Chapter 15

“Samanta, can you make sure the items on this list are all properly packed in the second wagon?  We need to make sure it’s all ready to deliver as soon as we arrive at Nont.”

“Okay, Daddy!”

“Honey, have her brother do it.  We must not have problems with this shipment.”

“Maritha, have some faith in our child.  If she can’t at least read a ledger and count after ten years of being raised by merchants, then we would be the worst parents in the world.  And surely we’re not so bad, yes?”

She was having that dream again.  Samanta Zemzaris had always considered her lucid dreaming a blessing, but no longer.  Now, it was her own personal hell, as she got to watch and rewatch her past, always aware and never able to change what occurred.  Never able to fix it.  A nightmare, repeated each and every night.  The dream was never fully the same, but it always started with the same day.  The worst day of her life.  The day that everything went wrong.

“Halt!”

It was starting.  Samanta wanted to close her eyes, cover her ears.  She wanted to run away from what was about to happen.  She wanted to wake up.  But instead, her view turned and she stuck her head out of the wagon, held captive by the memory.

“Hello sirs!  We don’t want any trouble.”

“This here is a toll road.  Pay the toll, and there won’t be any trouble.”

“Of course, of course.  Honey, can you get the ten kromars we set aside for the toll?”

“Fifty kromars.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Toll’s gone up.  Fifty kromars.”

“Good sir, we are but a poor merchant family.  Fifty kromars is more than the value of everything we have.  Surely we can work something out.”

“You hear that boys?  We can work something out!”

A round of laughter echoed off the canyon walls.

“All right.”  Samanta watched as the patrolman drew his sword and plunged it into her father’s chest, just as he had so many times before.  “Let’s work something out.  Kill the men, boys!  We’ll take what they owe from the rest!”  A whooping cheer rose up from several men nearby.

There were several weapons in the back of the second wagon, including a dagger small enough for her to wield, but she’d forgotten about that in the heat of the moment, and so she watched, and screamed, and cried, as the men took the lives of her father and her older brother.  She’d cried and screamed some more as they’d pulled her from the wagon and used her as a hostage against her mother.

But her mother wouldn’t have it.  She knew how this would end for them both, no matter what happened in between.   So she’d decided to end things on her own terms.

“Your mother was strong,” said the voices.  “If you hadn’t been caught, she could have escaped.”

“There were too many of them!” Samanta argued back.  “There was nothing I could do!”

The voices were the worst part of the dream.  They were always there, judging her actions and condemning her for them, speaking as one with a thousand throats.  She tried to argue with them, to fight back against their statements, but it never seemed to do anything.  This was their show, and she could only suffer through it.

A flash of pain ran through her body as her captor threw her to the ground.  A stab of agony lanced into her with each kick.  Then suddenly, a splash of warm, sticky wetness, and the blows ceased.  Somebody had saved her.

Samanta looked up and her blood ran cold with horror as she recognized the face of her savior even through her tears.  Nobody in Otharia could forget the face of the Elseling.  Like the rest of her country, she had witnessed his terrible escape from Eflok through a Many’s projection, and prayed to Othar every night that the vile monster would be captured or killed.  Yet he remained free, and now somehow he stood beside her, his remorseless eyes chilling her to the bone.

He moved amongst them effortlessly, killing with an efficient ease that reminded Samanta less of a fearsome warrior slaying his enemies and more of a butcher slaughtering livestock.  Part of her rejoiced as the men who murdered her family fell one by one to his metal left arm, but she knew that this was just trading one set of evils for another.  He was, after all, not just a vile Elseling, enemy to the people, but also a blasphemer, one who dared to bathe in immorality and sin by rejecting the Word of Othar.  This monster would not have spared her family any more than the hundreds he had already massacred.

Samanta pushed herself to her hands and knees, her left arm bumping something as she moved.  Looking down, she found a dagger, the one that had been held to her throat just moments ago.  The metal gleamed in the moonlight, bringing forth thoughts.  Reckless, dangerous thoughts.

Like every good Otharian, Samanta and her family attended the worship ceremony broadcast from Wroetin every fourth morning.  She dutifully paid attention to each sermon, absorbing their truths into herself, letting them mold her into a better Otharian, a better person.  As she stared at the knife on the ground, lessons and teachings from the Book of Othar bubbled up into the forefront of her mind, including one teaching that she had never thought would ever apply to her.

"Blessed are those who slay the blasphemer, hallowed those who slay the Elseling, for their clans shall bask in Othar's love for all eternity."

She looked at the Elseling again, this time with new eyes.  The metal arm fastened to his left shoulder had not been there during his escape, she was sure.  Like the rest of the country, she’d soaked up every last moment of the execution.  Such a glorious event happened perhaps only once in a lifetime, after all.  Yes, she would have noticed something so unusual.  Somebody had cut off his real arm, she realized.  He could be hurt.  That meant he could be killed.

He’d made a mistake, not killing her along with her captor.  Likely he didn’t view her as a threat, and deciding instead to save her for last.  Even now, as he effortlessly dispatched the final soldier, he stood with his back turned to her, exposed and vulnerable.  She could do it, she told herself.  She could kill the Elseling.  She could rescue herself.  She could free Otharia from his wretched presence.  Most importantly, she could save her family’s spirits, giving them a home in the Hall of Heroes for the rest of time and ensuring they would never fall prey to the darkness.

Her hands gripped the dagger’s hilt with purpose as she quietly rose to her feet and approached her unwitting target.  The Elseling stood over the body of his last victim, his shoulders rising and falling as he collected himself before finishing his task.  It was now or never.  Samanta’s arms pulled back.

“No, please, stop!” Samanta cried to her former self.  She begged and pleaded her to run, to do anything but what she was about to do, but it was to no avail.  The dagger plunged forward, as it had the night before, and the night before that.

She’d done it!  Joy and relief mixed with the already present sorrow as she watched the Elseling’s death throes on the ground before her.  Her family would be safe now.  She’d saved everybody.

Then the world itself began to writhe.

Tendrils of metal erupted from the ground beneath her feet, wrapping around the legs and climbing up her body.  She yelled in alarm, struggling against them, but they suddenly hardened, holding her body in place.  She struggled against them anyway, screaming at the top of her lungs.  More metal flowed up from the earth, flowing into her open mouth, filling it so that she could no longer cry out.

The Elseling was still alive, but barely.  He clawed at the ground with his metal arm, trying to move, while tugging at the dagger embedded in his spine with the other, releasing a teeth-grinding cry as he pulled the weapon out.  Nothing below the knife, which still jutted out from the Elseling’s back, showed any signs of life.  He couldn’t stand, she realized, couldn’t walk.  Even if he still lived, Samanta knew that he would not last long in the wilderness as a cripple.

Then more metal flowed out from below, engulfing the man’s lower half in a formless mass of liquid gray.  Slowly, the mass gained definition, rounded blobs hardening into angular plates that combined to become a set of strange-looking armor that encased the monster’s body from the knife wound down.  Lines of unknown purpose wound around the pieces, carving a pattern so complex that Samanta could not even fully grasp its entirety.  A whimper escaped her as the Elseling, gritting his teeth, staggered to his feet, a white-hot fury burning in his eyes.  

“You were too weak,” the voices said.

“He should have died!  I did by best!” Samanta argued.

The Elseling approached her slowly, haltingly, as if he were learning how to walk for the first time.  A small metal platform formed beneath her feet.  She could hear the sounds of gears turning under the platform and she felt herself being raised up until she stood eye to eye with the horrid creature.  She could do nothing but watch as more metal flowed up the man’s body and onto his hand, moving with a speed and control greater than any water Observer she had ever seen.  The lump of metal flattened and rounded, becoming a thick circular band covered in strange markings.  The Elseling pulled a several small, glowing crystals from somewhere and placed them into the metal, the crystals sinking in as if the metal were liquid.  Then the band opened from one side, like the jaws of a predator, and the man snapped it around her neck.

Samanta flinched at the sudden action.  The band, apparently some sort of collar, felt cool to the touch as it pressed up against her neck, snug but not tight enough to hurt or restrict her breathing.  What was going on?  Wasn’t he going to kill her like the others?

More metal flowed onto the Elseling’s hand and a second collar formed.  Once more, several crystals were inserted into the device.  Once he had finished, the man stumbled over to a nearby corpse, that of the man who her mother had set ablaze.  The body’s throat had been slashed by the Elseling’s blade, but as a whole the body, while horribly burned, remained largely intact.  He fastened the collar to the corpse and then staggered back towards Samanta, his breath shallow but his eyes determined.

“I want you to watch closely,” the Elseling croaked, his raspy voice making Samanta’s skin crawl.

He pointed towards the corpse, and Samanta looked at it, still unsure of what was happening.  Suddenly there came a loud “CRACK”, and the body was no longer a body.  Blood and organs spilled everywhere, bits and pieces dripping off the nearby rocks.

“If you cry out, or attack me, or try to remove that collar, or disobey me to my displeasure,” he said, pointing at the mess that had once been a man, “that is what will happen to you.  Have I made myself clear?”

Samanta whimpered.  She didn’t understand what was going on but she nodded her head, tears streaming down her cheeks.  The metal in her mouth flowed back out and the tendrils released her, dropping her to the ground.

“Please,” she pleaded, cowering before the Elseling’s oppressive gaze, “please let me go.  I’m sorry...”

“Let you go?” the man replied.  “Oh no.  Oh, no, no no no no no.  I couldn’t do that.  We have so much to do together, you and I.  So very much to do.”

Time passed in that way that it only does in dreams, where days pass by in moments but nothing ever seems out of place.  Samanta sat against the side of a cave, watching her captor stare at metal for the twenty-eighth day in a row.  The Elseling, whose name was apparently Blake, spent most of his time doing just that, gazing into nothingness and mumbling to himself.  His eyes would glaze over, his breathing would become labored, and he would twitch every so often while he sat there for hours on end.

She found it creepy, but not exactly scary, which was what surprised her the most about her new life as the Elseling’s captive.  Had she not known what Blake was, what he was capable of, she could easily have confused him, with his round face, piercing green eyes, and thinning dirty-blond hair, for somebody’s weird uncle with an unhealthy obsession.  But she did know, and if she could ever somehow forget, one hunting trip would easily remind her.

Every few days, Blake would rouse himself from his self-imposed fugue state and become something else.  More and more metal would flow over him, covering his upper body in a thick suit of armor like his lower half until he no longer looked human.  “Come on, Sam,” he would say.  She hated how he called her that.  “Let’s go find us some food.”

  With her in tow, he would march off, his massive gray boots thudding against the ground.  Of course, nothing worth hunting would stay near something so noisy.  That didn’t matter to Blake.  He would just point a long tube at something far off in the distance, there would be a strange “phu” sound as something left the tube faster than she could make out, and then whatever stood off in the distance would die.  The ease at which he killed terrified her.  It went against the natural order of things.  You were supposed to need to fight for your victories, but he didn’t have to.

The way he seemed to achieve the impossible with ease lent credence to his words about her collar.  She dared not go against him.  It didn’t help that he always seemed to know where she was.  She’d tried to sneak up on him to finish the job several times while he sat in his daze, but it never worked, like he had eyes in the back of his head.  She didn’t understand how he knew, but he always did.

Today Blake sat where he always sat, metal legs crossed, head bowed, looking at something only he could see and seemingly ignoring her presence.  However, the object in his hand, usually some nondescript lump of gray metal, or sometimes a sphere or cube of the same material, was something else this time.  It looked almost like a model of an insect, though not quite.  The body only had one segment about the length of his hand, ovoid but angular.  Strange, glassy eyes stared out from all sides.  Instead of six or more legs, it only had four, one at each end of the body.  Each leg had three segments, connected by two joints that seemed capable of bending in any direction.

The entire ensemble unnerved her for reasons she couldn’t quite understand.  It exuded an uncanny quality, like some strange, unnatural mockery of life.  Samanta didn’t know why Blake was busy creating bizarre knock-offs of real animals, but she knew that some sinister reason was behind it all.  No matter what he did, he was the Elseling, and he could not be trusted.  He had not harmed her physically since the night they had first met, but that meant nothing.  She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her, the rage, the hatred, barely contained.  She didn’t know for what reason he’d kept her alive, but she did know that it did not bode well for her.

Blake set the model down on its legs and stared at it, as if waiting for something to happen.  Samanta stared as well, unsure as to the reason for the Elseling’s expectant gaze.  Then, to her abject horror, the figure began to move on its own.  It made slow, ponderous movements to start, like a baby garoph taking its first steps, but gradually the figure sped up and it began to scuttle across the cave’s uneven, rocky floor, its metallic legs clicking against the stone with every small step.

She looked away from the creature for a second to take a glance at its creator.  Blake watched the creature intently, studying its every movement as it poked about the cave, climbing walls, scurrying under rocks, and the like.  Just how powerful was this man?  To create such an abomination was a task far beyond anything she had ever seen or heard of in her ten years of life.  What other terrors could he unleash, if given time?

The small metallic beast skittered towards Samanta and she quailed at its approach.  Without warning, it scampered up onto her leg, causing her to shriek and recoil at its cold, smooth touch.  Without thinking, she backhanded it into the nearby wall, but the evil thing persisted, heedless of her protests.   Her body quaked with fear as it clambered up onto her shoulder, and then finally onto her head.  Then, to her utter dismay, it settled down onto her hair, letting its limbs fall down the sides of her head, and released a series of syncopated clicks.

“Would you look at that,” the Elseling said in mild amusement.  “Alpha likes you.  That’s so sweet.”

Samanta didn’t have the courage to voice her disagreement, though her face said more than enough.

“Well!”  Blake clapped.  “Glad that’s finally over!  Now we move on to Phase Two!”

Time shifted again, and Samanta found herself beside Blake atop a giant six-legged metal beast as it strode powerfully through the forest, treetops speeding by on either side.  Below, hundreds of "skitters", and Blake called them, ran through the trees, their multi-jointed legs churning to keep up with the giant vehicle.  Skitters came in various shapes and sizes, though they all seemed to come from the same basic template as Alpha, who chittered away merrily perched atop her shoulder.  The smallest of the ones below resembled the Elseling's first creation, though larger, standing at almost half her height. The rest, however, were each equipped with an array of assorted implements.  She didn't know what most of the devices did, but if the ones she understood were any clue, none of them were good.

Many of the skitters sported as least one strange blade, long, thin, and wide, with hundreds of tiny metal teeth around the edge.  She’d watched as the first version Blake had created brought down a great tree in seconds, when a woodsman would have chopped at the trunk for an hour.  She shuddered to imagine what they would do against a person, but something told her that she would soon find out.

The other implement she recognized were the death tubes.  Most skitters had at least one.  Some larger ones had strange setups with multiple death tubes arranged in a circle.  Two skitters taller than a single-story house wielded two sets of tube arrangements each, the tubes themselves each thicker than her arm.  None of those, however, could compare to the array on the back of the six-legged skitter that they rode.  Samanta believed that she could probably fit herself into the death tubes behind her, they were so wide.

“Almost there,” said the Elseling, his voice buzzing through his suit, robbing his words of what little humanity they had to begin with.  He wore his full armor and more, standing around one and a half times his normal height.  Two large metal cylinders jutted out from his back, each connected by a hose of some sort to a circular array of death tubes at his sides.  Even without the weapons, his figure cast a foreboding air.  Not a single bit of flesh could be seen on his person, to the point that, if she hadn’t known better, Samanta might not have thought him human at all.  Instead he seemed like a spirit of evil given form, all the way down to the mask that covered his face, which seemed to scowl while casting judgment with its eerie glowing eyes.

Suddenly the giant skitter halted, shaking Samanta from her dour thoughts.  She looked about, and paled.  They had stopped at the entrance to a canyon, a canyon she recognized.

“Remember this place?” he asked.  “Of course you do.  I thought we should pay a quick visit to where this all started, get our bearings.  Now, which way to the capital from here?  Which way to Wroetin?”

Samanta’s entire body trembled under his gaze.  She wanted to lie, to point him to some distant, uninhabited place, far away from the capital and the Church and everything else, but he would know.  He always knew.

A shaking hand rose, slowly, laboriously, and pointed to the southeast.  The entire army, as one, pivoted towards that direction and headed off.  Samanta barely noticed.  She felt hollow inside.

“You could have told him anything,” the voices said.  “Led him into a trap.  Wasted his time.  Sent him to the ends of the world.  But you didn’t.”

“I was too scared!” she argued, trying as always to silence the voices before it was too late.  “He would have known, and he would have found it anyway, even without me!”

The voices did not heed her words and the dream shifted once more.  Armor encased her body against her will, covering her from head to toe.  Blake had formed the suit around her before the battle, ignoring her protests.  The weight made it hard to stand, though she didn't much desire to stand and witness the destruction taking place all around her.

The giant six-legged skitter rocked as giant metal pieces shot out of the death tubes on its back, flying through the air at impossible speeds to slam into the once-mighty walls of Wroetin, her nation's capital.  The Elseling's forces cut through the army hastily arrayed against them almost as if they weren't there.  All that remained where those who ran, and those with that unique combination of courage and stupidity to keep fighting.  The latter would pop out from behind cover as Blake and his troops moved past, charging towards Blake and Samanta's ride or observing some sort of attack, only to be riddled with holes before they could do anything.

Some remaining forces mounted a last-ditch counter-offensive outside the Grand Cathedral, led by the best of the Church itself, but it fared little better than the rest.  Samanta huddled on the floor of the giant skitter, hands over her ears, trying to block out the sounds of whirling toothed blades and her screaming countrymen.  She prayed to Othar to make it stop, to end her suffering, but her entreaties went unanswered.

Blake halted their metal beast in front of the Grand Cathedral, and turned to Samanta.

“Hey,” he said, nudging her with his gigantic metal boot, “where do they have all the weird people who show images in the air and talk over large distances?”

He meant the Manys, she realized, unsure why he cared to know.  She pointed to a round, wide building off to the side.  Any Otharian would recognize the House of Manys, the part of the Grand Cathedral where the Grand Apostle led worship.

“Stay here,” he said in reply.  He hoisted his death tubes off of his shoulders and leapt down to the ground, a group of small skitters forming around him where he landed.

Samanta stared, appalled, as an Elseling walked unimpeded into the most holy site in the nation, unchallenged.  What hope was there left for her nation?   She flinched as more screams and loud bangs echoed from the church.  Walls began to collapse, windows shattered.  She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t.  One piece at a time, the most significant symbol of Otharia became ruins before her eyes.

The dream skipped ahead slightly, moving to the next moment of interest.  Blood.  So much blood.  Organs caked what parts of the walls still stood.  Samanta followed the monster that had created this nightmare through the wreckage, choking down sobs as the Elseling took one beloved part of her life after another and ripped it to shreds in front of her.  This time, it was their beloved, glorious leader, the Grand Apostle, whose hole-filled corpse he dragged behind him, leaving streaks of blood wherever it passed.  She had no choice in the matter.  He bade her to follow, to witness everything.

Together, accompanied by the same group of skitters as before, they walked towards the only part of the Grand Cathedral that remained untouched: the House of Manys.  Samanta had always found Manys unnerving.  Most people did.  The way they mumbled to themselves, they way they were never fully there, the way they seemed to see things that nobody else could — there weren’t many people who would willingly subject themselves to their presence.  They seemed positively normal to her now, next to everything else she’d now seen.

Blake paused outside the large double door entrance, and began to remove his excess armor.  Soon he wore only his usual full suit — still an intimidating figure of angular metal taller than any man, but closer to resembling a person again.  Samanta noticed that he kept his mask on as he opened the doors and strode through, the Grand Apostle’s body still in his grasp.

“Come,” he ordered.

Inside, two church functionaries cowered before several skitters that had somehow gotten inside already.  They looked up at the open door, saw their guest and what he had with him, and fell to their knees in shock.

“If you two want to live, get these people ready immediately,” Blake said, their despair making no impression upon him.  “I want to speak to the entire country.  Now.”

The clerks looked at each other and then went to work, hurriedly removing veils from the Manys’ faces.  The process took several minutes.  This was the Grand Cathedral, after all, the nexus of the Otharian Many communication system.  Hundreds of Manys stood in semicircular rows on stands arranged around a central podium, the point where Blake stood unmoving, red luminescent eyes glowering.

As the handler removed a veil, the Many would startle, as if surprised by the sudden incoming rush of sensations.  He or she would focus on the central podium and raise his or her hands.  As the handler for the Many’s counterpart, wherever they might be, noticed the transmission, he would remove the veil on the other end, and a projection would appear between the Many’s hands.  Samanta watched silently as one by one, small projections appeared in hundreds of hands, each one showing a similar scene: hundreds of people, staring back in confusion and fear at the sight of the hulking metal man.

“Once, not too long ago, I came to you with a vision,” he began.  He spoke softly and surely, his metallic voice somehow amplified for all the Manys to hear.  “A vision of a world where food is plentiful.  A vision of a world where life was more than just a constant struggle to stay afloat, where instead it could be pleasurable and easy.  But you said ‘no’.

“I came to you with a vision of a world filled with wonders, where anybody could travel from one side of Otharia to the other in under a day.  A vision of a world where cities were clean and disease was kept in check.  A vision of a world where even the moons themselves were not out of reach.  But you said ‘no’.

“I came to you with a vision of a world where knowledge was celebrated, where truth to be sought, where ignorance was the enemy, and where to question was to live.

“But you said ‘no’, and you made it very, very clear.

“I will not accept that.  I cannot.  Not anymore.  As I walked this land, seeing the abject suffering that is life here, I came to realize that I don’t need your permission for any of what I have done or am about to do.  And as I spent my days hounded by a society that teaches its children to strike down any who dare to challenge orthodoxy, I came to realize that I don’t want your permission.”

The Elseling lifted the Grand Apostle’s body up for all of the country to see.  Gasps and cries could be heard from projections all around the chamber.  Contemptuously, he tossed the body behind him, not even caring where it fell.

“I am Ferros, and I come to you today to tell you that the Otharia you knew is dead and gone.  No longer shall entire villages starve.  No longer shall soldiers kill those they swore to protect.  What rises shall be something more.  Something greater.  Something to go down in legend.  I will remake this place, and none of you can stand in my way.

“There is a saying where I’m from — “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”.  That saying is bullshit.  I’m about to hold your head underwater.  You all have a choice — you can drink, or you can drown.  There are no other options.  Choose wisely.”

Without another word, Blake turned, strode past Samanta, and left the chamber.

The parade of memories continued, the scene flashing to another point in time, once from just a few days past.

"No," moaned Samanta as she recognized the scene and realized what she was about to witness again.  This was the hardest part of the dream, the newest part.  The part that had broken her.

Samanta slowly walked through the metal fortress, each footstep echoing down the empty corridors, joined by the lighter clicks of Alpha's feet as it followed close behind her.  The metal felt cold, even after an afternoon in the late summer sun.  Blake had raised the massive structure from the earth in only a few hours, replacing the ruins of the Grand Cathedral with his own creation.  Only the House of Manys remained from the Grand Cathedral, and even it had been largely altered to suit his needs.

Perhaps because it was such a large, cohesive piece of metal, the fortress seemed to have a deep connection with Blake.  She could feel it thrum sometimes, minute vibrations passing through the structure whenever he became excited or angry.  Twice a day the entire place would shake noticeably, once in the morning and once at night, though she didn’t know why just yet.

She could feel the thrum begin as she continued through the massive building.  She’d kept him waiting, and he wasn’t happy about it.  Samanta didn’t care.  The last few hours had been the only daytime she’d had for herself in a while, and she’d wanted to get every moment out of them she could manage.  It was the one small act of rebellion that she had the courage for.

Most of the time she spent her days following him about as he did whatever he planned on doing.  She’d watched as he slaughtered the army thrown together to fight him by the remains of the Otharian government, followed in tow as he hunted down the rest of the Church’s power structure from cities around the country and removed them, even sat in a corner as he worked on plans for something called a “sewer system”.

This was a bit different, though.  The last few days, he’d started to set aside time just for him and her.  “To teach”, he said.  Samanta hated every moment of it.  He wanted to shove his Elseling thoughts into her, make her just like him.  She wouldn’t have it.  Her fear had caused her to bow to his will over many things since that unfortunate night, but this was her limit.  No matter how much he wanted her to be Elseling, she was Otharian, and she would not allow that to change.

“You’re late,” he snapped as she entered the room.  He seemed tired, frazzled.  “Sit down.”

Samanta sat down in the empty chair across from Blake.  Between them stood a large piece of slate.  Blake would write on the slate using pieces of chalk that he got from who-knew-where, scribbling in his bizarre language various things as he jabbered on.  Reading that language was one of the things he most insisted on teaching her, for reasons she could not understand.

The man sat in a metal chair of his own design, covered in metal armor from the waist down, as usual.  However, for these “teaching sessions” he did not wear the matching upper half, instead just donning a simple shirt.  Samanta believed that he thought it would make him more relatable, help them connect.  It didn’t.

“Let’s start by reviewing what I taught you yesterday.  List as many of the elements as you can off the top of your head.”

“Earth, fire, wind, water, lightning, light, and darkness.”

“No!”  His metal hand slammed down upon its armrest with a thunderous clang.  “For fuck’s sake, Samanta, I’m getting sick of your bullshit!  I’m trying to help you here and all you do is fight me every inch of the way!”

Something in Samanta’s head snapped, and anger surged forth, words that normally would stay bottled up inside rushing out.

"I don't want your help!" she cried.  "Why do I have to do this?  Why won't you let me go?  What do you want from me?"

“What do I want from you?”

The stillness in his voice told her she’d made a mistake, but the subtle tremors rippling through the floor were what truly made her heart clench with fear.

“I want an apology.”

Samanta just stared at her captor in disbelief.  An apology?  That was it?

“I’m sorry for stabbing you, okay?  Can I leave now?”

“Oh no, no no no.”

The tremors increased and her stomach fell into an endless pit.  She’d only heard him talk like this once before, on the worst day of her life.

“An apology,” he continued, “means nothing without understanding.  Without that, it’s just a bunch of words, not even worth the air used to say it.”

“I understand!  I swear!  I’m really sorry!”

“You understand nothing!” he roared, shooting to his feet.  “None of you do!  You clump around in wooden wagons pulled by fucking animals, proclaiming your greatness far and wide!  You dump your shit in the street and call it paradise!  You’re all so proud of your pathetic little lives, so fucking smug and self-satisfied, it disgusts me!”

The tremors grew stronger still.  He took a step forward, his face contorted in anger.

“I try to help starving people, I’m attacked because I commit the ‘horrible crime’ of disagreeing with a stupid old book.  I try to share my knowledge and improve everybody’s way of life, they try to execute me in front of hundreds of thousands of people.  Why?  Because I’m from somewhere else?  Do you think I wanted to be here?  Do you think I wanted to come to this shithole?  No!  But I tried to help!  I tried to do the right thing!”

The tremors were audible now, but Blake seemed too far gone to even notice.  He came closer still, his eyes wild.

“I saved you.  I fucking saved you from your own corrupt, irredeemable people.  The same people who were supposed to protect you.  They killed your family instead and I saved you from them and what did you do?  You took my body from me.”

Samanta wanted to move, to escape from his white-hot gaze, but her body wouldn’t listen to her.  The Elseling took one final step and stood right in front of her.

“All those people out there, walking around with their heads up their asses, acting like their shit don’t stink?  They’ll see, soon enough.  I’ll make them see.  I’ll shove progress down their fucking throats until they have no choice but to admit how shitty their lives were before I showed up!  But you...”

He leaned over, bringing his eyes level with hers.  Samanta tried to look away from the inferno raging within those eyes, but his gaze held a power that she could not break.  The whole fortress vibrated with his unquenched fury, shaking her to her core.

“You’re different,” he said, his voice suddenly quiet but still just as terrifying as before.  “You stole my legs, and you probably think it’s the best thing you’ve ever done in your life.  I will show you just how wrong you are.  We’re going on a journey of discovery, you and I, and by the time we are through you will grasp the weight of what you did to me, the magnitude of your actions, and you will look upon my work and you will understand, so deeply that you will not just apologize, you will THANK. ME. for what I have done!  And only then will you be free to go.”

Samanta’s spirit broke, unable to handle the pressure he exuded any longer.  She sprinted out of the room, tears flooding her eyes.  The sound of a chair breaking against a wall echoed after her as she ran away from the monster she was trapped with.  The monster she had created.

“You betrayed your country,” the voices said.  “You betrayed your family.”

“I didn’t want to!  I didn’t mean to!  Please!  Please stop!” she cried out, begging for the voices to leave, begging for them to stop.  She couldn’t take what they were about to say, couldn’t handle what she knew came next.

“Otharia is dead, and it is all your fault,” they whispered.

Samanta could only weep, for she had no arguments left.