500 - Part I - Distorted Shadows and Monsters

Chapter IX - It's A Mind's War.

"The door is open, but you have to get there first," the mechanical voice sounded, reading Daniel's mind. This wasn't the time for pickpocketing or stealing fancy keys and keycards. Daniel had gone through a fearful, monstrous wave of pain and could hardly see the space around him. His blindness was only affected more, when fragile tears prickled his eyes, like miniature spikes in his sockets. "Feel weak, don't you? Grayden says you're a feisty one and you better start getting your act together, before he kicks you out of his show. You wouldn't want him to lose his interest in you, subject," commented the figure.
"You don't know how strong I am," Daniel whispered quietly; his throat was burning more than before. He was he victim. A victim. Vulnerability or ability? Daniel jabbed a clenched knuckle at the person's chest and they stumbled, but did not fall. His locked fingers of glass felt as though they would involuntarily shatter at any fraction of a second. Daniel could break, if he wasn't already broken.
The person smirked behind their mask and pointed to a jar of pills on a shabby table beside him, which Daniel could only just make out. "Half black, half white. Truly unique pills, aren't they? You have mostly boring-coloured ones," they drawled on. "We like to tablelands them 'Control Pills', but really the do pack quite the punch."
"What do they do?" called out Daniel dryly, in desperation. His tongue clicked, as sweat dripped in pearly beads down his cheeks. His dry mouth and parched lips craved answers, but his mind was a lonely man demanding battle. Violence wouldn't be exactly possible with his exhausting numbness, but he at least wanted to try. Even if his bones would bend and snap clean in two imperfectly perfect halves.

"Oh, not much. Just everything a boy like yourself wouldn't want. We've been trying to produce them for the last fortnight, but they've been difficult to make. Your muscles stop working completely, kid. Your thoughts delay and you eventually slip into unconsciousness. Then the real treat makes quite the entrance."
"You can control us?" Daniel swallowed.
"Yes, so you better watch your words carefully, young man. Suddenly force and weapons will come after this pill. You do what we want and when we want. Understand?" the mysterious figure snapped. Daniel nodded fast. Their words caused Daniel internal suffering. He had this new, unexperienced passion for inflicting pain onto others.
"You've already given me one of those, Doctor," Daniel braced himself for what was about to come.
"That doesn't mean you can't have twice the effect; it seems they only work for a short space of time. You intelligent idiot, kid. You can stop fighting now and rest. I'll take you back to your room and you can think about your actions. We all know about your vent adventure, boy," the person echoed true evil capability.
"I can't go back there."
"Let's not be difficult, now. I can make you kill people, subject. You do as I say, right now, or it's another pill for the psycho." Threats. "At least allow me have something to do in there," pleaded Daniel. If they doubled the pain, Daniel was almost certain he wasn't going to make it out alive: this was the worst nightmarish torture he had ever had to go through. There was a pit at the bottom of his stomach, where his heart dropped like wreckage in a plane crash. Worried sick for himself. Worried sick for his life.
"Take me to the dungeons. Please." That beg was his final moment of consciousness. It all blacked out and Daniel blinked furiously, but it was all a sickening blur of smudged nothingness and a void of a supermassive black hole.

He tried to open his eyelids again, but ultimately failed and the unknown swallow him up. The spooky figure was no longer in his vicinity, but a deafening silence replaced them. Just plain, simple, horrific emptiness. Daniel was drowned in his own murky depths of a tossing sea. Not a single ship sailed and not a glowing ray of a lighthouse was in sight. The water enveloped him in bed sheets of darkness and palpable fear. He tried to throw the waves off of him, but he discovered he wasn't just dreaming on his mattress. It was as though he was being chucked off the edge of the world. Water took over him. Daniel's mind wandered off to unknown places and sickness rose, like the collapsing tides, in his ever-tightening throat. The uncertainty squeezed the life right out of him. Clouds of rage and eternal betrayal lingered in the misty air, unanswered questions still hovering in his foggy brain. The clouds and fog swept through the boundaries of his endless mind, places only seen by the gloom. They danced peacefully, curtains blowing lightly in the wind. Then they picked up speed and caused Daniel to go completely dizzy. Grey. Darker. Lightning. Thunder. A plague of fog emerged from the troop of clouds and ventured like one compact army of dirt-covered, blooded, scarred soldiers. What was emptiness was beginning to grow into a span of life, but the overcast of dismal, Algiers thunderclouds were not looking for any companions. A brain, a life so full of exploration and imagination, a radiant beacon of joy and discovery, soon plummeted rapidly into a dehumanising hell. A burnt match was all that remained, charred from the final light. Burnt; black; gone. It was all like a solitary poppy fighting to survive in a graveyard of corpses, only to spread the colour in mountains of grey and black. Trying to achieve life's hardest task alone and half-dead. Thin, fragile blades of  grass were now colourless streaks against the caking mud. An oozing death trail of blood continued for miles. Despite it all, a flower continues to bloom, regardless of the war surrounding it North, East, South, West and here.

Daniel wouldn't give up without a fight. Petals would fall, but his stem would rise and further stand up high. His vibrant colours would shine the path towards heaven. So many had died and Daniel didn't want to have to prepare himself for any more lives to be lost, even if it was his. He couldn't let that happen. Justice for the corpses of the innocent and memories to feed their sickening starvation. The dead needed remembrance and too many bullets or rain, falling like unfortunate shooting stars fell down, down and down again. These people, these bright people, had their futures obliterated and souls cut clean into bloody remnants for the soul to capture them, as nothing more than worthless dirt to be lost in the wind and storms. To be stomped upon under heavy feet trekking across the decrepit moor. First day saw many hearts not beating, traumatising and overwhelming many. Children were still digesting the demises of new-found friends and the emotional, invisible scars and harrowing marks scratched their eyeballs like twenty-four daggers. Tears fell silently; blood was spilled; sweat became more common than the sight of crystal water. A revolutionary laboratory or a slaughterhouse? It became positively clear. Life faded into death and living was a complexed blur blended with hate. Being alive appeared to be a crime in Grayden's unwritten inhumane rules. Daniel had never had such dedication in starting a brand new life. Scrap the past, screw the neglect and burn the anger. He wanted to tear everybody who had ever hurt him into shreds. It was an explicit matter of escape or death. Daniel's choice was always expected all along. Life over death.