A Touch Of Lightning (COMPLETED!)

Chapter 76 The Seventh Island 5

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Chapter 76 The Seventh Island 5

The touch of those foul worms on his skin pulled Callin back into the present, despite his minds attempts to shut down. He opened his eyes, but his body ignored his commands to move, to scramble away. He was paralyzed, completely helpless.

It was so horrific, so terrifying, that he actually felt that last piece of his control snap. And the creature above him seemed to swell up in pleasure as his power flowed out of his body and up those five worms, like it was sucking his very life essence away.

In his peripheral vision he could see Vena being sucked dry by this monstrosity. Her power was a cold, golden glow, traveling up on the outside of her body, to be devoured by the five worms wrapped tightly about her. Then, through the mind shredding panic, he noticed a pattern to the movements of the worms.

They were weaving her power and his together! Callin latched onto that fact as if it were a lifeline and he were drowning. It was key to what was happening, it was key to survival itself. He didn't know how he knew this, but he knew it unquestioningly. And his healing power surged up one last time. A final bar, a final barrier, between his power and his life force. A bar changed by what he now knew about the relationship between his power and Vena's, and what this thing was doing.

The creature hissed viciously and tossed him across the cell, pulling back all five of the worms it had held him with like a turtle retracting it's head into its shell. Callin's last moment of clarity before he passed out was the seed for his recurring nightmares.

He saw the five worms holding Vena rhythmically pulsing, and he saw chunks of her life force, her memories, her very essence, shooting up inside those worms with every pulse. She was being devoured alive!

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"Callin!" Miya was crouched next to him, holding his chin in her steel grip, her panic bleeding from her eyes.

"Ow. Please stop trying to pop my chin like a big zit." Callin mumbled, pulling his head away from her grip.

"I think that means he's going to be ok. I hope..." Arianne said.

Callin carefully climbed to his feet, wiping his cheeks, astonished to find his hand soaked with tears. That nightmare, that onslaught of true memories, of true events, had been blocked out of his mind by his healing power. His healing power had found it so horrific that it had deemed it dangerous and had blocked it from his mind. But the intrinsic, core-deep link between scents and memories had overcome that block.

"What did you smell? What is it?"

"Cleaners." Callin said softly, reeling on his feet against the wall as his memories swirled up at that name.

"What?" Arianne looked around nervously, seeing how shaken he was.

"This cave...this is where Cleaners are...made." Callin forced himself to stand up straight, forced himself to push his memories away and analyze his surroundings.

"Cleaners are...twisted things. They are like...like swirls of psychic power gone rotten, linking this world to the other, through an incomplete Bond of a Weaver and a Flayer."

He knew Miya and Arianne would not understand any of that, but saying it out loud helped him come to understand what he had known all along. Now, facing what the Cleaners really were, in his own mind, he found his stomach churning, like it was trying to turn itself inside out. And then, even as he considered what the Cleaners really were, he remembered the other failed Bonding attempts. He remembered the other girls he saw die.