The Craving: Wraith Ship #1

Scene 1: In the Walls

The metal above was the first thing he saw. Steel threads sewn into his vision. His first memory was of a shadowed ceiling scraped by feeble gray light. His brain was awake.

His breath was a deep snarling gasp, an adventure of autonomy. Reflex-induced pain as lungs sucked their first air. The exhale was a growl from deep inside. The first clue that something wasn't right.

The deep nucleus of him twitched, his memories discordant. Something related to a house and a knife.

He heard scuttling noises from far away, ticks and scrapes of metal on metal, cautious picking in the shadows beyond his sight. The strong scent of coriander was all around him.

The box began to glow in his receptive visual field. It hovered before him soundlessly, glowing red and crisp. He scanned his surroundings, reluctant to move anything but his eyes. The movement felt odd. As if only one eye slid behind its membranes. Another clue. The box moved with him, blinking, telling him stories about anything he lingered over.

The ceiling. Threaded fusibond.

The vent in the corner. Tropoflow fusibond, tensile strength approximately 77 Ksi. Probable egress from central algidizer. Meaningless words embedded in truth.

Whispering behind his shoulder. Muffled gossip he didn't understand. Fear kept him silent, unanswering. Something was coming for him. Drawing fine claws over his mind, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike.

And there was no name in him, no label for the 'I'. No self-reference, no identity to place him in the world, to comfort him in the cold. He tried to speak, hoping that the exercise of vocal cords would resurrect memory, make him utter the magic phrase that would assure him of his existence. Again, the air came out as something bestial, low and latently ferocious. Fright took root in his body, made him suspicious of that which was without and within. Frustration at his inability to speak rapidly swelled to anger.

Who was he? Where was he? Why was he here?

He lay face up, strangely warm. The anger beat his body into compliance, wringing rigidness from muscles and nerves, making him swing his legs. A table, maybe four feet above the floor. He let his legs dangle and looked down to see if he was hurt, the red box following his eyes, as informative as a professor.

Laughter leaked from the walls. His body.

Alien. Foreign.

His vision threatened to go dark, but whatever animated the red box wouldn't allow the mercy of oblivion. He felt adrenalin's cold lightning as the box flitted from one limb to another.

To the machine that was his left arm. Servomechanisms and corded bundles bending and rotating in a gunmetal housing. The coriander scent seemed strongest there.

Motive systems nominal. Power output 1239. Kinetic Ram online.

The sinister voices began to form words. "You are alone."

Monster. Hands lifted before his face. Malign whispers in the corner. Anger replaced fear, reacting to the mockery.

Images wiped to the left and right. A murder of crows tearing at his soul. He saw the old house where he was born. The cave where he grew out of cubhood. The book he published. His first bloody kill. His father, with wrinkled pale skin. His father, with black streaked pelt. His sister was dead. No, his sister was alive. Endless contradictions. A crazed jester howled untrue truths at him.

There was a face in the wall. Icicle teeth in a mouth black as tar. Eyes that were rips in reality. Cold hatred and desire dripping from the open gashes. No pleasure. Only the want and hatred for what it wanted.

The fear sublimated, black rancor curling from his pores. When the fury erupted from him, the walls resonated with a feral roar, an animal storm of hot wind. He let the monster out to confront the demon in front of him.

Something within him now. On and off. Binary. Embedded message of opprobrium. Rescind, rebuke!

Soundless spirit shriek and deafening cold. He swiped at the empty space where the face was, had been. Gone in a swipe of light.

The red box registered no target, gave no counsel. He commanded himself to be calm. The scratching and scuttling sounded from beyond a door, a hatch he registered just now.

He knew he was naked. Not that it mattered. There was no manhood, nothing down there to hide beneath a carpet of light and dark. He felt no rush of blood, no blush forming on the skin. Icewater ire was his only companion.

The table creaked as he lifted his weight from it, brute paws impacting on anodized metal. He heard claws click, felt hairless pads give, flowing around the floor grates. No pain in the cold touch. The hatchway beckoned him forth to explore.

Though that exit was distant to his eyes, a mere two steps brought him to it. The hatch sighed open, letting an old air into his world. Beyond, a corridor branching out in three directions, ahead, port, and starboard. Strange names. Am I aboard a ship?

A faint thrum in his ears, scratches echoing off more half-lit walls and floor plates. A line of faint light casting weird shadows from below.

He sniffed the atmosphere, made his senses punch through the spice scent. Little moisture, no stink of chemicals. Only age. Long disuse. No being had left the scent of breath or flesh here in a very long time. There was no dust, no accumulation of waste. A space swept clean by no living hand.

The hatch sealed behind him as he stepped through, making him whirl in suspicion at the sudden sound. A name slid into view, etched in new carvings on the surface. He squinted a bit and read what was written.

Zoran.

No abstract glyphs, only familiar symbols that painted sound on his ears. Zoran. A name?

My name?

He tried to form the words, tried to command tongue and lips to mimic the meaning. But all that he summoned were the gruntings and snarlings of a beast's throat, attempting to speak a language it had never been designed to speak.

Zoran. If he could not speak it, he would remember. He would form a new truth to begin shoving aside the pasts that were so dissonant and unmixable inside him.

Then a voice whispered, "Zoran."

Whispered, but not by him. Whispered by someone far away.

No, not someone. Some... thing. The face that squirmed in the wall. The face he hated. The image in his brain. Cold smile inverted, razor fangs, cage bars of the abyss. Willful despair and gleeful bitterness.

Footsteps in the corridor with no one to own them. The slightest brush of reeking nails against his cheek.

"We know you now..." Damn the thing. Damn it to Hell!

He bared his own teeth, flicked tongue over protruding fangs of his own. Muzzle peeling back to expose the countenance of a devil. His bay of challenge shook the walls. This alien place, the emptiness, no companion save the teeth. No foe to fight, save the voices. Blood in his mind.

"Run away. If you can."

He barked and hissed, flesh and metal arms lashing out, feet pounding against the grates as he ran forward, smashing piledriver limbs against bulkheads, tearing at the dead environment, swimming through an atmosphere turned thick with mental poison. Trying to pull away from a sucking evil always just about to rip out the heart of him.

"Coming for you..."

The world was madness and horrid cackling.