Chapter 34: The Long Walk Home

34

Askauri was two days digging himself out from beneath the rubble.

Much of that time was spent attending to the dead and the dying; those poor fools whom he had trapped along with his enemies when he'd brought the building down around them.

None of them could have known, in the midst of their grief, as they graciously accepted his assistance, that he was the cause of the calamity. Askauri held his tongue, along with his great regrets, in that regard, while surreptitiously utilizing what magics he could, in light of the extent of the damage, to alleviate the suffering.

Up close and personal with the victims of his unchecked emotions, Askauri was horrified by what he'd done in the backrooms of The Passage. Acting without hesitation, without thought for the lives and safety of the others in the building, he had committed an act of atrocity, something he would have once thought himself incapable.

Now, though, as he dug and scraped through the building's remains, Askauri knew that something within him had changed. Something had hardened. He was forced to acknowledge just how much he seethed with a rage he'd kept bottled up for the better part of the last ten years.

His incarceration had created within him a roiling sea that he'd necessarily learned to hide beneath a seemingly placid surface.

Considering the loss of control, the quick descent into material madness, Askauri feels broken inside, damaged by the toll his period of incarceration had taken. He had spent the last ten years of his life learning to abide by a new code of existence and when faced with adversity for the first time in the 'world', he'd allowed the anger to bubble to the surface. He'd lashed out without thought. Intent upon ending the threat, proving himself, setting an example. He'd sought to crush his enemy.

These were the rules by which he had learned to survive within the Illinois Department of Corrections. Within the lawless confines of a self-governed prison state, an overwhelmingly male dominated environment ruled by base fears and desire, it was kill or be killed.

It was not a place where the decorums of royalty could be expected to survive. Askauri had found out as much, finding it easier and easier to eschew the indoctrinated values drilled into him with an unyielding, fierce formality.

His training in the Long Plains' Military Academies had prepared him for the captivity. He had trained intensively to withstand extended torture and isolation at the hands of the enemy, and yet the effects upon him were unprecedented, unique. As it was for each individual who had ever experienced it.

Prison, he rued, had permanently insinuated itself into his consciousness in a way he could never have expected. It had hardened him, sealed off a portion of his emphatic emotional spectrum.

Beneficially, in a rip the band-aid off sort of way, it had also given him ample time for self-examination. It had provided the opportunity for an unflinchingly harsh self-scrutiny that few are ever afforded.

Resultingly, he was painfully, acutely, attuned to the expression of his own flaws and shortcomings.

Some of which were only now becoming painfully apparent, angry etymologies, deservedly gained or not, that were completely out of place in a world of free men.

As Askauri dug through the rubble with bare, bleeding hands, the tears cutting clean tracks across his dusted face, he wonders what his newfound freedom meant to the child awaiting him, all alone, several blocks away. He was certain that Bealz had no doubt either heard or heard about the building's collapse by now.

Overseeing as the last of the bodies are taken from the wreckage, Askauri turns his head upwards towards the Angstrom, its spire visible in the distance.

He could be there within the span of a thought. He could step into the nearest shadow or shading. He could walk into the reflected surfaces along the sides of the emergency vehicles, the firetrucks and mobile trauma units.

There were many ways for him to appear instantly by Bealz's side, dozens of traveling shortcuts for short trips that didn't have to pass through the astral plane.

Setting off on foot, Askauri, head hung low, however, slowly begins the long trudge back to his son.