“It Watches, It Waits” by Abraxas (04-07-04)

 

“Creator uncreated.  Sole one, unique one, who traverses eternity....” – Suti and Hor, First Hymn to the Sun God

 

Will I ever get that taste off my lips?

I suppose, well, I suppose what does it matter if it leaves me now or haunts me forever, if it lingers another moment or another lifetime, if I will be dead soon?  Yes, dead, dead – and at last safe from the intimate horrors of this world.

It is not madness.  I swear, it is not fantasy.  I know I will be dead soon enough though the particulars I cannot speak.  All I can say is that it will be unexpected, sudden.

All is over for me and as I sit here, shivering, dictating, I cannot help but wonder what will it be like?  A certain shock; a certain pain.  Will the shadow of death instantly appear or will the light of life slowly ebb?  And what afterward?  Will I fade away completely, too, or will I continue someway, somehow, tormented by memories?

And that taste, might it follow me across the void of eternity?

What was that?  What the hell was that?

The old one is before me, behind me, beside me – it dwells in the vastness of the sky, the limits of the earth, its home is in the rustle of branches, the crackle of underbrush,  it lives everywhere even into the smallest parts of it, in the atom, no, smaller still.  No where can I run, no where can I hide that it will not find me.  So I choose to give up – and can you not see how sensible, how logical that is?  I choose to give up because I know now how utterly mortal my attempts to resist have been.  I choose to give up because, at least, in waiting for it to come to me I can – and will – use the time to get my story out.  If it can wait centuries then so can I; as long as it takes my voice will be heard.  Others, howsoever distant in time and understanding, will know.

I wonder where I should begin this sad, perverse tale.

It was a quiet time and we Thundercats grew complacent.  If the Mutants and the Lunatacs had withdrawn, if MummRa had exiled himself in his pyramid, why should we press the matter?  A victory, even by default, was still a victory.  Or, as Panthro might say, ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.’

So, instead of waging war, we busied ourselves waging peace.  We aided our allies in the Amazonian Kingdom and the Northern Territories.  Our technology curbed the dangerous weather, tamed the wild lands and, in general, repaired the environmental damage the forces of darkness inflicted upon Third Earth – it was a world set free.

Displaced from our people, it always seemed we were guardians without anything or anyone to guard beyond Lord Liono and the Code of Thundera.  But once our enemies had been vanquished we realized a new sense of purpose.  For it became clear that we had been sent to Third Earth by the action of divine providence because it needed our protection more than the Thunderian refugees, whose land of exile at the farthest reaches of the universe knew no Plunderian, no Mercenary scourge.

It was here, on this fertile, ancient planet, that the legacy of the Thundercats would continue, even though we understood the sacrifices the purity of our nobility would undergo, it was tolerable if it meant that this culture and civilization – the parts of our heritage untied to the constraints of genetics – might yet endure through our progeny, that mixture of human and Thunderian blood.

So it was and yet I remember standing outside Cat’s Lair at night, looking up to see that starry infinity of space and wondering what sort of evils lurked still and unseen – watching and waiting, scheming and plotting – if only my eyes had been lowered to gaze upon those dangers that remained closer.

Yes, the Lunatacs left – only smoldering pools of red-hot lava remained at the site where Sky Tomb once stood.  The Mutants, too, retreated – not a trace, not even a stench lingered at Castle Plundarr, only a dust, a thick, rusty dust, blanketed the innards of the fortress.  What could have driven them off, we did not know, but we were determined they would not return.  Well-time explosions around the territory of Dark Side submerged the area under a sea of fifty-foot deep water.

A series of unusual events followed – subtle from day to day, palpable only after a period of several years.  The environment of Dark Side, or what had been Dark Side, grew bountiful.  The effect was noticed, too, at Castle Plundarr – it had been spared summary destruction.  Even the Black Pyramid, that monstrosity of evil, was conquered by that untamed nature.  Barren wasteland gave way to luscious greenery:  slanted, almost horizontal trees, vines that swooped and dangled across weather-worn faces and tall obelisks, whose ornate stonework was obscured by the entangled masses of leafy stems and flowery offshoots.  Birds and animals – of varieties unknown us – made their homes within the massive structure but we did not venture within the pyramid.

Again, I stress, it did not seem prudent to press the matter.

But we are mortals and the fallacies of our small minds might be excused.

It was as if our enemies had been reconstituted into nature – much like a carcass decaying in the wilderness rots yet becomes part of something greater, bigger, the circle of life continuing ever onward.

And just as the coarse parts of Third Earth improved, the parts that were once sunny and bright were now attaining a new aspect of character, dark and melancholic.  It was cold and colder as the days were short and shorter but I dismissed it as a natural event.  Studying the history of the planet, I revealed evidence for what could have only been a series of ice ages connected to the shifting of the seasons.  I just assumed the changing weather was connected to the approach of a new ice age.

It was quiet and life went on.

I, however, was affected in a way, in my own way.  My abilities were mental and so I was more susceptible to psychological strains than my fellow Thundercats.  The shifting seasons, the numbing, dull and repetitive, routine that my world had become depressed me.  I was withdrawn, isolated and sometimes, oftentimes, the growing smallness of my misunderstood self-worth drove me to tears.

It was during those gloomy periods that I turned to Cheetara, whose powers were also mental but of a different variety.  She, too, was upset but her demons were more tangible than mine.  It was her dreams.

Together in bed, she related the visages of those night terrors.  Random visions of mangled objects, displaced objects, objects moving by themselves for no reason.  A hooded, faceless figure.   Thundercats vanishing, one by one, leaving and never coming back.  And Cat’s Lair in ruins.  The dreamscapes were pictures of a world coming apart.

At first I could not make sense of what she was telling me.  I knew she was afraid but just what it was about her dreams that upset her so much I could not immediately understand.  But I took it all in, I set it down on paper and over the period of a year I examined the record, the data.  It was then that I noticed – the dreams were in flux, evolving in predictable, consistent ways, like the plot of a novel, unfolding itself.

But it was one dream in particular whose description needed no analysis to shock me.  I said that it seemed as if our enemies had been reconstituted into nature.  It was an idea that I kept to myself, so to hear her speak it, I, well, I shuddered.  For the dream centered on MummRa, the ancient one whose age defied time, at last finding the way to defeat us, by waiting us out.  A year, a century, what did it matter if to him it was but a blink of the eye?  He would erase us from history simply by outliving us.

Worse – and this was the part that most upset me – it was a possibility I had never before considered even as logically sound.  No, it was heresy to a Thundercat.  The idea that he could reconstitute into nature because he was always already a part of nature – evil an aspect of creation, like sky and earth – and being part of nature, he could move freely through it, influence it.

By the fifth year of that global tranquility – and of my personal malaise – we succeeded in the organizing of states, the building of roads.  Trade and commerce flourished.  Largely by my persistence, we implemented safety systems to monitor the skies in the day and in the night – I wanted to keep us safe from stray meteors and other, unwanted visitors.  More and more we realized how fragile peace was, how easily it could be shattered.

All the while my depression persisted.  Despite my public façade of strength and stability, my private demons were clawing just under the surface.  Panthro noticed – my old, dear friend knew me well, too well – he thought that the way to cheer me up was to get me back in the lab.  Get me back to experiment, to design and, now that we had the time, to build those weird, bizarre inventions we dreamt of so long ago, so far away by the rocky shores of tranquil, ageless Thundera.

Cheetara’s dreams persisted.  I felt awfully guilty.  She was always there for me and it was so important that I was there for her that I juggled my time such that each and every night we belonged to each other exclusively.  Spontaneous vacations here and there across the countryside were also not out of order.  Working on the machines, leaning on the cheetah, for a time I was a very happy tiger again.

And it seemed that the world was warming – the skies were bright and blue as they had not been for a long time.

But – Cheetara’s peace of mind suffered, especially after she found it all over the place.  She showed it to me – it – a mass of red, thread-like substance.  Naturally, my initial impression was the obvious:  hair from Liono.  Or the twins.  Or me.  She insisted otherwise, she swore it had been something she saw in her dreams.

When I examined the threads under the microscope, I discovered something very different.  They were particles clumped into loose filaments due to their extreme cohesive powers.  It was a most remarkable substance that could be manipulated with magnetic and electric fields but, in general, reacted very weakly with ordinary matter – it even defied gravity. 

Its atomic nature was indiscernible.  I tried every experiment known to science but its elemental composition resist analysis.   I could not escape the conclusion that it was not material at all, not as we commonly understand it.  No protons, no neutrons, no electrons but something infinitely more exotic.

One night, she awoke me and there, there surrounding her body like a macabre outline, there matching very shape and form, was a singular, hair-like thread of those dreaded particles.  I calmed her and helped her up – her long, spotty mane spread out under my arm, engulfed with that rust.  And as I brushed it away, to my horror, I saw it appear between the strands.

It materialized and I could not get that image out of my head.  The red particles, the red dust that once existed only in nightmares was now part of reality.  The problem intrigued me and founded me but more than anything it terrified me – and from that moment I made it my mission in life to determine its paranormal origins, its true nature.

Our powers were mental and I knew from experience that electromagnetic fields exerted a strong influence on the mind.  But could it go both ways?  Could a mind, even unfocused, exert an effect on an electromagnetic field?  And what if it did, what would be the result?

I needed an answer and so, in the basement of Cat’s Lair, Panthro and I engaged our efforts onto a new experiment – but I confess I did not tell the panther anything about my true intentions.

We constructed six, massive coils through which we generated fields of almost lethally hazardous magnitudes.  For safety reasons, of course, the settings were kept to nominal, every-day values.  The coils were kept in ten-foot-tall towers and were arranged in the shape of an ellipse.  I, myself, would be seated at the first foci – a vortex of convergence – on a chair of rubber, insulated and elevated from the floor.  At the second foci would be the object – a slab of metal, five by five inches and exceedingly thin.

I concentrated my attention on the object.  In my mind I pictured it levitating, hovering above the ground.  I knew if the fields were manipulated the right way it would do it, it would happen – after all, that was the mechanism by which the twins’ hover boards operated.  Always, however, it did not rise.  It should have worked, I was certain, I was absolutely sure of it, but it did not.

Frustrated, I left the lab and later I left Cat’s Lair with Cheetara.  It was a week-long vacation and it was yet another week before the experiment resumed.  And when Panthro and I returned we discovered a carpet of dust covering the floor – normal dust, not red dust – no one had entered, no one had cleaned.  It was far too late in the day to sweep so we just continued.

The metal slab was still on the ground, exactly as it had been a fortnight earlier.

Turning on the coils, again, I sat and concentrated.  Again, nothing happened.  But taking a second look I saw that in fact there had been a change.  The slab moved to the right a very, very short distance, an almost imperceptible distance.  If it had not been for the shift in the dust, I would have never noticed.

I focused my eyes upon the object and willed it to move.  And it did.   It moved only when I wanted and, after practice, where I wanted.  Satisfied of the breakthrough, we retired early.

The very next morning, as we readied the equipment, as we prepared the next trials, the coils smoked.  On the very edge of melting, the machines heaved and groaned – bolts of lightning scattered about the tall, doomed roof.  We scrambled for the off switch and then and only then we examined the encasing towers:  the red dust, the dreadful red dust clogged the innards of the instruments.

It was a failure and it was a success for I was satisfied.  I knew the answer:  the exotic particles were byproduct of telekinesis.  Armed with that bit of evidence, I convinced Cheetara there was nothing to fear.  It was just something odd, something harmless and we would have to live with it.  We would have to find a way to live with it.

So be it – and once again, once again we settled into a new normal.  A normal where incomprehensible night-time terrors and dustings of rusty powder were par for the course.  In time even the ghastly visions were tolerable by the two of us and I stopped jotting her dreams down.  Say fool, fool, Tygra, now only fragments of death and other revelations of supreme import have been lost for all time.

But that normal of self-imposed, paper-thin serenity ended the day we lost Panthro.

He had been dispatched to the Northern Territories to buy supplies from the Tuskans.  I, myself, monitored the trip’s progress from the control room in Cat’s Lair.  I tracked him every step of the way – it was not something I normally did, but, after the incident with the coils and the red dust, I worried.  I worried – though I tried to hide it.  I worried and then, on the return trip, I lost contact.

It was unexpected and sudden and for three days he went missing until Liono, Pumyra and I back-tracked his last, known location.

Most of the Thunder Tank lay against its side; the rest was strewn about the flatland for ten miles.  The melted, mangled remains revealed little about the nature of what happened.  What I surmised was this:  in the middle of a sunny, summertime afternoon, the vehicle exploded so violently debris fanned out in the fields of a village so far away its inhabitants did not hear the blast or know the tragedy.  And, stranger, Panthro’s body, inside the cabin, remained wholly intact.

It was up to Pumyra and me to examine the panther’s corpse.  Its state of preservation was unnatural, ghastly.  Despite a three-day-long exposure to the elements, it showed no sign of decay.  It was cold, painfully cold and would not absorb heat.  It was as if the body had been robbed of all its energy.  A spontaneous loss of energy – it was ridiculous, it was ludicrous – but I could imagine it.  I could see Panthro’s energy sucked out of him to create the explosion within the Thunder Tank.  It was the only explanation I could offer for I could not attribute any other cause of death.  Nothing was wrong with the body, nothing.  Not as much as bone was broken.

Even my nurse, the cool, calm puma was at a total loss and stunned silent – and then she showed me what she found amid the panther’s fur, the red dust, the infernal, otherworldly debris.

The sight of it was almost enough to send me into a nervous breakdown but I remained calm, I remained sane.  I asked if she would keep it quiet, I told her it would upset Cheetara – superstitions and omens and dreams, that sort of thing.  She understood – I think – and helped me collect all of the rusty threads.

But I – I found something, too, something no one noticed.

In the middle of the road, as fresh as the moment they were made, were footprints.  They were facing the Thunder Tank, heading into the wilderness.  I followed the trail until it terminated within a clearing and, alone in that netherworld, I was overcome by a sudden sense of fear and dread.  Evil, piercing yet subtle, tainted my sanity and better-judgment.  I was thankful I was invisible but I wondered if forces, sinister and malevolent, might sense me still. 

Snakes hissed and birds fluttered.  Branches and vines along the tops of trees unwound and dangled, swinging in the wake of a breeze I could hear but could not feel.  Telltale, random sounds of leaves crushed underfoot and rhythmic, alien disturbances of a stalking intelligence composed a symphony so delicate, so balanced that even the breath of my body muffled and drowned the sensation of it.  I could not bear it any longer so I ran away and rather than confirm my worst fears I told no one nothing about what I discovered.

I postponed and delayed – and abandoned – the required autopsy.  I kept the body safe and intact in the morgue for a week, letting no one near it, wanting no one to take it way.  As perverse as it sounds, I wanted to keep the remains to deny his burial and, by extension, to deny his death.  I cannot describe the sense of sorrow I felt at the fact that my friend was gone – the world was a smaller, colder place without him.  Without his gruff voice and gentle mannerism.  Without his unshakeable sanity that always kept my wild imagination firmly grounded.  What was I going to do?

Once Panthro was buried, well, I could not fight back the reality of his demise.  And faced with a truth I could not escape – let alone accept – I grew moody and angry.  Poor Cheetara, that she endured that suffering, she, too, grew distant and isolated and more and more kept the secrets of her mind away from me.  To protect me.  I, too, protected her from the red dust – Pumyra did, indeed, keep her bargain and I, for my own part, did everything in my power to get rid of the dreadful particles before she noticed.

I thought about Panthro’s death, of the telekinetic experiment and of the otherworldly dust – that exotic aftertaste of psychic activity.  One by one by one I drew a singular connection and, aghast at the web I spun, I wonder what sort of psychic power killed my friend?

That clearing – the evil of that clearing, it seemed weaved into nature.  Did nature possess consciousness?  Could it exert its will?  Or was there another actor, hidden and obscure, at work behind the scenes?

A power using nature against us – the possibilities latent in Cheetara’s dreams were quite, utterly vivid.

If MummRa had cast-off the physical world of the Black Pyramid, if he had transformed into an abstraction, how could we fight him?  How could we fight a being that was not a being?

Why, it came to me, by exerting our own influence.  It was the only way.

If I could perfect the methods, then, I could become as immaterial as the forces of darkness and in my own way bring balance back to Third Earth.  And so, I returned to the lab.  I resumed the experiment.

I dusted the coils and installed a new filter to cool the internal circuitry, to remove the exotic particles.  Confident there was no further danger to the machine, I flipped the switch and resumed the trials.  Within a month I moved objects from metals to nonmetals.  Up, down, left, right.  I staked them, took them apart.  I melted them and cast them into new shapes.

And as I delved deeper into that occult science, I noticed a new effect heretofore unforeseen, for even after the machine was off and I was in bed – for a short time – my naked consciousness exerted a weak influence.

The second breakthrough came the day I reached across time – though it was only for a minute, it was significant.  I imagined a table, a pen and a clock – all of which did, indeed, stand behind me.  I pictured the clock reading seven forty-five – I pictured the pen moving off the table.  I focused and concentrated, replaying the event over and over again, unyieldingly until I turned off the machine and spun around.  The clock read seven forty-four or there about and the moment it turned forty-five the pen rolled from the tabletop to the ground without the aid of external intervention.

It was progress and like all progress it came at a cost.  It was a matter of energy, as simple as that.  The objects were manipulated by the fields, the fields were setup by the coils, the coils were powered by the generators of Cat’s Lair.  It was a problem whose solution I left for the next phase of the experiment.  I outlined a theory, I planned a strategy and then the next shockwave shattered my already shrinking world.

Bengali, Liono, Cheetara, Pumyra and I were outside, enjoying the summer day.  Lately, summertime had been short – short and cold – but that day it warm.  The grassy fields that surrounded the fortress were as clear as the noon sky that arched bright, blue from horizon to horizon.

Liono observed that it was the first time since Panthro’s death that we were together and happy.  I, myself, was chatting with Bengali about the women – our women – when the white tiger turned to the puma with a smile.  I turned, too and saw her walking across the bushes of Berbil fruit.  In that instant, at that moment, she vanished.  Dematerialized.

The cheetah screamed.

We rushed to the spot but there was nothing – nothing.  All the while the Sword of Omens slept, the Eye of Thundera was shut, unopened and unmoved, as if oblivious to the evil.  At once, as we stood there, confounded and baffled, the air cooled and the skies darkened and I felt what I felt only once before.  I was as aware of a vile, detestable presence in nature must as zebra might be aware of the lions.

Bengali and Liono thought they saw a figure lurk amid the trees – they sprung into the wilderness.

In the meanwhile, Cheetara and I combed through every square inch of the would-be serene veldt.  It was as I examined the brush that had been displaced by Pumyra’s feet that she startled me – she frightened me.  Yes, it was what she showed me:  the clumps of earth in her opening hands, the dirt sifting through her fingers.  What were left in her grasp were gnarled roots and decayed leaves kept together by the adhesion of that dreaded, red-rusty thread.

Bengali and Liono returned empty-handed.  They had discovered a series of footprints and followed it until it ended at the edge of a cliff and that was that.  Of the figure, they had little to say, other than a vague description that sounded utterly and absolutely familiar.  For it was the same figure that haunted Cheetara’s nightmares:  hooded, faceless and what might have been, fragmented suggestions of extremely long teeth.

We did not speak as we looked on, away, aghast.

All attempts to find Pumyra failed just as all attempts to find the figure failed.

And then the cheetah’s nightmares intensified.  They centered on the puma.  They focused on an obsession with the notion that she was still alive.  She was alive, dazed and confused, but alive.  Free, yet a prisoner – and a prisoner of the most subtle, sublime manner, for what she was, was a prisoner of time.  Forces of unimaginable power had snatched her and had projected her across time.

Across time.

At last I confessed my theories and observations to Cheetara.  It was night when I finished telling all of it.  We slept together, as always – except that it was the first time in a long time that she did not awaken with sweat and scream.  She slept well – but I wonder if she suppressed the nightmares so as to spare my already disturbed mind.  No doubt, no doubt, she was aware, she was always aware of other’s feelings.

But she awoke happy and I was happy and that was what mattered.

That morning, she left for a jog and did not return.

Damn it, I swear I saw her leave.  I saw her run across the bridge, swing into the forest.  I saw it and yet after she faded into the greenery she was never seen or heard again.

I was haunted – standing at the base of Cat’s Lair, the bridge retracted – my mind was tormented by visions of branches moving, vines unfurling.  Whispers, footsteps.  But it was worse inside the fortress:  I was terrified by shadows, random and intermittent, moving across brightly lit rooms.  I was horrified by spots of light, sharp and bright, appearing in the darkest rooms.  I was shocked, almost to death, the midnight I awoke coughing – I thought – for no reason until I turned on the lights and saw those clumpy threads of red particles suspended in the air, like a freeze-frame of snowfall.

I was faced with the fact that what I termed ‘natural-evil’ was very much real.  It was studying me even as I was studying it.  It knew about my experiments and my intentions.  I moved a slab, it shattered the Thunder Tank.  I moved a pen across a minute, it hurtled Pumyra across the ages.  It was mocking me, telling me, in no uncertain terms, that it was, indeed, infinitely more powerful than me.

The footprints, the figure.  My enemy could be physical – at least for a short time.  Perhaps it could only exert itself in material form.  Perhaps not.  Whatever it was, I understood then and there that it was my duty to stop it.  So I was determined to master its art and mock it:  if it could destroy, I would create.

It was a question of energy – yes, everything is a question of energy.  It could manipulate energy at will, but I could not.  At best I could transform it one type to another:  potential to mechanical, sound to motion, light to heat and vice-versa.  But if I wanted to convert mass to energy – or energy to mass – the generators were not enough, I needed a reservoir of enormous, bottomless energy.  And it came to me:  an external tank of water.

I created objects.  Formless blobs of ordinary matter.  With time and practice, the nebulous globs attained shape and form.  The objects – whose atomic compositions tended to be iron – were always cold, painfully cold and did not take heat.  And just to make sure I was not loosing my mind, at the start and end of each trial, I measured the output of the coils, the mass of the objects and compared it to the amount of water in the tank – each and every time the accounting of energy confirmed to known theory.

At last, now that I was confident that I found the method to transform mass to energy to mass, I wondered if by the same, exact rules I might create life.

I stopped to contemplate the nature of the problem.  Of life, of living – organisms were quite complex.  I would have to create the cells and the tissues and the organs one by one from scratch.  Even if I could do it, it would take forever – and I could not stop midway through the process lest the object rot and decay.  Again it came to me:  just as I had a reservoir of energy, what if I had a reservoir of a living thing?  An object – a creature – with the necessary structures intact?  Why, then, all I would have to do was reshape it and that I could do easily if the ‘final product,’ as it were, were already similar to the ‘raw material.’

I could bring Cheetara back from the void but a price that was too high.  For I did have Panthro’s body – albeit buried in its grave – his curious mode of death left his corpse free from the effects of entropy and decay.  It would be only a small, little step to take to change the panther’s physique to that cheetah that I knew so well.  So intimately well.

I could bring her back – but what about Panthro?

It would have been infinitely easier to bring him back.

Therefore, I could not go on – but I knew it was watching.  I could not give up either.  It would have been too obvious a setback so instead I experimented with the bodies of animals.  I found, as I suspected, that their reanimations was possible as long as they had been dead for no longer than an hour – a short enough time that putrefaction had not yet set in.

All the while it was watching, I know it, yes, I know it – and it is not madness.

No sooner than I was reanimating the dead, Third Earth was plunging into a deep, cold winter – an unnatural winter.  Things were falling apart, coming apart at the seams:  mass extinctions, mass migrations, entire ecosystems obliterated by the encroaching, emerging ice age.  I could not hold back any longer, I knew what it was doing and I was forced to tell Liono what I discovered.

I showed him the record of Cheetara’s nightmares, the array of laboratory equipment – and the infernal red dust.  And then I told him that a new – or old – evil was infused into nature and was exerting itself in a way we could not fight against.  It was using energy and time as weapons – all I wanted was permission to turn the coil-setup into a counter-weapon.

I did not discuss my plans to bring Cheetara back.

I warned him to be alert of that figure that I was certain was the physical manifestation of my enemy.  I warned him that since it was now a part of nature, the Sword of Omens would not alert its presence and questioned aloud if it might be of any use whatsoever against it.  I suggested that we stay as close together as possible, that we not stray out of contact for very long – he agreed and called a council meeting to install a new round of security measures.

It was one week ago today that Liono disappeared.

By Jagga, it was just a simple run to fetch Bengali and Lynxo from the Tower of Omens.  But he failed to reach the outpost.  Why, why, why did he fail?  What could have happened?  What – the tiger and the lynx were combing the area, searching but not I for I knew what had happened.  I knew what was responsible.  I screamed ‘red dust’ into the radio, I warned them but they went anyway and I went mad.

Forbidding the Twins from even leaving their room, in the brashest move of irrational defiance I – I – under that Augustan roof of snowy, gray skies – I scrambled into the wilderness where Panthro was buried and with the very shovel that interred him I dug him up.  He was as intact as the moment he slipped out of our hands – only dirt soiled the fur.  There was not even a smell.

I carried the body – that was still utterly cold – to the basement of Cat’s Lair but in my haste I failed to notice the threads of rusty-red, I ignored the series of footsteps, the swaying of leaf-less branches, the unfurling of brown, withered vines.

In the middle of the ellipse of coils, at the foci, I sat myself and Panthro.  I flipped the switch – the lights flickered, the tanks of water, into which I inserted my arms, teemed as energy conducted from me to my object.  For countless hours I sat and concentrated on Cheetara.  On her form.  On her personality.  My memories of her, now clear and undistorted, pour out into the void and with that essence I attempted to recreate my mate.

I dared not open my eyes for fear of what horrors my strained mind or that vile creature could have produced.

The room was freezing and I was tired.  Slumped over the vat of water, I was still and motionless for so long I must have fallen asleep.  Maybe I dreamed, maybe I did not.  All I can remember was darkness and when I awoke suddenly I was filled with the certainty, utterly terrifying, that what I just experienced was death itself.

Opening my eyes, I was shocked at the brightness of the lab – and I gasped when I saw, spread across the floor, the body of Cheetara.

It was her!

It was Cheetara!

Elated, I picked her up.  She was warm, supple – a whimper passed her lips.  Her eyes were moving as if in the throws of sleep.

I won, I beat the damn, detestable thing and now, for my moment of complete triumph, I brought her lips to mine.

And I shrieked for the taste of death was fresh.

I brought her back – but the body was still dead!

The warmth was that of the transferred energy radiating away – the whimper was that of a weak scream – and in my arms, before my eyes, she withered, she crumbled.  The precarious balance that left Panthro’s body immune to entropy was disturbed by my meddling and all at once it decomposed to absolute nothing.  Worse, I forgot to turn off the machine and now the mass-energy was returning to the coils.

The equipment groaned – bolts of lightning shout out of its components.

I fled the chamber, saving myself from the explosion.  But I was unable to warn the others stuck in Cat’s Lair.  And even if I had been able to, there was no time to evacuate.  I lost the fortress and the lives of WileyKat and WileyKit.

That taste, that taste.

All is over for me.  If my life is taken, does it matter?  I went too far in my attempt to fight the unstoppable – I crossed the line – and, so, am I not, then, just as evil as that thing, that beast – that embodiment of evil.

I wonder – aimlessly – like an animal.  I cannot stay at the ruins and I cannot go to the tower.  I once resisted now I accept all is over for me and I want to meet my end on my own terms.  I do not know where or when it will come but I know it will come.  I know.  I feel the hooded figure near.  I sense that unbending grimace, those unblinking eyes peer at me across time and space.  It watches, it waits and I wait, too.