Imprisoned.

It had been forty-seven days. Forty-seven days, and a notch on the wall for every one of them.

Rayman did little but stare up at the tiny porthole in his cell, noting the setting of the suns, waiting for them to rise over the lip of the far-away horizon that remained hopelessly obscured – the position of the tauntingly diminutive window was such that he could never see anything but a two-inch circumference of open sky. He knew the difference of sunrise and sunset, day and dusk only by the different colors of light that flooded into his cell. Each sunrise would find him scratching off another notch on the wall in his chosen corner, counting another day completed, a new one begun. Clouds, rain, and other disagreeable forms of weather never interfered – the Buccaneer was tethered fast by its electromagnetic anchor, high above the clouds. Rayman kept a constant vigil over the window, and knew the ship was still floating in the atmosphere of his fair, green planet, knew the light that stunned his eyes each dawn was of that planet’s own binary suns. He knew this not only because the light of those suns was so familiar, so ingrained into his mind, but because he had never once slept since his imprisonment on the slave-ship. At first, the pirates hadn’t let him – apparently finding some mechanical entertainment in the torment of prisoners. For days after the officers had grown bored of their game, Rayman suffered insomnia and terrible half-waking nightmares. Eventually he couldn’t be bothered to try, his body growing so inured to not sleeping that he stopped craving it altogether. In those forty-seven straight days of wakefulness, he had never heard the airlocks close on his porthole, never felt an absence of cold, upper-atmosphere wind passing through the thick screen of the cell’s ventilation grate, never felt the ship accelerate up, up, up into the star-pricked black of space.

The few officers he came into contact with appeared to despise him especially, above all other slaves, and went out of their ways to let him know. The sleep-deprivation may have stopped weeks ago, but that, apparently, had only been a warm-up game. All prisoners aboard the Buccaneer, no matter their status, were to be fed two meals each day: usually meager bowls of pasty oat mush or thinned broth, and a little water – never anything particularly mouth-watering or nourishing, but it was hot and it filled their bellies, and that was all that mattered now. But for the past two weeks, the guards had brought Rayman absolutely no food, and water only every three days: hardly enough to keep him alive. They would often leave bowls of steaming broth outside the shielded door, always just a fraction out of reach, and leave it there for hours. At first, Rayman screamed for it, his stomach retching for want of food; the wafting smell of it was enough to drive him mad. But his sleepless stupor eventually numbed the hunger pains enough that he might regather his pride and cease that fruitless begging. On the inside, though, the screaming never stopped.

An electric screen secured his cell on every side, and barred the door and even the porthole with fatal voltage. It droned and buzzed without end. He often marked the times when it grew softer or louder, or changed in pitch at all, searching for a pattern. This was every bit as ritual now as notching off the days, and he knew that it was all just a desperate effort to maintain sanity in this place. Rayman didn’t actually care how many days he had been held captive by the pirates, or wonder at all about the frequency patterns of the very thing that held him here! No, neither would help him escape. Neither would keep him alive. But Rayman did not want to die a madman, and right now, these useless tasks were the only things that could prevent this – the only things that gave him some kind of purpose.  

Why was he here? Rayman had confronted the pirates only once, in a rag-tag battle which ultimately led to his capture. Young, hapless rebel though he was, the pirates had treated Rayman with as much severity as though he had been a mighty war-leader. It didn’t make sense!
Subjected not only to torment by the pirates, Rayman had been a target of extensive jeering, mockery and general name-calling by most every other slave he’d crossed paths with in his time aboard the ship. For the structure of his body was most unusual, even in the eyes of this slew of prisoners from countless planets all over the galaxy. He had a head and body, two hands, and two feet as was typically expected, except that each body part floated separately of its own seeming free will – no arms, no legs, no neck, though he moved just as though he had them.

Then there was a third torture, an isolated one kept and created by himself – his powers. Rayman, by a freak happening of circumstance, possessed an ability to generate spheres of light-energy with his hands and shoot them at will – a kind of natural weapon. But being electric themselves, his spheres were utterly useless against the zapping force-fields by which his cell was entirely sealed. One misfired sphere might go ricocheting off the walls three dozen times before it either lost all power and fizzled out, or smacked right back into him (and he had actually done this once – it stung terribly and gave his skin a good singeing).

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Sudden metallic footsteps clattered along the corridor. Rayman looked toward his door, squinting at the blue-white glow of its electric shield, to watch if anyone was coming his way. Indeed, two soldiers came into view a moment later, one uniformed in the standard black-and-green stripes of a high-ranking general. The other was a plain, bare-metal “fetcher” – a robot model designed specifically for walking through electric shield-doors to retrieve prisoners deemed too dangers to let down the field for even a moment.

“Yah’re ta see the Admiral,” said the first of the pair as he came to a halt, jabbing a metal thumb back down the hall. The fetcher, looking pleased to have something so important to do, took a few long-strided steps and was through the super-charged shield, the killing electricity crackling over his metal skin in a literal rain of sparks. Quickly placing a temporary restraint on Rayman, the fetcher signaled to his companion that all was clear, and the shield went down with a tired hum.

“’E wishes yah to witness somethin’.” Continued the general from the other side, and there was acid in that mechanically-engineered voice.

Rayman’s heart leapt as he was led from the cell, so much excitement and fear suddenly coursing through his limbless body that he might have burst from it. This was his chance! Surely the pirates must have forgotten all about his powers – the fools – or they would never dare let him anywhere near their precious Admiral. Whatever torture was being planned here for him didn’t matter now – they would never have the chance. He would strike their Admiral down! He would escape the slave ship! He would be a hero!

A hero.

Just like he’d promised his people.

Just like he had promised Ly.

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“Admiral Razorbeard, sir, we have prisoner 29351-0 here as you requested.”

“Good. Bring him on in.”

Special barbs on the soldier’s fingers, probably particularly designed for restraint of odd cases like himself, stuck into Rayman’s hand like fishhooks. The more one was to struggle with these things attached, he assumed, the more excruciatingly lacerated one’s skin would become. Rayman walked between his two captors gingerly, wincing almost constantly. There was no relief! Never mind struggle, one little step ahead or behind the soldiers’ and he could feel the barbs rip his skin.

Finally, release. Once inside Razorbeard’s spacious cabin, the barbs retracted back into the pirate’s fingers like so many bees in their nest - stingers ready. Rayman was dropped to the floor in a heap of hands and feet and muffled yelps. Without a word, the soliders saluted their Admiral and marched from the room to stand guard outside the door. Razorbeard poked the crumbled thing on his floor with one metal toe, hard – better described as a kick than anything else.

A sorry sight, Rayman lifted his head and tentatively tried to stand, convulsing as his maimed hands inadvertently scraped against a rough-hewn floorboard. Nausea twisted and sank in his stomach like a lump of cold mercury. His two wiry, ear-like tufts of hair fell greasily over the grey paste skin of his face. Sporadic, heavy breathing rattled in and out of him and his body was all shivers. Not even his eyes seemed alive – fixed though they were on his foe in a numb, muddy stare.

“Hello, Rayman,” sneered the Admiral in his grating synthetic voice. “Are ya’ enjoying yar stay?”

This is your chance. Shorter than other robo-pirate Rayman had ever seen aboard the Buccaneer, Razorbeard would prove an easy target – just a single, full-charge energy sphere would be enough – however vile, however fearsome he was. Rayman regathered his strength with a few deep breaths and pushed all pain and sleepless sickness out of his mind. Never lowering his stare from the Admiral’s beady eyes, he drew his right hand over and above his head, spreading his fingers to form a shallow cradle. The static heat of raw light-energy began to pulsate from the center of that cradle, forming itself into a sphere and growing, growing until it was twice the size of his fist. All restraints of time and physical existence had melted away, leaving him a pure, bodiless entity of light, controlling the ticking of space-time at his own beck and call. In a single solar-flare surge, he thrust foreword his hand and released the sphere; his inner mind sailed along with it in lurching sluggishness, and every second was an agony of years as it drew closer, closer, closer to impact. Impact, that shining moment of his victory, the destruction of Razorbeard.

Ten full seconds, ten panicky intervals of real-time clicked away… and there had been no explosion, no great and dramatic end-all collision of magic and titanium, no sound at all!


Rayman was snapped back into his physical self with a suddenness that set him reeling. “So you knew,” he muttered to the hated figure of the robot before him, the figure that should have been crumpled to the ground and smoldering, yet stood unfazed and grinning instead.

Admiral Razorbeard appeared pleased with the situation indeed, gears clicking agreeably, a sort of robotic chortle. “Yar powers? What, ya’ thought I didn’t know ya’ could do that? I am the leader a’ these scrap-rats, ya’ must remember – it was under my order that ya’ were captured to begin with! Poor, ignorant Rayman, these failed heroics must be growing so old.” The Admiral drew closer to his prisoner’s face – the sawblade beard nearly scraped against his nose. Rayman squirmed; that voice made his insides retch in cold disgust, as though someone had just set a swarm of insects crawling within him. “Ya’ put on a good show, I’ll admit, but yar little energy ball splashed right off my side like a drop a’ oil – not a scratch! Ya’ see, I know all about ya’, Rayman, and how yar powers work. Ya’ll find that those barbs my officers used on yar hands weren’t just for transport. Actually, they were pumping ya’ full a’ poison all the way from yar cell to my quarters. And that’s a hell lot of poison for someone so small, let me tell ya’. It was designed not to activate unless ya’ tried to fire one of yar shots like that.”

“Activate?” Rayman asked quickly, too shocked, too utterly bewildered at his own ignorance to worry over bigger questions now. “What else is it going to do to me?”

“If ya’ behave and don’t try putting on another light show, the poison will have no other affect on ya’ and should be out of yar system in a few days. But with every shot ya’ fire, ya’ little limbless freak, the poison will double in potency. And it’s volatile – eventually, it will react with all that electric stuff inside ya’ and gnaw away yar light. Just like draining the blood from some normal organism, it will leave ya’ empty and dead.” Razorbeard allowed a moment to let his words soak into the tense silence, apparently relishing his own genius.

“Why have you called me here?” Rayman asked after a long while, trying to keep his voice steady. “Just for that? Did you have me dragged from my cell just so you could poison me, take away my only defense, threaten me with death and then send me on my merry way again, all for your sick amusement?”

“No, Rayman. I ordered ya’ brought here because I have something to show ya’ – didn’t the good General I sent down tell ya’ that? The poison was only for my own safety, a’ course, nothing personal meant. Come along.”

Metal-cold fingers touched Rayman’s back, near where a pair of shoulder blades ought to have been. Gruffly, the Admiral pushed the slight form of his prisoner foreword. All manner of torturous devices were stuffed in shelves or lay scattered on the floor among the gold coins of recent treasure-raids, and many, rusted (or was that dry blood?) appeared well-used, but Razorbeard passed by each and every one. Woozy from the poison and the mental strain of his sudden powerlessness, Rayman did not, could not even try to think of what the robot scum had in store for him now. Instead, Rayman studied the Admiral in brooding curiosity as he was lead onward to whatever new doom. It was so frightfully easy to forget that these robo-pirates were machines. Mechanization, industrialization – words of grand taboo on his soft, living planet. And if all machines were like these pirates, it was very easy to understand why. But how could a machine, having never been alive or dead, having never known wonder, intellect, free will, or anything that constitutes life – how could such a thing know how to be so evil? They were chunks of metal… solder and bolts! Maybe there was even a little door hidden under Admiral Razorbeard’s extravagant hat, that Rayman might yank open to expose the horrible wire brain inside and pull them out of their circuits like cobwebs from a neglected corner. Yet each pirate, with those fragile wire neurons, demonstrated a remarkable understanding of the emotions of living creatures – and with that understanding came the ability to manipulate, to confuse, to break and destroy those living creatures. Was there a program for hatred? A chip for greed? A switch for brutality?


The haze of his angry thoughts cleared as Rayman found that, quite without warning, he had been shoved nose-first against the frigid glass of a gaping window. Reeling blackness soared under and above and all around his gaze. Space! There were the infinite stars like lonely, frozen Lums. There were the asteroids and the feather-whisp comets luminous as fairy-lights. There was the dead vacuum that challenged him to stare, to peer without a blink into the dark folds of static time even as it swallowed him whole.

A primordial panic shot through Rayman. His planet, his home – he couldn’t see it! Disconected hands flailing against the glass as though he might claw through and escape into airless freedom, Rayman let out a tiny wail. In his daily ritual of notching off his days aboard the Buccaneer, he had taken a certain comfort that the ship had never moved, never left the sweet atmosphere of his world. It gave him a sense of hope and of plausible escape. Now, though, his fate as a prisoner of the robo-pirates was sealed, for where would he go? There was nothing to escape to.

A pleased cackle from behind reminded Rayman of his captor. “Calm down, ya’ limb-lacking fool. Yar dear planet is still in reach, and we’ll be heading back shortly anyway. Now, sit quietly and have a look.”

Whirring and lurching, the Buccaneer descended, puttered to a standstill again, and finally swept foreword in a great arc. The perfect sphere of Rayman’s planet, a vibrant patchwork of green glades, blue oceans and caramel sands swung into view, the binary suns sending out bright rays like golden spider webs as they sank behind it. Remote and so far away, the scene was nothing more than a toy, a little forgotten marble, dropped onto a gardener’s black loam. With one hand against the glass, Rayman could shut it out of his vision completely. He pressed his forehead to the windowpane and slouched dejectedly, eyes open without want for seeing. The yellow glow of that distant sunset that should have been his was cold as it filled Razorbeard’s quarters, bitter cold as space itself.

“What, one last look before you trash it with your metal and sludge?” said Rayman after a silence, his voice growing haggard from the strain of not screaming and crying out (for like a child he felt, a lost little boy who couldn’t find his home or his parents or his most precious toy, and in that moment realized that everything he understood was lost to him).

There was a sound of buttons being pushed from the Admiral’s control console somewhere behind. As Rayman watched, a shudder, an invisible beam, shot from the ship, perceptible only by the slice it left through the ultra-fine stellar dust. With a stricken gasp he watched its path, zipping at light-speed toward its target: his world. Before he could even react, the beam had hit the outer air of the planet, cocooning around it like a second atmosphere. It then sent off littler beams, each spearing toward the core of the planet, piercing it like a stab to the heart. Rayman didn’t see, but felt each stab – one thousand. One thousand wounds, and his planet was screaming, bleeding – from each lesion to the planet’s Heart, light was pouring. And the pain was not remote, not far away like the besieged planet. The pain was inside him.

Though he already knew what he would see, Rayman looked down at his own quaking self. One thousand needle-thick holes had formed on the skin of the old, O-shaped scar the marked his chest, and from each shot a beam of white-yellow light – the turmoil of his planet in perfect miniature.

The invisible force imploded suddenly upon itself, and with the great rushing it caused, the last of the planet’s core-light emptied out. In the after-a-storm quiet, the light flowed amorphously in the upper atmosphere like a viscous halo. Then there was a minute twitch, a flicker, and soon a massive trembling. Our sky is falling, Rayman mused in some corner of his mind. It must look like our sky is falling.

Finally came the boom, an ear-splitting POP that seemed to jar the cosmos. The floating aureole shattered like delicate glass. Scattered, lost to the power of their former unity, one thousand shards of the Heart of the World drifted groundward.


“There, Rayman, now ya’ have seen,” the Admiral stepped up beside Rayman at the window, and no longer did he carry the air of a stumpy peacock, having done this thing. No, he loomed as tall as the whole universe could hold, it seemed, and there was nothing funny or mockable about this enemy anymore. “I told ya’ that I knew all about yar little powers and how they work. What better way to stop a problem then to kill it at its source, wouldn’t ya’ agree?”


Rayman recoiled, from the window and the horrific scene of destruction it offered, from Razorbeard, from the Buccaneer itself and all the malevolence it held in its swollen wood-and-metal belly. He fell. The core-light that still streamed from his body was dimming, dimming, draining away.


His light was leaving him.