Gyah Beckons

"Kraahua, come home!."

- Gyah, Gyah Beckons

Gyah Beckons: Kraahua's Lament is a Short Story supplement to Early Sunsets: Iaja's Tale of the Early Sunsets Arc by BZPower and C.I.R.C.L.E. member Cap'n K.

Gyah Beckons: Kraahua's Lament
Darkness. Darkness, darkness, darkness. Darkness darkness darkness darkness darkness! It was like that for months. Crouched on the cold, hard ground with nothing to hope for but the sustenance tablets Mutran would throw in every once in a while. I no longer knew the days, the nights, the weeks, like I once did. I could have been in there for months, years, decades, centuries, and still, there would be no days or nights. Only the sound of the unforgiving protodermic door creaking open, the dim light that seemed blinding for merely moments and then... darkness. Which brought me back to square one. Darkness, of course. Darkness darkness darkness darkness. I kept that knife clutched in my hand. I had no idea why, only that it was some sort of primal instinct. Fight for survival. The weak die. I’d never know anything but the shadowed room in Mutran’s ship. I’d never return to Manax Nui, to— Darkness darkness darkness voices. It was Mutran. Yelling. I hadn’t heard the Makuta’s voice in... so long. I had lost track of how many times he slid the tablets into my room. Why he kept me caged up but alive like this in the first place was beyond me. All I knew was that I was trapped in here forever... And that’s when the light came, like a vertical line through the blackness first but then a piercing, angular crescent in the distance, and the thing in Mutran’s hand was anything but a sustenance tablet. It was something squirming and spider-like... no, something squirming... but with four limbs. Writhing, practically no body compared to the lanky limbs... but it was a Matoran. “In ya go!” Mutran hissed, and the pathetic Matoran was thrown into the room. He skidded across the metal floor for a short while, and came to rest quite a ways away from me. My breath picked up. The door swung shut with a slam, submerging me into darkness again, with the strange Matoran. “Let me out!” the lanky Matoran shouted. His voice was high-pitched, but Matoran-like. Could this Matoran be at all like me? Was there hope of escape? No, of course not. The Matoran was a threat. It needed to go... it needed to die, and I would be the assassin. “You know too much! You’re nothing but a failed experiment! You must die!” Mutran barked from across the door. “What in the world are you talking about?” the other Matoran yelled. “Maybe Kraahua can explain it to you...” Mutran said, trailing off. It was my cue. Mutran obviously wanted one of us to die. The weak, pathetic Matoran... or me. I wouldn’t be the one to die at Mutran’s hands. I noticed that I was growling now. I had become a true beast of the night, nothing that I was before. The thing that the blue Makuta had done to me had given me strength... strength to understand the truth, and the truth was that in this world you had to be stronger than everyone else. Nobody could be trusted. They all brought you pain. Even— I dismissed the thought rather violently, and pounced through the air with my electric knife extended. The darkness was all around me, but I was part of it. I could always see some things in the dark, and I had even more dark vision once the Makuta had changed me, but now... now I truly understood the dark. It wasn’t the enemy. It was a tool, just like my dagger. I felt it pierce the Matoran’s flesh, and I drove it further into the Matoran’s neck. He screamed and fell, writhing, to the ground, and I cackled dominantly. “Matoran!” “Get away!” the pathetic Matoran shrieked. I relished his fear for a moment, and then stepped closer. “I haven’t had company in forever!” I laughed. The Matoran’s weakness fed me more than a sustenance tablet ever could. I was finally... strong. Empowered. It was my turn to be the master. The Matoran struggled to stand and weakly limped for a few steps, but fell to the ground again. “It’s useless to run, I can see where you cannot.” “Who... who are you?” the Matoran gasped. “I’m an abomination, that’s what,” I spat. I was going to leave it at just that—but being trapped for countless days makes you want to talk to someone. Really badly. “For ten years I have been prisoner to the Makuta... Subject to their experiments... their slave, their tool! But now... Now it’s you that belongs to me! And I’ve never felt better!” Speaking this suddenly unnerved me. Was I... becoming just like Mutran? I fought back the anxiousness and waved it off with a wicked cackle. I lifted my blade and held it in front of my face, illuminating the blade with its' electrical charge just so that the Matoran could see my face... just so he could see my eyes, my torment. Maybe then he would understand. Maybe he already did. Probably not. I just wanted him to see the pain... I wanted him to lose himself at the sight of his tormentor’s eyes, I wanted him to learn the meaning of true pain, the meaning of true loss... the true meaning of lament. But this was more than a lament. It was bloodlust. I swung the blade down, but the Matoran twisted out of the way. What? How could he have dodged it? I lost myself right there. “Kraahua!” The voice pierced through my skull, shocking my brain and sending volts of energy causing my nerve endings to burn and then tingle. I struggled to hold onto my blade. The voice was as plain as day. I was going insane. It was like hearing the most beautiful sound of bells in the universe, the sound that sounded just like home and like the warm sun and the verdant grass of late spring and the smell of summer in the air... the sound was the color of Gyah’s eyes. Her blue eyes. I lost my grip then. The Matoran didn’t matter. Mutran didn’t matter. It was that I didn’t have Gyah... “Kraahua, come home!” the voice shouted. The world blurred around me again, and then I saw the blue-green eyes of the Matoran who Mutran had thrown into my cell. What was going on? He had taken Gyah away... her voice was gone now... I needed to kill him... kill him and watch him suffer. I knew I was losing grip on reality. The Matoran was helpless, I knew. But Gyah beckoned. And the kill awaited. And the corners of my mouth turned upwards. And my knife blazed.