Sigma/Star

Chapter 42: Bowl-o-rama

Ochenkov awoke to the mumblings of the old man reading from the scriptures. He would drift in and out of consciousness while bound to the chair, sometimes hearing what was being spoken and other times tuning it out into white noise. What did it matter if he were listening or not when he was trapped in this situation?

The brainwashing was pointless though. Ochenkov had already survived the attempts by the Enian Federation to erase his totemic system of tribal gods and replace them with Saint Ishiyama; what made Mazarrat and Zolraq's efforts any different?

The general swirled saliva around his mouth in an effort to hydrate it, a technique he had developed for wilderness survival. This didn't feel quite the same as those many times he had been out in the woods. It was a bit more depressing to be doing these things while sitting in the middle of a town. If he could just walk out the door he could have the water he so desperately craved.

A good tactic though on the part of the cult leader. Depriving a man of water could drive him to the edges of his sanity and a broken mind could easily be reshaped into anything desired. But Ochenkov was not an ordinary man. He would not break. He was forming a plan instead, during the brief periods he experienced complete consciousness.

The barbarian would need something momentous to come from nature, a calamity, a great storm. He had been praying to every spirit he could think of to help bring him this event, but there had been nothing over the last couple of days. In one moment of weakness he had begged Mazarrat for assistance but had quickly silenced his mind and had hoped his prayer had not been heard by such a dark being.

It had come time though for Ochenkov to make the next move and to push the coming storm into existence through his own mental being. He would need his spirit though, and a lot of it. So much that he would be killing himself and reviving, pushing to the edge of death before reeling his mind back. It would be difficult, something he had not done for many years and for good reason. It was a capacity he had locked away within himself, in order to save both his body and the surrounding world. It was why he had been tracked down and found by the Federation, why he had been built a Goliath, and why he had been made into a general. It was time.

Ochenkov closed his eyes, focusing on the well within himself where his spirit sat. It was as he had been taught when he was trained by the old man, to think of the lake and the calm winds upon it. To open up the dam and release what was within. But Ochenkov had always struggled to release the right amount. He could either open it a bit, letting out enough to make him a better fighter than the average. Or he could unload the flood gates, the power within pouring out and nearly drowning him. He would have to open that now and live with the consequences, if he lived at all.

There was a tremor above as the church was rocked by a growing, howling wind sweeping in from the northern mountains. It carried with it dense clouds that had swelled quickly with dense moisture. For the villagers, this was not immensely unusual in the area. A storm like that could suddenly come up over the mountains in a flash and hit the town with a freak blizzard, and so they had grown accustomed to seeing the appearance of these sorts of clouds. Their response was to move to the church, the steadiest, most secure building in the village.

As the winds increased and the clouds grew more ominous, it was soon decided amongst the people crowding the church that they should all move down into the safety of the basement, which had enough space to contain most of the town, while the stronger males would typically be left above as they were the most likely to survive. With the crowd now filing in, the old man speaking to Ochenkov stopped abruptly, surprised to see all these new visitors. Zolraq approached him and gave a little nod and the old man hustled up to the stairs and reopened his tome, beginning to read a sermon to the people to help them settle and distract them from the storm.