The Physical Limits

[Dogs231]

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED FROM "Transgressing the Boundaries"

Alexander flew. He sprinted from that tomb, that forbidden place—he ran from it and never looked back.

His long legs were as quick as lightning, or so it felt; everything seemed fast, from the rapid beat of his drum-like heart to the one-two-one-two rhythm of his feet against the composite concrete that made up the island's tunnel systems. With each stride, he surged forward, towards a place somewhere, with no directions but those that were instinctual.

He had never pushed himself this hard before. Every synapse in his body fired on all their cylinders. The exertion weighed down on him like an iron chain around his ankles, like a millstone on his shoulders. But still, he continued. With each breath, it grew harder, but he refused to stop or slow; through every pang of pain, he persisted, progressed, and prevailed.

But this bravado was a falsehood at its molten core; weakness, not strength, carried his legs forward.

And, of course, it would be that weakness that brought him down. As much as his steps possessed those three qualities and used them to power themselves, another factor also played its part. Each step came of overwhelming, primal fear—fear of hope and hate, victory and loss, death and life. And it drowned anything else in its wake like a gout of water.

And soon, Alexander drowned in it. The only parts of his brain now that worked as they should were the lacertian structures of the basal ganglia and limbic system—the amygdala system came to the forefront and drove all other thoughts away like shattered debris in the wake of an emergent conqueror. And then he felt everything give, and himself slip into the dark.

The last thing he realized before all the signals stopped was that there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED IN "et Refaire et Refaire et Refaire"