“g–ah...ye” Kaleb tried to speak, but the man’s hand gripping his throat stopped anything from exiting his mouth. “A–ah’m…” He tried again desperately, his eyes bulging, trying his hardest to convince the man that he was not here for any purpose, that he wasn’t trying to hurt or harm anyone in any way, but even as he tried to make these thoughts into words his mind was giving out, whether from panic or a lack of oxygen it was hard to tell. Abruptly, the man, realising Kaleb couldn’t speak, dropped him to the floor. Kaleb’s vision was filled with sparks, pulsing and glowing in a rainbow of colours. Dark panful spots accompanied their disappearance. He had never felt this before. His shivering shuddering body knew it though –knew it instinctually. This was death, and this was the fear of death. And right now, he was pinned beneath the gaze of that hand. He breathed in and out rapidly, relief filling his body, but his mind only continued to watch that hand, dark and hard and he was sure that it watched him back.

“I’m … just travelling through. I’m … I’m here to see cable city” he finally answered, trying his hardest to be as small as possible, to seem as weak as possible. Please don’t hurt me. He pleaded the hand. He was nothing, no one, there was no pride in him –how could there be? He had been defeated instantaneously. He had been defeated before there was even a challenge.

“Cable city? Isn’t everything cable city?” The man with the dark hand sneered

“... came … from… The Lone Pillar”

“What’s that?”

“All alone… in the mists.”

“Oh, so you’re from a colony outside” The man suddenly seemed a little sheepish, perhaps even guilty. He raised his right hand and moved it over the air in front of Kaleb. Kaleb froze. If terror could take solid form it would have taken the form of that hand, he knew. His eyes followed it like some monster from the depths. He stopped breathing again, this time not from strangulation, but from the pressure that horrible black thing exerted even without touching. He felt a shiver run through his body. A strange but familiar sensation. It was a field, he realised. It was his own field. What? He suddenly realised what this sensation was, and what was happening. The hand, as it moved, caused his field to change. It controlled it. He knew the feeling of his field. He knew how it worked, he had even felt it assaulted by individuals in mock monster battles and such, but now… now he felt as if he were a puppet on the end of some god-like string, and at the top of the strings… He watched the hand that moved him, and the yawning chasm of despair widened further than he thought possible. There would have been no point making himself seem small before this, he realised. This hand could simply move his field, and therefore move his body, as if he were a simple glove.

“I see” said the man “I recommend you get out of here, and I recommend you go back home. Don’t you know this world is twisted? You’ve come to see a rotting carcass. A fucking rolling catastrophe. Here’s my advice: go home kid”

“B…” Kaleb nearly asked why he wasn’t dead, but decided suddenly that it was wiser to say nothing. He waited, stunned as the man walked away from him. Never in his life had he had such little control of his fate.

“Get the hell away from here” The man called out to him, sitting back down on his chair, placing his hands once again under his chin.

Kaleb obeyed. Was this the hand at work? It felt as if something else was inside him, but it could just have been his fear. He smashed through the door, grazing his arm on the metal, tripping out into the walkway. He sprinted along it, his pack flopping wildly behind him, and then launched himself into the air, not caring what way he was going. He didn’t bother extending his wings, he simply let himself drop, gathering as much momentum as he could, and then he raised them out around him to try and get even further away, to get as far away from it as he could. How far could that hand reach? Was the only thought that entered his mind, and behind it was an image, an image of his life, sitting like a tiny baby gull in the middle of that hand’s dread palm. He was sweating and breathing heavily. He felt tears on his cheeks. He did not care. For the first time in his life, even after facing monsters and the endless loneliness of the mists, Kaleb had felt the true shadow of fear.

Even though, logically, Kaleb could understand that if the man wished him dead, he would surely have been dead almost immediately, Kaleb’s instincts overrode any such consideration, and he flew at a breakneck speed, building it up by descending as rapidly as he could and then levelling out in order to move away from the empty settlement. He paid no attention at all to the direction in which he was travelling, choosing directions almost at random, and he evaded wires and cables as best he could, dodging and spinning, releasing his field and dissolving his wings when he needed to fit through particularly troublesome areas. Thankfully, he was travelling mostly through pillars that did not have the concentration of obstacles that the empty settlement had, or he might very well have been caught up in a web of tangled wires.

Kaleb’s mind screamed on, uncaring for the logical arguments he tried to present to it to slow his rapid escape. He was panting and his heart was beating, and in the forefront of his maddened mind was the image of that dark black hand, shining and glinting like a dagger as it levelled with his throat. There was something unendurably troubling about that hand, even beyond its obvious and horrific potency. It was as if some malevolent force had been condensed and purified and then formed into a kind of bad copy of a hand. It was as if the darkness of the shadows had decided to try to make some kind of appendage, but had made something unspeakable instead.

Kaleb, after another few minutes of letting himself escape –though from what, it was hard to say– tried to force the strange shape of it from his mind, and enjoyed some slight success. His breath was running ragged, but not from adrenaline – he was growing exhausted now, from his extremely rapid speed and the reciprocal forces that were weighing on his field.

He finally regained his senses and slowed enough that the pressure was no longer unbearable. He kept going though, kept swooping through the pillars and the mists, things that had that very morning seemed so new and interesting, and that now gave the impression of hiding another darker shadow with five fingers behind them. And then another problem reared its head, one that he was glad to have, as it caused him to start thinking again: he had no idea where he was, or in which direction he was heading. Kaleb thought about stopping, but despite his exhaustion, his fear would not permit him just yet. His heart still in his throat, he kept on flying, deciding to ignore his exhausted limbs for as long as he could.

Eventually, he was forced to land –though crash is probably a better descriptor– onto a reasonably protected area of a pillar. He curled up behind a boulder and lay there, breathing hard and watching the mists carefully, though what reason anyone would have had for following him –especially someone so obviously powerful as the man with the dark hand– he could not reasonably guess at. Finally, even his panting subsided and he slowly unwound the coil of tension which was his body. All of his muscles felt as if small splinters had been driven into them, such was the extent to which he had exhausted his field. He would have to rest here for a cycle, he realised, there was no way he could continue in his current state.

Kaleb rested his back against the boulder and pulled out his pack, undoing the top and fishing out some rations that Iowara had suggested he take. He bit into the dried fungus, and it slowly softened on his tongue and as he chewed at its tacky surface. Gradually reality was returning to him, and he felt a rush of gratitude for Iowara again. It felt as if the strangely textured fungus were softly giving him back to sanity. Now that the shadow of death had passed over him, Kaleb was feeling more uncertain about his decision to leave Haethea than he ever had before. He had perhaps been naive, and his stay with Iowara had lulled him into a false sense of security. That kind man had even tried to warn him, and Kaleb had even thought that he’d understood. But the reality of his precarious situation, alone, unarmed, weak and without allies, had not hit him until that black hand had been before him. He shivered and drew his coat closer about himself.

He needed to know where he was, he finally thought, trying to snap himself out of his ongoing contemplation of the image of that dark appendage. With shaky hands, from worry or exhaustion he could not tell, he opened the terminal that Iowara had given him. It took him some time to figure out where he was as he was still unfamiliar with the interface and his mind was not working as well as it could have. But eventually he figured out his relative position. The problem was that the abandoned settlement he had fled from ended up being almost directly in line with the town that he had wished to go to initially. He immediately refused the option of going back the way he had come. He wished to avoid even the slightest possibility of an interaction with that hand. If he were to travel in a large enough circle, perhaps he could make it. But as he looked at the map, he reasoned that he may as well simply continue in the direction he was going, with an adjustment of a dozen or so degrees, and he would come to another settlement that was marked blue on Iowara’s 3d map. And anything that would put more distance between him and that monstrosity he had encountered would be more than welcome.

Having made his decision, he placed the terminal back in his pack and then hugged it tightly to himself, and, unwilling to take his bedroll out –for he assumed lying down would make him even more vulnerable– he simply sat with the pack between his knees and fell asleep. All the cycle long unnatural black insect carapaces crawled through his dreams searching for him, and he slept fitfully, and in his waking moments he would peek into the mists, searching for non existant signs of a horrid dark hand.