A Touch Of Lightning (COMPLETED!)

Chapter 50 The Tearing

Chapter 50 The Tearing

Although Callin's memories were disjointed, broken and scattered about his mindscape like shards of glass, he could still piece together a memory of his brother. Carl had been so much more than a brother. He had been Callin's closest friend, always there for him, always by his side. He had been the rock in his youth.

Now, amidst the sea of shifting imagery of his own past, Callin remembered that he had been born with his healing ability, claws and fangs, and enhanced senses. But Carl had been totally normal.

Callin thought of the way the organs had been transported to the surgery table. And the way they had handled his own organs as they removed them. The organs they had brought were carried in a stainless steel box, full of computer screens and tens of bottles of different liquids, their hoses running down and disappearing into the box. When the container was opened, a faint mist escaped. Some type of pressurized, sterilized gas.

The organs they had brought to implant in him were in a custom designed transport box that must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The surgeons handled the organs they lifted out of those boxes with great care, as if they were holding something infinitely precious and fragile.

And then, as they removed his organs in preparation to implant the new ones, they simply threw them into a plastic bag hanging off the end of the operating table. Like bloody chunks of garbage. As if they had no further use for them. The contrast couldn't have been greater.

Callin understood. Carl, without an enhanced healing ability, without these critical organs, was dead. The lab scientists and surgeons therefore had no use for the organs they cut out of him once they replaced his with Carl's.

This sent him reeling back, back into the heart of the beast within, where he could hide from the bitter barbs of his own savage memories. His pain brought the animal within to an even greater height of rage, immersing him in electric fire and ice, a nearly mindless, lashing tangle of power and emotions.

The blood red flat line he stood on, out amidst the pure black emptiness, suddenly went wild. It surged up and about, great rising spears and barbs, shooting upwards and then collapsing. Holes appeared for an instant, each one blazing with an image ripped from his memories before collapsing under fiery, crimson lines. Lines of power woven with hatred, sown tight by the hand of the lust for vengeance. It was a raw display of such chaos that the complete lack of sound was so out of place that it shook him more than the thunder of a trillion storms.

There was no immediate threat to him, therefore the beast within stood still, surveying the shifting field of insanity with its cold, uncaring gaze. Callin was so nearly lost within the animal that he almost wasn't able to make the connection. But when he did, it stunned him into wakefulness. This place, this shifting, lashing land, was just a visible representation of the mind of the beast. Of his very core. As if he were looking at his life-force itself.

It explained how he was able to access any and all of his memories. It explained how the great lightning bolts that had scared him so terribly had become calm and stable the more he had fallen into the beast. It explained the visible scene of purest rage that now danced about him, spurred on by those memories. This was the totality of his psychic self.

Now he understood why it was called the Fraying. Were you to enter here, were you to embrace the entire depth of your power, without the instincts of the beast to control it, you would undoubtedly be ripped apart, from the inside.

This was the ragged connection between psychic power and the real world. Where the stable, solid energy of the world met dynamic, uncontrolled psychic energy. A land between lands, where energy, where raw power, lashed about as it would. Fraying at the very edges of reality, fraying at the strands of thoughts that formed a normal mind.