Five Golden Rings

Title: Five Golden Rings

Author: Harper Kingsley

Character: Kanon-Darkstar, post-Battle for Terra

The setup: After ruling a city of sycophants, a tired-of-all-the-bs Darkstar approaches Dr. Zee for the technology to jump universes. He activates the device and travels to a new Earth… And in that moment, there are an infinite number of worlds he could have gone to. And if branch-theory is a thing, a version of him has gone to a version of every world. This Darkstar has come to this world.

A/N: I wrote a snippet I called "That Dune Thing," and that’s what I’m recycling here. The summary for "That Dune Thing" was "Summary: A prisoner held in a Dune-like setup with a cat. Thought-centric." Now you know that prisoner is and might always have been Kanon-Darkstar. Enjoy.

. –– . x_x . –– .

He was captured the second he stepped out of the portal. Hit with something that sent yellow energy jolting through his whole body.

He got knocked out.

And when he woke up, he was collared and cuffed with chains holding him down. His superstrength was worn to practically nothing (he figured a normal human would have died from the treatment he received). He wasn’t healthy, but he was alive.

If miserable. And terribly fragile.

Tend the cat, suckle at its teats… fucking Dune-obsessed moron needed to be put down. But what could he do? They’d broken both his legs, his right arm, and three fingers on his left hand before casting them in heavily weighted plaster. All he had was his thumb and middle finger, which made it hard enough to care for the cat–how was he supposed to escape?

And the cat…

There was resentment, of course. Trapped as he was–wrong as it was–he felt the need to lash out at the nearest living thing. But it wasn’t her fault he was here.

Nothing was her fault. She was just as much a prisoner as he, moreso as she would never understand why this was happening to her. Why some horrible man had stuck her in a glass box with her limbs held immobile and only her head poking out the top.

He’d begun to pity the beast, even as he forced his heart to stay hard. They were going to die here in this cold stone room that leeched the warmth from his feet. They were going to die here and there was nothing he could do about it. So he held the tattered remains of his dignity around himself and refused to break.

Even as he tended the cat–slowly and painfully dragging himself across the floor each day–and felt his soul slipping and cracking at the madness, he refused to break.

Because somewhere in him, he still held an ember of hope: Someone would come for him. His followers would not leave him here.

And even if all he left behind was an empty shell, he had to hope that they would see his body home.

"Here kitty kitty."

. –– . x_x . –– .

Flarian raced after Dov down the near endless corridors of the Dark Citadel. He clutched his blaster in his hand and kept his head on a swivel.

They had escaped the Black Prince and his Demon Horde. They needed to escape the dungeon if they wanted to leave this accursed place.

The underground prison was a massive complex of cells and their pitiful occupants. It hurt his soul that they could not stop.

I will come back and rescue you, he promised in his heart. Because it was only chance that he wasn’t behind bars at the moment.

Because it would be only through good luck if he and Dov escaped.

He refused to waste this chance he had been given. They were going to get away, or they would be captured trying.

He would die before he gave up his freedom. And he refused to be used against the Alliance.

"Which way?" Dov asked. They had reached a (–nexus–) in the corridors.

They could go right, left, or continue forward.

The doors around them had become solid expanses, each broken by a single narrow horizontal slit of a windo about 6 feet up. In all directions, there seemed an endless number of doors, the only differences about them the alien shape of the glowing runes carved about the doorways.

Flarian hunched in on himself, gasping for breath. They’d been running so fast. "Wh-which way did we need to go? North and up?" He fumbled for the leather thong around his neck, holding the pendant toward Dov.

The end was a glass bubble that contained a compass.

"Looks like you’re useful for something after all, Montague," Dov said.

"Thank you, Sire," Flarian bobbed his head agreeably.

His father had gotten him the posting with the prince. Unless they were for sure going to die, he wasn’t going to drop an ounce of his manners around the royal shitbird.

Dov squinted at the compass, turning it this way and that. Flarian held still as the thin strip of leather rubbed against the skin of his neck.

"All right, I think we wanna go that way." Dov pointed right and released the pendant. "Let’s go, Montague. No time to waste."

"For certain, Sire," Flarian chirped. And they were running again.

. –– . x_x . –– .

It was the sound of arguing that caught his attention. His hearing had been getting better and better in the recent days, and he could feel the pain of his wounds easing.

He thought that he was getting stronger. With a bit of help, he could be completely healed.

He’d taken to listening to the world around him as he stretched his muscles.

While he was "powerless" in the sense that he wasn’t vaporizing anything or flying free, he could see his body healing abnormally fast. Crooked leg bones and all.

He had to get out of here. Him and Cat the cat.

"I’ll take you with me," he promised amongst his tears. And there was no way he was leaving the cat in this hell if he ever managed to escape. They would leave this place forever and never look back.

The voices outside his prison caught his attention. That he could understand them was what held it.

"It is unfortunate, but we may just have to go back."

"No way, Montague. This is the way we want to go: East and up."

"North and up, Sire. We wanted to go North and up."

Realizing the dullness of normal human senses, he dragged himself beside the door and began knocking against it as loud as he could.

Hopefully they would hear him over their oddly polite bickering.

. –– . x_x . –– .

Flarian refrained from strangling the Second Prince through pure force of will. He was a bit proud of himself.

They had been running the wrong way and had made more turns than he thought he could backtrack.

He could feel the trap closing around him and wanted to scream.

In the prison area with the open bars, he had seen the horrors the Black Prince had done to sentient beings. They were pitiable broken things barely clinging to the last glimpses of life.

He’d followed Dov into literal hell itself, and now he’d let him trap them there.

His hands had balled themselves into fists and he was talking himself into pummeling the prince when he heard the sound of knocking.

"Quiet!" he hissed, then listened closely for the source of the sound.

A door encircled with glowing runes. The magic was heavy enough he could feel it against his skin as he approached.

"Hello?" he called, swallowing hard before reaching out his left hand to rap his armored knuckles against the door. It rang like metal.

Whoever was on the other side knocked out a strange sequence of three and three and three.

Flarian glanced at Dov. "Let me have the crowbar. I want to find out what’s on the other side of this door."

Dov looked indecisive. "We should go back. We shouldn’t waste time. We…"

"The crowbar, Sire. This door need opening," Flarian said firmly. And the prince finally–finally!–passed over the short length of bent metal.

Whatever the runes were intended to do, it wasn’t to stop brute force entry from the outside.

Flarian had to shrug off his jacket and roll up his shirt sleeves, but he was able to pry the prison door open.

Once there was an inch of space, the person inside reached long fingered hands through to help force the door open.

It gave with a loud screech before slamming against the wall. The prisoner didn’t look as if he could have opened the door with such force. He looked in terrible condition, more than just scraggly black hair, but leg bones bent in painful directions and left to heal that way for months.

Flarian made a moue with his mouth. There was no way this man was running anywhere. He swallowed, and raised his eyes to meet the man’s, to explain that they wouldn’t be able to take him with them.

"Well, hello to you," the prisoner drawled.

And even with the covering of filth and debris, with blood dried black against his skin, there was something undeniably charming about him.

Flarian felt himself blush. "Hello."

=END=