New Morning

Posted on Aug 22, 2014 @ 12:10pm by Captain Michael Turlogh Kane
Edited on on Aug 22, 2014 @ 12:10pm

Mission: The Tangled Webs We Weave

"NEW MORNING"

(Continued from "Gentrification")

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"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
- Andre Gide; dedication plaque of the USS Discovery

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Location: Thomond, Earth
Stardate: [2.14]0807.1945
Scene: Emoland


When Michael Turlogh Kane came to his senses, he was lying on the floor of the corridor outside his bedroom. The spirits of the night retreated back into the stuff of dreams, and he lay there a moment, feeling the dead stone cool under his cheek. This is the real world, he told himself. This is your reality.

He picked himself up and went back into his bedroom. The night-storm had blown itself out, everywhere was calm, and in the east the sky was lightening. A new morning was dawning over Thomond.

Kane showered, shaved, and dressed himself in his Starfleet uniform. He polished his rank pips and smoothed out the creases in his red-banded black jumpsuit. He cleaned and donned his boots and looked at himself in the mirror, making sure he looked the part. As he fixed his collar and patted the dust off his sleeves, he saw himself change. His back straightened, his shoulders broadened, his jaw set. The person he was looking at was not the same child that grew up in this mausoleum, but it was still him. He knew that more clearly than anything. The man in the mirror was what life had wrought of him.

Many years ago, when he romped a free spirit over Thomond's green hills, he had fallen in love with a girl from his homeplace, a beautiful, brazen young thing whose eyes held all the lustre of a million stars. All through that first year they had explored their feelings, their urges, had sworn eternal fidelity, had secretly whispered sweet nothings to each other amid the blasted, misty heights of that land. Even now the memory burned bright and constant as the Pole Star.

Those days had been the best. The sun shone down upon the rivers and heather-brackened glens, had breathed life into their carefree hearts. Throughout that warm, balmy summer they had been inseperable, but as the days grew shorter, colder, and as the first leaves of autumn fluttered forlornly down to die alone on the cold ground, something changed. Young, blind love slowly gave way to staleness, to sourness, and finally to a bitterness so strong that the very air itself used to taste of gall. He vaguely remembered trying desperately to save it, to frantically resuscitate or resurrect the feelings they had shared, as a gardener might try to save his precious rose doomed to die under the white, suffocating snows.

As the first sleet of winter fell, as that year shivered to its end amid a hard, cracked frost, they had met one last, final time. In the distance, Bernagh stood out, white against a miserably grey sky, and she had told him what he had been dreading to hear. Nothing lasts forever, she had said, love was only ever a fleeting thing, an ephemeral prop in one's life that lived but a short, happy existence. His heart had turned to ash, then, as she had bade him farewell under Bernagh's crags. Even her last kiss had turned cold as the ice that locked her heart away from the love he was so desperate to give.

"Remember everything, Michael," she had whispered. "In the end, only memories remain."

In the great hall, he remembered everything. There was where he had fallen as a child and scarred his elbow. There was where he had been sitting when they found his father's body up on Bernagh's slopes after falling from his horse. There was where he had told his parents that he was leaving for Starfleet Academy. But there was more than that - there was the great stag's head that Cormac Cathain had shot down with one arrow, there was the coat-of-arms bestowed on the family by the English king James I, and there were the portraits of men and women long dead, each of whom had touched and shaped the history of Thomond in their own way.

It had been a proud history, but it was over now. It had been a slow death lasting centuries, but the end was here. It had taken fourteen years, but Kane had finally admitted to himself that it was over - he had no interest in taking over management of the estate, no desire to become the curator of a museum. His heritage meant nothing to anyone except ghosts.

He opened the front door and put his bag outside. Then he went down into the basement generator room. It only took him a few minutes to overload the generators there. Then he went back up to his bedroom, set his phaser to level six, and set his bedroom aflame. He moved from room to room, igniting curtains or rugs, working his way down through the castle until everything was burning. As the flames gathered and spread, Kane stepped outside for the last time.

From a safe distance, he heard the generators thud as they exploded, demolishing the ground floor. The ancient roof creaked and groaned as the fire ate it alive, and when it collapsed the noise sent all the terrified riverbirds flapping into the dawn. The fire ran like a carefree child through the whole castle, from room to room, up staircases and down into hidey holes, seeking out every nook and cranny, bursting out through windows and blackening the ancient stone.

Kane looked up to Bernagh's slopes towards Aval's cloud-capped cave, but there was no keen on the wind, no scream from the otherworld as Thomond died in fire. There was nothing at all except the silence of a thousand years of superstition.

There was no saving it now. The wooden floors had collapsed and each room was a gutted mess. The stone outlines remained, but over time that too would be gone, reclaimed by the hills and streams and thorn trees. The birds would nest in its rafters, the animals would make dens in its halls, and the world would forget all about this place. In another thousand years when Kane was dead and even the village was gone, there would be nothing left except a grassy mound with some stones lying around it, lying underneath a mountain that would hardly even notice. The graves of his ancestors would become overgrown, and their spirits would return into the collective memory of life, their scant time on earth nothing more than ephemeral drops in eternity's infinite ocean. All things moved inexorably towards their end, and like that young love that lived and died for one short year of his youth, like the crew of the Discovery who had died on Byss or during the battle with the Century in system K-60, and like the thousands of Calnarians who died in the nuclear fire that he triggered, it meant nothing. Laughter, love, friendship - only words. The feelings they represented snuffed out all too quickly, the accomplishments they achieved empty and meaningless.

The fire burned a long time, well into the morning, and the villagers came up the hill and gathered solemnly behind him.

Seamus O' Shaughnessy was beside him, laid a hand on his shoulder. "A place like that was a fire trap," he said gently. "Sheer coincidence that it broke out while you were there." He patted Kane's shoulder. "Now you really are the last of your people. Do them proud, won't you?"

The words hit Kane hard, though he tried not to show it. He nodded as Seamus stepped back into the little crowd.

His communicator chirped. [[Starfleet Command to Captain Kane.]]

"Go ahead," he whispered, touching the device.

[[Captain Kane, the Board of Inquiry will be convening on the next stardate. You are hereby ordered to return to Starfleet Headquarters.]]

"Acknowledged," Kane said.

For the last time, he turned away from Thomond. Whatever was left of his life stretched out ahead of him like the road that led away from here. He passed the crowd of villagers who watched him go. In the sky above Bernagh, the long needle of Spacedock was visible in the new morning, passing between the Earth and the Moon. Starships ploughed the furrows of the sky, warping in and out of the atmosphere in bursts of light, bound for far shores. Something beckoned, and he followed.

Michael Turlogh Kane never returned home again.

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NRPG: That's my little story arc concluded. Next post from me will be the Board of Inquiry convening. What about YOU?


Jerome McKee
the Soul of Michael Turlogh Kane
A Captain in Starfleet


"He speaks an infinite deal of nothing!"
- Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", Act 1, Scene 1.117

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