Fear Inverted

((My fourth story! And this one isn't very long, I know...I whipped it up in about half an hour :) I felt pretty strongly that I needed a way to express how Nulion, the character, is feeling in regards to the Legionnaires in a way people around him could better understand. Whether or not what I mention in this story comes to fruition is ENTIRELY up to chance - it could go either way. But this is how things stand at this moment in time. This is how Nulion feels...))

Fear Inverted

...It's taken a long time, but...I've been cracked. It takes time...but emotions, like fear, can after a time turn inwards; inverted and ten times stronger than the old, worn shell of an emotion. Fear turns to mindless courage....just to end whatever sparked the fear in the first place. A last, desperate attempt by the emotional centers of the brain to rid themselves of whatever the threat was..

And it's how I felt towards that man....I don't know if I could even call him that. Man? God? Both? ....None? It didn't matter...Two months ago though, it had been all that mattered. My every thought was of how to keep away, to keep myself off the map, below the radar...Only to surface for air, for food, for brief company. Sleeping with one eye open....I was scared.

I've been so scared....My mind wandered all over, feeling at the dark depths of uncertainty, with no choice but to go forwards. Thrust into the unknown....I spent too much time there. I spent too long in that darkness...that...that unending crawl away from inevitability.

Volcatius....That name pulsed through my thoughts. He was always there....He was the man I hated, the man I feared, the man I most wanted to see. He's been....as comforting as a disembodied whisper can be, one responsible for the disappearance of so many children...And the death of eight of them. It could be more...I...don't know. There's so much I don't know....and...I'm gaining a hunger for it.

It's ravenous....I hunger for information, for knowledge....For any scrap of intel I can get, to help put my mind at ease, to know, to understand once and for all what that man had wanted with me since February...

He'd come to me not too long after I had returned from Rome, after taking back my framed memories, the ones destined to hang proudly in my office. The frame that was supposed to set my mind at ease....That image of me, my parents, my grandparents...The sandwiches...The singular sun...Home.

But I never got to bask in memory...Not for as long as I'd wanted, at any rate....I stood, alone in a small, grassy patch with a marble statue erected right in the center...leaning up against the stone...And it happened. The static...the piercing, maddening static...It rose in cacophanous spikes, growing, fading, coming back with a vengeance....A terrible symphony of dissonance and fuzz. It happened every...single....time.

His voice blooms from nothingness...I have only seen him once, and...and even then it wasn't much to behold. A simple black robe...hovering a foot from the ground. Nothing more. I wouldn't see him for two months from that date, though. He spoke to me...telling me of plans involving me; a simple, sentimental Opifex. "I have plans for you, Nulion of the Clans..." He...never said what the plans were. He still hasn't.

Things....have come a ways from then. More people have been contacted....More have given their opinions, expressed their feelings, their hatred. Sacrifices have been made....children have been lost. Information has been obscured, hidden, blotted from the view of those would do good with it. We would have done good with the information....The Council of Truth is hungry for it, too....We want answers. We want explainations. We want an end.

Just...like everything else on this planet though, things get in our way...namely, Omni-Tek. They...have a near-monopoly on concrete, solid information regarding Volcatius and his band of Legionnaires....Sotto won't tell me a word. Tipha hides information from me while I stay open to her. We give...and recieve nothing in return.

I've...endured a lot, thanks to Volcatius and his men. Thanks to my fear of them. I have spent a week curled up beneath a bridge in the Coast of Tranquility. I have spent a month sleeping on a crate of replacement slayerdroid claws and workerdroid limbs. I have stayed days inside the apartment of a man who was supposed to have died...A man Tyma can never know about. Tymaar kept pictures of his dear sister everywhere....And I could almost feel her eyes piercing my body, even though in person I never felt anything close to that way about her. I've spent a month and a half away from my home...away from my sanctuary of mental peace. My restless dreams continued to keep me in cold sweats at night...One night a dream of walking Rubi-Ka as a hideous mutant, the next night a dream of becoming a cold, cloaked member of the Legionnaires, at the beck and call of my Lord Volcatius.

I had no peace...

I had no answers...

I had nowhere to go.

Life in fear is a difficult...terrible thing. Peering over your shoulder at all times, expecting someone to be watching from the invisible shadows....Putting up an iron wall of indifference, of good attitude, of confidence...I still had to run the Council of Truth meetings along with my fellow Clerical Staffers...even though on the inside, I felt as ramshackle and torn up as the top two floors of Truth Tower were. The more I think of it...the more it feels like Truth Tower is just...a physical representation of how I feel on the inside.

I try my best, alone, to put the top of the Tower back into working condition...And as I put back the broken pieces, I feel the pieces of my mind slip back into order as well. The pieces fit so well...and look so wonderful and feel so satisfying when they shine like new. Both inside the tower, and inside my mind. When I work on the Tower....I work as my own psychiatrist. I reconstruct and repair....But...Volcatius had delayed whatever work I was to do on the Tower....and that which the Tower represents.

There was a brief respite....A short time where I could catch my breath....Apply some new coats of stain to the woodwork inside of the Tower, having only had the time to make several chairs shine as if they had just been imported from Earth the day before. I didn't have time to go any further though...

He started reappearing again....talking to others. It...was around the time he began speaking with Tyma, that things began to unravel. Around then, fear inverted.

Several days ago....Tyma had spoken with him...in person. Face to face. Born from my fear...was my flaw. Volcatius knew that, somewhere in the two months since he had first come to know me, that I plotted against him in secret....Tyma had let me know almost immediately upon returning, that any day now....he may strike me down.

I....can hardly describe how that felt. I still felt the hunger....I still had the craving....I wanted more than anything else to just figure out where I fit, in this grand scheme of his. I never realized it until that moment....and everything became clear as day.

Humans are invariably flawed...never figuring out what it is they truly want, until the chance has passed them by...or is dangerously close to doing so. The beautiful thing about humans though....is that once they figure out what they want, what they feel...They never give up. My turn had come...for this moment, this one...singular moment.

As soon as I realized....that maybe what I wanted was unbelievably selfish, I had to...to come up with something. A noble purpose maybe? Learn what I wanted to, and then tear Volcatius' head off? As much as I wanted to say I would do so...to strike back in the name of those seven clan children whose lives were lost...I couldn't.

I will find Volcatius...someday very soon...and I will talk to him. I'll....I'll do whatever I can, to set my mind at ease...To put aside doubt, to have conquered fear....just for an answer. I can do that....

If...something goes wrong...I still have people here who can help.

I still have Tyma, bless her soul...I still have Falikos, I still have Tipha, Hyperion, Cylie, Anamelle, the whole of the Council of Truth....Even knowing that most of them would try and dissuade me from whatever it is I might have to do, to get myself back into Volcatius' favor....I just hope they understand.

I am an Opifex driven by memory, by curiosity and by whimsy....By sentiment, by friendship, by a need for understanding. I....can't fail. No matter how much I have told myself that I will in the past...My fear inverted will keep me safe.

Volcatius...I'm coming.