The Rising Sun: Episode 3 Read online

“So … Where do we begin?” commander Rox leered, bearing down on a helpless Ion placed at the corner of the prison cell. He had a well toned, heavy physique and a brutish, merciless demeanor. His cold yellow eyes seemed to glint with malice as he looked down over the shivering, frost bitten eight year old boy.

  “I’m your prison supervisor … unfortunately.” He seemed to revel in the Ion’s inner carnage, enjoying the brutal effect of his words on the boy. “You have been found guilty of treason in the name of law … And nature itself.” He sighed tragically. “The law states that mystics are to be hung immediately on discovery. But unfortunately the exception is those well underage. It’s a little too bad, I would have well preferred a quick exit … Compared to what’s gonna happen to you now.”

  “W - What?” Ion needed to force the words out from the bottom of his stomach, as he shivered in despair. “What’s happening t-to me?”

  Rox’s dreadful leer grew wider. And he bent down over the boy, bringing his face mere inches from him. “You’re gonna be experimented upon … we need to find out why you’re so…” He stopped for a rough chuckle. “So … wrong.”

  “There’s n- nothing wrong -”

  “Shh.” Rox placed a finger to seal Ion’s lips, making a cold feigning of an assuring loved one here to help. “Don’t talk now … It’s almost started.”

 

  They had conducted experiments on the eight year old boy. Ruthless, savage experiments to find out what made him such. They had placed him in simulated environments, dream like states of a gory, savage nature. They had put him in illusions to study his brain wave patterns, and to determine what made it such. They had even tampered him bodily, subjecting him to electrocution and various other forms of crude inhumane treatment, meant for finding out what gave him such supernatural abilities. They were unwilling to digest the simple, beautiful fact that these abilities were not of the body, but of the mind. They couldn’t accept the fact that people such as him could live among them in peace … and so they tortured him. Day after day. Experiments. Simulations. Electrocutions. Ion’s life would have been described by one sheerly simple word.

  Hell.

  And it went on, grinding him through years of misery…

  And he lost all hope, all life, and all light. He was turned into a mere sack of bones, thin and skeletal, with rumpled crimson hair. His sweet orange eyes now seemed to burn on the inside. He had become something beside human and emotional. Nothing existed inside of him, his mind and his dreams, but a swirl of darkness and disgust. Hatred for everything around him. His life had been shattered. Pain itself had become his world.

  But he knew that he wasn’t the only one…

  The knowledge that he was the reason for his family’s suffering … That was the true pain. He knew that his foster parents were losing a bit of their life everyday without Ion and Eol. And Eol, though innocent, he had been forced to undergo this as well. And the fact that he was innocent, and not a mystic, was horror to Ion: because even he, as a mystic, couldn’t undergo these tortures. How could Eol? He couldn’t hope for it. Eol, his innocent twin brother, was forced to suffer and die because of Ion. He could not last … And the reason for it was Ion. The knowledge drilled into him with merciless fury. At night, sometimes, he thought he heard the ghostly cries of his brother reach him from across the veil … and he would stay awake, sleepless and wide eyed, for the rest of the night…

  When will it end? he asked fate everyday, for suicide too was kept away from his reach: the prison ensured that he stayed alive, strapped up and placed at the corner of the cell, so that he could wake up the next day for his usual schedule of experiments. When?…

  And then light came.

  One fine day, it happened.

  A thirteen year old Ion had been sleeping, submerged beneath the same layer of cruel dreams he had these days. He was jolted out of his sleep by the thrashing, loud noises. Lying strapped at the corner of the prison cell, he could do nothing but listen. There were bangs and screams and then…

  The door to his cell blasted open. And he had strode into Ion’s cell with a blazing sword in one hand, cutting Ion free from his bound state, and then holding a hand to help him up.

  “I’m here to help.” the mysterious attacker declared. “The name’s Vonayz.”

  The boy was here along with a small group of kids around his age. They were all mystics, like Ion. the group of them were bounty hunters, assassins. Merciless and savage in what they did. They took pleasure in what they did, which was showing the world how much they hated it. They were repaying the cruelty and contempt the world had shown them, in a radical and brutal manner. They had decided to make an attacked this prison as a leisure activity. And they chanced by Ion and rescued him.

  Before they fled the burning prison, wrecked by Vonayz and his group, Ion had sought commander Rox. Luckily he had still been alive. Luckily for Ion.

  His mind blazing, Ion stood before the man who had made his life hell, the man who had torn his world apart … and Ion unleashed all of his madness. All of his pain. He had killed Rox with his bare hands … And the moment was one he would never forget, ever. For the first time in his life, he felt a savage, untamed joy like no other. It seemed to ignite his world his world. Revenge.

  “Join us,” Vonayz told Ion after the incident. “You know this is where you belong. You can feel it.”

  Ion felt a growing tug of madness pull at him. A tug of fury and revenge … But suddenly, two faces flashed before him, obliterating the hatred and anger instantly…

  Marion and Selia would not have wanted this…

  But when he remembered his two foster parents, his insides twisted painfully … for another question arose: what had become of them, after all these years?

  He wished he hadn’t found the answer…

 

  He stood in front of their graves in the village, feeling a storm of rage like no other. They had died of grief, the other villagers had claimed. Eol’s gravestone was perched beside his parents. An empty gravestone. Eol had died as well in the Naxim station they had taken him to … but his mutilated body hadn’t even been recovered!

  When Ion had heard that, he had felt as though an invisible fist and clenched upon his insides…

  And it was all his fault. It was all Ion’s fault that they were gone. The three of them were gone. Forever.

  It was all over … all over.

  With his world brought to ashes, he sank to his knees before their graves. Anguish and sorrow crashed over him.

  But then, something arose from within him. Something mightier than even the sorrow. And it erupted with the force of a thousand volcanic explosions compressed as one …

  Rage.

  Rage against fate for what it had done to him, to Eol, and his family. Rage against this world. Against the people, and against everything.

  It consumed his being.

  And it was then that everything, all the values and principles and ideals which his foster parents had bred and brought him up with died … and joined his foster parents.

  And Ion made up his mind, as to how he would now proceed with this lunatic meandering called life.