Blackest Night

Posted on Aug 22, 2014 @ 12:04pm by Captain Michael Turlogh Kane
Edited on on Aug 22, 2014 @ 12:05pm

Mission: The Tangled Webs We Weave

"BLACKEST NIGHT"

(Continued from "Metamorphosis, Part One")

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"What dungeon is so dark as one's heart? What jailer so inexorable as one's self?"
- Nathaniel Hawthorne "The House of the Seven Gables"

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Location: Thomond, Earth
Stardate: [2.14]0805.2010
Scene: Emoland


As the summer night-storm lashed Thomond, Michael Turlogh Kane tossed and turned in the throes of dream-laden sleep.

He got up and moved to the bedroom door, passing through it like it was air, and found himself standing in a corridor in an unfamiliar part of the castle. When he looked behind him he could tell no difference from the way ahead - the same stonework, the same bare floor and ceiling, the same gloom that settled over everything.

He could no longer see his bedroom door. It had fallen away somewhere behind him, but he was not blind. The outside lightning made white-on-black flashes that lit up the stones for a split-second, but there was no accompanying rumble of thunder.

He reached out and touched the stone walls, feeling them heave and groan like living things. There had been a human settlement on this river fork for over a millennium, and all the memories of those years, good and bad, were soaked indelibly into the bricks and mortar. When he was a child, he had sometimes lain in bed on nights like this, listening to the wind swirl around the castle and be comforted in its steady, unchanging nature.

He passed that room in the corridor, then, saw himself lying in his childhood bed, the moonlight shining on a clean, unscarred face that never saw horror, never knew fear, never had one inkling of what it was truly like beyond the borders of familiarity.

A thought, unbidden - if that child was to die now, dreaming sweet dreams in his own warm bed, it might be a mercy. He would never have to grow up.

Kane touched his ravaged left eye, the one that had been shredded in his skull when the Discovery had been crippled following its disastrous first contact with the Calnarians. Not knowing Human physiology, the Calnarian healer who had treated his wound substituted the ruined organ with a mechanical replacement. Now his eyes were different colours - one natural green, one industrial gold - and the occasional stress headaches he suffered from processing alien technology punctuated the loss of something that could not properly be replaced.

Behind his eyes, in the great canvas of memory, did he recall a childhood dream of a dark stranger standing at his bedroom door, with thoughts of murder in his mind?

The child stirred. The dream retreated away, back into the benighted corridor, and rejoined the formless dark.

The lightning flashed again, and the wind began to moan. In the distance, at the end of the corridor, Kane thought he saw a figure approaching him. It was stooped and hunched, with long, matted hair falling in sods over filthy robes. Light, dark. Light, dark, and the thing was a little closer. From under the dirty smock that it wore, a hand holding a comb appeared. It was the hand of an old woman, gnarled and wizened and shrivelled. The hands reached up, and began to comb the hair.

Dread rising, Kane watched as the thing came closer. The hands pulled the strands of hair away from the face, and Kane looked.

Mother? Is that you?

I cried out for you at the end, my son. You gave me pain when you came into the world and when I left it. Why didn't you come to me when I cried for you?

The corpse-hands reached for him. Let me share my pain with you.

The rain made the earth wet and leaden, drizzled down on the sad parade of funeral mourners who wound their way up the hill behind the chapel. The open grave had a puddle of water at the bottom of it. The priest spoke quickly, his words giving no comfort, and the mourners stood there waiting for the prayers to end, their shoes filling up with water. Laid down beside a dead husband. No children to cry for me, no hearts to pine for me. Nothing to tether my memory, nothing to say I was here too. I lived a life, and I never wanted it to end. The mourners checked their watches, talked about getting home before dark. I died on my own, Michael. I saw it strolling up to me, in no hurry, while I lay there weak and helpless, and in a moment, everything I was, all my hopes and dreams and feelings and thoughts were snuffed out.

Don't you think the universe lost something special, or would you spare no more a thought for a lost mind than you do for a dead flower?
The universe is so unimaginably vast, teeming with myriad lifeforms. We are mere drops in the ocean of eternity, dust particles in the winds of time and fate. What matter if a world such as ours was here, gone, or never here at all?

See, there, those tiny lights in the black curtain of night. Uncountable stars, unknown worlds. We stand upon the threshold of death with every step we take into that black unknown; our zeal to explore, to seek and to find carrying us relentlessly forward, thrusting us like breaking waves upon the rocks of fickle chance and merciless nature. We leap gaily forward unto our doom; every day spirals toward our deaths, and yet we struggle and fight with all our strength to resist the inevitable. So frail we are, so small, so miserably insignificant.

Look again, Michael. Those sparkles against the night are the burning fires of our souls. And one by one, they are going out.

The fires became suns, that bloomed like flowers in his mind's eye. There had been a shuttle malfunction. The metaphasic shields had failed, and he had been exposed to the full heat of the corona of the star named Taramp, a light so old and far away it could not be seen in Earth's night sky. As well as the tumours and melanomas from the UV rays, he had also needed extended treatment and surgeries for numerous skin grafts. When he had regained consciousness in the Century's sickbay it had felt like his whole body was on fire. Like his eye, his own skin was also not his.

For a moment, he saw himself standing in his Academy jumpsuit, raising his hand to take the oath of alliegiance to the Federation amongst his classmates. I take this oath freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion. They didn't coerce, they didn't draft. He volunteered to be burned in the glare of stars and mutilated in starship combat. He was the one who abandoned the thousand-year-old castle, the child in the bed, the mother in the grave. Now that he was gone, Thomond had nothing left. It had been drained of the last of its life and had no more history to give.

Kane turned on his heel, looking back down the dark corridor to where he had been, and saw a line of men and women stretching back into infinite gloom. He recognised the ghostly outline of his own father and grandfather standing immediately behind him, and felt their silent admonishment. You are the Cathain now. At least, you are supposed to be. Look at us, all of us. How can you forsake so many?

When Kane turned away to look ahead of him, there was nothing except the cold, empty gulf of space. The corridor was empty, and there was only a hour or two until dawn.

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NRPG: To be concluded....


Jerome McKee
The Soul of Michael Turlogh Kane
A Captain in Starfleet


"He speaks an infinite deal of nothing!"
- Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", Act 1, Scene 1.117

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