PROTOBLOOD BROTHERS Chapter Eight

From: Cheryl Baumgartner(C Baumgartner, Posted Date: Dec 27th, 2010

Life is pleasant.  Death is peaceful.  It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

-Isaac Asimov

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

After the first few blows the frigate captain’s vision became blurry; after the next dozen or so his memory began to lapse; within half an hour he had lost most of his blood.  What was left looked far from human.  A puffy, purple mass of swollen flesh, dangerously close to sloughing off the bone, clung to the front of his skull.  His left eye socket, hollow but for some discolored slime and a stringy incised nerve, appeared as little more than a pockmark amid the mound of throbbing sinew.  His scalp was gone, as were his cheeks and the flesh around his mandible, exposing a thoroughly battered jawbone and the few teeth that weren’t strewn about the ground.

The captain coughed up a magnum of blood, welling up what breath he could with a lacerated diaphragm and convulsing as he forced a modicum of air into a pair of lungs that had been perforated by a dozen broken ribs.  The blood bubbled as it mixed with saliva from a shredded tongue and discolored mucus that dripped from a deep indentation in the middle of his face—all that remained of a nose.  The concoction spattered on the floor, becoming one with the heavy stream of blood free flowing from the incision between his legs.

He twitched, attempting to elicit mobility from any of his four shattered limbs.  He dimly perceived something moving.  His head recoiled as the tip of a boot struck his good eye. There was a pop, and the lights went out as a fresh glob of warm goop seeped down his face.

“The arch-heretic Tharin was here.  Where did he go?”

The captain coughed up a fresh wad of phlegm along with what may or may not have qualified as human speech.

“You are of no further use to me.”  For the first time in half an hour the man in the shredded black bodysuit said something else.  From the time he stepped through the docking terminal, corralled the crew and began working them over, first with his fists, then with his blade, he had uttered the same question about the arch-heretic Tharin at least two dozen times.  Thus far, their answers had yielded little more than pain, followed by more questions, followed by pain, followed by more questions…

            There was a screech, and the captain breathed a sigh of gratitude as his heart burst.

            Thorin retracted his brace, splattering another stream of fresh blood across his thoroughly crimsoned face.  He grasped a pant leg and casually slung the captain’s carcass in the nearest corner alongside two nearly identical lumps of bloated, pulverized meat.  Three down, four to go.

            The remaining crewmembers sat hunched against the wall, quivering, bawling, and bleeding profusely from eight mutilated heels…eight severed tendons…a thorough inquisitor’s safeguard against escape attempts.  Thorin approached the waning mass of urine reeking horror and confusion for the fourth time.

            “The arch-heretic Tharin was here.  Where did he go?

#

Tharin awoke stiff as a month old corpse, his right calf throbbing.  This is no way to live, he thought to himself as he rolled off the straw mattress and clumsily collected himself.  How can she put up with this?

He eyed Coitilia.  She hadn’t budged since dropping off five hours prior.  She always fell asleep long before he did.  Dehumanizing as it was, being reared in the Wife Bank had a handful of upshots, the most practical being learned ability to fall asleep at will…literally on command.  Yep, he nodded, ruminating on his previous assessment, definitely a model soldier.  Despite having been indoctrinated from an early age with the notion that sleep was a privilege, and every second of allotted sack time should be cherished, it had always taken Tharin half an hour or more to fall asleep, even going on a decade removed from active duty.  Even now something about leaving himself that open, that vulnerable, lingered uneasily in the back of his mind, impeding his slumber. 

            Tharin combed the ground for his boots and something sharp jabbed his lower leg.  These straw mattresses have got to go, he thought to himself.  As soon as our cotton crop starts yielding I’m setting fire to these f***ing things.

            Coitilia didn’t stir as Tharin slid his boots over his bare feet.  He stood up and started outside, popping his back, knees, neck, and shoulders as he crossed through the den and out the front door.

            The nighttime air was cool, a welcome departure from the past week’s heat wave.  Coupled with the humidity, the air had become increasingly cumbersome—there were days when it felt thick enough to chew.  Tharin stepped onto the porch, drew some water from the spigot, and splashed it on his face.

            “Take a lot more than that to make you smell good again.”

            Tharin chuckled as he eyed Breel, reclining on a makeshift bench puffing a pipe.

            “That’s twice I’ve snuck up on you now.  So much for aging gracefully.”

            “You talk big.  I knew you were there the whole time,” Tharin lied.  “And don’t give me that old man shit.  I’m in my prime.”  Another lie.  He applied a second coat of water to his face and took a seat beside his friend.

            “Here you go,” Breel offered Tharin a flask.  Where did he keep getting those damn things?  Tharin waved it off.

            “No thanks.  The sun won’t be up for two more hours, I don’t need to feel perky.”

            “Oh it’s not Pick-Me-Up.  No, this is a little something else I’ve been working on.  Try it.”

            “Breel…tsk tsk tsk,” Tharin raised his eyebrows, feigning admonishment.  “You disappoint me.  I thought you were too well trained to imbibe.”

            Breel slung his feet over the rickety porch fence that Tharin had already resolved to fix at least a hundred times.  “Yeah, well the Principles of Perfection are a fine idea.”  He took a hit from the flask.  “In moderation.”  Tharin couldn’t help but smile as Breel slid him the flask.

            “I’ll drink to that.”  He raised the flask, stopping short before touching it to his lips.  “If this makes me go blind, you’ll be throttled in short order.”

            “I’m shaking.”

            Tharin tipped his head back, swallowing a jigger of cool, semi-syrupy liquid.  It was some sort of sweet mash liquor, like fruit juice crossed with sugar water crossed with the combustible homemade spirits Thorin would always cook up in his basement.  He could feel it taking effect immediately.

            “Like it?”

            “Well I sure don’t hate it,” Tharin smiled.  From this day forth his customary plumb wine just wasn’t going to cut it.  “Where do you keep coming up with this stuff?”

            “Ah, ah, ah…my secret.”

            “Nice night.”  Tharin took another nip and handed the flask back to Breel.  If he wouldn’t cough up his secrets, they may as well change the subject.

            Breel nodded.  “How’s the leg?”

            “Fine…so long as I don’t think about it.  We’ll see how that changes when winter rolls around.  If they even have winter on this rock.”

            “Maybe by then we’ll have that generator up and running.”  Breel motioned toward an oversized cobalt tank adjacent to the barn. 

            Tharin stood up and hit the spigot, dampening his face a third and fourth time.  “Hard to believe they were able to construct a kraalyon generator out here.  Our best weapons techies couldn’t even come close.”

            Breel nodded, relighting his pipe.  “Industrious little buggers.”

#

Thorin had no way of deciphering the alien runes that adorned so many of the structures in the eastern quadrant of the village (what the sixth terrified frigate operator had referred to as the “business district”).  So he relied on aesthetics, deducing that the Magistrate’s chambers must be in the largest, most gaudily adorned building.  Drawing on his dim recollection of His Shadow’s temple, he opted to investigate a colossal trapezoidal pyramid.

            The structure was black, fashioned perhaps from a single titanic hunk of obsidian that caught the sun’s rays like a mirror.  At seven stories it dwarfed the surrounding structures.  A sweet, dry odor Thorin failed to recognize as incense wafted from innumerable small clefts along the pyramid’s base, driving back the smell of fish and carbonic exhaust that clung to the rest of the town.  There was no entrance, merely a hollowed out wall that gave way to an open-air antechamber.

            Thorin passed under a low wooden arch that was shoddily nailed to two vertical wooden beams.  A lone sentry, who appeared to be in the midst of a two front battle with drowsiness and boredom, slowly raised his pike, tapping Thorin’s chest.

            “An jes where do yeh think year goin’ dressed like that?”

            Thorin cast a nonchalant glance at the pike.  “I seek an audience with the Housing Magistrate.”

            The guard lowered his pike, tittering and rolling his eyes as he playfully slapped Thorin on the buttocks.  “Well yeh muss be lost,” he said between muffled guffaws.  “‘Tainno magystate aroun ‘er.  Thish ‘er’s the govner’s harem.”  He grinned, motioning toward an oversized bas relif of a zaftig, big-lipped woman clad, like Thorin, in little more than a few strips of cloth.  “Them honches year lookin’ fer are in session.  ’s that crapshack down the road yeh want.”

            “Thank you.”  Thorin started off.

            “Year no’ from aroun’ here,” the guard said.

            “No.”

            “‘Sit bedniss ‘er pleasure what bring yeh here?”

            “Assassination.”  Thorin rounded the corner and disappeared.

#

The generator was old, bordering on ancient.  It had been easy enough to ignore during the first few weeks of settling in.  For all Tharin knew, at first glance, it was nothing more than some rusted out piece of agricultural equipment about which he knew nothing.  The family got on fine without it, it contributed nothing of note to their living accommodations…it was a space filler.  Nothing more.  A visually appalling space filler. 

            Leave it to Breel—good old dependable-even-when-it-was-uncalled-for-Breel—to go poking around and discover that, junk though it may have been, it was a most intriguing, most unusual piece of junk.

Tharin marveled at the master-panel—what little was left of it.  It hardly mattered that most of the runes had worn away, as he had no idea what any of the switches or actuators did.  Thin patches of cracked orange rust clung to the cobalt shell, the rest of which had been thoroughly coated with moss decades, perhaps centuries before.  Tharin strained as he attempted to scrape it off with a stick.  The first two go-arounds were fruitless; on the third try the stick broke.

            “Well,” Breel said, “what say you?”

            “I don’t even know where to start.”

            “So much for the Dark Zone being uncultured.  Guess I’ll have to take back all that stuff I’ve said about them over the years.  Well, some of it.”

            “It’s cold,” Tharin put the back of his hand to the metal.  “The kraalyon is supercooled, kept in stasis somehow.  Can’t say I know much about it, but I remember the engineering geeks talking about how powerful this stuff is.  See those main lines?”

            Breel observed several easily ignorable tubes running from the generator into the ground.

            “Those run all the way back to the city.  Two or three of these things could power the whole town.  I imagine at one time they did.”

            “Sounds like a moneymaker,” Breel said.  “So why the hell is it way out here?”

            “Insurance.” 

            “Come again?”

            Tharin raised his eyebrows.  Breel was going to love this.  “Kraalyon is insanely unstable.”

            Breel froze, agape.  “Define ‘insanely.’”

            Tharin grinned as he casually rattled off his definition.  “Let’s see…heat of a dozen suns, blast wave that could shred a—”

            “Woah, woah, woah, you mean this thing could blow?  That we’re shacked up next to a damn bomb?  Tharin have you lost your—”

            “Only if it’s misused.”  Tharin chuckled as Breel extinguished his pipe.  “Don’t worry.  You’d have to hit this thing pretty hard to do any real damage.”

            “We’ll I’ll certainly sleep better knowing that.”

#

“State your business.”

            The doorman at the Magistrate’s chamber fingered his caster as Thorin rounded the corner.  Rarely did anyone simply march right up to the door…bad form indeed. 

“I seek an audience with the Magistrate.”

            “Yeah,” the guard chortled, “you and every other down-on-his-luck pisshead.  Get lo-”

            Thorin never broke stride, never even slowed down.  He grasped the guard’s lower jaw and snapped his neck with a flick of his wrist, continuing unabated through the wooden double door.

            There was little in the way of a hallway.  The door simply gave way to a spacious wooden chasm in which two-dozen people, the bulk of them old men, were seated around a mountain of dusty old parchments under which a table may have been buried.  Thorin could tell right away that they had been in session for some time…the musky cloud of body odor told that tale.  One of the old men sat up briskly, his papers fluttering in every direction.

“This is a closed session,” he cast a disparaging finger at Thorin.  “Seize him.”

            Two guards, identical in appearance to the one he’d already dispatched, advanced on Thorin.  The first of them reached for his shoulder and Thorin’s right arm became a blur.  His blade sliced indifferently through skin and bone, and before the guard could register surprise at the loss of his hand the side of his neck exploded, a bright red geyser spewing its contents about the wall.  The second guard reared back and fired a punch at Thorin’s face.  Thorin sidestepped the blow and countered with an open-handed chop to the back of his neck.  The guard’s spine shattered and he fell, twitching only once.

The councilors, unmoved by Thorin’s display of force, served up the full range of bureaucratic inquiries: Who are you?  What do you want?  Where did you come from?  What is the meaning of this?  Do you have an appointment?

            Thorin raised his brace.  Time was in short supply.  “I seek the arch-heretic Tharin.”  Silence.  “He has been here.  You will tell me where he is.”

            A sandy-headed man in an orange smock stepped forward.  He looked his would-be attacker over, giving no thought to the brace and even less thought to the two dead guards.

            “Say…you look familiar.  Have we met before?”

            Thorin trained his brace on the man’s chest.  “No.”

            “I could swear I’ve seen you before.”

            “You have not seen me before,” Thorin said.  “You will tell me where the arch-heretic Tharin may be located.”

            “Tharin…Tharin…” The man bit his lip, stroking the dust from his hair.  “I’m so bad with names.  Could very well have been a dozen Tharin’s came through here in the last month and I’d be hard pressed to remember.  But faces…” he took a step forward and inspected Thorin’s features, “well I never forget a face.  If you’d be willing to point that gut-cutter in another direction…perhaps we can have a chat.”

#

Thorin boarded the midsize transport the Magistrate had furnished him with.  He found that his job was much easier when those he encountered cooperated with him.

#

Tharin slept peacefully through a windstorm; six hours of unobstructed slumber following a mind-numbingly slow hour of chewing on his lip to fight back the pain in his lower back brought on by a lump in the ripe-for-the-bonfire straw mattress.  As soon as his eyes opened the pain had at him.

            He glanced over his shoulder at an unkempt pile of periodically rising and falling bedding.  At some point during the night the children had laid their blankets out on the floor and set up camp, undoubtedly seeking solace after being spooked by the wind.  He nodded, envying them for the hardwood floor they slept on.  They’ve got the right idea, he thought to himself, simultaneously pondering why he hadn’t thought of abandoning the bed in favor of the floor weeks earlier.

Tharin grunted.  He wanted to pop his neck, but his right arm was numb.  Coitilia had fallen asleep in his embrace.  Seven hours down the road and she was still in his arms, her head nestled on his shoulder.

            Tharin smiled as he attempted to ball up his right fist.  It tingled, but despite his best effort his fingers barely moved.  He lay back down, thumping his head against the wall to his own amusement.  His thoughts drifted back to trenches, shuttle alcoves, and any of the myriads of cramped, unpleasant spaces he had been forced to bed down in.  On more than one occasion he had found it necessary to huddle—practically spoon—with up to half a dozen of his shipmates.  Tharin meditated on many a cold, unpleasant night, reasoning that it was a damn good thing he never lovingly cradled any of his comrades, as a non-functioning right arm was a surefire harbinger of disaster in battle.

As Tharin gently struggled to free himself a faint vibration shook the room.  The smaller of the two lumps on the floor briefly stirred, never really waking up.  Tharin glanced out the window.  The sun was only just beginning to creep over a cloudless horizon.  The storm had passed.

            The vibration intensified, giving way to a faint but steady hum.  Coitilia sat up and Tharin gratefully snatched his arm away. 

            “What’s that noise?”

            “Sounds like…” Tharin listened closely as the humming became a low drone, “sounds like an engine.  A ship.”

“A ship?”  She yawned through her words.  “Somebody from town maybe?”

            “I don’t know.  Maybe we’re getting new neighbors.”  Tharin cracked a half smile.  “There go my midnight swims in the nude.”

Coitilia playfully slapped Tharin’s chest, kissing a jagged scar on his bestubbled cheek.  “I’ll go see who it is.”  She sat up.

            “No, no,” Tharin sat up quicker, “I’ll go.”  He stepped into his boots.

            “Are you sure?” Coitilia yawned again.

            “I’m already up.”  He slung a shirt on with his semi-functioning right arm.  “Besides, I was planning to repair the porch fence this morning.”

            “Ha!”  Coitilia grinned.  “You’ve been saying that since we got here,” she whispered.

            Tharin leaned over the bed and kissed her, making certain not to step on the children.  “This time I mean it.”

“The things I mean to do to you if you’re lying,” she said as Tharin started for the door. 

            Tharin chuckled to himself as he made up his mind to prolong the job another day and face the consequences.

#

The tiny craft was nearly lost in the half-risen red sun.  Tharin doused his head in the trough under the spigot, shivering as he thoroughly saturated his hair.  Now he was awake.  He recognized the craft as a terrestrial jumper the likes of which he had seen in town.  The droning subsided as it touched down near the barn.

            Tharin hailed the ship.  “A fine wakeup call!”  No response.  “Don’t tell me the committee has more papers for us to sign!”  No response.

            The engine died and the anterior hatch dropped.  Tharin reclined against the increasingly wobbly porch fence, opting to let his company come to him.  A lone figure emerged, little more than a shadow backlit by a gleaming red halo.  Its stride was steady, deliberate.  Tharin’s muscles tensed as an inexplicable uneasiness gripped him.  Something inside told him that he should already be running.

A gust of wind hit the silhouette as it stepped off the hatch.  A wild tuft of shoulder length hair fluttered every which way as Thorin stepped into the light, a collage of black, white, and purple—his pale skin draped in little more than grungy black rags, his hands…his arms…his entire upper body stained with dried blood.  His triangular chitin blade glistened as he advanced.

            No.

            Tharin froze.  He was dreaming.  He had to be…this had to be a nightmare.  Thorin was dead!  Dead for all time and free from bondage.  It was over.  That part of Tharin’s life was behind him.  He had moved on.  This wasn’t possible…it wasn’t fair.

            “No…” Tharin exhaled as tears welled up in his eyes.  He remained hopelessly frozen as Thorin strode toward the house.  “No…”

            There was a creak, and the porch fence gave way.  Tharin hit hard on his backside, the blow knocking him back to reality.  He scuttled toward the door on all fours.

“Coitilia!”  He didn’t so much yell as vomit out his words.  “Coitilia!  Breel!”  Tharin leapt to his feet and made a break for his bedroom.  “Coitilia!”  The children were already screaming when he stormed into the room.  “Coitilia get the kids!”

Coitilia sprang out of bed.  “What is it?”

“Tharin!”  Breel charged around the corner, half dressed.  “Tharin what’s going on?”

            “Grab the kids, get the shuttle!”

            “What’s goin-”

JUST GET TO THE F***ING SHUTTLE!

            Coitilia didn’t even bother putting her shoes on.  She snatched up Thadin as Tharin grasped Thindolin.

“What’s happening?” Thadin shouted.

“We have to leave,” Tharin said.

“What?” Breel started.

“Breel we’re leaving!  Now!  That’s an order!”

            Children in tow they made a break for the rear of the house.  Tharin kicked the back door off its hinges and the five of them spilled out into the backyard, quickly converging on the belowground hangar in which Breel had stowed his shuttle.

Coitilia twisted her ankle and went down.  She hit hard on her side and Thadin screamed.  Tharin grasped the both of them in one arm as he eyed Thorin in the distance.  He was almost to the house, his stride unwavering.

            “Come on!”

They reached the hangar and Tharin sat Thindolin down.  He picked up a slip rod and rammed it into the primary lock, throwing the switch.  Breel was in the hangar as soon as the overhead hatch began sliding open and had the shuttle powered up by the time the all-clear beacon flashed.  He engaged the primary thrusters and the shuttle rose to ground level, its lower hatch already hanging open.

            “Get in!”  Tharin heaved the children through the hatch.  “You too, get in!”

Coitilia grasped the handrail and pulled herself into the underbelly of the shuttle.  Tharin glanced back at the house.  Something was moving inside.

            “Come on my love!” Coitilia screamed over the roar of the engine.

            Tharin touched the handrail and froze, knuckles bloodless as he clutched the rod, his face flushed and streaming with tears.

            “My love, get in!”

            Queasiness overtook him.  He broke out in a cold sweat, tasting vomit on the back of his tongue as his body began to tremble, feeling both cold and hot at the same time.  Sweat begot blood as a capillary below his eye burst.  A single crimson tear trickled down his cheek.

“No…” he mouthed.

            “Come on!”

            “No.”  Louder.  This time she heard him.

            “What?  What are you doing love, get in!”

            “I have to stay.  Go on without me.”

            Coitilia shook her head in disbelief.  “What are you talking about, you have to come with us!”

            Tharin could no longer hold back his tears.  “I have to stay.  You have to go, the children need you!”

            “You can’t stay!”  She threw herself at him.  “I need you…I need you!

Tharin caressed Coitilia’s hand; his bloodshot stare peering through her confused visage.  They embraced.  He held her tightly.

“I…I have to stay.  If you…”  He shivered and nearly fainted.  “If you understand love,” he whispered, “you’ll understand why I have to stay.”

“…love…” she pulled him closer, nearly cutting off his circulation.  Love.  She swallowed what felt like a lump of iron as she ruminated on the word.  Love.  In her moment of weakness the Matron resurfaced…

            What is love you may wonder?  Love manifests itself in many ways.  Silence, obedience, temperance, and in its rawest form, complete detachment from the wanton desires of the self…

…in short, true love is understanding and accepting your place—”

            She gritted her teeth.

“The hell it is,” she whispered as another image overwhelmed the face of her artificial mother.  The image solidified into a form she knew almost as well as her own…

            Breel.

            Breel and everyone like him.

            Tharin’s words became her world as clarity gripped her like his warm embrace. 

            Breel…Breel and everyone like him.  Everyone he felt he owed.  Everyone for whom he risked pain, torture…death (or worse).  Everyone…for whom he was willing to sacrifice. 

            Sacrifice…to put others before yourself…not because you have to…not because you’ve been conditioned to.  But because you choose to.

            Choice.

Sacrifice.

She nodded.  She understood.

Tharin pulled her closer, his fingers numb.  “Tell…Thadin…” The words were sporadic, little more than grunts lost amid a storm of sobs and labored breaths.  “Promise me you’ll…tell Thadin…about my scars.”  He released his grip and grasped the back of Coitilia’s head.  He touched her forehead to his.  “I love you.  I have always loved you.  And I will always love you.”  They kissed.  Tears flowed forth from two pairs of eyes, seeped down two sets of cheeks, met at two lips, and became one.

            Tharin stepped away from the shuttle.

            “Now go!  Go!”

            The hatch closed.  Tharin exchanged a knowing look with Breel as he peered through the cockpit glass.  There was a roar, a rush of hot air, and the shuttle was gone.

Tharin sobbed as the dust settled.  “No…no…there was time…there was time…”  He turned as Thorin emerged from the back door, his brace readied.  “Damn you Thorin!  There was time now!  There was time!  Damn you, you bastard!

            Thorin loosed his blade.  So swift was his quarry’s reaction that he nearly lost sight of him.  Tharin broke hard to the right and the brace sailed overhead.  He clutched the slip rod and charged, bringing it down across his brother’s face with force sufficient to behead a normal man.  There was a hollow thud as the metal vibrated in his hand.  Thorin brushed off the blow and returned with one of his own, slamming the middle knuckles of his left hand into Tharin’s cheek.

            Tharin hit the ground and the world became cloudy, hazy.  Streaks of pink and blue danced across the sky and suddenly there was not one Thorin, but three.  He instinctively found his feet and took another potentially fatal swing, hitting nothing but air.  Thorin answered again.  Every last molecule of air was wrenched from Tharin’s being as he felt his ribs crunch.  He hit the ground and coughed up blood.

            “There…” he took a strained breath and hacked up another wad of reddened mucus, “was time.”  He gathered what strength he had left and sprang to his feet one last time.  He clutched the rod in both hands and drove for Thorin’s neck.  Thorin put a hand up, stopping his momentum cold.  He snapped the rod in two and buried the jagged end in Tharin’s abdomen in one deft motion. 

            Tharin blacked out.  It couldn’t have been for more than a second.  He came to on his knees, a cold, heavy sensation weighing down his lower body.  He grasped the rod, acting once again on instinct, and wrenched it from his gut, splattering a heap of black blood on the ground.  The rod had pierced his liver; he would be dead in a matter of minutes.  That aside, Tharin was amazed at how little it hurt.

            “There…wa…” Tharin coughed up another wad of blood, a fresh stream of black oozing from his ruptured abdomen as the muscles contracted.  It was all over.  The job was done.  In a few seconds he, the arch-heretic Tharin of Ostral-B, would be dead.  His task complete, Thorin would start back home.

Home…The Cluster…that hateful rock where his master, the one, by rights, to whose will Tharin should have been bending, waited with open arms to resume leeching off of his humanity for all time.  Thorin would return home to a cold, timeless purgatory, only to be sent forth to cut down other innocents, to destroy other families again and again and again until the end of time.  This wasn’t meant for him.  Thorin deserved better.  Damned if Tharin would cross over before ensuring he got it.

            NO!

The power came from somewhere outside…somewhere beyond reason.  Raw hatred gave it life, but it was nurtured by memories past…fortified by love.  Love for a brother whose uncontested zest for life served as a shining, unattainable standard for all those throughout the Two Universes who dared to call themselves free; love for a friend, whose compassion and commitment to his fellow man served as the catalyst for a lifetime of selfless sacrifice; love for a woman, with whom he had shared the wonders of revitalizing a long-suppressed humanity; and love for his children…wide-eyed, innocent, pure…everything worth dying for in this or any other universe. 

            Love fused his fingers into a fist.  Imbued his legs with the strength to stand, and the whole of his being with the power to deliver one final blow…his last statement to the