Undone : Episode 1: Rebirth (full)

Posting a link to the whole thing this time, to avoid posting in 4+ sections. I'll include the first few paragraphs of each chapter in this and following posts, then y'all can follow the link to the rest. Thanks for reading! - The Cosmodrome had never been a friendly place. Beautiful, maybe, but too dangerous to appreciate; if you stopped long enough to smell the flowers, if you found any, you’d have superheated arc wire flying through your skull before you could bend a knee. And that’s if you were lucky. Worse things had happened to those too brave and too stupid for the lands beyond the City. Like this Ghost, for instance. Keeping a low profile among the wreckage of what was once a major thruway, the one-eyed contraption darted in and out of long-abandoned vehicles, pausing and scanning along the way. It seemed far from systematic, its method of perusing the debris, skipping over dozens of rusted chassis just to peer into one further on. It stopped at another, looking through the gaping hole where the driver’s door once attached some untold time ago, and coldly inspected the remains of the vehicle’s thoroughly deceased operator. The dry bones made no reply, and the Ghost darted through the cabin and continued its search. Two hundred meters behind, maintaining a distance just beyond the tiny explorer’s radar range, a Fallen Captain gazed down the scope of his wire rifle. He knew the Ghost was somewhere in the grouping of transports and… aha! There. The prey had not escaped, and the hunt was still on. Whatever the contraption sought, it would not find today; his Archon desired a new trophy, and these tiny cyclopes were rare enough caught dead, never mind living and fighting. The Captain stood, and heard his compatriots behind him leap forward, ready to do his bidding. Ignoring the Dreg to his left, he glanced over his other shoulder and barked an order to his second-in-command, an eager and capable Vandal. Without hesitation, his subordinates rushed forward to take down their target. The climax of the hunt was approaching, and the Captain felt the rush flow from his chest down all four arms. Head tilted to the sky, he let loose a throaty roar, a battle cry that his prey would hear but could not escape. Further in the distance, a shape moved against the horizon, well beyond the sensors of the tiny Ghost or the tunnel-vision perception of its hunters. A crouched figure moved slowly and intentionally, watching the scene ahead unfold. One steady hand held a rifle aside as the other braced against the rock’s edge, and the body lowered itself gracefully to the tall grass. There was a pause, not uncertain but perhaps calculating, a step forward, and nothing. Wind blew undisturbed through where the figure just stood, and the paranoid glance of the Dreg in the distance fell on empty ground. An angry growl from his superior, and the minion was back on the hunt. (read the rest at amarokundone.wordpress.com )