The italicization is gone, but I'm sure you can figure out when the character is thinking.
Reviews welcome, obviously. Enjoy! *commanding*
~I did a bit of editing, but I'll probably wind up doing more.
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Thad Sehow slid his long fingers along the lines of text circling the cool, dark stone pillar. At least, he assumed it was a text of some sort; nobody had been able to translate a single glyph, and many had tried. Including Thad. After several months studying nothing but this pillar, Thad had discovered only three things unusual about it: there were sixty-seven different symbols used, all of the symbols consisted of entirely straight lines and sharp angles, and somehow the stone had evaded erosion. For as long as anyone could remember, this pillar had stood erect, unmoving, unchanging, and enigmatic.
The circular clearing around the pillar was only slightly overgrown, the result of a few months of abandonment. He shook his head solemnly. He was an old historian, a specialist in studying the past, and so much of the present around him was changing. Never before had an outsider led the City, but now it seemed inevitable; Hiron Aadeaki had been a name on everyone's lips ever since he came to the City. He had high goals and a radical opinion of how those goals could be achieved. Thad knew too well that those two things do not make a good combination in a man, much less a leader.
Aadeaki had for some reason called for making the clearing with the pillar off limits to the public, but Thad had no illusions about why he had visited the pillar, and it was not because of that, nor was it only because of his fascination with it. Losing his Gina had taken the already minimal interest he had in everyday life away, his only reason for caring about anything beyond the histories. What had been a passion for him before became an obsession, his only refuge from his Gina. Whenever he allowed himself to become idle, memories triggered by small things he had never before thought significant assaulted him, cultivating his grief and watering it with his unshed tears. She ghosted through his dreams, as radiantly beautiful as she had been in flesh, never acknowledging or perhaps never aware of his presence, luring him ever onward to some unseen end.
He traced one of the symbols, the most frequently used throughout, with one finger. Nowhere in the world had anyone found its like. There are no unrelated languages, he thought almost by rote. He traced another, two rows down and somewhat to the left. Nothing is untranslatable. Some link would be found, and something would be deciphered. Time seemed to lose meaning as Thad kneeled before the pillar, tracing symbols and wondering where he might find a link; minutes ticked by like seconds, hours dragged like millennia.
Somehow, his methodically slow ponderings and tracings became urgent and a sense of foreboding crept over him. The sun was nearly hidden by the surrounding trees, cleared for several meters around the pillar. Darkness leaped from the forest, tendrils of it closing in from all directions. The moon, abandoning its usual role of nocturnal illumination, left him among the shrinking gray and growing black. The pillar in front of him suddenly did not seem an innocent puzzle, but a great dark beast ready to pounce on the small prey conveniently lying right in front of it. His heart racing, Thad traced faster, as though in that minute act he might outrun the hunting blackness.
A flash of white light, tinged with red, or so it seemed to Thad, ruthlessly crushed the dark from the clearing just when it appeared about to engulf him completely. He traced a final symbol with fingers moving almost of their own accord. Final, only partially because it was the last, but mostly because it felt final. The last note in a sweeping arpeggio. The last page in a good book. The last breaths before death.
And the preparatory sacrifice necessary for rebirth.
~
Hiron Aadeaki, as he had dubbed himself, smiled warmly at the fools surrounding him. If all went well, this speech would finally give him the authority he needed. Unfortunate that these primitives didn’t have any effective method of creating light, but he could avoid the night with ease. For now. “Thank you for listening.”
Stepping down from the stand, he walked confidently through the opening that formed before him in the crowd, waving to the people he passed. Applause slowly grew around the surprise of his sudden departure, but it soon became tumultuous, drowning individual words and muting the incessant buzz in his head that reminded him of the change about to happen. Something would have to be done about that particular change.
He began to feel an itch of sorts behind his eyes, trying desperately to drag his attention to the southwest. He clenched his fists, silently cursing the idiots surrounding him. How much easier would his life be if they simply did not exist, if he did not need them?
With no time for subtlety, he ran into the larger crowd to his right, and to the few who saw, seemed to vanish.
Hiron reappeared in the air directly above the thorn he had been trying to remove, barely able to stay out of the growing shadows cast by the trees surrounding it. He arrived, and almost too late, but something could still be done.
Looking down, he saw a dim shape, a man most likely, huddled at the base of the thorn. He glanced at the horizon. The sun was almost completely down, barely more than a sliver visible above the trees. He was not in his domain enough to be able to destroy the threat completely. Still, he thought he had the ability to stave off the transformation until morning. Once that came, his old acquaintance would be hidden deep in the recesses of the man's mind.
He held the right hand that was barely his by then and used it to cup a flash of light directed into the clearing, then dimmed it as far as he dared.
There was nothing more to do. He could only hope that the small light would succeed in outlasting the night, and that it would be enough.
Leaving the same way he came put considerable strain on him, and he stumbled into the secret chamber in which he kept his other self locked away. A small window facing east ensured that he would reclaim his control of this body every morning, but there was no way to escape once his hold on this body faded each night. He had felt the desperateness of his other self slowly ebbing away its sanity, along with its will to live. Soon, Hiron Aadeaki would have complete control, of his new body and of his new world.
Night came, and the world was free from the grip of Hiron and his old acquaintances for the last time.
