The Blade

Lion-O dreamt.  All was darkness as it always was.  Except the hard bright line was there again, separating the void into two equal halves.  No, felt Lion-O, not separating the void, cutting it.

Lion-O dreamt.  He felt himself closer to the odd bright thing cutting through the void of his dream.  It was massive, towering, and bright.  He felt the thing, it was cold metal.  Not a thing, a blade.

Lion-O dreamt.  The wide surface of the blade was polished, and he could see his reflection in it.  "You are the blade," said the reflection.  The reflection gestured downwards.  Lion-O looked down, and saw a massive hand wrapped around the base of the blade.  It was not his own.  It was--

--footsteps...definitely footsteps.  Lion-O felt the cold dirt under his cheek, and heard the unmistakable sounds of the forest at night.  How did he get here?  He reached down toward his hip for the Sword...and found only his hip.

Now he was awake, sitting bolt upright.  How had he gotten here, where was the Sword of Omens?  He rolled up into a crouch and listened for the footsteps again as the answers started drifting into his mind.  He had come out here to spend the night on purpose.  And he had left the Sword of Omens behind for a reason.

He listened to the footsteps and began stalking towards them, silently through the broken ground of the woods.  He had come here and fallen asleep waiting for those footsteps.  He knew what he had to do to the owner of those footsteps, for the sake of the safety of his people.  And he knew that there was no place for the Sword of Omens on this mission.  He now vividly remembered reaching out to it before he had left, but pulling his hand back away from it as it growled at him.

It didn't matter.  He knew what he had to do.  He was closer to the noises now, close enough for his amber eyes to cut through the darkness.  There was Vultureman, his terrible rifle with him.  Lion-O crept up behind the gangly mutant.  The forest at night was so cold, but he was sweating.  He reached out towards the mutant.

Lion-O cringed and nearly jumped back as Vultureman's beak flew open and he let out a loud squawk.  Had his breathing been that loud?  He had hoped the quick, ragged gasps had been confined to his own ears.  A bright flash behind his eyes and a sharp pain in his jaw signalled to Lion-O that he had been nailed by a quick rabbit punch from the startled mutant.

But Lion-O's muscular frame was too heavy to be moved by the blow.  He arms flashed out and his strong hands caught around Vultureman's neck like vices. A twist in Lion-O's hips brought them both crashing to the ground.

"C-c-c-caw!  What...are you...doing?" choked out the mutant, his eyes wild. He tried to punch the broad frame of the Thundercat atop him, but his hollow blows bounced ineffectively off of Lion-O's heaving chest.

There was no sound from Lion-O as his nails dug into the soft flesh of Vultureman's throat.  He was panting, sweating, his insides felt like a cold knot of nervous tension.  It had to be done, he said to himself over and over again like a mantra.

Desperate, Vultureman brought his knee up into Lion-O's crotch.  There was a grunt and the grip on his neck slackened.  Vultureman windmilled his arms in a frenzy, pulling Lion-O's hands from his throat and gasping in air.

But the respite was short lived.  Lion-O's hands found new purchase on the tip of his beak, and started prying his mouth open.  The wide-eyed mutant thrashed frantically and gurgled as blood spurted out of splits in the side of his mouth.  There was a sicking popping noise.

Vultureman was amazed at how distant he felt from it all.  The pain wasn't even that sharp.  His vision was swimming.  He could feel the warm red blood gushing down his throat, choking him and making little bubbles as he exhaled through it.  It was all so far away, the strong hands that were turning his head to the side.  Too far to the side.  Impossibly far, until the loud crack sounded.  The crack he never heard.

Lion-O was shivering.  He felt sick, as if he had been sprinting all out for miles and miles.  He clutched his stomach and promply heaved out green bile onto the ground next to the body.  The body.

He looked down at his clawed hands.  They were coated in a sticky red substance, and they were shaking uncontrollably.  "V-vultureman?" breathed the trembling lord.  "Are you okay?"  He nudged the still body with his hands a few times.

The glassy eye of the mutant stared at nothing.  His head was twisted round at an unnatural angle.  Blood was seeping out of his mouth and into a pool...

"Oh Sweet Jaga, what have I done," murmured Lion-O, closing his eyes to block out the sight.  At first he saw the comforting blackness of his eyelids, the same safe blanket of nothing that he had spent countless dreamless nights inside.  But there were holes in the darkness.  Jagged flaring cracks spread out across the darkness of his mind.  The black walls around his mind were
crumbling like plaster.

A flash.  A teenager with a wild, red mane runs through the halls of a spaceship with weights on his arms and legs.  He leaps, he spars robots, all under the watchful eye of his quiet tutor...

Lion-O's eyes fluttered open.  What was that?  A memory?  But how?  He had never been a teenager, he had aged in his suspension capsule.  His eyes fell back to the body of the mutant.  Jaga's words echoed through his mind.  You must not kill, Lion-O...ever!  He stared at the glassy eye of the corpse. Blood was seeping out of his mouth and into a pool...

A flash.  A young boy and a young girl are lying in a field of tall, green grass, staring at the sun and laughing.  The young boy has an unkempt mane of red hair.  The girl's hair is red with a thick, black stripe up the middle. They are holding hands...

"What's happening to me?" cried Lion-O, struggling drunkenly to his feet.  He leaned weakly against a tree, and put a bloody hand on his brow.  You must not kill, Lion-O...ever!  The vulture was so still.  Blood was seeping out of his mouth and into a pool...

A flash.  A young boy with red hair is screaming as he sees an old, guant man leaning over his father's throat.  "Don't be afraid son," says the father in a weak voice.  "You will understand someday."  The guant, gray man turns to stare at the boy.  It is Jaga, and his right eye is red, glowing with menace, and looks just like the Eye of Thundera.  The white slit inside the glowing red eye growls at the young boy, and flashes an intense white.  The boy screams again...

Lion-O screamed and screamed as the images washed over him.  Meaningless, random, a flood of a life's worth of memories that had been dammed up behind a wall of dark nothingness and hidden from him.  All of them flooding back into his mind at once.  His roar of pain cut through the silence of the forest at night like a blade.

The spectre of Jaga looked on in tight lipped rage, and then faded out of sight.