Chapter 10: Prison Break

10

Askauri's body was in the prison infirmary. Looking down on it, he felt a pang of pity for what he had become. Prison changed a man. Forced him to devolve into something completely unrecognizable to his younger, more optimistic self. Here lay the culmination of all of his dreams and aspirations. A sad sight, indeed.

His time in incarceration had been a morose and lonely affair. There were no next of kin noted on Askauri's intake paperwork and no one in more than eleven years ever listed on his visitor's list, though he did surreptitiously receive the occasional envoy. His only pleasures had been in meditating, reading, working out and sleeping. Especially sleeping.

The barriers were thinner during one's deep sleep, so he had been able to slip below the veil of his concealment spell and enter into Bealz's personal dream domain. This had been his one chance at experiencing anything even close to freedom. The one chance to talk to, to interact with his son. Even if it was, when it was all said and done, just a dream.

The same could be said, he knew all too well, for most every one of the prisoners who were pining for home, for family, for those lost to this country's bloodthirsty demand for mass incarceration.

Still, Askauri had attempted to make the best of what he could while locked up. He spent much time in meditation, reviewing the lessons from his youth, practicing the mental exercises necessary to manipulate the base aspects his family was responsible for maintaining. In this meditative state, he was able to separate into a locally projected astral emplacement and engage with his familial history. A sort of cloud based repository of genetic knowledge.

He much better understood now his family's role in the Grand Dance and learned to greatly regret his own youthful dereliction's of duty. Askauri would have to live with the knowledge that the acceptance of his responsibilities much sooner would have saved a lot of people from the harm to come.

He also understood in the moment that it was because of these neglectful choices that he had met Monie. That there was a Bealz.

Evidence that, sometimes, roses really did spring from cracked concrete.

Before, though, as a younger man, duty, responsibility, obligation to something bigger, something beyond the limited confines of self, none of these things held much interest for him. Askauri had no reason to adhere to tradition, to act with anything but self-serving interest.

For him, it didn't really matter. It wasn't like he would be king. The king was dead. His mother ruled in his stead and his older brother awaited the crown. Askauri's contribution to this lovely family portrait was symbolic, at best.

Why not, then, enjoy his time and avoid, if he could, any boring calls to duty.

It was like that up until the moment he'd fallen in love. Monie should have been no different than any of the other women he'd traipsed around with over the years. For him, the bar for their approval had been very low, pegged as it was to their willingness and the ability to withstand a good four or five day binge.

Monique Felani, Warrior, Daughter of Earth, had been so much different. So much less of what he'd sought out and discarded before.

He'd walked away from his comrades the night they met, didn't see any of them again for several days. And when they did see him, with Monie at his side, they knew immediately that something was different. And it was. His choices from that moment on were conceived of from a different place. They were made with another in mind.

This newfound sense of responsibility had turned painful when he first felt Bealz's consciousness flare up in search of him. The implications had struck like a hammer blow. He sat alone in his cell and wept for days.

His banishment, forbidding him from being there with her, with his son, had been the most painful experience of his life. Never before could he have imagined such a longing for the chance to fulfill once onerous duties and obligations.

Never before had he so longed to be an upright and righteous man.

In a way then, he had those now conspiring against him to thank. He would see his son. He would hold his lover in his arms again. Thanks to someone's inept meddling, he would do so much sooner than he had only just recently thought possible.

He had been bound by the laws of this man's Earth due to his abandonment of authority. In doing so, Askauri had voluntarily set aside his birthright and along with it, the outright ability to access his family's mantle of power.

The brand that he wore, that his own father had seared into his chest above his heart, was gone. It was his family seal, burned into his flesh, serving as proof of identity as well as a badge of authority, of honor.

The veve-pattern entwined within the brand served as a key, unlocking the magical genetic heritage which ran throughout the Royal Family's bloodline and served to facilitate his connection to the Source. Without it, considering his lack of experience wielding the energies through tedious methods such as studying, he had been virtually helpless. Left with little else, basically, but a mostly ineffective bag of tricks.

Until the rogues had shown their hand.

Askauri's spell of concealment had masked both the boy and his mother's presence. They were all but invisible unless one had prior knowledge of their existence, knew of their whereabouts, or possessed a piece or part of them or their belongings.

Askauri should have known the instant the spell had been disrupted. It should have been impossible to do so without his awareness, so another force must be at play, counteracting the alarms.

Worse than that, when the barrier had been broken, the boy and his mother would have flared up, their essence lighting up the dimensional planes like exploding stars. Hopefully, Monie would have received his warning and got to the boy, got him out and away into the Incata before anyone else recognized what their sudden appearance portended.

If she could manage to get him there, Bealz would not be so easy to find. Here on Earth, with this world's lack of magical attributes, he would stick out like a sore thumb. The Incata held more than its share of danger, and most likely the root of the plot against his family, but at least Bealz would be hidden against the backdrop of the Source.

As Askauri continues to look dolefully down at his graying body, two privately contracted prison nurses enter the cold room. Roughly transferring the dead man to a wheeled gurney, Askauri is rolled down into the bowels of the aging medical unit.

This is the long serving prisoner's greatest nightmare. To live a life devoid of hope for the chance at freedom was one thing, enough to break a man's mind, but the idea of not just dying alone, but dying alone in prison, was terrifying.

Inmates knew not to proscribe to the myth of an idyllic graveyard out back. To die with no one to claim your body in here is to know that you will face the flames, be reduced to ash and humanely discarded. That was the only fate which awaited the imprisoned dead down in the dark basement.

Askauri, though, felt not one bit of remorse as his body was shifted into the angry red maw of the furnace. He watched with passivity as the flames singed black his hair, scorched and split his skin and bubbled away his blood and fat. He watched as his body was slowly reduced to a charred and shriveled skeleton and then to nothing recognizable. A grayed pile of ash.

As the last of his flesh and bones gave up its cellular cohesion, he could feel himself growing thin, thinner than even his current ghostly form.

The room blurred, the air sharpened and, quite anticlimactically, Askauri stepped out of the void of the astral plane, the thin place between worlds, and into the Incata. He fell to his knees, weak with the effort. The family crest, his brand, burned anew on his chest. It glowed red hot and felt just the same.

He could feel Bealz's presence immediately, feel a slight distress buried beneath images of laughter and light. He could do nothing for him right now, though. Not like this. Counter-intuitively, he had to get back to Earth immediately if he was going to have any chance of protecting his son.

But Askauri had misjudged just how weak he had become, cut off as he was from his homelands, and struggles to hold onto consciousness. He knew that he had to get up, get back to his feet, back to Earth, before it was too late.

But first he had to rest up. Just for a little bit.

And so, right there in a field of flowers at the base of the hill that Bealz and Monie and a hidden hunter had passed through not long before, Askauri fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.