DarkLight - Commando Inc. 1

Chapter 1

Firestorms blazed across a blood red sky. Illuminated in their fury stood a lone structure. It's two stone towers, decaying and in ruin, reached upward from the surrounding wasteland, seemingly in a gesture of defiance. It resembled a castle from a dark, nightmarish fairytale, but there was no beautiful princess inside to rescue-only lingering horror and death.

A wall of stone, weathered and beaten, surrounded and sheltered all within, as a shroud protects a corpse. Viewed from the small volcanic ridges that ringed the valley from almost a kilometer away, the towers rose above the high wall like the fangs of an inverted snake. Inside, within a large dimly lit chamber, a malevolent form paced back and forth. Dark thoughts of hate clouded it's mind. The time was almost at hand. They would be made to pay. The universe would crawl before him as it had done more than a millennia ago.Long ago his march of conquest had been stopped. His minions had been forced back to their own planet. The audacity of the creatures; they had forced him to seek shelter in his own city.

"The fools!", he said to himself. After all he had done to them, they would not kill him. Instead, they exiled him to this world-sealed in by an impenetrable dimensional lock. His prison was inescapable-that he knew. Attempts at recreating the portal on this side had met with total failure. All he had was an entrance with no exit. The swirling chaos beneath the small arch he had created had been a great disappointment. The same conditions which kept them trapped had distorted the dimensional warp generated by the arch. There was no way to tell where the portal would transport anyone who entered. He had tried. Many of his minions had been sent through, but the last heard of any of them were their screams of terror as they disappeared from sight. So here he would remain, until someone activated the machinery of the arch within the old city. The world provided for them would have been considered a paradise for any other. But for he and his warrior creatures, it was a nightmare world of bright colors and living things. It took but a little time to correct that problem.

The planet had paid dearly for his failed attempts at escape. Unstable in nature, the portal had disrupted the frail ecological balance causing global disaster. The magnetic poles, altered by the energies released by the portal, caused the upper atmospheric firestorms that continued even now. The intense heat ravaged coastal areas by melting polar ice fields. Tidal floods two hundred meters high washed away all animal and vegetable life wherever it touched. Areas not flooded were subjected to incredible heat. Whole forests were reduced to burning ash while above ground water supplies dried up under the continued onslaught. The former inhabitants had died by the millions. Heat and dehydration had left nothing but their bleached white bones. And still, he would have killed an entire galaxy of planets to escape. Eventually, an ecological balance was found. The violent intensity reduced to something more endurable for those remaining.

Stepping over to the open balcony that connected to his private chambers, he faced his many subjects. He might even consider them his children; his experiments, some successful, some not, could be seen here. This world was no longer beautiful and neither were its inhabitants. All was now in his image. What were great forests, trees reaching to a blue sky, now was barren wilderness. What grew was what he chose. What lived was what he allowed.