The first thing he noted as he entered the room was the clutteredness of it all. Books, lever arch files, printouts, handwritten notes, and a selection of cups and plates littered the floor, and he saw a man sitting down typing away on the keyboard.

It was then that he realized some things were wrong. How had he gotten here? Where had he come from? Where was here? Who was the typist?

And more to the point, who was he?

As the questions danced around his mind, leaving the faintest traces of answers he could barely grasp for more than a fraction of a second, he was aware of something knocking repeatedly, and he looked to see what was so loud. As he focused on what the noise was it grew quieter and quieter until it became a natural sound and he frowned at what was happening and at his irritation at not recognizing the sound earlier.

The clock quietly ticked away in the background as he focused on the screen in front of him. His intensity in the task ahead was matched only by the determination to go one better than he had done before.

'How do I know what he's thinking?' he wondered as he watched the man's fingers move silently across the keys.

"Maybe it's because I'm writing what you do." He stopped typing and looked directly at him.

"Holy..." he said as the man answered the unspoken question and his need to know got the better of him. "How? What? Why?"

"I give you free will back and that's what you do with it? Unbelievable."

"Who are you?"

"You don't recognize me?" the typist asked, with a smirk across his lips, which he couldn't decide if it was amused or bemused, though his eyes twinkled with a light that he found disorientating. "Doesn't surprise me seeing as how we've never met."

"Chuck?" he asked wondering who Chuck was, but then, as he couldn't remember his own name, he didn't give it much more thought.

"You wish," came the answer with a loud guffaw, as the typist sat back in his chair, standing it on two legs, making it lean quite severely. "Siddown, take the weight off your feet."

Cautiously he sat down on the bed and looked around a little further at the place. There was a large window, from which he saw a housing estate. It wasn't exactly Beirut but it wasn't home either.

"Did you bring me here?" he asked.

"What makes you say that?" asked the typist as he walked over to the stereo system and ran his finger up and down the rows of CDs looking for something to play.

"You were writin' me."

"So you assumed I brought you here," he mused as he opened a CD case and looked at what was inside. "That's a little arrogant. Did you even think that my writing you was a defense? You come here unannounced, uninvited, and you're not exactly the greatest of guests I could ask for. You're free to leave whenever you wish."

There was a tint to the voice he didn't trust, and as the typist was fiddling with the CD player, twirling the CD around on his index finger as he waited for the drawer to open, he looked around for a door, or some way out at least. There wasn't one.

"How do I leave?"

"Same way you came in."

"I don't know how I did that."

"Then the only person keeping you here is you."

"That's not very helpful, bub."

"Who said it was meant to be?"

"Huh." He had a suspicion he wasn't going to like this fellow and then he saw the words on the screen. He was sitting a bit away, but they were close enough and large enough for him to read things. "It was you?"

"So you noticed that?" The sound of the guitar solo moving up and down the notes creating a very melodic tune, startled him out of what he was thinking. "I hate Guns and Roses. Think they did some lousy songs, but this one is a gem. 'She's got a smile that it seems to me, reminds me of childhood memories when everything was a fresh as a bright blue sky." The words that the typist was singing resounded in his head as he turned his eyes back to the words.

"Oh, whoa-ho, sweet child of mine," he mumbled at the chorus as he read over what was there in front of him, sitting down in the screen reading the words.

"Interesting read?"

"How could you do this to me, to her, to us all?"

"You know who you are then?"

Silence was the only reply.

"Of course you don't. If you did you'd try and stop me. But you don't. You don't even know if the people on the screen are your and any friends you may have." He felt the anger rising within him. How dare this man treat him with such a manner, provoking him with impunity?

"Stop tauntin' me with riddles and the half truths. I demand..."

"You demand nothing." His calm voice and tempered tone seemed to drown out everything. The music, the ticking of the clock, the very world seemed to freeze as the words hung in the air like the light of stars on a cold night. "Let me show you what you think you see." His hand met the glass of the window shattering it and the façade of what was outside. The housing estate fragmented, painted on the broken glass on the floor, yet the image still moved as if real even though it were in pieces at his feet.

What remained looked oddly familiar, an echo of something he'd thought he'd lost but was uncertain as to what it was. It was mostly black with the occasional flash of speckled colour streaks. The blackness seemed to ripple in waves as if it were flowing out there. He heard its call, felt its song and desired to walk closer. He turned and looked at the screen only to see it disconnected and he gasped in spite of himself.

"Surprised you're still here?"

"What happened to them?"

"To who?"

"The people in the story!"

"It's a story, nothing more."

"But you wrote me!"

"But I'm not now. Search the darkness, tell me what you see. Open your mind. It has been so thus far."

He took a gulp of the air as the song redoubled its summons and he closed his eyes, feeling his body go limp as he relaxed. His entire being seemed to sag but he didn't care, he wanted to show this man that his taunts and riddles would not better him. Though his body did not move he felt his spirit take a step forward, and the song changed its pitch to something sweeter, reminiscent of childhood days long gone and long forgotten. The desire for more echoed in his ears and his spirit advanced, the tune changing tempo and pitch each time, becoming a vastly different tune from when he had started. He opened his eyes, no longer needing to force a state or relaxation and knowing how foolish that very thought was.

Then he gasped as the room he had been in had gone and the darkness before him was now around him. There was no up, no down. No left and no right. He freewheeled in the emptiness looking for something for his mind to focus on, so that his senses could ground him and give him something to ascertain that he wasn't going mad. The he heard it. It was no longer a song but words whispered on the edge of the void.

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk roses, and with eglantine."

The words repeated over and over, a chant against the darkness conjuring flashes of colour that he had seen before and he saw the shards of glass that had been sent spiraling out by the blow that broke the whole. Within the shard he could see the world that he had left, and he reached out to touch a shard to see what would happen, his curiosity getting the better of him. Yes, he was scared but after all he had been through it was nothing special. Then again, he only had it as a vague impression that he had been through a lot and he hoped to the heavens or whoever was in charge he was doing the right thing.

As it turned out he needn't have bothered because the shard was continually out of reach. With nothing but a soliloquy being chanted on the horizon, wherever the horizon was, he had nothing to ground his physical senses. His perceptions were wrong and he wondered if he were twisting in this void and for no reason he became dizzy. His mind was playing tricks on him, his subconscious betraying him, making his thoughts reality.

"You are learning."

The voice of the mysterious typist echoed throughout for there were no barriers to halt the progression of the sound around him, eventually having it fade into the distance and he hoped that this place was not circular, for if it was the voice would be back, then it would fade then return, following the loop forever. The very thought of it scared him beyond measure and a madness seized him.

"What have you done to me?" he shouted, regretting it as soon as the words left his mouth, for if it were circular he was adding to his own hell.

There was no answer, for which he was anxious and relieved at the same time. It was a feeling akin to being in love. How did he know that? Was there someone out there waiting for him, wondering where he was? He hoped so, with fervour and a longing that gripped his soul like an icy hand and he shivered with the thought that he possibly had no one waiting for him outside of the darkness. Was that why he was here, he mused, because he had nobody to call his own? Had he fled reality to this place seeking solace in a strange new world where there was nothing but him, where he was dependant on nothing but his own creative ingenuity to survive. If it were, he reasoned with a bitter vehemence, then he would possibly become very lonely.

Then he thought back and remembered the words. 'You are learning' they had said. Learning what? So far he had learnt nothing but grating self pity and he had a feeling that if he surrendered to that self same pity then he would rediscover a talent for it that had long since been banished from his blighted soul.

"Where is this coming from?" he muttered through gritted teeth, the spittle flecking from the gaps between the teeth. They weren't large gaps but he muttered with such force that it had to escape. He mustn't let his mind wander, he decided. He had to focus and he closed his eyes. Without an object to fixate on he was having no luck with them open and having his eyes closed seemed to relax him somehow. He sighed deeply as he tried to decipher what he was learning.

He wasn't stupid, he wasn't as slow as he made out and he wasn't unable to grasp basic concepts. This was easier than it looked, it had to be he who was making it difficult and he pushed the thoughts of it to the front of his mind. Forget the questions that plagued him about his identity, focus on the here and now and the rest would follow. What had he thought before the voice had spoken to him. He had thought he was dizzy, thinking he was spinning in the void and that his mind was playing tricks on him, making his thoughts reality.

His thoughts reality.

That had to be it. He didn't want to touch the shards, to see what truly was behind them so he had failed to reach them. He had heard the song of the void and thinking it was a void that was all he saw, the colours that went past him flashes of doubt as to what the truth was. A truth he was creating, and if he was creating the truth then perhaps he was hiding it from himself as well, for reasons he had yet to find.

He tentatively opened an eye and saw that it was void no longer but a vast desert landscape, littered with trees glinting in the sun with a metallic sheen. The sands were blue and the sky was crimson, with a yellow sun beating down that gave no heat, as a slight breeze whipped the sands up, and he covered his eyes to protect them from the dust and the harsh light. In the distance he could see something tied between the two trees at the far end of the row and began to walk towards them, wandering further into the desert, and he wondered if he had been at a 90º, was he in that position now, and what would it be like for him to return back wherever he had come from.

"So you finally figured it?" said the typist who was lounging in a hammock between two palm trees, drinking a cocktail from an oversized glass.

"I think so," he said. "The walk gave me time to go over things in my head and I know who you are." The typist raised an eyebrow as he slurped on the drink. "I also know what this place is, what the words on the screen are and a lot more as well."

"But you don't know everything yet do you?"

"No," he admitted, solemnly. "I don't remember my name, my past, or anything other than that I've seen while I've been here."

"So tell me what you do know."

"I know this place is a projection of my own mind. My hopes, my fears, my despondencies and my ambitions. It's what I am when you take away the things that give me an identity that others in my life have taken me for. It's the façade I place on myself when I'm out there. This is the face I wear when there's nobody else about. Somehow its given form and brought me inside myself, making me face that which I had forgotten, by making me forget that which I thought I knew."

"Adeptly deduced."

"Thank you. I wondered how you controlled me by typing on a keyboard, putting words on a screen that seemed as if I was living my life via your words, like I were some character in a strange story that only you knew the plot to and only revealed what was happening in drips and drabs as if waiting for the right moment to say what happened next. You weren't controlling me at all. Or you were in the sense that I am you, you are me and we are each other."

"So you see my face," said the typist, swinging his legs over so that he faced him properly, his hands balancing him on the edge of the hammock. "That face is me is you is us. So who are we?"

"I don't know."

"Then how do you know I am you?"

"Because you are and my thoughts say so."

"Then this is nothing more than a passing fantasy," he said gesturing to the desert landscape and it twisted so it was back as the bedroom, the window intact and the screen back on.

"You cannot control things to the level I can."

"What makes you so sure that you are not me?" asked the typist. "Why is it you believe it is the other way round?"

"Because only I could delude myself in such a manner as you delude me, but the me everyone sees, the prime me would never do so openly which is why we are here, wherever here is."

"The past. This is our past." The feelings of a lost childhood were suddenly explained and he grasped the typist by the hand, his grip firm and strong. Their eyes locked on each other and there was a sparkle of energy between the two as the typist faded and the clutter around the room became order. It was a final openness between the two of them, for once he saw the truth of himself and knew why, he could no longer keep a secret from himself.

Except there was a final joke, something that neither of them apparently knew, even whole as they were.

"WHO AM I?" he shouted and prayed with all his strength that someone would answer and free him from this mental prison, for he knew he could not do it alone. Despite all the things he had told himself in his lifetime, he'd never been able to and he knew he never would.

"And so you will learn." A new dark figure grabbed his head, touching his solid temples with the ghostly palms and the cold light of truth was revealed, and for the first time in his life his question was answered as the merging and alteration of his mind and soul began.

"What in Sam Hill do you mean, he won't wake up?"

"Sir, he went to bed about twenty three hundred hours last night and soon after there was a spike in the sensor array. At first we thought it might be a glitch in the system, however we are now investigating."

"That doesn't answer my question, son."

"Sir, I'm sorry, but Mr. Logan is not responding to any of the stimuli we're introducing into his system. However his mind is in a state of hyper-REM sleep. Waking him now might kill him."

"Damn. We've the hearing in less than three hours."

"I know, sir. But we can't wake him."

"I'm gonna give it a go anyway."

"Sir..."

"I suggest you find out what that spike was, instead of questionin' me, understand mister?"

"Yes, sir."

"Logan, I don't know what's goin' on in that canucklehead o'yours, but get it together. I know you can hear me. Get it together, or it's over, ya hear me?"

"Sir, please..."

"I know. Dammit, I know. Ain't doin' no good by shoutin' down his earhole. What the hell's he dreamin' about that's so incredibly great or so unbelievably dark, he can't wake up?"

Many years had passed, coming to this moment, and all but one could believe that it had come to this.

He looked at them all, as they were tied down to the guillotines. They had been friends once, but now no longer. The Master he served was an anathema to them all. However they were stripped of their abilities, made human and by their captivity, less than that. Each of these so-called heroes were bound and had a piece of that nice masking tape over their mouths so they couldn't shout, scream or cry for help.

And without their powers they would never free themselves

Well, all except for their leader, who was now lying face down in the now blood red water. He hadn't moved in about five minutes or so, and his wife hadn't taken her eyes from his body since he'd been tossed in there like a piece of litter, the long standing argument between them finally resolved.

"Well," he said with a smile. "Ain't this fun."

There was of course no answer as the tape over their mouths prevented speaking, but he knew that. Like all megalomaniac types, he just loved the sound of his own voice, something he had once hated in others but things had changed, and he now knew the real purpose behind it. It was not ego, pride or the desire to give the audience the reasons they were about to die. It was to taunt them, to drag out their deaths with a form of mental torture.

Yes, he had changed, though none had ever truly guessed by how much. His transformation had been gradual, and there had been nobody to bring him back to whom he truly was, for everyone that mattered was no longer there, and by the time they were it was too late. They had tried to bring him back, using everything from telepathy to therapy, but the former was no longer a threat and the latter was an exercise in futility.

His final therapist was a powerful man, given great strength by radiation and he had tried to cure him as he had tried with others in the past. However the patient had gotten bored of listening to the man telling him how he should feel, what he should do, how he ought to behave and he garrotted him with the flex of the lamp on his desk.

He wondered if there was irony in that, but to be honest he didn't really care. His change was now complete in attitude, in mannerism, in tone. He was no longer recognizable as the man that any of them had once known, and some of them had known him intimately.

"Time is tickin' on slowly," he said as he walked in and out of the many boards, on which the men and women lay, and he checked the moorings of the head pieces that locked them in place, and that the blades were all correctly positioned so that they would all fall at the same time and they'd all die together.

They were friends after all and friends should share everything.

"It's almost gonna to be a shame to kill you all," he said as he sat down in the wicker chair, next to the log fire that burned brightly. "You all did so very, very well. 'Specially as most of the challenges and quests that were set on your later travels were made up out of my head and theoretically shouldn't have existed, but there you go. Chalk it up to coincidence. Charley would have been so, so proud."

He stretched out with his legs and arms, his hands clasped together, and he yawned, as his eyes fell to the small white marks just below his wrists. It had been a while since he used them. There really wasn't that much of a need anymore. However it did put his mind back on track to the business in hand.

"It's getting quite late an' I know you're all waiting for me to get on with it an' kill you." He smiled, if you could call it that, as he fingered the control pad lightly. "Like now." He pressed the red button and the blades fell down towards them but before they connected he pressed the green button and they stopped and started to slowly go back up again.

Each of the faces of his victims were wide with horror. Two of younger ones had lost control of their bowels as the blade came down and had wet themselves, but he wasn't going to go over and check which of them it was. They were heroes but even they could not face death... well, not like this. True and perfect helplessness was something they had never truly faced and it stripped away courage, as time had stripped away their youth. This was not a death in battle, where their lives were given in a righteous cause for honour and duty.

This was a drawn-out, tortuous execution, something for which they'd never been prepared, in any of their classes or training sessions. However he needed to make the torture even more memorable, and he knew he could do it with just two words.

"Just kidding," he said with a chuckle. "You see, I hold your lives in my hand. And the blades are positioned just right so it will cleanly slice open your scalps and your brains will just drop out of your heads in to the baskets below. Believe me, I'm an expert at the slice and dice.

"There is a theory that says you can live a few minutes without your brain because there's nothing there to tell you that you're dead. I'll be writing to Harvard and letting them know the results of the study. I'm sure that the neuro-science labs will be very appreciative of what you'll be able to give them."

He smiled as he got out of the chair, the controller still in his hand and walked over to them, taking care not to step in the urine that was now on the floor.

"Once I've removed your brains, I will have the tops of your head put back, stitched on and then your vacant corpses will be taken to the metal works where they will be dipped in bronze, mummified and your visages will be immortalized for ever, even if your lives are over. You will be a 'living' monument to those who have failed in the cause, the dream. You were not the first to play and you are not the first to lose. But you gotta admit, the prospect of immortality is really exciting."

He pressed the green button again and metal screens came up around their heads, forcing them to look up so that they would see the blade coming down towards them. However this was just the first part of the final stage and there was no way they could be prepared for what would happen to them next.

Metal fibres shot from the screens, threading and fixing themselves in to the eyes, cutting through the thin skin before they ploughed in to the jellied tissue that made the eyeball and out the other side of the eye until it attached itself at the opposite metal slab, ensuring that it was impossible for their eyes to be closed.

He could hear their muffled screams as it occurred and he felt gratified that it had hurt as much as he had hoped it would do.

"The wonders of modern technology," he said, softly. He stroked the thin beard as screens descended down, pointing over their faces, so that they could see what was above them. The screens switched on to reveal the face of their jailer, their torturer and their executioner. It would be the last thing they saw as the blades chopped through their heads.

The black haired woman stared up at the screen, the tears in her eyes not from the pain of the psychical damage, but from the pain of loss and knowing that in some small part this should have been avoided. He wandered over to her and kissed her bare forehead, then he stepped away.

"Ladies and gentleman, my oldest and best of friends, the dream is dead. Long live the dream."

He pressed the red button, and tossed the controller in to the water as the blades descended towards the exposed flesh of their targets, his mocking laughter ringing in their ears.

Logan awoke sweating, breathing hard and his heart beating like a jack hammer.

"Logan?" queried a voice and the X-Man known as Wolverine turned to see Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD.

"Nick? Where..."

"A SHIELD safe house, just outside Westchester."

"I remember now," said Logan as he calmed down from the dream. It had been about a week since he had been taken in to custody by SHIELD, following on from the revelations about his actions in World War 2. While he'd been tried by the Canadian Government and convicted of treason, the American Government were taking matters into their own hands.

SHIELD had cut him some slack and placed him close to the X-Men so that he could back them up as needed, however they had kept him under close watch at all times. It was difficult but necessary. If SHIELD had simply let him go there would have been hell to pay and Logan wasn't going to cause Fury that kind of grief.

"What happened?"

"Nick, I gotta feelin' the Shadow King's done somethin' to me. Put somethin' in my head."

"What?"

"I don't know, except there's a darkness there."

"Yer savage side?" asked Fury, concerned.

"No, the side o' me that betrayed his country, that killed for the Axis powers, that did things that were evil, in all senses of the word."

"That wasn't you though," said Fury. "You were under his control, or have I got the story wrong?"

"I don't know," said Logan. "I thought that was the case, but what if it wasn't? What if he simply unleashed somethin' I didn't even know was there."

"Logan, I've known ya f'r a hell of a long time," said Fury. "Whatever you did back then, it wasn't you. It wasn't the man I know."

"Bub, I ain't the man you know. Not anymore. He's done somethin' to me, erasing the line between black and white, right an' wrong." Logan could see the concern in Fury's eyes. Logan had the potential to be as vicious and as evil as his longtime nemesis Sabretooth, and the only thing that separated the two of them was right and wrong. If Logan no longer cared about what was right and wrong...

Nobody would be safe, and both men knew it

"Okay, Logan, what do we do?"

"I gotta find a way to control this," said Logan, knowing that though the changes were gradual, they were taking place and that he couldn't stop them alone. "I gotta get myself back in balance, long enough to find and stop the Shadow King."

"How? What can you do, where can you get that kind of help?" The X-Men's telepathic options were scattered these days and, arguably, the only person out of them all who could help him was Jean Grey. Except she was missing, held captive by Apocalypse, and Xavier was dead, but Logan was thinking further afield.

"The Chaste."

"The who?" said Fury. The name was familiar but he couldn't quite place it.

"Buncha spiritualists that can heal the soul. Except they're all dead."

"So how..." said Fury, not making any sense of this.

"Elektra," said Logan and Fury understood at last who the Chaste were - the enemy of the Hand, devoted to the ways of learning and peace, warriors of grace and beauty, power and strength. "She's the last disciple of the Chaste, she's the only one who knows how to save me. It ain't a question of love now, it's a question of survival."

"You've come up blank so far," said Fury, knowing Logan had been using the SHIELD computers and the X-Men's systems to try and find her.

"Tech ain't doin' it for me. Never has in the past so why would now be different?"

"Maybe she just don't want to be found."

"Maybe I ain't lookin' it the right places. An' I ain't gotta choice now. The Shadow King's makin' me in to somethin' I don't want to be."

"So where do you look first?" said Fury, looking at his watch. They only had a short while before they had to go to the hearing, where Logan's fate would be decided - at least insofar as the United States was concerned.

"Gonna look up an old friend o' hers. Soon as I'm done at the hearin', I'm gonna have a little chat with Daredevil."