The Light Within Ch. 04

Another thrill of energy ran through me, coursing through my insides like a rough tongue. The insides of my eyelids felt warm. 'Suffering' was a funny way to describe it.

"In several minutes I believe I will have accumulated enough electricity to short the battery, which is connected to the ultraviolet lights. This will be an unpleasant, though certainly non-fatal experience for your newly strengthened body, and I will do my best to distract you and minimize the discomfort. I estimate that after the battery shorts we will have less than sixty seconds of darkness during which my Second and I will retreat."

"And kill Brogn?" Even in my head I sounded hopeful.

"No. If my Second and I are both quick and fortunate, we will be able to leave the vessel entirely and convince Brogn we have fled to protect ourselves."

"Sure, yeah, I can only think of one problem with that plan. What the fuck is going to happen to me once you both leave?!"

"I doubt very much that Brogn will want to delay relieving himself of you by more than a day, even if the circumstances surrounding our departure are suspicious. He will likely isolate you but he knows better than to harm you. After he receives compensation from the Loyalists, I imagine his retreat from this system will be hasty; he has no investment in our politics."

My remarkably swollen belly ached as though it was already empty and I felt cold. "So then what?"

"He will deliver you to the Loyalists, whose militia would be impenetrable without your assistance. Sneaking you inside the stronghold within proximity of the king would be impossible and otherwise we have little chance of overcoming their forces. But Brogn has permission to deliver you to the leaders themselves."

"So you're leaving me with a deranged, murdering, sociopathic serial rapist for a day or so and then letting him give me to a few more monsterous, inhuman creatures to rape me some more?"

"I am inhuman," said Perikos.

"No you're not," I said, and in a way it was the truth. He felt more real, more compassionate, more loving than any human I knew besides maybe Dad.

I felt his warm chuckle deep in my own chest. "Yes, I am. Perhaps you have not considered that you are becoming less human as time goes on."

I hadn't of course, but that didn't change my panic, the odd feeling of betrayal that coursed through me when I considered that he really was leaving me behind. To use as a kind of bait and for the first time in what felt like ages, I would be physically alone again. In the company of Brogn and Loyalists, I though, and I felt my anxiety triple.

My back cleared the table as another jolt slammed through me. My stomach bounced heavily above me as little charges of pleasure snaked through my limbs and torso. And Perikos moved inside me again and I actually saw my belly swell slightly. I wanted to touch it, to touch him.

"You can see me. You can feel me. Now you must trust me. I will not let anyone hurt you."

How he intended to prevent me from being hurt when he was fucking kilometers away was anyone's guess.

"I explained to you before, Little Shade, our connection is now invulnerable. I can use your ears and your eyes, I can control your physical sensations. I can control your thoughts if you let me. None of my kind will be able to detect our physical bond by touching you. Wherever you are, I am there also. And my body will follow because I crave you. I crave your lust and passion, your thoughts and your affection. I will not let anything happen to you and so we have few choices left to us, because when the shocks you have been experiencing do not work, I believe they will resort to other forms of pain and torture. I can alter the physical sensations, but to what end? It will only stop when Brogn is convinced he has completed his part of the bargain and delivered you to my king. And then we will ambush, and with our bodies united we will defeat him and his court and our running will be over."

I felt my eyes water, less from the electricity than the fear. Fear that it wouldn't work, fear they'd be stopped or I'd be left alone with Brogn, who would punish me for ever daring to escape in the first place. But I knew Perikos was right. This wouldn't stop until the king was dead and his was a better plan, a better opportunity than we'd had so far.

"Thank you, Little Shade. After I release the current I have absorbed back into the battery, we will retreat was quickly as possible, though we will not hurt you of course. Try not be afraid and remember I am not really leaving."

I took a deep breath as a last, comparatively pitiful current ran through me and I am proud to say I kept it together.

"I will count to three. Your senses may overload when I prevent you from experiencing the pain of the current but if that happens, you will not be unconscious for long. Just let go of your anxiety and trust me."

I couldn't stop my entire body tensing.

"...One", whispered Perikos. My heartbeat thrummed in my throat.

"...two", he said, and I felt him stir a little inside me. I felt a slight burning ache I hadn't concentrated on before. My bracelet. I could feel a thin burn-like welt around my wrist under my bracelet.

"...three!"

I was high, higher than I'd ever been, ever dreamed of being. My body felt hot, heavy with sleepy, scorching lust and I still flew. I felt jammed full, like every cell in my body lit up with such an amazing, perverse intimacy that I could never have imagined it before. I was being used, filled and loved in ways I never dreamed existed. I felt like I was everywhere, like I was everything that existed and at the same time that someone special, someone just for me had melded with my skin, my blood and my bones. They were everything I was and more and they opened me up, gloried in what they saw, filled me up and swallowed me whole.

I saw starbursts in the dark and felt horribly deflated. My belly was no longer distended. I heard crashing and squealing outside the room and then the overhead lights flashed on and I was blinded.

I felt something horribly like a hoof press down on my gut and then turn and emit an awful, earsplitting squeal. Then the drone of an alarm and the door slammed shut again.

I waited while my eyes adjusted to the light. Now I was alone and I couldn't see how Perikos and Shadow, however small their masses, would be able to get away from a ship designed for hyper drive. There weren't exactly gaps under the doors.

In spite of my fear, and the immense vulnerability of waiting there alone and spread for all the world to see, I felt little aftershocks of pleasure travel up and down my spine. If that was pain converted to pleasure, I was glad Perikos was in my head enough to change my perceptions. I was also more than a little relieved to have survived enough electricity to short a battery and two lights and live to talk about it. Maybe sharing my body with a piece of Perikos wouldn't be as devastating as I imagined. There were certainly plenty of benefits in evidence.

A few minutes later the door to the room opened again and Brogn was standing, silhouetted there, looking like nothing so much as an overgrown rabid boar. He stepped forward and the door shut behind him. He reached up and pulled the clamp from between my big toes. And then he yarded on the one on my navel till it parted company with me. Then he pulled the clamp from my tongue and I was left, naked and tied down in front of him, no Perikos to save me now. I felt my jaw ache under the strain as I tried to close my mouth around the dental retractor but of course I couldn't.

"It looks to my crew as though your slugs have left the ship."

"He's not convinced," Perikos whispered and I started as though the battery was still going. It could have been my own inner voice, it was so deep, internal. Natural. But it wasn't my voice, it was very clearly his.

"I will not bother to ask how they blacked out the room because I know better than to trust on lying, whore word from your mouth."

Brogn raised his hand as thought to hit me but then took a step back. He turned and I heard him rummaging through tables and drawers on the far side of the small room. He returned with a bulbous bit of glass and steel attached to a strand of trailing cord. The first thirty centimeters or so of the cord was rigid, though the rest was slack. Brogn leered over me and the bulb and the end flared to life. A UV probe.

"Since your slugs are gone, you won't mind if I check to make sure you smuggled them into any other holes?"

Never have I ever wanted to be strapped to a gurney less.

Brogn aimed the light at my open mouth, like a trip to the oral hygienist. He shone the light delicately, noninvasively even, all the way to the back of my mouth and I didn't flinch even once, at least not until he literally jammed the light down my throat. Then I tried not to throw up.

"Relax your throat, Little Shade," Perikos whispered pointlessly.

"Not there, eh?" Brogn grunted, withdrawing the little bulb. He reached out and twisted a dial on the dental retractor and removed it, probably not out of the goodness of his heart. It hurt almost as much to close my mouth as it did to keep it open.

"This is your chance, sow. Tell me where they are and I won't have to look for them." Brogn jammed a calloused thumb inside me, just in case I missed the subtlety of his threat.

"I don't know," I told him, allowing myself to sound as miserable about that as I felt.

"Wrong answer!" Brogn barked at me as he jammed the light into my pussy.

It was hardly comfortable but I'd taken bigger, wider and more unique shapes. God, I even sounded like a slut to my own ears. But there was nothing there to find.

It didn't stop Brogn from taking his probing duties very seriously. He couldn't make it past my cervix like Perikos could, for which I was extremely thankful, but Kragosi probably weren't all that up on human anatomy anyway, so maybe he didn't know he was leaving stones unturned. I wasn't about to tell him.

Brogn yanked the light from my pussy with a slick and embarrassing 'pop' and took a moment to just stare at my exposed flesh, until I wanted to slide through the ship's floor.

"We will try again. Where are the Perikos?" I felt a rough, blunt prick at the entrance to my ass. "Are they here?"

"No!" I shouted, and even to myself I sounded like I'd been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. "They're not," I added feebly, with what I hoped very much was a calm and rational tone.

"But you're a cock-hungry, filthy, lying little sow, aren't you? So I better check for myself."

I felt a dry, awfully sharp pain but then I was standing alone back on the surface of the planet, surrounded by nothing but darkness, stars and the dull red glow of the luminescent fungus beneath my feet.

"Perikos?" I called out. Odds on this was the dream and I was still back on the Kragosi ship getting probed by Brogn but there was always the hope that the opposite was true.

First there was only silence, stillness. Then the starry sky lit up all around me, in bursts and waves of green and pinks and blues. The colors rippled and changed and made twisting, shimmering shapes before me where I stood.

"What do you see?" I heard Perikos' music echo through my head.

"I don't know. It's beautiful though," I answered. Maybe this wasn't a dream after all.

"It is an illusion, an escape," Perikos explained finally, "but it is based in reality. These are my memories of the night before I was captured and sent to Kragosa."

The night before he killed the former king and got convicted for it, to be even more precise. "I don't understand why you're showing me this. Besides to distract me," I added, in case he thought I'd rather not be distracted.

"These are the Destiny Stars. They are visible only far east and they occur once every eight years. Before my people gained an understanding beyond the reaches of our planet, we believed they had the power to tell the future of our people. Only the wisest, most learned and powerful of my people were allowed to interpret them. These are the ones I saw before I was taken from my people. And before I met you. What do you see, Jayn?"

I looked their patterns, their dips and swirls, the spiraling, shifting, glimmering movements but there were no patterns, no symbols I recognized.

"Silly Shade, their colors and movements are not a literal part of my memory. I cannot see such things with eyes as you can. What you are perceiving is how they felt, their sound, their composition."

I thought about that for a moment. "Do you believe in fortune telling and stuff like that?"

Perikos' melody was cool and sweet as spring water. "It is clear from our knowledge of the natural that these phenomenon are the product of gasses, starlight and magnetic fields interacting with one another. Now that I have answered your question, please answer mine. What do you see? Or perhaps feel?"

The colors were bright, glowing and changing. So much change, and so much strength. And there was something strange about the composition, something foreign and dark mingling with the light. It wound its way into the center of the lights and the colors and shapes exploded outwards into a shower of effervescent stars.

"There is a story among my people of an outsider who comes to rule as a god. Someone weak, perhaps underestimated by those around them. That person has a unique greatness inside them and with them they bring enormous change. Change for the better."

I stood staring at the now dark sky that wasn't really a sky. It looked like someone had unplugged the stars. I wasn't sure what I ought to say but maybe something in the blackened sky would inspire me.

"I will admit that at the time I hoped such signs flattered me. I wished that they spoke of my destiny, the change I would bring to my people."

I frowned. "You did. I mean, you still are Bring change to your people, I mean."

"The Destiny Stars echo the old story of the outsider who brings peace and abundance and is beloved. While it demonstrated nearly unforgivable arrogance to assume I was somehow the subject of the tale, I could not have imagined you before I met you. I could not have understood my importance in this tale, that I would be the catalyst, your guardian and your friend."

The details of Perikos' memory had faded completely now and I was surrounded by an imaginary darkness and I felt little ripples of anxiety run through me about going back to face reality. This little visit to Perikos' La-La Land had been a real neat break, a real boost to the old self-esteem and I didn't want to have to return to my body to face the music. Or the flatulent, grunting violations of the Kragosi Warden.

"You only need to be brave a little longer, Jayn." Perikos' gentle tune beamed down at me from all directions.

"What if it's all wrong? This may be no time to be a downer, but there is no such thing as destiny or prophecy or any of it. You said yourself it's all just superstition."

"Of course it is," agreed Perikos, which surprised the hell out of me, to be honest. "We see what we wish to see and believe that which gives our life purpose. Now I have shown you my life purpose, in the hopes you will ally yours and we will do all we can to bring it about. And together we can do a great deal."

I tasted blood in my mouth and I was lying on my stomach. I wasn't strapped down anymore, but I had to the muzzle of a fairly hefty blaster wedged into the small of my back so I didn't feel much like struggling anyway.

My eyes scanned the room quickly trying to remember if it looked like a cyclone had been let loose in here before Perikos had taken me on his magical mystery tour. Apparently Brogn had had a proper tantrum while I was off star-gazing and I could only hope that all my parts were still intact, because my body felt quite numb, and I had reason to believe I'd been knocked around but good in the interim.

"Hands!" shouted Brogn, and I flinched in spite of myself. He sounded totally unhinged.

As a prison veteran I knew the drill, so I pushed my elbows back towards one another and felt Brogn awkwardly slap a pair of heavy manacles around my wrists. Then he pushed me off the table.

I didn't break anything, face included, but I was getting tired of being at such a disadvantage and the string of profanity that gushed out of my mouth just then earned me a literal kick in the ass from Brogn.

Then against all reason, he helped me to my feet. His sweaty, cloven hand curled around my arm and then he pushed me hard enough that I stumbled to regain balance. I felt another meaty mitt squeeze my ass and I twisted out of his hold, though I was careful to keep my back turned to him so he couldn't imagine I intended to run.

"So, what's our ETA? I only ask because I'd rather be torn apart by raping, murderous alien tentacles than have you do that again."

That earned me a hard kick planted squarely in the back, so that I was launched into the far wall. My head hit the metal but I barely noticed the pain. This lack of pain sensation wasn't helping keep my smart mouth in check even a little, I thought, as the room spun in front of my eyes.

Brogn's normally grayish-green hide was tinged an unpleasant shade of puce. "Do you think for even a minute that I would dirty my cock on anything so foul as you? So slutty and depraved you would fuck a banha melon if I left you alone with one. You'd shove anything in your cunt, wouldn't you? I would far rather receive a tenth of my new and considerable fortune than pollute my cock in you, Jayn bek Sherop. Let the Perikos fuck you full of squirming, larval worms and then tear you apart in the suckling."

He pressed a thick, steel toed boot at the aperture of my thighs and I felt my face blossom red with shame as I saw the clear sheen of my earlier arousal reflected in the metal. I could see the muscles tense in his leg and I could tell he wanted to kick my there, in my most vulnerable place. I braced for it but Brogn instead pulled me to my feet by my hair. His face was close enough to mine I could feel the moisture and heat of his breath and I could smell warm slop. I gagged but he didn't seem to notice.

"Less than five hours, since you are so eager to begin your new life. Enjoy your last hours in Kragosi custody, Jayn bek Sherop, because they will be your last moments of peace in this world."

The wall I was pressed up against vanished behind me and I fell backwards, nearly hitting my head on the wall of a tiny, metal-lined closet. Before I could look up, Brogn had coded the door shut behind me.

It was like Kragosa all over again. Except smaller and with no bars. My eyes strained in the darkness but I couldn't distinguish anything. No irregularities in the wall, or distinctive shapes. My arms ached behind me and the heavy chain connecting the thick manacles scratched against the cold metal floor. How long would they keep me here? It wouldn't be very long. It couldn't be. Brogn had said less than five hours till I was down on the planet with the Loyalists but with the wall closing in on me I felt tiny and forgotten.

"Jayn." Perikos' voice was warm, filled me up to the brim and made me want to cry. What if everything went wrong? What if I never saw him again? Never felt his touch? What if even worse than being killed, they did manage to isolate me, breed me?

"You are feeling pessimistic because you are scared," he said, his voice a whisper in my mind.

"No shit I'm scared," I whispered back, my voice tiny and tremulous even in my tiny cell. "You know, you could try being reassuring instead of giving me the silent treatment while Brogn is knocking me around."