, but the metal froze his legs in place. In a matter of mere seconds, it crawled up his chest and locked his arms in their struggle. Then it claimed his wings, followed by his neck, and finally, it wrapped itself around his head and snout, forcing it shut.
Only his eyes, ears, mouth, and nostrils were spared. He was frozen like a statue, helpless to move or even scream. The solidified metal carapace that held him began to fall over, but somebody caught it and slowed his fall.
The anomaly that defied focus dissolved from the attacker. He could only see its legs from his vantage point. The attacker's feet were black and its toes were covered with metal cleats. Hands as white as talc drew a jar from a belt and opened it. Dipping a claw into the jar, the attacker scooped some sort of jelly and smeared it on the carapace that trapped him, placing the substance right under his nostrils.
The panic began to leave him as he inhaled the intoxicating fumes. He was being drugged. He was vaguely aware of the iron prison being turned over so that he stared at the sky. His attacker’s face was hidden by a hood but he could feel its eyes inspecting him.
With each breath he took, he invited more of the fragrant drug into his system. It did not put him to sleep, not immediately, but rather induced a sense of disconnection. He knew somebody was lifting his frozen carapace onto the back of a landrider but he did not care. He knew straps were being thrown around his form in order to secure him, but it did not matter. He was completely helpless and he was fine with it.
No, he was not fine. He was trapped, somebody bound him in a straitjacket against his will. But with another breath, that anxiety went away. The figure put its palm on his mouth so that he was forced to take long breaths through his nostrils. In a few draws, he was out.
