It was fucking excruciating.
Yet, as it turned out, the patience of the Ancestors could outlast even his own.
Really, there was no contest.
In the battle of wills over Revik’s soul, over his way of looking at the world, over his way of seeing himself… he was definitely losing.
He honestly couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Two
Water On Stone
Revik came out of the training session, if anything, angrier than before.
He’d expected to be alone, at least, once he got back to his monk’s cell.
He craved aloneness, needed it by then, even if it meant returning to that fucking lightless, airless cave for the remainder of the afternoon and evening.
He more and more wondered if they’d saddled him with such a tiny monk’s cell on purpose, knowing he was claustrophobic.
Rooms with real windows existed inside these caves.
Some even had real ventilation to outside.
Revik had seen many empty rooms of this sort, on his wanders through the tunnels. He knew the monks suffered from an excess of space, given how much the monastery had shrunk in the years since First Contact, when monks were slaughtered wholesale, along with the rest of their brethren.
That didn’t even include the rest of the underground city, which now stood mostly abandoned, including caves adjacent to the formal spaces belonging to the monks.
Revik wasn’t a monk.
He could have lived in any of those caves.
They’d had an abundance of options when assigning him a room.
They also likely knew he wouldn’t particularly want to admit to his own discomfort, if only because he wouldn’t want to discuss the reasons why, or the precise incidents in his past that led to Revik being claustrophobic in the first place.
His claustrophobia was his own damned business.
Tulani, the old monk who had been in Revik’s room, asking about his music, would probably have agreed with him on that point… right before he suggested Revik talk about it anyway, for his own benefit, not theirs.
Revik wondered if Tulani had been assigned to him.
The old monk might be hanging around to keep Revik from being alone too often with his thoughts… or to keep him from committing suicide, for that matter, or contemplating escape. He might be there simply to monitor Revik’s reactions more closely.
Revik also wondered sometimes if Tulani overstayed his welcome on purpose, waiting for Revik to snap… to have some kind of nervous breakdown they could all observe and use to pull him apart from the inside.
Revik knew by now, as “innocent” as the monks seemed, they were no strangers to penetrating difficult psychology. Nor were they fools, as much as Revik was tempted to treat them as such. The truth was, they were wearing him down.
Patiently, slowly, kindly… strategically.
Revik’s “training” sessions were a part of that, as well. Right now, those consisted of opening structures in the light around his aleimic heart, which had been an exercise in fear, frustration, embarrassment, pain, and grief.
Mostly fear.
He hated feeling that goddamned vulnerable.
Even breathing hurt by the end.
After over four hours trying to meditate with a bunch of happy, contented monks, who found the entire process effortless and illuminating, Revik more or less wanted to put his hand, and possibly his head, through a wall.
At the very least, he very much wanted to be alone.
He knew it was childish, hiding from the rest of them.
He knew it was childish to avoid getting to know any of the monks, as well as holding onto his own music, his own books, his previous connections with the world… the fact that he’d read a fucking newspaper in the last fifty years.
But he couldn’t seem to shake his stubborn desire to hold onto those things.
He couldn’t shake his reluctance to truly understand their world.
He knew they’d call it attachment, avoidance, a kind of addiction, and he even agreed with them up to a point. He could see and understand how it kept his light and mind in a certain space, one that wasn’t wholly healthy for him, especially right now.
He just didn’t care.
Or maybe he did care, but not enough to change.
They’d told him, over and over, that they would not keep him here, that there was no danger they would trap him inside, or try to force him to be a monk forever.
Revik knew this. He knew they meant him no harm, that they weren’t trying to brainwash him, or force anything upon him, or convert him to anything… but he feared these things anyway. After years spent inside the construct of the Rooks, who molded his mind, his very sense of who he was, he was terrified of doing that all over again, with just different masters––no matter how “benign” those masters might seem on the outside.
He didn’t trust himself.
For the same reason, he didn’t let himself get too close.
He isolated himself, instead, even as he hated the feeling of disconnection. He held on to things he knew didn’t define him, even as he hated how erased he felt. He hated not knowing who he was anymore. He hated knowing he’d disappeared to the rest of the world.
He hated how irrelevant he felt.
It was as if the last thirty years of his life had pretty much been a wash.
Worse, really––those years now felt like steps backwards. He looked back at who he’d been under the Org, and saw nothing but delusion.
Of course, the monks saw all of this somewhat differently.
The monks told Revik that his depression was as much organic as it was psychological. They likened it to a drug addiction, telling him that he missed the symbiotic nature of the Org themselves, and the way in which they fed upon one another’s light. They told Revik he’d grown completely dependent on the Org, while living inside their seer network.
They called that network, “The Pyramid.”
They called the Org, “The Rooks.”
The monks told him his light had been severely damaged living inside the Pyramid of the Rooks. They told him he’d been brainwashed, yes, but perhaps more significantly, his light had been parasitized, and broken in ways to make it difficult for Revik to live without them.
The Rooks “repaid” him for this rape by giving him the illusion of power, as well as a sense of purpose. The monks explained to him that most of Revik’s “power” inside the Pyramid had been an illusion as well––accomplished only via the rape of every seer’s light that stood below him on the rungs of the Pyramid’s ladder.
This all felt true to Revik.
Moreover, he could see it, clearly, when they showed him light-diagrams of how the Pyramid actually functioned. In essence, the Rooks stole from him, and Revik stole from the seers below him on that ladder, and sometimes even those above him.
The monks told him he was suffering in part because he was rebuilding those pieces of his light they had broken in him, so he could stand on his own.
In the meantime, they said, he was like a junkie, screaming in pain from the hole in his light––screaming in pain because he missed the symbiosis of the Pyramid.
They told him that his psychological pain stemmed mostly from this, as well.
Revik could feel the truth of this, too.
As much as it embarrassed him to admit it, he missed the power the Pyramid had lent him, even if that power was stolen. Perhaps more than that, he desperately missed the sense of purpose being in the Org had given to his life.
The monks assured him this was all part of the process.
They saw it as “necessary pain” to get him to the other side of this “addiction” he had developed on the Rooks’ light. They cautioned him that the Rooks had stripped away his true independence of mind while he’d been one of them. As a result, he’d lost the ability to really know his own mind, or make his own decisions.
They told him he’d lo
st confidence in himself as a result.
The told him he would get all of that back.
They promised him he would, if he did not give up.
As much as it annoyed the shit out of him, those things felt true to Revik, as well.
Still, he suspected some of these things were less about brainwashing, or his aleimic structure being damaged, and more about him genuinely missing being a part of the world. He missed being involved. He missed knowing what was happening. Hell, he didn’t even know if the last human war he’d been in had ended.
He didn’t know if his favorite human bands got played on the radio anymore.
He didn’t know if the same politicians were in office, or the same types of clothes were worn, or what scandals had broken, or what movies were out.
Then there was the mind wipe Vash had been forced to perform on him, as a condition of Galaith and the Rooks letting him go.
Because of that, Revik was missing pieces––black marks, where his mind had once lived, where he had once lived. Those empty, void-like spaces were surrounded by vague emotions and prejudices and wants, things that pulled at him but without any of the specifics that went with them, without anything for him to make sense of what he felt.
He could no longer remember good chunks of what he’d done since the end of the second world war. He’d stumbled across pockets of grief, remembered faces, fleeting images that felt and tasted familiar.
He remembered the faces of some of the people he’d killed.
He even remembered happy moments, here and there.
He definitely remembered more decadent ones.
None of it lingered, however––not long enough for him to know what to do with any of what remained, or to remember which pieces of that belonged to him now.
He remembered Kali.
He remembered his flight from Vietnam.
The monks told him to let that go, too, however.
They advised Revik to try and approach himself with new eyes, to relearn himself without allowing any of those old ways of seeing himself to color his impressions. They told him he didn’t see himself clearly, either in the good or the bad. They told him he didn’t see his abilities clearly, nor others clearly, nor how others viewed him clearly.
Revik didn’t want to, though.
He didn’t want to let all of that go.
Even when he tried to defy them, however, he couldn’t hold enough of his own mind or emotions or memories for any of it to make a real difference.
He’d been in here for almost five years, according to Vash.
Five years, and no one had fed him a scrap of news, not even on whether the American war in Vietnam had finally ended, or if any of his friends in the Org were still alive.
He was losing his fucking mind in here.
He was starting to really lose his mind.
The monks, of course, called this “progress.”
Revik had different words for it.
He’d been muttering and even shouting those words at them for months now, but they didn’t react to that much, either.
He wanted them to fucking react.
He wanted them to get angry at him now and then. He wanted them to shout back, punish him for being an asshole. Hell, sometimes he wanted them to hit him.
But they never did any of those things. They never gave him anything to push back against, which only made his frustration, confusion, and disgust with himself worse.
He wondered what they would do––what they would really do––if he just left.
If he just walked out of these cold, dry caves one night, hiked down the mountains to the nearest facsimile of civilization, got drunk as shit, did his damnedest to get laid as many times as his cock and light could handle it––would they care?
Would they even come after him?
Just thinking about it made his cock hard. It made his skin flush, his light snake and spark like an angry, frustrated coil of electricity.
Gaos. He couldn’t start thinking about sex right now.
He really couldn’t.
He mulled the idea over, anyway.
He mulled it over, knowing he wouldn’t do it, knowing why he wouldn’t do it. Knowing penance was a condition the Rooks left him, too––that Galaith left him, as a part of his agreement with Vash not to come after him after Revik defected. Knowing he wasn’t cut out for living life on the run, any more than he was cut out for living as a monk.
Knowing none of that was the real reason, even now, just another bullshit story he fed his ego to keep it quiet.
He was still playing this nightly ritual with himself when he reached the door of his cave-like cell––
––and froze.
His light flickered out, confirming what he’d felt.
Someone was waiting for him.
Someone was inside his room.
Someone he didn’t know.
Three
Requested
He snapped into infiltrator mode. The shift happened fast––so fast, his mind didn’t utter a conscious thought.
His light clicked into assessment.
Then, feeling infiltrators inside those rock walls, not monks, Revik’s aleimi hardened into a more aggressive form of self-defense.
Of course, in doing so, he didn’t miss the irony that even when he hated his own life, some part of him fought to protect it with a vigilance that bordered on pathology.
A few things calmed that hyper-vigilance relatively quickly.
Whoever waited for him in there, they made no attempt to hide from him. They made no attempt to hide their scans of him, either, which in seer’s parlance was more or less the polite way to approach a stranger’s light when you wanted to learn more about them.
It gave the other seer the opportunity to shield, for one.
Even so, the contact brought Revik’s separation sickness back with a lurch.
Fuck. Whoever this was, they definitely weren’t a monk.
The monks had figured out some way, around Revik at least, to keep their light from triggering the worst aspects of his deprivation.
It didn’t really help, of course. He still found himself staring at some of them, depending on the specific frequencies of their light.
Even as he thought it, he wished he’d found time to jerk off that morning.
He wished he’d done it before he had to deal with whoever the fuck was in his room now.
Humor swept the Barrier space around him.
In it, Revik swore he heard actual laughter.
His face warmed as it sank in what the humor meant.
They could hear him. Even shielded, even though he hadn’t yet made a sound that would have told them he was outside the door––they could hear his thoughts.
It’s quite all right, brother, a voice murmured in his mind.
The seer behind it sent a warm, packed pulse of reassurance with the words.
Believe it or not, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with such settings, the male-sounding voice added ruefully. I take no offense at your difficulties from living in a celibate environment for so long. Nor will anyone in my team. And whatever your issues on that front… for which I have nothing but the profoundest sympathies, my brother… I suspect I’m not really your type.
Revik’s jaw hardened.
There wasn’t much he could say in response. The seer inside his room had already made it abundantly clear that he outranked Revik, sight-wise.
Still, Revik picked up a few things.
Middle-aged. Male. Military-trained.
Smart ass.
The other seer laughed again.
Are you coming inside, brother Revik? he asked. Or should I come out to you? I was told if I waited here long enough, you would eventually return. Or were those kind old monks lying to me, just to see if they could elicit an emotional reaction?
Muttering under his breath, Revik shifted his weight on his feet indecisively.
His hands rose from his sides, clenching on his h
ips, but his indecisiveness only worsened.
Then, realizing the monks probably didn’t want him dead, no matter how much of a pain in the ass they found him, he walked the rest of the way to the door, making up the distance with swift but jerking steps.
Flinging open the wooden panel, he walked inside, then stopped again.
The seer who had spoken to him wasn’t alone.
Three seers in total sat there.
Two males, one female.
The fact that he’d felt none of them specifically told Revik they definitely outranked him.
The one who let Revik feel him first, meaning from outside the door, smiled.
It had to be him.
His gray eyes held the same humorous glint Revik felt in his mind before. The older male’s light felt like what Revik first tasted from outside of the door, too.
All three of them sat on cushions on the stone floor––cushions that someone must have dragged into the room to accommodate them, along with the thicker mats where the cushions had been placed, since neither thing lived in Revik’s room normally.
They all sat with straight backs, like they were accustomed to sitting on the floor.
They looked up at him expectantly, facing him in a disjointed half-circle.
Revik took a snapshot of the seer in the center with his light, even as he looked him over.
He was clearly their leader. Those pale, far-seeing eyes stood out under chestnut-colored hair, with some gray at the temples. Maybe three-hundred-and-fifty, four hundred years old. He was in good shape, not a spare ounce of flesh on him. He looked like a fighter, both from his muscle tone, and the way his eyes flickered over Revik where he stood.
He had odd features for a seer.
His bone structure was almost human-European. Coupled with those gray eyes, and his tightly-shielded, nearly invisible aleimi, Revik might have thought him human altogether, if the other hadn’t already spoken in his mind.
He still couldn’t see much of his light.
He strongly suspected he could only see as much of it as the male specifically wanted him to see. Even the pieces Revik managed to discern, he found himself pinning down only with difficulty––making him question if it was all just another layer of disguise.
The Defector Page 2
