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Sight Unseen	By : ehiltebe Category: M through R > Pitch Black Views: 2323 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own Riddick, Pitch Black, or any of the characters from that universe, nor am I making any money off this. All I have is Eileen...

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Sight Unseen

A The Chronicles of Riddick Alternate Universe

Chapter One

“They are an army,” said a feminine voice in my ear, one whose accent might be traced back to an area of Old Earth called Britain, “unlike any other, crusading across the stars toward a place called Underverse, their promised land, a constellation of dark, new worlds.”

I found myself looking down at three roughly-finished, converging metal prongs. Something all but pulsed behind them, emitting a terrible blue-white light and the crackle of thunder. With a groan of resisting corrosion, they began to move apart as my point of view soared up and back. Each beam was attached to the top of a massive graven face.

“Necromongers, they’re called.” The voice continued speaking as I got further away, the images moving up and out atop a colossal pillar like some strange flower. Ships of a design I’d never seen before held stations in a ring around the tower, engines thrumming as they seemed to suck in shadows.

Suddenly, a spherical mass shot up from the monolith, trailing sparks, to hover and spin slowly. Scabrous black patches dimmed its radiance, yet the light outlined the surroundings. Crumbling buildings formed a dead cityscape beneath ominous clouds.

“And if they cannot convert you, they will kill you.” Another set of cast-metal faces entered my field of vision, though one set of eyes had been left out to show a pair of real ones that gleamed cruelly. “Leading them, the Lord Marshal.” He became my new focus, tormented faces burnished with gold decorating his shoulder plates. He stood on the stairs of a temple-like structure, flanked by two groups of people. To his right stood men in less ornate, dark gray armor, one with a sumptuously-dressed woman holding his elbow possessively. Opposite them, men in long black coats and silver ornamentation waited on the Lord Marshal’s pleasure. My eyes lingered inexplicably on the palest and most heavily decorated one in the group. Then their leader turned with a dramatic flourish of his long, scaled cape and began climbing the stairs.

“He alone has made a pilgrimage to the gates of the Underverse and returned a different being.” The cleared steps retracted as the observers filed through huge doors. When panels began sliding across the empty portico, I realized that it was actually a ship. “Stronger.” The setting changed, gilded walls emphasizing the case form rising from within a pillar. The sculpted man appeared to have been stripped of his very skin before his arms had twined painfully around a post with rounded finials. “Stranger.” The ghostly image of a gauntleted hand grasped the bar, followed by the real one after a second’s delay. “Half alive and half… something else.”

‘Something else?’ Try ‘some bizarre freak,’ sister.

The fist shoved the handle back into its base, and the scene snapped back to the gigantic pillar. The strange mass’s spin accelerated rapidly, black flecks cast away as it became a disk, then a torus, its center large enough to engulf the monolith without touching it. It slammed into the ground as I rocketed away. A deep boom accompanied the mushroom cloud of an uncontrolled nuclear explosion, buildings disintegrating all around it.

“If we are to survive, a new balance must be found.” More disturbing than the explosion, the quickly-receding ground itself began to burn, great cracks splitting the planetary crust. I stopped in a distant orbit, able to see the entire hemisphere as identical blasts turned a once-thriving world into a giant cinder, only death remaining.

“In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these… well, it should be fought by another kind of evil.” The cosmic fires shifted to a smooth silver, a second orb appearing with the subtle lines of a shadowed and yet very familiar face. The eyes gleamed in the inky darkness of space.

‘Big Evil,’ some called the man. But I knew him better than anyone else, knew him as Rick… my friend, my lover. My mate.

~*~

I came awake all at once, flinching with the horror of what I’d just seen. World-killers, changing or destroying every living thing in their path, and that woman, whoever she was, believed that Richard B. Riddick was the universe’s best hope of stopping them? He’d laugh in her face.

Unless they posed an immediate threat to him, me, or my adopted sister.

I didn’t even consider the possibility that it had just been a strange dream; I have no such thing. I see things in my sleep, yes, but they always prove to be the truth or a possibility that the three of us could do something about. This one had felt like a message, a warning.

Rick’s bulk pressed against my back, one arm holding me close as deep, even breaths ghosted across my neck. Only with me did he sleep this soundly, as though the fact that both of us were here could ward off any threat all on its own. Gradually, I relaxed against the furnace warmth of his skin and drifted back into slumber.

~*~

The familiar pink-red sky I’d only seen in my dreams spread through the darkness behind my eyelids, bringing with it the grave-covered hills all around and the dark grotto in front of me. She walked out of the shadows cast by the tangled, dying trees, green eyes momentarily flashing mercury. I had no name for her, had never been able to speak in this emotion-drenched place.

“You have settled your past, last scion of House Veruna.” I frowned. Had that been my birth mother’s name? “But he has not. I have reached him but once, and House Riddick has always been… stubborn. It is your task now, to guide him until he accepts what you both truly are.” Then she paused, looking out across the desolate landscape. “You must choose what the future brings, though our dead cry out for vengeance.”

No shit, I thought as a gust of wind wailed through the tombstones. From the moment I’d understood, as a child, that my mother had been stolen from me by a murderer, I had wanted the head of the person responsible. Preferably severed by my own hand as he or she screamed.

“But now… now it is time for you to bear the mark.” Splaying her right hand over her heart, she locked gazes with me. A faint blue radiance gathered around her fingers, and then the palmful of eerie fire turned toward me. She hesitated, close enough for me to feel the crackling energy on my breast.

“This is going to hurt.”

~*~

Every single muscle in my body seized up in agony as my eyes flew open. I jackknifed upright, barely managing to turn my scream into something between a growl and a whimper. Disturbing Jack’s sleep, one of the few things needed by all growing teenagers, was not on my list of things to do.

Hurt?! Understatement of the decade, you bitch!

Strong arms quickly stilled the worst of the uncontrollable spasms, holding me tight as the pain wracked my body. A heavy leg pinned both of mine to the mattress to stop the wild, thrashing kicks.

“What th’ hell?” At the sound of Rick’s voice, the stabs of energy began to fade, leaving me limp and gasping in his embrace. “Th’ fuck was that, babe?”

“Not… sure.” My voice came out on a wheeze, but then I looked down at myself and yelped. A handprint, her handprint, shone on my bare skin exactly where she’d touched me in the dream. “Freak-o-Meter off the damn scales here.” The convict peered over my shoulder, then lowered me to the bed so he could examine the glowing mark more closely.

“You’re fuckin’ tellin’ me? What happened?”

“I’m not sure.” The phrase almost turned into a sob. “Another dream with her, an’ that’s where she put her hand. God, did it hurt.” I’d never felt such an intense pain, even on the two occasions when I’d been shot, and it had reduced me nearly to tears. But with incredible patience and tenderness, my partner held me until it and the light faded entirely.

“I am not likin’ that bitch, whoever she fuckin’ thinks she is.” He’d said it before and would surely say it again. The shoulder-to-toe skin contact of his embrace relaxed me further, just as he knew it would, and I reached up to run a hand over his smooth-shaven skull. His lips covered mine, all but erasing one worried thought.

What would I do without him?

~*~

In some ways, the five years since we three had met seemed to have flown by, yet in others it turned into an enjoyable eternity. Despite appearing to be polar opposites, Riddick and I fit together like two halves of a much greater whole. Had I believed in such a thing, I might have said we were made for each other. His tall, broad form was a wrecking ball against those foolish enough to attack us, while my petite, toned body was the dagger in their backs. He didn’t bother with mincing words, saying exactly what he thought; I could make mine twist and turn as well as any seasoned politician.

Perhaps the way our strengths and weaknesses meshed was a part of our shared Furyan heritage. A vanished race that we knew little about, even after half a decade of careful, cautious searching.

Our uncanny ability to work together as if we possessed a single mind had gotten us out of scrape after hellish scrape. And, usually at my insistence, we’d pulled others through with us. Ten people had escaped two different hells because of us, and in return, we owed our lives to one of them.

The one who slept in the cabin two doors down from ours.

With a little help from a man I considered my brother in all but blood, we’d built a small but profitable express courier service with the hyper-capable freighter Wanderers’ Den. I supplemented that income by helping solve tough cases for Meyer, Meyer, and Trent—the private law firm that had trusted the judgment of an employee enough to hire a very young, freshly degreed criminologist who’d declined the Alliance government’s job offer. I did my very best to live up to their expectations and those of my immediate boss/good friend, Jamie. He did us a favor at the same time, taking care of the one other Furyan we’d found while he worked a bizarre cryo-suspension cocktail out of his system. Five years hadn’t been long enough, as Marcus still moved at a ponderously slow pace when he tried to hurry.

Emerging from my memories, I hauled my ass out of the tangled sheets to join my lover in the shower. We had a pickup scheduled with a customer in the afternoon, but hadn’t finalized our own plans for the rendezvous. That discussion needed to include our pilot—one of the youngest commercially-licensed pilots in circulation— and I knew one sure-fire way to rouse her in the morning.

Breakfast.
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Sight Unseen