What Does A God See In The Mirror?

[Soliath Devin Talith]

Soliael crouched over a large sink on the left wall of a largish room that seemed to contain everything one would expect in a bathroom. His pale orange eyes stared into a neat reflection of himself, black flecks floating across his eyes with a hating intensity. A frown was settled on his face, and a small spurt of growth rested on both his head, and his chin.

The clothes he wore were not fit for a god, but instead resembled those of a beggar. He wore clothes that a man who had survived out in the facets of nature would have worn. Torn strips of cotton and wool, dirtied garments that had once been bright and flashy were now ruined and dyed a deep brown and black by accumulated filth that stained them. The rags hung off of him, barely clinging to his skin as his eyes flashed down, inspecting himself in the mirror. A look of disgust formed on his face, though it wasn't due to his clothes or anything so silly.

Slowly the Sith Lord placed a hand on the mirror, covering the reflection of his face.

His eyes didn't move from the hand, they didn't dart away in shame or tear away in disgust. Instead they stared at a fixed spot in the back of his hand, where the intricately lines of veins and muscles connected, wear bone and sinew came together. He watched, for a full ten minutes, and then finally something began to wriggle beneath his skin.

It moved and flicked about for only a split second, a fraction of time that would have been impossible to perceive had he not been filled with the force. His lips turned down into a frown, and he let more time elapse. Seconds seems to tick by like hours, and after what seemed an age he saw movement beneath his skin once more. His lips, disgusted before, now turned down into an angry scowl, though who the anger was directed at was impossible to say. Soliael flexed his palm against the mirrored glass, outlining the forms within his hands.

Muscles when taught, tendons gripped tightly, and veins seemed to pop as he pressed against the glass.

This time he forced the movement, and almost like a growing tree he saw thick lines carved in the back of his hand, pushing and pressing beneath his skin, wriggling, as if trapped between muscle and flesh. Soliaels scowl slowly disappeared, and his eyes became more focused, spotting out the very edge of the wriggling little form.

His other hand came up, moving as slow as a viper.

With his right hand flexing against the mirror, he began to push again. The wriggling little thing beneath his skin began to flick about in panic, pushing and pressing up against his flesh over and over again almost as if it was trying to burrow back into him. The Sith Lord frowned, then with pincer like thumb and index finger he gripped the very end of what lay beneath his skin. In and instant, his eyes snapped shut. Soliael pressed his index finger down like a vice, pinning the creature in place, and then he tore.

A single silvery length of something peaked from his skin, a living writhing tentacle that seemed to be made of living metal. It shirked and slipped about, struggling and letting out inaudible screeches as it was exposed to the air. The thing flicked and tore itself from Soliaels grasp, escaping his fingers and slipping back into his palm in an instant.

The pain of the creatures return made Soliael let out a gasp. The sudden jerk of its digging into his flesh sent a spike of pain running up his arm, and involuntarily his hand seized. The mirror he had been flexing against shattered into a thousand pieces, breaking and cracking outward as his hand seized against it. The False Gods eyes snapped open all of a sudden, blood on his hand quickly coagulating as the same creature he had been trying to remove stitched his flesh back together in almost and instant.

His scowl grew.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

He let his hand drop away from the cracked and broken mirror just as the creature withered back into his lower flesh. He could feel it moving and squirming about within his muscle tissue, embedding itself deeply into his flesh and piercing through his veins and every facet of his body, almost merging with him as it transfixed itself up his arm and throughout his entire body, overlaying his muscular and cardiovascular system like some kind of pale shadow. He could feel it move, press and tie itself against him, he could feel it shift and move about at all times.

To Soliael, this was no foreign agent. It wasn't some parasite or strange creature that had infected him, no, it was far more familiar to him than that.

With a careless disregard Soliael pulled the stained rags from his upper body and tossed them to the floor. The cracked and broken mirror showed him his upper body, not well toned and muscular flesh, but instead a strange metallic sheen that seemed to cover his entire being. Were there should be pale and discolored scars were instead rough metallic bumps, etched metal where there should have been flesh. He ran the lines of his fingers over some of them, and felt the creature flick beneath his touch, it was weary now.

No, this was no foreign agent. Nor was it a parasite that had been gifted to him by some machination of his enemies. This thing was something of his own doing, something that he had created and supplanted within himself. He frowned at himself in one of the edges of the broken mirror, looking at the metallic hue that his skin had taken, a side effect of the creatures work.

The thing was a technobeast of a sort, or perhaps a more pure form of the technovirus. It had been born of Soliael experimentation with Mechu Deru-Vitae and Sith Magic. A powerful combination of the two arts had seen the creation of this creature, and its continued evolution. At first it had only been meant to use as a way of healing, a path to fix the effects of Sith Magic upon his body. Yet as time had gone on the thing had evolved, changed, and nurtured into something entirely different. It still performed its original function, healed his wounds and kept his blindness at bay. Yet it also did far more now.

It moved to give his body...additives. Things that he did not necessarily enjoy, nor want.

The creature had begun to twist him, change him in ways that he could not follow along with. It strengthened his muscles, his bones, his very skin, turning them into some sort of metal. It altered his grasp on the force, warped it and changed it so that it was not he that truly grasped at the great well, but instead, the creature itself.

That was what troubled Soliael the most. It seemed that the organism had grasped the nature of the force itself, and worse was drawn to it. It had begun to form itself as a buffer between Soliael, and the force. It called on the darkside and fed it into Soliael, somehow drawing upon the true source in some unexplained way. The False God suspected that through his prodigious use of Sith Magic the creature had somehow become suffused with the ability to draw on the force, and being an organic being, albeit a twisted technologically born one, it was capable of touching the force itself, acting as a..capacitor of sorts in order to draw on the Darkside, and then feed it to him.

It was an interesting development, but again not one that the Sith Lord had wanted to occur. The creature had its benefits, but those outweighed the facts that it was keeping him from the force.

No, the creature had to go. Soliael would have to dig the thing from his very veins, pull the technobeast out from his body inch by bloody inch. It was the only way he could be rid of it. Using the force would simply feed it, and surgery by another would likely end fatally. His scowl deepened as his nails began to dig into one of the few fleshy spots left on his skin.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

The fingers plunged beneath his skin with a sharp bite. Almost instantly the creature reacted, it began to pierce and stab at him, grasping and trying to push out what it perceived to be an invader. His eyes shut slightly and his teeth gritted against one another as he fought the urge to retract his fingers. Instead, he dug them deeper, curling them beneath metallic flesh. There he rested for a second, letting a thousand tiny needles stab into him again and again, until finally he wrenched to the side.

A loud piercing scream erupted from his throat, and a wince and shake covered his entire body.

Metallic clanging could be heard as he dropped what he had torn away, and almost instantly the creature began to surface, its metal spines and needles beginning to stitch new metallic flesh created form the techno-organic virus that it was composed of. Soliael watched it in the cracked and broken mirror and instantly shot his hand down towards his gut. He plucked at the pieces of the virus that he saw, grasping them between fingertips or the gaps between knuckles.

Each one he tore away, ripping a piece of the virus away from his own flesh and stopping it from repairing the metallic flesh he had pulled away. Piece by piece he removed the Virus, taking it away and placing it carefully in the large porcelain sink before him. There it seemed to wriggle and twitch about, each individual piece less than a centimeter in length moving and twitching about.

Soliael went on like this for some time, plucking pieces of the virus from his muscled flesh until eventually the creature began to catch on.

Startlingly, it realized what was happening, what Soliael was doing to it. He saw it shift and move beneath his flesh, saw the exposed muscle press and stretch slightly as the creature retreated from that section of his body. His breath caught as his teeth slammed shut, a wave of pain emanating from his side hitting him for the first time. Before the creature had pumped natural anesthetics to the area it was repairing, now, having voided that area of his body those chemicals were no longer there.

Pinpricks ran across his skin and his torn flesh seemed to scream at him to stop, the hurt and pain causing water to well in his eyes. Soliael gritted his teeth, gasping slightly as the sharp tips of his fingers dug into yet another section of pale flesh.

Letting out a deep breath of almost satisfaction as they dug beneath the metal Soliael looked at the broken reflection in the mirror. The whites of his eyes were already filled with red, blood vessels popping under the strain of self induced pain. The orange speckles of his iris' seemed to shift, moving in an odd way as if trying to adjust to the red around them. His lips turned down into a scowl as he realized how weak he had become.

This virus had made him complacent, had weakened him to the effects of pain and hurt.

His hand tore to the side.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

He repeated the process just as he had done before, grasping tiny slivers of living metal and pulling them free from the larger organism that lay just beneath the muscle. He squired slightly beneath his own touch as the creature began to halt its anesthetics, ceasing to aid in stopping the pain. The thing was catching on faster than it should have, it knew that Soliael was trying to remove it, knew that it was in danger of being wiped out from his body entirely.

It couldn't remove itself from his muscle and flesh, not completely at least. That was how far it had spread within him. It had infected him to the very flesh, digging and pushing itself through every muscle and tendon to be found.

Soliael winced slightly and gritted his teeth as he pulled free a long strand of silver, nearly eight centimeters long. The pain of removing it was excruciating, it sent a signal of pure excruciating agony through Soliaels entire body, he shivered, and his legs nearly collapsed from beneath him. His eyes began to shake, and another blood vessel popped beneath his eyelid. He let out a pitiful cry, snapping the long strand of silver away from its source and dropping the wriggling tentacle into the sink with its brethren.

There in the sink the silver slivers began to gather.

They did not form into one large creature, but instead seemed to migrate towards one another, like a colony of fish that found one another to seek survival. Soliael hardly noticed the strange behavior, too busy plucking the creature from his flesh one small piece at a time.

His quest continued.

Every few minutes he would remove a new piece of the metallic flesh, then he would pluck out what parts of the creature he could find there. Over and over he did this, taking apart his own body until he in front of the cracked and broken mirror with massive patches of his upper torso missing, each displaying rigid muscle, as though he had been flayed alive. A single breeze would have cause immense pain, a touch, agony unheard of.

The False good seemed to stare into his own eyes, amber split by cracks in the glass. A shake ran over his body as he knew what he had to do next, his entire body willing him to stop, his mind screaming at him to rest, but he knew that he could not. If he paused now then the creature would recover, it would regrow and try to enact again. He would go to sleep and awake with his metallic flesh renewed, his wounds completely healed and his body even more altered than before.

No.

There was no stopping this task now.

There was no halting what it was that he was doing.

With a loud sigh Soliael moved his hand over to his left shoulder, placing the palm of his hand directly onto the blade with a grimace. His eyes flickered away from the mirror, not wanting to watch what he was about to do. He pressed his hand, and a loud snap could be heard followed by a groan of agony.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

As bone and muscle was displaced he felt the squirming push of a large segmented mass of the creature attempt to latch onto the broken pieces that Soliael had thrust away. It squirmed beneath his palm like a thick piece of rope, pressing and pushing against him when it quickly realized what it was that he was doing now. Before it could slither away however Soliael grasped the creature, using his fingers to dig through skin and muscle, tearing at flesh to grab the long silver slither within him.

In an instant he wrenched it from its place, pulling it out like a worm. It bucked and even screeched as he pulled it form the newly formed wound, every inch seeming to send a new kind of pain through his body.

The False god kept pulling however, plucking the creature from its place inch by bloody inch. His knees became weak, and his vision became blurry as the pain threatened to overwhelm him. Soliael howled and cried out in hurt, collapsing to the floor as he tore the last of the creature from himself, the deep silver coloring of the parasite coming loose from the huge hole in his skin at last. A breath of pure relief ran through him as the thing came loose, squirming and wriggling about in his grip, desperately attempting to loose itself and return to his flesh.

The tight grip of his hand kept the thing directly ahead of him, the massive nearly three foot long parasite hanging in the air like a snake, its form moving serpentine all along.

Deep heavy breaths echoed through the bathroom, blood and broken pieces of mirror floating with mixes of metal. For a brief moment, Soliael considered destroying the creature, using the force to crush it into dust. Yet as he saw it wriggling and moving about, screaming and hissing to return to flesh, curiosity got the better of him. He eyed the technovirus, the thing that he had removed from his body, watching as from the main serpent like body more and more tentacles erupted. Feelers that tried to grasp at the air and seize anything they touched.

It wanted to expand, it wanted to be whole again.

With slow deliberate movements Soliael pushed himself up from the blood floor, supporting himself with a small decorative statue that stood in the side of the bathroom. He pushed himself towards the massive sink, and dropped the creature into it, allowing it to fall with the pieces that he had earlier removed.

At the touch of the cold marble the Virus seemed to shrink, its considerable size growing diminutive in response to the cold stone.

There within the sink, the small pieces slowly came together into the main body of the virus, folding into the liquid like creature and slowly becoming inert. Its metallic serpentine form seemed to lay still, only half the size it had been when he pulled it from its body, the dozens of branches it had grown had retracted to only the thinnest of lines, and the main body seemed to lay perfectly still. It didn't take Soliael long to realize that it was attempting to survive, it was not suited to the open air and the cold.

With his remaining working arm Soliael reached up and turned on the hot water to the sink, filling the basin only a few centimeters. Nearly instantly the Virus dropped into the hot water, slithering and placing itself into the warmth.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

The False God watched the creature for only a moment, and then collapsed.

With a heavy thud Soliael fell into a pool of his own blood, flesh, and pieces of broken mirror. His back struck the side of the thick marble bath tub and his head managed to gently come to a rest on the lip of the massive stone bowl.

Pain lanced through him.

It pushed through every faculty of his body as though it were part of him. The massive patches of exposed muscle seemed to scream with every molecule of air that touched it, the dislocated shoulder cried out, and the massive chunk of missing flesh radiated with such excruciating agony that it created a world all its own. Blood dripped from him, heavy breaths pushed his chest up and down as he barely clung to any semblance of consciousness. His spine seized up, and his functioning arm seemed to strain against itself, as if a massive weight had been pressed down upon him.

His eyes, now almost completely red and orange had more popped blood vessels than there were shards of glass on the floor. His vision blurred, and the weight of excruciating hurt threatened to crush him, and yet, Soliael felt relieved.

It was if a massive weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as though his whole being was lighter. He wanted to stand, he wanted to flex and move about, he wanted to feel his new form, but he was stuck. A small almost non-present chuckle escaped his throat. It was hoarse and barely there, but a clear sign amusement washed from him between heavy breaths of stiffing pain. Slowly he lifted his arm, moving a mountain of wait to lay the limb even with his torso and onto the lip of the bath tub.

Slowly he twisted the appendage, bringing his palm upwards and observing it for a few moments before slowly closing fingers.

A smile pulled at his lips, and he repeated the process. He allowed his hand to fall open, then pushed closed. Again and again he pressed and flexed his fingers, turning over his hand and straining against an unseen force. His hazy and blood filled eyes shifted over his palm and the back of his hand. He watched every inch of his flesh for signs of movement, and when he found none he began to laugh.

It was as if he had to confirm it.

Even with the feeling of lightness, the lack of weight within his body and the disappearance of his metallic flesh, he had to know for sure. It was gone, and as the weight of that realization struck him completely Soliael began to laugh.

His body screamed at him, but Soliael laughed.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

The force flooded into him.

Like it had not in months, the darkside came to him. It ran through him in a torrent of power and strength, a flood of pure negative power that radiated from him like a beacon. It filled with, each an every inch of him. His skin began to prickle, his muscles began to pulse, his eyes began to bleed. It ran through him, rending and biting him like an uncontrollable beast, snarling and biting at its master. It sought to destroy him, to tear him apart and render him a corpse.

It was sweet music to his soul.

The feeling of dullness was completely gone. The buffer that had formed between himself and the force, the shield that the creature had created had slipped away as he had torn it from his body. He let his mirth show through, a wide grin splitting his as the torrents ran through his body. Soliael felt pain, but it was pain of a different sort. It was a pain that he had been missing, the pain of gripping too much of the force.

The feel that he was on the edge, that what he held threatened to eviscerate him in the blink of an eye. The Darkside tore at him, grasped at him. It felt as if it was pulling him apart piece by bloody piece, a thousand tiny hands grasping at his flesh and pulling chunks away.

The Sweetness of it threatened to swallow him whole.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

A single breath left him, and with it, the force. The roaring tidal wave of pain and sweetness that had threatened to swallow him whole washed away. The pranging joy of destruction that had taken him quickly fled his body, his mutilated form slagging slightly as the rushing power of the force dissipated, leaving him but a walking corpse. Yet he smiled, the False God felt complete, felt whole, better than he had in months. His eyes shifted upward towards his arm again, looking at his palm as it flexed over and over again, almost as if it was beyond his control.

He forced the hand to his other shoulder, gripping the malformed bone with strong fingers. He braced himself for a moment, closing his blood shot eyes and flexing his exposed muscles in way of preparing himself. Soliael wrenched his hand back, pulling his shoulder back into place. The socket of his arm gave off a lot pop, and suddenly the use of his arm returned to him.

Smiling, he began to roll his shoulder. He moved his arm in a range of motion, up, down, left, right, circling it around and around to test that the limb worked as it had before. Waves of dulled pain shot through him with each move he made, but next to the throbbing anguish of his exposed muscles it wasn't even noteworthy. A few times he found that his arm refused to shift correctly, it would not lock into place or raise all the way up properly, and instead he had to force it, pushing his arm up until the pain became anguish and the anguish became excruciating misery. He pressed through this, choosing to ignore the debilitating hurt that he forced upon himself.

To him, it was penance.

The pain and grief he felt now was payment for what he had missed, reparations for all the wounds that the Technovirus had healed, for all the pain that he had missed out on. He was feeling it now, and he would not stop feeling it for many weeks. Such was the price of evolution, such was the price of pushing oneself past boundaries unknown.

His arm finally dropped down to his side once again, hanging loosely as a twin to the one opposite it. Soliaels eyes flashed open, blood caking his face like tears, the whites of his eyes still as red as a dying star. He allowed himself to look down finally, to inspect the mutilations that he had gone through. His eyes darted from patch to patch, frowning slightly. These would take months to heal, perhaps longer.

That was just as well, they would serve as a reminder.

 

[Soliath Devin Talith]

For a time, Soliael simply sat there.

His arms rested on the lips of the bath tub, his head rested against the cold marble, and his body seemed to relax through wave after wave of pain. Despite all that had happened over the last few hours, despite the blood and broken glass on the ground, he seemed content. The blood on his body began to dry, and the missing patches of flesh quickly found coagulating blood covering them. He smiled slightly as the wounds healed, being a garhoon still had its benefits.

An hour passed, then two, then three, all without Soliael moving. He simply sat rigidly against the side of the bath tub, lounging in place until his wounds healed enough for him to move without tearing them open once again.

Finally, he allowed himself to budge. His muscles had grown stiff, and his tendons seemed to scream at the exertion of even leaning forward slightly. The massive scabby patches that clung on to his side screamed with agony as he pushed himself up on the edge of the tub, his face contorting into a mixture of effort and total agony. The False God managed to sit himself on the edge of the marble, resting for a few seconds to regain his strength.

Heavy breaths flowed in and out of him, his system still coming down from the highs of adrenaline that his body had pumped into him when the Virus had been expelled. His eyes fluttered opened and closed, his mind straining to stay awake, even after so long a rest. His lips tugged into a frown, and his arms flexed against the side of the tub.

Slowly he rose, pushing himself to his feet. Dried blood had long since fused with pieces of broken mirror, pinning them in place and making an odd sort of art on the ground when looked at from above, though Soliael payed it no attention. Instead he focused on the sink that lay several feet before him, his eyes shifting down onto the porcelain as he wandered over to it. There, within the heated water the parasite still moved. It had grown its appendages out once more, each limb like a tree branch, searching for something to touch, something to interact with. Soliael quirked his head slightly, an urge to touch the creature running through him.

Instantly he squashed the impulse, pressing the life out of it and instead studying the creatures from afar.

The water should have been cold by now, yet it was still giving off steam, the creature should have been rendered inert again, yet it was still searching for new life. The False God frowned slightly and wondered exactly what had been gestating inside of him all this time, what exactly his blood had born. As he watched the parasite, he called to someone.