As soon as Alastair had posed the question, the doctor realized that the consent that she had been given was not in fact true. In response to this, she hastily tries to apologize, only to find Alastair raising his hand yet again to silence her.

“I appreciate you healing me doctor, but there is only one person I hold responsible for this mess. Until I have an appropriate answer from the party responsible, can you hold off on the explanation?” His eyes never moving from Derek’s face. It was as if he held very little regard for the doctor in the room. Unknown to the two of them, Alastair had begun utilizing his powers to reduce the chances of the organ’s rejection probability.

The doctor stiffens and then relaxes as she hears out his request. Hearing such, she could only be thankful that he hadn’t held her accountable for what had happened.

“Well, Derek— Project SCION, was it?”

Derek’s eyes widen in alarm as he had made sure that Alastair had been unconscious when he had stated the project’s purpose eight hours earlier to the Special Cases Response Unit (SCRU).

“This was… supposed to be part of your training.” He states hesitantly.

“Training, how? I believe I gave you permission to ‘train’ me, not change my body.”

“The training was meant to see how you would adapt to the new changes taking place in your body. Our last promising subject died shortly after the second set of implantations had been administered. Seeing as you had already had a preexisting enhanced condition, we felt that it would be better to see the effects on a person who had a changed physiology that hadn’t been done within our realm.”

“So, I am a lab rat. Essentially speaking.” Alastair’s face hardens as he doesn’t like where the project was going despite hearing so little about it.

“Yes and… no. Seeing as we didn’t know what kind of enhancements we—”

“Your body is a treasure trove!” the doctor blurts out. Both men swivel in her direction. “Sorry, it— just— your body has obviously had enhancement procedures done in a very… unorthodox way. It’s as if someone had—”

“— rearranged the very fabric of what it is to be human.” Alastair finishes with a predatory smile. His eyes flash through a range of emotions before settling into a cold, detached look of muted agony. “Well I would hope so. I was changed during the war for reasons that are more desperate than you’d believe.”

Her expression stiffens before quickly draining of color. Derek takes this moment to step forward, confusion twisting his features as he struggled to contain the questions howling within.

“What do you mean, the war?” he asks, his eyes searching Alastair’s for the answer before he could he give it.

Alastair sighs. His gaze drops as he takes a moment to remember the names of the fallen. Names that had fallen so low that it was a wonder whether they were truly human.

Finally, as if casting aside all that he was, he poses the one question the two would never have considered.

“Have you ever heard of a World War?”

Derek takes a minute to reign in his own queries to the question he had been posed. The doctor, however, held no reserve when it came to hers.

“You mean like a war that is fought on every continent of a single world?”

“Yes and… no.”

“What do you mean?”

Derek, as if having gained some insight into what Alastair was asking, widens his eyes in horror.

“How many worlds?” he asks, his voice trembling as he struggles to contain his emotions at the enormous implications of the man sitting in front of him.

“Seven.” Alastair replies, his voice retaining the cold detachment from earlier. Casting his eyes downward, his voice strains as he mutters, “Each one coming with its own little brand of hell.” As short as his answer was, he seemed to decide that that was as far as he was willing to go to explain it because soon after he was struggling to hold his tears from dropping onto bedding.

A minute passed as Derek stared Alastair with pity. The doctor, sensing that this was one subject she rather wanted to avoid, swiftly makes her way to the door only to shut it softly behind her.

The minutes quickly turn uncomfortable as Derek stands in the doorway, not knowing what to do in this situation. He didn’t expect that he would be forced to cater to the breakdown of a man he had only known for a scant few days at best.

Pulling up a chair, he sits beside the bed and asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Derek watched the young man, gaunt and grim. He knew, in all his years of commanding young men and women, that sometimes, a person just breaks under the strain of stress. He had seen it happen more times than he could count. Time and time again, he had watched as his marine’s teeter upon the edge of a knife with only the slightest push can send them over the edge.

If he was honest with himself, he had never expected to experience it yet again. Only this time, it wasn’t one of his own that were suffering.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. His query was either ignored or fell upon deaf ears as his words held a question that not everyone wanted to hear.

Derek knew what the question meant. To those who had been broken, it was either a life-line, or a whip. The intention was entirely determined by the person who responded to it. He had pulled his share of all-nighters. He was ready and willing to play the role of personal therapist in order to pull his marines from the fight of their mind and back into the real world.

But even then, he had a handful of experience when it came to the mental breakdown of a psion. In his few encounters, there could only be one word to describe them.

Dangerous.

If he were to make a comparison, a marine could be equivalent to single stream. Easily navigable and easily manipulated. A single person with no powers were better at having their minds repaired using the techniques and medication available to them. Even then, there were bound to be accidents if the person ever turned violent. Usually, they could be contained within a hospital ward or a psychiatric unit.

Psions, on the other hand, were a wild card. They varied anywhere from a river to a small ocean, depending on the psionic tuning and the overall strength of their powers. The reason as to why they were a wild card is because most medication in this case either acted as a dampener or as an enhancer. The drugs themselves having such an adverse effect on the psions mind that it could catastrophically damage the surroundings of anything around them.

Derek had had the pleasure of ‘helping’ two psions in his day. Both had drastically different results. One ended up with the dampening reaction to the medication. The other disintegrated three city blocks with one minor outburst of a psionic tuning of telekinetic energy.

He determined that the best way to deal with a psion like this would be to talk it out. Especially given that he had no idea what his powers were and how powerful he really is in an unconscious state. And so, he asked again, hoping that Alastair would open up to him.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

The minutes’ pass again in silence. He waited, and waited, and waited. He waited for the young man in the bed to speak. After an hour of waiting, a whisper seeps out from Alastair’s lips.

“I’m so tired.”

“Hm?”

“Nothing. Will you bear witness?”

Derek blinks, not certain if he heard the Spacer right.

“Say again?”

Alastair looks up to finally gaze at him. Eyes glazed over with a teary film as he struggled to keep his emotions in check.

“Not to everything, mind you! But, will you bear witness?” he blurts, more forceful in his request. It seemed as if he was not asking for absolution or exoneration, but of shared pain. Like he knew he would never be forgiven for the acts he had done and knew that he would always carry this regret and pain with him.

Derek looked Alastair in the eyes, studying the dark depths hidden in the center for the meaning of such a request.

“I am uncertain as to what you mean, but sure. If it helps you to move on.” He states with a bitter smile. Alastair smiles in return, before wiping his eyes free of the excess tears gathering at the edges. His gaze hardens as all previous signs of distress are removed before locking eyes with Derek.

“The Bond of Brotherhood is forged. The Word freely given.”

As if on cue, every person within the five-thousand bed hospital felt the emergence of his power. A feeling of weightlessness filled Derek’s chest as the power coursed through the dark gaze straight into him. The power that he had thought to expect from the young Spacer far outstripped any he had come across within the various races of the galaxy.

It was a potent, like a bonfire set amidst mere candles. It was not prone to the subtle whispers of enchantment held within the student body of Molokä Academy or the booming battalions of mobile artillery of the Psionis Brigade.

In that moment, Alastair spoke, his voice unnaturally calm despite the raging emotions that had been present earlier. A voice that was not his own.

“The first seal is loosened. The Bloody Hand opens. Let the Hand be grasped.”

His cornea changed to a deep blood red with flecks of iridescent gold scattered within. Power pulsed through them as if synchronized to his heartbeat, illuminating them to bear his power.

The other people within the hospital felt the warmth of his power grow within each of them. Each strand of life given either healed and killed hundreds of patients. As for the staff, all they could do was watch, helpless under the weight of the ocean pouring around them.

Derek was spellbound. The longer he stared into Alastair’s eyes, the more he felt a pulling sensation growing within him; a pulling that he felt would cast him adrift among the veritable sea of psionic energy and life-essence pouring through. As he drifted, the golden specks in Alastair’s eyes began to move.

The gold specks shift and swirl, slowly picking up speed. The gaze started to bear down on Derek as he was further enraptured by the crimson gaze. It was mesmerizing to behold.

All at once, the specks explode into light and color, casting the memory of Alastair Thawn, or rather, Elijiah Pierce, upon the barren walls of the hospital room. Streams of battlefields submerge Derek into an ever-turbulent roller coaster of memory as the eyes filled his field of vision.

One memory in particular held more importance than the others. The patterns of millions of men and women lay strewn across stretches of Mars’ craggy surface. The red planet holding true to its name, Derek watched through Elijiah’s eyes as he moved from one battlefield to the next. He could feel the pain and torment as with each battlefield, he would be forced to slay more and more until the war is ended.

This battlefield, the last one for this planet, surrounded him. He lay kneeling amongst the bodies of fellow Warsworn agents, his Agents, and millions of rogue psions within the confines of a city of Mars. In his eyes, this was not a war. It was a purge. He looks down at his hand to see a blood slick spear held tightly in his grip.

Grooves of gold etchings peak out from beneath as the blood sloughs off. Enough drips off to lay the hints of lettering, resting neat and formal, along the length of the spear. Derek watches further as his other hand wipes off the rest, allowing him a brief moment to read the letters embossed upon the pale haft.

L O N G I N I U S

“Soon,” words whisper from his mouth, words that are not his to own. “Soon we shall rest.”

“You have yet to earn that privilege, Horseman of House Cornelius.” A young fluttery voice speaks behind him. “We Warsworn cannot end this war if we cannot even end our own.”

Derek turns slightly, feelings of regret welling up within him. He knew the woman, or at least, Elijiah did, and that in itself was something to worry about. He could feel longing, and love etched within the corners of his heart. She was lovely to look at, but it’s a strange kind of beauty.

She was the same as him. A Horseman of the Warsworn. One of the commanders and presiding leaders of the Warsworn Order.

“Yes, my love.” he states, looking deep into the woman’s eyes. Large and luminous were they, each carrying a shade impossibly green with flecks of iridescent gold, the markings of a Horseman from a different House. Each eye partially hidden beneath wavy curls of blonde hair. “We cannot.”

And with those words he twists the spear so quickly in his hands that he impales the other Horseman through the chest. She smiles, the puncture in her space suit working quickly to allow the atmosphere of Mars to purge the insides.

“I will wait for you,” she sputters, half gasping for a breath, half trying to blurt out her last wish for the man before her. “on the… morrows… ed..ge.”

With this short exchange, she dies, leaving Derek to weep, silently, amidst the bones of a dead city. Pain, loss, and self-torment struggle to beat at the cusp of his minds being.

Alastair’s memory stirs, the power receding from the surroundings of the hospital. Derek feels the warmth dissipate within him. The crimson, gold filled eyes slow as the colors of the room revert to their worn white hue. Emptiness and the pain of loss fills Derek’s body as he struggles to comprehend what he had just experienced.

Silence echoes within the room, before Alastair states a final few words.

“Omni fine initium novum. By the words passed down by the elders of my order, let this new beginning serve as a testament to the new time I shall share with the universe’s embrace.”