What I searched for I found at the center of the planetoid. A circular prison held him captive, with bars all around and solid rock over his head and beneath his feet. He was chained, too. Dark haired, quite young looking and perhaps a half-inch taller than I. I circled his cage in silent regard, studying him. If I'd been solid, I would have shook my head at what the scents were telling me. It was shocking, what I learned through scent.
Gathering more energy around me, I wove a shield around the Khos'Mirai's cage. To the Ra'Ak outside, it would appear that he slept—he was lying on the bare rock of his cell. Once the shield was in place, I turned first to mist and then to myself inside the cage.
"I wondered when you would get here," he sighed, sitting up and blinking at me. "They can't see or hear us, can they?"
"No. We're completely shielded. The image they see is of you sleeping."
"I don't mean to do wrong—most of the time."
"I can see that," I said, watching as he nervously twisted his fingers together. "But there is total chaos going on out there in the real world and you're sort of at the bottom of it."
"I know. I remember doing and saying some of those things, though I sometimes regret them later." He was now rubbing his arms—as if he were cold. I watched him carefully. The Ra'Ak kept everybody else warm but didn't worry so much about this one. Mentally shaking myself, I shoved that thought aside.
"I knew what was going to happen to the others—the Elemaiya. That made me happy. Both Bright and Dark, wiped out with a single blow." I could understand how he might feel that way—he'd been sold to the Ra'Ak twice. The other things he'd done, though—I didn't understand that at all. But he wasn't sane—one look into those hazel eyes and anyone could tell. I moved backward as he stood, rattling his chains with the slow and deliberate effort.
"So, you saw that, huh?" I asked, keeping an eye on his movements.
"Saw it?" he laughed. It was nasty, that laugh. "I planned it. I knew you would come. Friesianna and Baltis just couldn't help themselves. They didn't forbid their subjects from breeding indiscriminately with any other race, but they never hesitated to kick out the undesirables, did they?" The Khos'Mirai leaned against the bars of his cage. His dark hair was shaggy but not unnaturally so, and he was clean and dressed in something similar to a healer's scrubs. Bare feet stood on the rock floor of his prison and I focused on his toenails for a moment before going back to his face.
"They weren't particularly kind to their quarter-blood children," I agreed. "They are paying for their abuse now."
"Hmmph. You should have killed them, but no matter," he tossed up a hand. "They'll all die, eventually. You should have made them suffer more. I wanted to see that."
"I don't do suffering," I said.
"Such a shame," he dipped his chin and shook his head in confusion before lifting his eyes to mine again. "I lost sight of you for three hundred years. Why is that?"
"I can't really explain that," I hedged. Something wasn't right, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Still, he hadn't moved toward me and didn't appear threatening in any way. I hadn't seen anything from him that might be truly threatening. Yet.
"But you don't see," he laughed as his eyes filmed over in a strange glow. "I know I'm going to die. But I'm going to live." The grin he offered was unholy in its glee. Well, he was insane. Still, there was a touch of truth in his words. That frightened me.
"See me now?" His chains dropped away and he changed. Ra'Ak were frightening when they turned, but this—he was a terrible experiment gone awry. Half humanoid, half Ra'Ak, with a Ra'Ak's scaled body, he grew and elongated on the opposite side of his cage. The scales covering his snake-like body were flesh-colored and poisonous. A flattened, humanoid head sat atop a thirty-foot body when the change was complete. His arms and legs, shrunken and stick-like, were still attached to the reptilian torso.
Ra'Ak have a terrible, gleaming beauty about them when they transform. There was nothing redeemable in this monster. "I knew you'd find me repulsive," he laughed. "I asked them to do this—to experiment to make a hybrid. I'm almost as poisonous as they are, if you touch me." Eyes that were larger and rounder than they'd been in his humanoid shape still glowed, although they were slitted, now.
"You know I killed bigger and stronger than you on Kifirin," I pointed out, watching him warily.
"Oh, but you didn't kill smarter," he snapped and rows of long, sharp teeth clicked as he bit off his words. I'd hit a nerve, looked like. "You can kill me—I've already said that. But you can't kill all of me."
"Look, stop talking in riddles and just tell me what the hell you mean," I snapped. Yeah, I was getting a little testy, too.
"Do you think," he hissed, his lengthy body uncoiling and beginning to move toward me, "that they'd be satisfied in creating just one of me? That's so limiting," he growled a laugh. "There are hundreds. Thousands. Who knows how many of me there are? And the best part?" His eyes glowed brighter as he glared at me.
"I'm sure you're going to tell me," I muttered, shocked and angered at his words. There were thousands, just like him? Could all of them do what the Khos'Mirai could do? Create havoc and destroy?
"Oh, yes. All of who I am—what I am, can do everything I can do." He'd pulled the thoughts straight from my mind—I hadn't shielded them as I should. "I am the collective me. You can kill me, but you can't kill ME."
"But what about the Ra'Ak?" I asked, stalling for time while I searched desperately for an answer to this new and horrible reality. "Aren't they pulling your strings? You're in their prison, after all."
"You take things so literally," he pointed out. "They've done exactly as I wanted them to do—for a very long time. Once I saw they wouldn't let me go, I began to work on this from another angle. They ask, I answer. You see they're still around after you thought you'd destroyed all of them. Not a problem if you can manipulate time, you see."
I almost said it before thinking better of it. Yes, the Ra'Ak could manipulate time. And this one admitted that he knew I was coming. But the Khos'Mirai had also admitted that he'd lost track of me for three hundred years. Somebody had covered up evidence of my existence except to a select few during that time. I desperately needed more time to think and I didn't have it. Not here, facing down what may or may not be the original Khos'Mirai.