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Simple Unicycle
Punished GN
Your Day Begins, Hassan, Part II
Outside the Hounds Base
Pantheon landed softly, shirtless and pants tatters. Alchemyst leveled precaution his way, he gave it no regard. Doing it her way would mean it would take longer than necessary. Injured bodies still had willpower and an inkling of revelry for their cause regardless of if their bodies would return them the privilege of fighting for that cause again. Mold these Hounds into little less than lifeless husks and there would be no more attacks. Do it.
Never. But this fighting was too much. Hassan was exhausted. How easy to blind a mind from itself once it had spent all its waking hours in tug and war. Aggression burned; weak thud of disjointed things braced one another: Hassan knew he was weak--these were not battles he could fight on his own; Pantheon knew Hassan needed him for that very reason. And he would force a suitable host out of the boy before she came. Time was not on either of their sides, and Pantheon had to do his work quick if he, and subsequently, the boy, were to survive.
Sculpt a child’s immaturity into at least the beginnings of responsibility, and perhaps he would see clear what was in front of him--what was haunting him. Had the child not yet felt that snare that was greater than Pantheon’s? Of course he hadn’t. He was too busy thinking about all the ‘cool’ things Pantheon would allow him to do. Somehow, Pantheon had to focus the boy’s mind; thus, they were here. Pantheon first had to make the boy find his limits. Here would be the testing grounds.
The pure energy of which he was composite swirled within him; it was something like… nerves. Pantheon felt tense, a sensation which the boy--when he was disembodied from Pantheon--knew as fear. It curled up inside him and made Pantheon’s face tremble. Customary confidence packed into a hurried flair of words,
”We will take the helicopter, then, man of tinfoil.” he hurried off, without the Iron Knight’s direction. He landed atop a random building.
Down to one knee he went as though forced. Sparks of that mystic electricity rippled around his body wild; the palleted iris’ joining at once to a singular deep brown and yellow tint. He was shaking. He looked up from his supplanted position and saw nothing but a world black. A quiet. In this new black, much like the one he had first seen, Hassan found himself as he was before Pantheon--a boy. Alone. Before him stretched a vibrant, shimmering crystalline-ruby quartz thoroughfare. His face glowed a crimson, discoloring the pupils of his eyes to that of the road below. No sound; he could not breathe, and he had found himself weak. It had been a considerable amount of time since he had last practiced his abilities as a mage, Pantheon had become his crutch.
For the first time in a while, he felt his own thoughts swirl into his head: those of video games and slurpees and girls. There was nothing to be had of fighting tyrants or destroying mechs or shrugging bullets off like fragile male egos. His moment of requiem was short, for from the blank crystalline road spun a woman. Her person formed from a swirl of rainbow-light. Chaotically curious as he was, Hassan moved toward her and she toward him. He saw nothing well in the astral plane, not like he used to. He could feel his own mind slipping from this plane of existence already.
Before he knew, she stood right in front of him, towering over the petite young man at a height only feasible in this plane and in one’s dreams. It was when he reached out to touch her that she shrunk down to his height with immediacy. There had been a black object in her hand that he had not noticed before; she held it in front of his face. It was Pantheon’s cape. She spoke,
“Ask yourself,” Pantheon’s cape levitated in the air and was spun around; where there had been no body attatched to the cape there now was one. It was Pantheon himself: clothes in tatters, holes puncturing his chest, gashes lengthening across his body from the shoulders to the hips, eyes swollen shut, head hanging lifeless to the side, mystical energy replaced with crimson blood dripping from his head to his feet and burning into flame when it touched the crystalline ruby road below. She held Pantheon in one hand, strewn up by the cape without slack.
“What will I do when I find out what he will cost me?” she held the lifeless Pantheon in front of her, and with a single word, Pantheon turned to dust--dust which she blew in Hassan’s face. The world around Hassan cracked, splinters in the sable black sky; the apparition disappeared in that same whir of rainbow light and dispersed into the breaking astral heavens. The road beneath Hassan sheared once and then shattered completely, and he fell. Down, down, and into nothing.
A lightning flash, a concussive force, Hassan’s soul was violently shoved back into the immobile and tranced Pantheon who was still fixed on one knee.
”No. No! NO!!” a single boom of thunder rolled across the sky, followed by a whip of lightning which sounded like it had several screaming voices trapped inside it. The sky itself flashed dark for but that single moment before returning to daylight.
Pantheon was afraid.
