Blindsided

CHAPTER 16 – III

To delve too deep into the blackness
Is to lose orientation and connection to the oneness
Like devotees of Loch Ness
Destination: Madness

Geryman was becoming more and more unpredictable, unhinged. Stievo could attribute his wild vacillations to several factors. First, his hunt for his brother continued to frustrate. It didn’t matter how many neighborhoods were leveled or how many underground safe harbors were collapsed, Glendan refused to be flushed out. Second, there his budding obsession with his nephew, Aricame. Both Geryman and Stievo knew that Aricame would need to be dealt with, but with all of the fighting that surrounded them, Stievo was not ready to set his sights on his Other who lived one thousand miles to the south.

What truly frightened Stievo was this third factor. In his quest to escape from captivity, to kill his Other and his brother, and to conquer the northwest/country/world, Geryman had fully embraced his Dark nature. He had sacrificed his humanity at the altar of a power that he did not fully understand. This complete devotion is what gave him his unprecedented strength, but it also divorced him from the race of man that he had hitherto been tethered, however tenuously. Stievo was terrified by the lengths Geryman would go to attain and sustain his superhuman power. And what mortified him even further was that he too saw the attraction within himself. Stievo was the next in line, the heir to the throne. Thanks to his dual trainings under Victor Strife and his father, he was already displaying some of the strongest abilities of anyone who had ever walked on earth. What would happen if he fully embraced the unknown?…

…But no! He had too much humanity; too much of a sense of right and wrong, and a connection to homo sapiens; to the human condition, confounding as it sometimes was. Stievo would eventually have to face Aricame, but he realized at that moment that the more pressing concern was actually his own fath…

A crack to side of his head
A smack that would leave lesser men dead
Darkness atop me
Daggers plunge into my chest
A pre-mortem autopsy
Discarded like the rest?
Barbarous! A blindside attack
Treacherous! Fading to black
I’m too late, too slow to realize
My father is no longer
Attempting to become the weapon of my demise
Were I a human, I’d be a goner
But clarity returns to my vision with this recognition:
I am stronger
A Champion

Summoning a vitality he did not know was possible, Stievo knocked his father across the room. Without hesitation, Stievo was off the floor and out the door to live to fight another day. A new hunt had begun. All other concerns were slashed apart like the flesh of Stievo’s chest. The unsheathing of Geryman’s knife against his own kin had unleashed one of the most gruesome blood feuds that humans and superhumans alike would ever witness.

A love for another, animalistic and mystic
Yes, above a lover, altruistic and sadistic
Back to the past, eyes firmly on the future
Parent with child – irrationalistic