Series Content Advisory
Scriptures of Nokternum is a dark fantasy story involving grief, trauma, violence, death, coercive control, forced experimentation, and bodily alteration. Some chapters address past suicide, abuse, blood, severe injury, and psychological manipulation. Additional chapter-specific warnings are provided when necessary.
Additional Chapter Warning
This chapter contains medical captivity and experimentation flashbacks, panic, burns, uncontrolled electrical injury, altered-body horror, hypervigilance, and death-related trauma.
Chapter 23: “Distance He Chose”
Event Date: May 24th, 2010 - 7:02 AM PDT, Earth
Lightstorm had not died tonight.
That was not the same as being alive. Morning found him beneath the broken roof of an abandoned ranger station east of the ridge line, far enough from the rainline that the trees no longer smelled sterile. He sat with the damp shroud drawn tightly around him.
The building sat half-swallowed by trees, its windows boarded from the inside and its front door hanging crooked on one hinge. A faded trail map peeled from the wall beside a rusted cabinet. A dead radio sat on a shelf beneath it, its cracked plastic face aimed into the room.
Lightstorm did not like it.
The room had too few exits. He had chosen it anyway because the storm had ended and his legs had begun shaking badly enough that every tree looked like a place to fall. The boards smelled damp and the door could not close. For the moment, it was enough to keep the wind off him.
He sat in the farthest corner, back to the wall, knees drawn up, shroud pulled around his shoulders. From there he could see the door, both windows, the broken roofline, and the narrow gap behind the cabinet where something small could hide if small things still mattered. They did. Small things mattered.
A loose nail. A branch against glass. The first wrong breath before someone touched you. The sound of a lock catching behind him.
Lightstorm pressed one hand against the floorboards.
His fingers trembled. A thin violet-white spark crawled between his claws. He jerked his hand back. The spark snapped out.
Silence returned.
Not peace.
Silence. He stared at his hand.
Pink fur darkened by rain and dirt. Pale cream along the wrist. Purple markings interrupted by small burns that healed badly and too quickly, as if his body had been given instructions by someone who understood repair but not comfort. Electricity flickered under the skin.
Not weather.
Never weather. He knew that now. He had known it before Kaostar said it, but hearing the horror in Kaostar’s voice had made the knowledge stop hiding behind panic. 'You have electricity.'
'You never had electrical powers.'
Lightstorm closed his eyes.
The room flashed white behind his lids. Metal. Glass. Lights that did not turn off.
A voice patient enough to become part of the walls.
“You will be frightened when he comes.”
No.
Lightstorm pressed both hands over his ears.
The electricity answered faster than he meant it to. A jagged line snapped from one palm to the other. It formed the beginning of a blade, thin and crooked, then collapsed into sparks that scattered across the floorboards. He gasped and dragged his hands apart.
The lightning moved before he understood what his hands were doing.
Fear was enough to give it direction.
Lightstorm curled his fingers inward until his claws pressed into his palms.
No more.
The room did not believe him. Neither did his body. Outside, water dripped from the edge of the roof into a metal bucket someone had left behind years ago. One drop.
Then another. Too slow to be rain. Too ordinary to trust immediately.
Lightstorm counted the drops until they stopped trying to become a pattern.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
Nothing answered.
He let his breath out. His throat hurt.
He had screamed too much in the rain. Not only with his voice. With everything. Hands.
Teeth.
Lightning. Running. Refusing. Remembering.
Darkshyne. Kaostar.
No.
Both names hurt differently. Metatronas had told him there would be a creature. He had said it in a room where the lights never closed their eyes. “He will come wearing what grief left behind.”
Lightstorm’s stomach twisted. He bent forward, one hand braced against the floor, shroud sliding from one shoulder. The memory tried to become the room. Metal walls.
Straps. A ceiling too white. Questions asked in the tone of someone measuring the weather inside a corpse. “What do you remember?”
No.
“What name remains most load-bearing?”
Stop.
“If he comes, he will use your tenderness as proof.”
Lightstorm’s claws scraped the floorboards. A spark jumped from his wrist to a nail and vanished with a sharp blue snap. He flinched from himself. Metatronas had given him an answer.
Kaostar had given him a contradiction.
Kaostar’s contradiction felt more alive than Metatronas’s answer, and that frightened him.
Kaostar had been wrong.
Wrong smell. Wrong body. Wrong height. Wrong voice dragged through a throat grief should never have built. Wrong teeth. Wrong hands. Wrong name. Wrong healing. Wrong everything.
And then he had known about the creek.
Not like Metatronas knew things.
Metatronas knew like a scalpel knew a body. Kaostar had remembered like someone bleeding from the inside of a moment no one else had entered. 'Your hand was already there.' The pressure of fingers that had tried not to hurt him even while terrified.
I’m here. Lightstorm’s fingers curled. He had remembered Darkshyne’s hand.
Not taking it.
Already having it. The memory opened possibilities he did not want. It meant something had survived the explanations. It meant Metatronas had not reached everything.
It meant Lightstorm’s own mind was no longer a room with one door. He hated that too. A person could get lost in a room with too many doors. The dead radio clicked.
Lightstorm stopped breathing.
The sound was small. Polite. Mechanical.
The radio had no power cord attached. Its battery cover was missing. One knob had broken off. Dust covered the top in a gray film disturbed only by water stains and a mouse’s narrow path.
It clicked again.
Two taps.
Lightstorm’s body moved before thought. He slammed himself back into the wall, one hand up, electricity exploding around his claws in a ragged fan. The room flashed violet-white. The radio did nothing.
No voice came from it.
No light.
No static.
Only its dead face looking toward him.
Lightstorm’s heartbeat battered his ribs.
“Who’s there?” almost formed.
He bit it until the words died.
No.
He had learned enough from monsters to distrust anything that knocked politely. The radio sat silent. Waiting. That was not better.
Lightstorm’s raised hand shook violently. Lightning crawled from fingertip to fingertip, seeking shape.
Dagger. Spear. Lash. Exit.
He forced his fingers open. The electricity snapped outward and struck the wall beside the map, leaving a black branch-burn across the faded paper. He stared at the mark. The old trail lines beneath the burn vanished.
Good.
No.
Not good.
He had not meant to do that. He had not meant to attack a wall. He had not meant to attack Kaostar either.
Not at first.
Maybe. The thought made his throat close.
Kaostar had kept letting go.
That was the contradiction his panic could not solve. Monsters held. Metatronas had held with straps, with names, with explanations, with the awful patience of someone who could wait until refusal exhausted itself.
Kaostar had caught his wrist and released it.
Blocked an exit, then moved. Exposed his back. Said where the path was. Told him to leave if he needed to leave.
And Lightstorm had left. He had kept expecting the pursuit. Every branch behind him had been Kaostar’s claws. Every shift of air had been wings.
Every distant crack of wood had been the huge black-and-rust body closing the distance grief had no right to cross. But Kaostar had not followed.
Lightstorm pressed one trembling hand over his mouth.
He did not trust Kaostar. He trusted that Kaostar had let him leave. For now, that had to be a kind of fact. A fact was smaller than trust.
Smaller was safer. The radio clicked again. Once.
Lightstorm did not look away from it this time.
His body wanted to run. His electricity wanted to strike. His mouth wanted to ask whether someone was inside the dead thing. His heart wanted, traitor that it was, to hear a voice that would make the next choice simpler.
Darkshyne. Kaostar. Metatronas. Any name would have been easier than silence.
Lightstorm lowered his hand by one inch.
The electricity hissed between his fingers.
“No,” he whispered.
The radio waited. He did not know whom he had answered. So he corrected himself.
Not to the radio.
To the room. To his own body. To the part of him trained to mistake pressure for
instruction.
“No answer.”
The sparks around his hand thinned.
Not gone.
Thinned. He swallowed against the ache in his throat. He did not know Harrow had written those words in a cave. He did not know Kaostar had written them too.
He did not know that somewhere, people had begun building rules around not being used. But his body knew what it felt like when a choice tried to arrive wearing his fear. Lightstorm pulled the shroud tighter around his shoulders and looked at the dead radio until the urge to speak became survivable.
Water dripped outside.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. The count steadied him.
Not healed.
Steadied. He needed rules.
Not Metatronas’s rules.
Not laboratory rules.
Not the other rules—the ones enforced with straps, lights, and pain until obedience looked voluntary. His own.
Lightstorm looked at the burned trail map.
“Water first,” he said quietly.
His voice scraped. He waited to see if the radio liked that. It did nothing.
Good.
“Shelter second.”
His hand trembled.
“Proof never from wanting.”
That one hurt. Because wanting was loud. Wanting said Darkshyne had returned. Wanting said Kaostar had to be Darkshyne because the alternative was too cruel.
Wanting said run back. Wanting said kill Metatronas. Wanting said find Kaostar and demand he be one thing long enough to hate or hold. Wanting said the radio might explain what the dead were supposed to become when death changed its mind.
Lightstorm closed his eyes.
“Fear does not choose direction.”
The electricity sparked once, weak and angry. He opened his eyes. The radio remained silent.
No applause.
No punishment.
He had expected one of them. A laugh left him. Broken. Small.
Not happy.
His body did not know what to do with a rule that did not immediately hurt him for failing to complete it. He moved slowly. First one leg. Then the other.
Every muscle protested.
His knees felt like they belonged to someone who had run through two deaths and one storm without asking either body for permission. His shoulder throbbed where he had struck the ground. His wrists ached with remembered restraints. His jaw hurt from biting down on screams that had come out anyway.
He stood. The room tilted. Electricity flared around his right hand. He slapped the hand against his own chest, over the shroud.
The current snapped through him. He gasped. Stayed standing. Pain, but not command.
Good enough. The radio clicked twice.
Lightstorm turned his head slowly.
The dead thing sat beneath the map. Polite. Patient. Waiting to see which rule would break first.
That was how traps learned people. He almost laughed again. This time there was a sharper edge to it.
“You sound like him,” he said.
Then froze. The radio had not earned speech. His own words had left before he weighed them. Answering was not always questions.
Sometimes it was accusation. Sometimes it was giving the thing a place in the room large enough to argue with.
Lightstorm stepped backward.
“No,” he said, quieter.
Not to the radio.
To himself. He moved toward the crooked door. One hand on the wall. Slow.
Every step wanted to become escape. He made it walking instead. At the doorway, morning struck him pale and cold.
The trees outside stood bare and wet. A narrow service road curved downhill toward the main trail. Beyond it, the forest thickened, then thinned toward distant city edges he could not yet see.
Somewhere far away, traffic existed. People existed. Places where no one knew Lightstorm had died, returned, attacked the person who had once loved him, and walked away alive.
Alive.
The word did not fit. He stepped outside anyway. The air smelled wrong for a moment. He froze.
Not clean metal.
Not glass.
Not instrument trays.
Only wet pine, rusted roof, old dust, and his own burned fur. He breathed again. The shroud dragged against the doorframe. He hated the fabric.
He needed it. Both were allowed to be true, apparently. Annoying. He looked back into the ranger station.
The radio sat in shadow. It clicked once. The sound tried to follow him.
Lightstorm did not ask who was there.
He did not strike it. He did not go back. Instead, he reached into the shroud and tore a narrow strip from the inner hem. His hands shook badly enough that the fabric ripped crooked.
He tied the strip around the outside door handle.
Not a signal to Kaostar.
Not a trail for Metatronas.
Not a plea.
A receipt for himself. A place where he had not answered. A place where he had left. The strip of cloth hung pale against old wood.
Pathetic little flag.
Good.
Let it be pathetic. He was tired of everything needing to be powerful to count. The radio clicked again from inside.
Lightstorm stepped away from the door.
One pace. Then another. The electricity in his hand flickered, then settled into an uneasy glow beneath the skin. Still there.
Still wrong. Still his problem because it was inside his body, whether he had asked for it or not. He looked at the trees. Every direction was imperfect.
Back toward Kaostar was dangerous. Toward Metatronas was impossible. Staying here meant waiting for a dead radio to teach him obedience. So he chose the service road.
Downhill.
Water first.
There would be a creek or drainage line below.
He could wash the dirt from his hands. Check burns. Find something to wrap his wrists. Think after water. Maybe think.
Maybe not. The morning brightened by one shade. Night was over. The promise needed another shape.
Lightstorm stopped beneath a tree whose branches forked like a hand reaching for a sky it did not trust. His throat tightened. He had said it to Kaostar because Kaostar had asked with the creek in his mouth.
'I don’t intend to die tonight.'
Tonight had ended. That did not make the answer complete.
Lightstorm looked down the road.
Then back once at the ranger station. The dead radio did not click. That almost made him want to wait until it did. He did not.
“I do not intend to die today,” Lightstorm said.
The words shook. They still stood. From inside the ranger station, the broken radio clicked once.
Lightstorm walked away from it.
~ To be continued ~
