No Longer

Chapter 6

Present Time . . .

From the darkness, Jason only partially emerged. Waking up was a strange feeling. He had been in the darkness so long that any kind of light felt strange, even alien to him. Logically, he knew he was once a master of light, could even bend it to his will. It was too bright. The light above him was too bright. It hurt, the thing that used to give him such strength now offered only pain. He was done with pain. He wanted it gone. Not just gone, he wanted it destroyed.

He felt Caijin's power roiling within him, at once a familiar comfort and somehow so different from what he remembered. He reached out to the light with his power but felt it do something it had never done before. It revolted against his command. It no longer recognized him as its master.

Angry, he felt something new at his fingertips and seized it. This new thing lashed out at the light and the room was filled with the sound of shattering glass and sparks as the it burst overhead, raining shards down around him. At last, it was dark. Peacefully, blessedly, dark.

***

He did not emerge from the darkness until much later. He could feel the passage of time in the condition of his body, it was healthier but so incredibly weak. It was an effort to open his eyes and even more so to move his body. After a moment of struggling, Jason was able to manage sitting up by himself.

Someone opened the door and flicked on the lights. Unknowingly, Jason cried out and shielded himself from the light. "Turn it off," he whispered, no force behind the command.

"Jason? You're awake! Jason, it's me, it's Sara, Sara Tanaka." He didn't recognize the name, or the voice, but then, everything sounded different in the dark. Did he know her? Maybe once, in the light, but no longer. He was alone in his darkness.

"Turn it off!" Jason growled, his voice animalistic. He supposed he might no longer be classified as human anymore, not with the corruption having fed on his soul throughout those few months.

"Jason?" The woman called again, sounding... was that disappointment?

Furious, he turned on her, the new power lashing out. "I said, turn it off!" The darkness surged against the source of light, consuming it.

He felt his Energy spike before bottoming out once again. He was still weak and hadn't regained much strength since waking up. It felt pitiful considering Caijin was one of the strongest Spirits this world had ever known. It should have recovered by now, even if its Host body was weakened by their captivity.

Jason felt lightheaded, using that power and consuming the light had taken more out of him than he realized. His body swayed a little as he tried to keep upright, but ultimately betrayed him, returning to its comfortable place in the darkness he had grown so used to. It would be in the dark where he learned to rebuild himself, and his Spirit with him.

***

When he woke again, he had absorbed enough Energy that it had strengthened his body to a manageable degree. No one was there when he woke and it was dark in the room, the windows blacked out, the lights off. That woman must have figured out that it was he who had broken their lights after his reveal of his command of darkness, weak as it might have been.

Jason swung his legs over the bed, his floor cold under his bare feet as he carefully stood and hobbled his way over to the wall with the full length mirror.  He looked at himself and didn't recognize even a small part of who he used to be.

His eyes—which had once reflected his golden Light Energy—were a grey so dark they could almost be considered black, one blind and the other lifeless. The one eye had been scarred beyond use and the other looked vacant, as if no soul rested behind its gaze. His hair was long, stringy, and tattered, clumps missing from the scuffle in his escape. He had scar tissue everywhere, the most severely across his face—as if a beast had clawed him with talons the size of daggers—and his chest, where the battalion had seen him impaled before his capture.

But the most striking was that there seemed nothing between his skin and bones despite the progress in his recovery. He had been given scraps to eat and infrequently at that, he only had steady access to water because there was a crack in the wall that seemed to lead to an underwater reservoir. His features had sunk in and his body had become emaciated, even skeletal. He didn't just not look like himself, he looked grotesque, monstrous even. He didn't even feel like himself. Before he had felt so light, filled with power as he was by Caijin. Now he was weighted down by what had happened to him, and Caijin . . . Caijin had not escaped the treatment and was now too weak to restore Jason, or help itself for that matter. He was unsure if Caijin's sanity had even survived such a place.

"Zugon." A voice abruptly spoke. It was a soft voice, whispered quietly as if afraid to disturb a sleeping beast. "That name is no longer, now, it is Zugon."

In the mirror, Jason's reflection distorted, showing a half formed shadowy version of the once great Spirit. They still shared features as a True Host pair would with their designated Spirit, but those features were different from what they had been before as the Great Protector. Even thinking of the title they had held brought forth massive amounts of pain and suffering that malformed and mutated itself into a thirst for vengeance henceforth not felt by this world.

"We are no longer the Spirit of the Great Protector. We are the Spirit of the Great Scourge, fore we will bring our wrath down on the corruption that has infected us bar none that impede our path." Jason felt Zugon's dark power flushing out what little of the light that remained within his body, the shadows bowing at his command.

Eradicating the corruption would come first, the rest of the world would follow. Now, the scourge was all that remained, a protector no longer.

The End.