"Through pain, my chains are broken..."

Posted on Sat Apr 18th, 2026 @ 9:31pm by Thane

4,654 words; about a 23 minute read

Chapter: Chapter IX: The First Verse
Location: Dunari's Delight Space Station, Mayagil Sector
Timeline: Late Day Two, shortly after "The Quiet Between"

There was no clear beginning to it, no clean return to consciousness - only the slow and uneven emergence of sensation pressing inward from all sides, as though something vast and indistinct had been wrapped too tightly around him and was only now beginning to loosen its hold. The fluid that suspended him carried a muted warmth that settled across his skin in a way that should have been soothing, yet instead it dulled and distorted everything it touched, softening edges without removing them, leaving each sensation suspended just beyond clarity. Pressure existed without source, contact without certainty, and beneath it all, something deeper and more insistent moved in slow, irregular pulses that did not belong to the environment around him, but to the body he had not yet fully recognised as his own.

Breath came, but not from him. It was drawn and delivered through the apparatus he felt fixed over his mouth, forced down into a throat that resisted it in subtle, unfamiliar ways, released again in a rhythm that felt imposed rather than lived. There was no instinct within it, no natural rise or fall, only a measured cycle that continued regardless of whether his body accepted it. Somewhere within that process, a quiet tension began to form, small at first, barely distinct from the surrounding pressure, but growing steadily as something within him tried, unsuccessfully, to take control of what was being done for him.

Awareness followed slowly behind sensation, dragged upward through a haze that refused to organise itself into anything coherent. Shapes formed and dissolved without meaning, fragments of memory drifting past without context, until one of them struck with enough force to disrupt the rest. It did not arrive as a thought, nor as something he could examine or understand, but as an intrusion that forced itself into the present with a clarity the rest of his mind could not match. Heat came with it first, deep and invasive, not spreading across the surface but burrowing inward through nerve and bone alike, igniting the right side of his face with a pain that did not belong to the chamber, but remained wholly intact from wherever it had been born.

The response it drew from him was immediate, though not controlled. His body reacted before his mind could follow, a tremor running through him that began as a subtle disruption and quickly deepened into something heavier, more uneven, as muscles that had not yet reconnected to his awareness attempted to answer a signal they did not fully receive. The fluid shifted around him as he moved, offering resistance that felt at once gentle and absolute, holding him in place even as he strained against it. The apparatus over his mouth adjusted fractionally with the movement, maintaining its grip, forcing another breath into him that came too quickly, too forcefully, pressing into a chest that had not prepared for it.

That was when the sensation changed.

The warmth of the fluid lost its distance, becoming present in a way it had not been before, no longer a passive environment but something that pressed closer, heavier, waiting at the edges of his awareness. The breath forced into him no longer felt like air, but intrusion, filling him beyond comfort, beyond control, while the liquid that surrounded him seemed to close in, its proximity suddenly intolerable. The distinction between what he breathed and what he was submerged in blurred, and the instinct that rose in response was immediate and absolute. It did not form into language or reasoning.

He was drowning.

The next breath forced into him met resistance, his throat tightening around it in a reflex that had nothing to do with the machine sustaining him and everything to do with the memory that surged forward at the same moment. The heat in his face sharpened, the sensation no longer abstract but precise, and with it came the recollection not as something distant, but as something still happening. The acid did not exist in the past. It returned in full, tearing through him with the same relentless certainty, eating through skin that could not resist it, carrying with it the smell, the taste, the knowledge that it would not stop. It filled his awareness completely, overwriting the chamber, the fluid, the fragile attempt at stabilisation, until there was nothing else.

He moved against it without direction, his arm dragging upward through the suspension in a slow, resistant arc that lacked coordination but carried enough force to disrupt the stillness around him. His hand found the inner surface of the tank without intention, flesh and metal digits pressing against it with uneven pressure, the contact sending a muted vibration back through his palm that travelled further than it should have, echoing through structures that no longer transmitted sensation cleanly. The surface did not yield. It remained smooth, continuous, offering nothing to grasp, nothing to push against, and the refusal of it registered somewhere beneath the pain, beneath the confusion, as something that should not have been there.

Containment.

The idea did not form cleanly, but it took hold nonetheless, tightening alongside the rising panic that continued to build as each forced breath failed to satisfy the instinct that demanded control. His chest began to work against the imposed rhythm, small, uneven attempts to reclaim the act of breathing that only disrupted what was already being done for him, creating a conflict that his body was not equipped to resolve. The fluid pressed closer again, the warmth turning oppressive, the boundaries of the tank becoming something he could feel without seeing, enclosing him completely.

Beyond it, movement resolved in fragments. Tall shapes, elongated and distorted through the curvature of the surface, approached with a steadiness that contrasted sharply with the growing instability within him. Their presence carried sound, low and layered, vibrations that reached him through the fluid in a way that bypassed clarity, arriving instead as tone and resonance that suggested calm, suggested intent, but failed to translate into anything he could understand.

Another breath was forced into him, and this time his body rejected it more visibly, the response sharper, more violent, his throat constricting around the intrusion as the memory surged again beneath it, dragging him back into the moment of impact, the weight in his arms, the sound of something breaking that should not have been able to break. The Kaiburr fractured again in his mind, the sensation of it reverberating through him with a force that did not belong to memory alone, followed by an echo of laughter that cut through everything else with a clarity that left no room for doubt.

The tremor that had begun as a subtle disruption became something else entirely. His body convulsed against the suspension, the movement uneven and strained, travelling poorly through a frame that no longer responded as it had. Pain followed it immediately, sharp and disjointed, running along his spine in fractured lines that disrupted what little cohesion remained. The fluid churned around him, no longer still, no longer passive, responding to the force of his movement as it spread outward in widening currents that struck the inner surface of the tank and returned in smaller, erratic waves.

His hand struck the surface again, harder this time, the impact carrying through the liquid with enough force to produce a clearer response from the structure containing him. The vibration that followed was stronger, more defined, travelling back through his arm and into his body with a clarity that cut briefly through the surrounding noise. It was not enough to satisfy the instinct that drove him, but it was enough to confirm that something separated him from the space beyond.

That separation became intolerable.

What rose in response did not resemble thought or decision. It came from the same place the memory had come from, the same place the pain continued to draw him toward, and it did not organise itself into anything controlled or deliberate. It surged upward without structure, without restraint, driven by the singular need to remove what confined him, to end the pressure, to stop the drowning that his body could not distinguish from the reality of the fluid surrounding him.

The liquid around him reacted first, shifting violently as the force moved through it, currents breaking against one another in sharp, irregular patterns that disrupted the carefully maintained stillness of the chamber. The apparatus at his mouth pulled slightly with the motion, maintaining its seal but sending a fresh wave of sensation through the damaged side of his face that blended seamlessly with the memory that still burned there. The shapes beyond the tank moved more quickly now, their forms tightening, closing in, the tones of their voices rising in layered resonance that suggested urgency, but still failed to reach him in any meaningful way.

His body drew in on itself for a fraction of a moment, the movement small but absolute, as everything that had been building within him aligned without coherence but with purpose, and then drove outward all at once against the boundary that held him, with no control, no restraint, and no understanding of what it would do when it met resistance.

The rupture did not end with the breaking of the tank. What had surged outward in blind reaction did not dissipate when the boundary failed, but continued to drive through the space beyond it, unshaped and violent, a continuation of the same refusal that had torn him free. The shattered transparisteel burst outward in jagged arcs, carried on the force of the release, and with it came the bodies that had stood closest, the three Ithorian seers thrown back as the wave struck them with full, unrestrained impact. Their tall forms folded under it in uneven motion, limbs driven wide as the air itself seemed to buckle around them, fragments of glass striking across their hides in dull, wet impacts that broke their composure but did not silence them.

Their voices rose through it, layered and resonant even as they were driven backward, the tones no longer measured but urgent, reaching toward him with something that might have been recognition, might have been warning, might have been appeal. The sound carried through the chamber in complex harmonics that brushed against something faintly familiar within him, a distant echo of encounters long before this moment, but the connection failed before it could form.

The fluid tore away from him in heavy sheets, dragging across his skin and leaving it bare to the air in a way that stripped the last barrier between sensation and awareness. Where the suspension had dulled and diffused, the open air sharpened everything at once. The right side of his face ignited again, the damaged nerves beneath the surface firing without pattern, pulses overlapping, refusing to settle into anything that could be endured.

He struck the floor with the remaining force of the drainage, the impact misaligned through a body that no longer moved properly. His spine took the weight unevenly, stabilised sections holding rigid while others lagged behind, the signal fractured as it travelled, sending sharp, disjointed bursts of sensation along its length. His limbs followed poorly, one side responding with sluggish compliance, the other slower still.

The apparatus over his mouth remained and forced another breath into him but now there was nothing to mute the intrusion. The unwelcome air came too dry and sharp, driven. The result this time was immediate and catastrophic as tried to breathe himself, but the machine still did not allow it.

The conflict sharpened into panic with no room for thought between it, the sensation of drowning shifting again, no longer tied to the fluid that had surrounded him but to the failure of his own body to complete the simplest act required to live.

His hand found the apparatus. The movement was clumsy, fingers dragging across his face before catching against the edge of the mask. The contact sent a fresh surge of sensation through the damaged side, sharp and immediate, but it did not stop him as he pulled.

The connection held against him for a fraction of a moment, anchored not just to the surface of his face but to something deeper, something integrated beneath the skin, linking the external apparatus to the structures that had been rebuilt within his throat and chest. The resistance carried through that connection, a deep, invasive tension that spread inward as he forced against it.

He pulled again, harder, until the seal broke. The apparatus tore free with a wet, mechanical release, the connection disengaging in a way that sent a shock through the systems it had supported. Air rushed in where it had been controlled before, unfiltered, unregulated, and his body failed to meet it. The first breath he drew for himself collapsed halfway through, his throat tightening violently as the pathways struggled to function without the support they had been given.

A sound escaped him then, but it was not really a cry. It was not even a voice.

It was a broken, rattling exhale forced through, a hollow, uneven groan that carried more breath than sound, scraping through a throat that could no longer shape it. The next attempt came no better, a shallow, desperate draw that failed to reach depth before collapsing again, leaving his chest tightening sharply in response.

He could not breathe! Not properly. Not without...

The realisation did not arrive as thought. It arrived as failure, repeated with each attempt, his body struggling to find a rhythm it no longer understood, each breath shallow, uneven, insufficient. The absence of the apparatus did not restore control. It removed the only thing that had been sustaining him.

Pain followed the loss of it, spreading outward from his throat and chest in jagged lines that traced the internal structures now forced to function without support. He could feel them in a way that should not have been possible, the presence of the implanted systems registering as foreign weight and tension beneath the surface, responding poorly to the strain placed upon them.

He rolled onto his side in a broken motion, one arm dragging across the slick floor while the other lagged behind, the coordination between them uneven and unreliable. The chamber shifted around him as he moved, only one eye vaguely drawing in his surroundings, alarms continuing to sound in relentless repetition, their sharp pulses cutting through what remained of his focus with each iteration. The Ithorians had recovered enough to move, their forms withdrawing now.

One of them reached toward him again, more cautiously this time, her voice lowered, the layered tones carrying something steadier, something attempting to anchor him. The sound brushed against him without meaning, the familiarity still present but distant, unreachable through the noise that filled his awareness.

He reacted before she could reach further.

The same force that had shattered the tank surged again, not as a deliberate act but as an extension of the instability and panic that had not yet settled within him. It pushed outward without direction, carrying enough presence to disrupt the space between them, forcing the Ithorian to halt mid-motion as the others called out, their tones rising sharply now, the harmonics shifting into something that suggested warning.

They all withdrew now. The chamber's seals engaged, isolating the space with a series of low, mechanical movements that cut beneath the alarms.

Thane's attention turned inward, drawn toward the failure of his own body to sustain him. Each breath came harder than the last, shallow and uneven, his chest working against itself as he tried to force air into pathways that resisted it. The sound that accompanied it was constant now, a low, rattling presence that filled the space where his voice should have been, each attempt to draw more only deepening the obstruction.

He tried to push himself upright but even that movement failed. His spine did not respond as it should, the stabilised sections holding rigid while the rest lagged behind, the signal fractured as it travelled, leaving him half-raised before the effort collapsed beneath him. Pain followed the attempt immediately, sharp and disjointed, forcing another broken exhale from him that carried no strength behind it.

He remained on the floor, half-submerged in the remnants of the fluid that continued to drain away, his body shaking in small, uneven tremors that had not yet resolved. The apparatus lay somewhere nearby, discarded without understanding, its purpose already forgotten in the struggle to breathe without it.

Nothing had settled. Nothing had stabilised - andthe reality of what had been done to him had only just begun to surface, not as thought, but as sensation that would not release him, no matter how much he tried to force it away.

Each breath came shallow and uneven, collapsing before it could reach any depth, his chest tightening with each effort as though the act itself had become something foreign to him. The rattling sound that accompanied it filled the space around him, low and broken, an involuntary expression of his broken body. Nothing aligned. Nothing worked together.

And beneath it, something else remained.

The Force had not left him.

It had never left him.

The same presence that had surged through him in blind reaction, that had answered his panic with violence and release, lingered still, always as something intrinsic - something that lay just beyond the reach of conscious thought but responded to need with immediate and absolute certainty. It stirred again now, not in response to the chamber or the figures beyond it, but to the simple and overwhelming failure of his body to sustain itself.

The motion came as much as choice as instinct, as the same refusal that had driven him to break free, now turned inward instead of outward. The need was not to destroy, but to endure, to force coherence into a body that had lost it, to reclaim some measure of control over what was slipping away from him with each fractured breath.

It answered fast and hard. It surged through him with the same intensity it always had, if not more - immediate and unrestrained, flooding into the fractured network of sensation that defined his awareness and forcing it, briefly, into alignment. The effect was not healing or restoration, but reinforcement, the raw presence of it pressing through muscle and bone alike, filling the gaps where signals failed and carrying them forward through sheer force of will.

His next breath came deeper - not clean or easy, but fuller than his last attempts. Air forced its way further into his lungs before meeting resistance, his chest expanding more fully under the pressure before collapsing again, the failure still present but delayed, held back for a fraction longer than before. The difference was enough to register.

He drew again; the motion remained uneven, the obstruction still there, but the Force within him pressed against it, forcing the pathways to open just enough to allow the act to complete, driving through the pain.

His hand found the floor once more, fingers pressing harder now, the movement more deliberate even as it remained clumsy. The strength behind it did not belong entirely to his body. It came from the same place the breath had come from, carried through him by the Force.

He pushed. The motion travelled through him in fragments, but it held where it had not before. His arm bore weight more effectively, his shoulder following with less delay, his spine responding unevenly but sufficiently to lift him from the ground. The sensation that accompanied it was immediate and severe, a jagged line of pain running along his back as the stabilised structures took the strain - but it all held.

He rose.

The chamber tilted around him as he brought himself upright, balance uncertain, his weight shifting unevenly from one side to the other as his body struggled to reconcile the movement. One leg took more of it than the other, the response there quicker, more reliable, while the opposite lagged behind, forcing him into a slight lurch that he could not correct immediately, but remained standing - barely.

His awareness began to sharpen and the chamber resolved more cleanly around, the harsh light cutting across surfaces that had once been obscured by the fluid, revealing the damage in stark, clinical clarity. Shattered transparisteel lay scattered across the floor in jagged pieces, the remains of the tank spread outward in a rough arc that marked the direction of the rupture.

His unsteady gaze caught on a length of black hanging nearby, its shape resolving slowly through the haze. He moved toward it in a shallow and awkward lurch, and reached with a disjointed and delayed motion that slipped once before finding purchase. Drawing it toward himself, he struggled to orient it, the movement constrained by stiffness along his spine and the poor response of his limbs, until he managed to pull it over his shoulders in a series of awkward adjustments. It settled loosely against him, dry against his skin, an unfamiliar but grounding presence he did not question.

His attention then turned inward again, drawn toward the sensations that had begun to organise themselves into something more recognisable.

Memory followed again more cleanly, but still not as a single sequence.

He saw and felt the fall first, the sensation of weightlessness collapsing into impact, the force of it travelling through him with enough clarity that his spine seemed to relive it, the stabilised sections responding with a sharp, immediate protest that echoed the original damage. His back tightened involuntarily.

Then, the heat returned and his face turned slightly, the damaged side registering the movement with a surge of sensation that carried the memory with it. He felt the pressure of it again, the way he had been forced down, the way the acid had met his skin and not relented, the way it had continued to eat through him long after the initial impact.

Axion.

And beneath that-

Ventul... Remembering the weight in his arms, and the absence that followed it.

The memory did not complete. It broke apart under its own weight, leaving only the sensation behind.

Something within him reacted to it and sound tried to form. His face tried to shift into one of abject sadness, but most of the freshly-scarred skin could not manage it, as a sound tried to join the effort. It rose from deep within his chest, drawn upward through a throat that could not shape it, carrying with it everything that had begun to surface at once - the pain, the memory, the understanding that was only now beginning to take hold. It should have been a cry - it should have been something that filled the space around him, like a siren's wail of anguish.

What emerged instead was a guttural, fractured exhale, a hollow, uneven sound that broke apart before it could take form. It carried no strength or volume, only a dry, scattered rasp, and the effort collapsed him.

His body folded under it, the strain of the attempt travelling through him in jagged lines that his frame could not sustain, his knees giving way as the partial stability he had forced into place faltered. He dropped back down onto the slick surface, the impact less severe than before but no less disorienting, the Force within him shifting again as it attempted to compensate for the sudden loss of balance.

A fragment of the shattered tank lay within reach, its surface reflecting the harsh light in uneven lines that caught against his vision as he shifted. The movement was slow, unsteady as he reached toward it, his fingers closing around it with a lack of precision.

He lifted it and the angle shifted, and his world resolved around a single point. For a moment, he did not understand what he was seeing - the image did not align with expectation, the features within it familiar in structure but not in form, the symmetry broken, the surface altered in ways that resisted immediate recognition.

The damaged side of his face filled the reflection, the reconstructed socket filled with small and unfamiliar machinery where his eye had once been, the surrounding tissue marked by the chemical destruction that had not yet fully settled into scar. In his dazzled state, he had barley registered one eye was not responding, had dismissed it as swollen or-

The other eye that remained stared back at him, a ball of shining molten gold set within a field of hateful lava - but set within a face, ragged and unnaturally aged, that he no longer recognised.

His understanding finally began to settle, pushing through the storm of agony, regret and rage. The chamber, the pain, the broken rhythm of his breath, the unfamiliar weight within his own body - all of it started to align with something beyond the immediate, something that pulled at him with increasing insistence until the fragments of Sleheyron forced their way back into place.

The fall had been real.
The impact had broken him.
The acid... Axion stood over him.

Axion had done this - yet he remained. Not whole, but present in a way that should not have been possible. Alive, held together by something that was not mercy.

The weight of that realisation settled heavily, not as relief, but as something far more corrosive. His chest tightened again, not from the failure of breath this time, but from something deeper, something that pressed inward as the truth of what had been done to him began to take shape. His good eye flickered, the surface tightening as though it might finally release something of what built beneath it, but he forced it shut instead, the motion sharp and deliberate despite the instability of his body, killing the tears before they formed. The act grounded him for a fraction of a moment, until the absence on the other side registered more fully. The damaged socket did not follow. It remained open, unresponsive, fixed in a way that his mind could not immediately reconcile, and the sensation of it - the inability to complete something so instinctive - unsettled him more deeply than the pain itself.

He drew into himself in response - not physically, though his body trembled with the effort of remaining upright where he knelt, but inward toward the one constant that had not abandoned him. The Force answered again. The pain did not vanish beneath it, but it shifted, pressed down, contained within boundaries he could enforce through his power. The instability in his body did not resolve, but it aligned just enough to function, hold and continue. It was not relief in any true sense, but it was control - and control was enough.

The edge of his breathing steadied by degrees, still shallow, still strained, but no longer entirely at the mercy of failure. Each draw of air came with effort, but the Force forced the pathways to remain open, to obey where they would otherwise collapse. It would not last for long, but it would hold for the moment. The tremor in his limbs lessened, reduced to something he could work through rather than be overtaken by. It gave him the smallest margin, the barest foundation, on which to stand against everything else that pressed in.

And with that came clearer thought.

Amare.

The name did not arrive gently. It struck, immediate and absolute, cutting through the haze with a clarity that brought everything else into sharper focus. Whilst she had been his student for a year, he had grown familiar to her presence, but could not sense her nearby. His last view of her had been as they separated, when he had gone one way and she the other - and she had been followed by-

"Bomoor."

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