Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Knockout Night

She stood on the cold, dark cement of the Tesraki homeworld. Light glittered off growing puddles of water caused by an ongoing torrential downpour. The sky overhead was black with night, and the rain itself was visible as a curtain of visual noise refracting light from the many neon lights that scattered about the city. Buildings towered hundreds of feet into the air crisscrossed with a latticework of metal, wire, and scaffolding.

Before her, the street was still crowded with alien life, humans, Tesraki, and others packed together in a slow moving current through the streets, stopping by streetside vendors selling food, clothing and electronics from under leaky tarps pulled taught against the rain.

The cloak she wore was tight around her body, almost to small for her, though that in itself was a rarity. Still, her snout poked out from under the hood, rain water dripping down the bridge of her carapace and down onto the ground in shimmering diamond strings.

She pressed forward through the mass of bodies, limping on her bad leg as the rain overhead only grew heavier.

She knew This place, knew these streets and these people. She hadn't lived here long, but it was the sort of place one could easily find themselves lost in obscurity, and that was the way she liked it. Even back then, however, she had never been alone, surrounded b long time companions that understood her struggle.

Now she was alone.

She had never been alone before, not really.

Ever since she was young she had been raised in the loving arms of the Forsaken, until she was old enough to take their place as it's leader, and as its leader she had led them to her sister who had in turn led them to the Omen.

And that had in turn led them to salvation.

A salvation she just couldn't bring herself to accept. All around her she had watched as the other Drev of her kind had shed the identity that was their imperfect bodies in acceptance of augmentations and surgeries that would finally cure or mitigate their ailments, and while she had least come to accept their decision, she could not come to accept that reality for herself.

Her entire life had been built around what she was.

And she worried, that there would be nothing left of her original self when it was all over, when the limp was gone and her arm was straightened out, when she looked normal.

Would she feel normal?

She hated that word.

It implied there was something inherently wrong with her.

She looked down at herself, though her body was mostly obscured by the folds of the cloak. Why did any of that have to be normal, why did it need to be fixed?

Dzara warred with herself on the inside, and that war had brought her here.

She understood that the others were moving on without her, accepting the augmentations that would make their lives easier, bring them up to level with others of their kind, and she couldn't blame them. Living the way they had was hard, not being accepted was hard, and now they had a chance to change all of that.

But she just couldn't.

And it was hard to watch from the outside.

Better for everyone that she leave and start over.

Alone.

Overhead she could hear the distant rumble of maglevs rolling through the city, the screech and roar of the magnets engaging rumbling through the concrete and up into her feet. She slipped into the darkness of a side alley and vanished into a world of darkness.