Planet X (Revised)

Chapter 2: Kali

I woke with a start, or at least, I thought I was awake. I don’t know, everything feels too strange; there is pain near my eyes, I can’t tell up from down, and everything feels weird. My head is spinning, but I can hardly feel it, colors and shapes are blurring. It felt like some one was holding me, but picking me up at the same time, I can’t tell which is which. They might have happened at different times, but even time is blurring together. Sometimes I would open my eyes and it would be dark, and other times it would be light. At one point, someone is talking to me, the voice sounds familiar, but I can’t remember. The voice is frantic, so I try to answer, say I’m okay, but all that comes out is a murmur. I get frustrated, so I open my eyes, I see a boy, he also seems familiar, maybe he’s my brother. No, there's something wrong in the appearance for him to be that. It takes too much effort to think about it, so I close my eyes, and my mind moves to images of my friends and family, trying to fifure out who this guy was. I’m lost, hopelessly lost, and then everything blacks out, and so do I.

The black out went for a while, I heard nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing, and knew nothing. I finally woke up, and found myself in a hammock in a room. I could only look up, so I studdied the cieling. There was something weird about it. It let in light like it was made of sticks, and it was peaked.

The person who came in was the boy I knew, he wasn’t my brother, his name was…was… At that precise moment, my body decided to blank out again. It felt like I merely blinked, but that wasn’t possible. When I had woken up before, it was early in the morning, now it was closer to night. I looked around, Salim was there by the fireplace, it wasn’t glowing with fire. The thing inside was more like yellow electricity. It emanated heat, but it had a very unnatural feel to it, I shivered, not from cold, but from uneasiness.

When I spoke, my voice sounded weird, “How can you sit by that…that thing?”

 He looked up, and smiled a little, "It's a warmer, we use it to warm ourselves, rather than with fire. It doesn't feel the same anymore, not sice you made that fire."

“Sorry I ruined it for you.”

“It’s okay.”

After a little pause, I asked, “Where are we?”

“This is the Temmer infirmary.” He answered.

“Why are we here?” then I thought about it, “what happened to me?”

“You were bitten by a Tenja.”

“What's a Tenja?”

He looked at me strangely, “You don’t have them back home?” I shook my head, “I only assumed because they are common enough here. A Tenja is snake like creature, much like a cobra, except smaller, faster, and have legs. Their venom is very poisonous. If not treated properly or within two days of being bitten, the victim will die." He didn't let me respond yet, "There is always a mark left behind after every bite, impossible to get rid of, but the mark it left on you is nothing like I have ever seen before.”

I looked at him puzzled, “What do you mean?”

 “Most survivors come off with a slight discoloration to the skin around the bite mark, but for you, it left something quite unique.”

"Really? Where?"

"On your left shoulder," he said.

There was a bandage on my collar bone, I pealed it back. Salim was right, there were two holes like bite marks. That was normal enough, but what wasn’t normal, were the colors “leaking” out of it. It was only slightly longer than the width of the bite mark, but it pulsed like a heart beat. “My mother would hate this… if I ever see her again.” I blink from unexpected tear build up in my eyes.