Code of the Vanished
Out of Character comment: At times there are strong relationships build in secondlife. They evolve in amazing stories. But when these relationships change, the story sometimes need to change to. After a wonderful time in a storyline with one of the most amazing persons, it was time for me to step away from it. This is the end of that chapter. If there is ever a new chapter that will be unknown for now.
The lamps in the Holmesk office were still warm when the door was finally breached, but the room itself was a tomb of clinical silence.
Everything was in its place. The surgical steel had been cleaned and aligned with obsessive precision. The scrolls of patient records remained rolled and tied in their cubicles. Even the scent of medicinal herbs and sharp, antiseptics lingered in the air, as if Niamh had only stepped out for a moment to draw water.
But Niamh didn’t step out.
There were no signs of a struggle, no overturned chairs, no shattered vials of DNA cultures, no blood. For a woman who had been abducted across the stars, crashed in an acquisition ship, and survived the slave blocks of Ari Blackthorne, she knew how to fight. Yet here, there was only the chilling perfection of a room left in “order.”
The office in Holmesk was more than a surgery; it was supposed to be a fortress. The Black Caste does not offer protection lightly, and for a woman with Niamh’s specialized knowledge of the “building blocks of life,” the shadows surrounding the infirmary were meant to be lethal.
To an observer, the order was the most terrifying part. It didn’t look like a flight; it looked like a harvesting.
The agents of her enemy, those who had dogged her steps since the docks of Port Kar, hadn’t just taken her. They had erased her. They had plucked a woman capable of rewriting the code of life itself out of the infirmary in Holmesk without tripping a single alarm or leaving a single footprint.
Outside, the docks remained busy and the city of Holmesk continued its pulse, unaware that one of the few minds capable of bridging the gap between Earth science and Gorean reality had been silenced.
Niamh was gone. And this time, it wasn’t a broken lock that told the story, it was the terrifying lack of one.
Crows Murder 
Leave a comment