Synthesia - A Mind for Violence

9 - Exciting News in Natia

Throughout all the different lands and nations across Dawn, through golden ages and times of suffering, in unity or fracture, Réons grew steadily and hardily. A smattering grew in far lands, isolated vistas, and rocky outcroppings. More still thrived in meadows straddling rushing rivers, placid ocean banks, and island redoubts. Sometimes, Réons could cover an entire field with stalks stretching several hundred meters in the air. They created potent works for good and ill.

Réons faced the sun whenever it appeared to grow and nurture and provide them with energy, or to desiccate and wither them with despotic heat. They have done this since they first appeared many hundred years ago.

Today, the Réons faced a withering sun. He often stood tall over his subjects, hand in hand behind his back, ever inspecting the quality and the stock of future Réons yet. This sun, the emperor, Hea Réon Kehim, walked in the shadows of greater suns who had risen before him: high Réons Kana the Beloved, Fyria the Defender, and all the way back to Véom the Chainrender, who was the first to cast light on the newly freed Réons. Before the First Apocalypse.

Some of these were distant memories, others were painfully closer in time, but they all weighed on Kehim, who often found himself passing the time, clutching that bloody rag and wondering if he truly stood under the protection of fallen martyrs. Now, however, he clutched his stomach as he was hobbled down the halls of a public clinic in the center of the great city, followed by a horde of journalists and their top-of-the-line synth cameras.

Later, several nurses and clinicians rolled him into the operating room and placed him down in a vulnerable pose on the table. The straight black bristles above his mouth ceased moving as the wind from Kehim's reflective and overhanding nose stilled, all thanks to the work of his personal physicians' top anesthesiologist.

Just before going under, he panicked in the face of death. It was not that Kehim thought he would die, but feeling the operating table underneath him for the last time, he saw death staring into the weakening eyes of another who had been bound just like him. It may have even happened in the very same clinic. The murder of Kana the Beloved, strapped to a hospital bed and sapped of her remaining life by that newborn babe, which had since come to preoccupy Réons across the globe. Kehim fell unconscious as Kana died in his mind.

The surgery dragged on a little longer than the clinicians had hoped. They stood around Kehim's body. Despite the clear point of entry, precious time had been burnt getting a hold of the bullet that did him in. When the finicky forceps found it wedged between the layers of fat above his intestines, the operators knew Kehim would survive.

Kehim's physician extracted the silvery lug, uncorking blood from below, which the other clinicians were quick to manage. Though they acted quickly, they did not feel themselves jumping into the fire the way they did for other unfortunate Réons.

Those nurses and aides glanced at each other, at Kehim, his breathing machine, and the lanky federal investigator who impatiently opened up an anti-static forensic bag. As the bullet plopped into the bag, the investigator gave a toothy smile to all the assembled hospital workers. He wondered if he should stay a little longer to see if another accident might accost the despised Hea Réon.

No one else came to harm the unfortunate ruler.

In just under an hour, Kehim was breathing without the aid of a machine again, but he remained asleep through the evening and far into the night.

The Hea Réon, the Emperor of Réonia, Kehim, having avoided assassination for now, slumbered peaceably after his surgery in his bed. He slept calmly, ignorant of the ongoing shadowy war flaring up in Natia and across Réonia. Not even the bullet could wake him from his stupor.