The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

A Peek into Probability

It took only a moment for the Storm Wolves to release Lash from the table. When his feet were on the ground, the big vampire properly gathered Fiadh in and, for a long moment, just held her as she cried softly in relief, emotions rolling over her. As soon as their grip on each other eased slightly, Mordecai asked:

"Ready there, my friend?" At his nod, and with Fiadh holding tightly to him, Mordecai took them to another chamber with a teleportal wink of light.

This room was both larger, and oddly more intimate than the other. Instead of being in the heart of a giant sphere, it was a simple platform with a curved wall stretching out of sight both up and down behind it, and in front of it.

"I feel ... holes in there," Lash said, looking over at Mordecai. "You removed something, didn't you."

Mordecai nodded.

"You had memories of trauma so grievous, that it was preventing your mind from re-engaging with your brain," he added. "But I only sculpted the specific engrams out of your memory and did a little backfill. So you'd know that something was there at one point. And I put them in the data vault, if you ever want to process them."

Lash slowly nodded as he absorbed that. It was true; he wasn't missing vast tracts of memory. Only a few hours here and there, pruned just enough that he knew after the missing time elapsed, that something horrible had happened to him. Would he miss those memories? Unlikely. He still had the ones that gave him purpose, that made his blood churn with rage, and kept him focused on task. Besides, they had given him advanced PTSD, and threatened to lock his mind away forever in a vault of pain and shame.

"Maybe when this is all done," he said, looking down at Fiadh, who beamed up at him. "I'll grind my way through them one at a time, instead of having them all inside, burdening my very soul." He smiled wryly. "I find myself wishing that all who suffer from such trauma have a powerful psionic as a friend who can go in and excise the sick parts and free the mind."

"Wouldn't that be something!" Mordecai said with a wry smile.

"One last thing."

"And that is?"

"Did you do something to me physically? I feel the best that I've felt in about ten years!" Lash exclaimed.

"Ah, yes. That would be a realignment," Mordecai said, his smile warming.

"A what now?"

"A realignment. You suffered significant damage to your body several times in the last fourteen days."

"Yes," Lash grimaced. "I still remember most of that!"

"Right? And when I scanned you, I found almost eighty five percent of your body was less than fourteen days old. So, I did a molecule by molecule realignment to make sure all your tissues and systems were synchronized with each other. Helps with reaction times, muscle recovery, short term memory, well, a whole bunch of things, actually. And gets rid of all those niggling little pains that you may have felt from a forced regeneration under duress."

"Forced regeneration under duress?" Lash said with a grimace. "What's that?"

"Ha. I'm pretty sure every regeneration you've done recently was under duress. If only judging by the amount of trace werewolf DNA you had in your bloodstream."

Lash smiled wryly.

"Sometimes the oldest tricks are still the best ones, my friend," he said. Then he looked at the massive curved wall in front of them. "And now I believe you're about to tell us why we are in this particular room."