Checkmate: Games of War » [Cherik]

Chapter Eight

As the remedy ebbs, Charles's telepathy washes over him like a rising tide. Fizzing and frothing is the psychic whitewater: the precursor to the tsunami.

Then he's up to his ankles, sinking in the sand as the backwash tries to steal him in the sea of psionic sound. Welded in the sinking shore, the currents seek to submerge him. Seaweed snares around his ankles and chains him to the seabed as the waves whirl around him. He thrashes, paddles, flails; but it's to no avail as the ripcurl looms above him.

Then it all comes crashing down. He's drowning. The howling din returns. The surface is like a crystalline roof, cerulean shades of sunlight refracting through the rippling waves like some long forgotten reprieve and relief. He can't breathe. And the ocean only gets darker the deeper he plummets; and the weight of the water is compressing his skull.

He's falling.

The water is ice cold at the seabed, no light, no warmth. Only monstrosities swim those depths, filling the obfuscousness with unimaginable abhorrence.

Charles startled awake, choking on air as he tried to distinguish his mind from the regiment renegading through his head.

He was not alone in his skull.

He felt like his mind was in a tug of war; thousands of psionic hands tussling with his consciousness, tugging it this way and that. He felt like his mind was a hyperextended metal spring; elongated inordinately, beyond healthy proportionality, beyond the realms of being able to spring back.He felt like his mind was a stretched elastic band; creaking and straining under the pressure, about to snap.

Charles was busting at the seams, his mind unravelling like a rolling ball of yarn, and his reality torn into thousands of indistinguishable scraps.

The pain ripped through him and he roared. The racket in his head was maddening, a resonant vortex of sound and he was being sucked under.

For two-hundred and fifty miles he could hear the people. Feel them He felt as though he barely had room to contain his own consciousness inside his skull, he could feel the press, and the bulging stain. He could feel the thrum of other minds buzzing around in his head.

"Hank!" He screamed, voice crackling in his throat like an aborted bolt of thunder. "Hank!" He wailed again, his own yelps drowned out by the cacophony ricocheting off every wall of his mind.

Because he can't climb out of bed and cook up a cure for his psychic psychosis himself. He relies on Hank - not that he has any choice but to place his faith in his furry companion - to administer the curative draught. It was imperative.

The emotions, they were visceral. It was too much. No single mind was made to contain that many emotions, the neurochemicals weren't capable of compensating for the flippant flashes of emotion flooding him. His heart didn't know if to be restless or restful, it palpitated unnervingly - his pulse on the blink. His breathing was short and sharp, then laboured, then back to choppy.

Out of practice, he couldn't assert control over his own body. It was like being in a fighter jet without a joystick as it nosedived at terminal velocity. He felt like a child all over again.

"Hank! Please?!" Charles tried distinguish Hank's mind from the crowd. It was a needle in a haystack.

Ears attuned to the anguished professor's pleading, Hank had to fortify his compassionate heart and choke down his nurturing nature to ignore the cries.

"Mutant and proud," Hank recited like a mantra, an echo of Raven's words to him; a shadow of the past he savoured. His dainty fingers - not blue and beast-like, the irony - traipsed over the pocket sized picture of Raven he kept on his person at all times.