Current mood:

accomplished

I have Written for the first time in...damned Months.
There. The title was something I saw in the database at work, at some point, and I decided I needed to see what I could do with it. This was a brilliant excuse, as it was this or rework something old, and that would be a copout both to the idea of the thing, and to me not having finished a damned story in For-Fucking-Ever.


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[Wake.

What's in that corner, there behind you, girl? You sleep but can't see where you're lying; maybe there's nothing beneath you, and when you realize this, you'll fall into forever...]

Violent waking, like shattering the surface of a pond, a gasp and a breaking into nothing but black, like some great hand has thrown her out of dreaming, into waking life. A velvet, negating lack of light, and she doesn't know whether to feel claustrophobic or painfully aware of the space around her. What could be minutes or hours or even days pass, time measured not in swift, precise sections by a clock, but by heartbeats and breaths; her breathing slows, and time slows with it, as her mind clears.

She begins to see slightly, sees shapes in textures in the ink-colour surrounding her, not in light and shadow but in velvet and in liquid and stone. Sees faintly the corners, dimensions. Where is this? It smells like a room, like stale, fetid sheets on cold, hard floors and it echoes her breathing, her movements, maybe her heartbeat. Animal-sound, that, like something trapped [you are] and terrified [you definitely are] and helpless.

[You're not that, not by a longshot.] Shadows speaking, a whisper like something in her hindbrain, like static from distant stars, black-ice-bitter but amused. Trying to stand, she watches pain blossom from the inside of her skull against her blindness, false-light from abused and desperate nerve endings. Remembers the crack of something hard and sharp, of awareness exploding, then collapsing in on itself, the singularity of an assault. This voice, far different from the one who'd put her here, the traces of a language unspoken for centuries in that voice, traces of years beyond imagining, the age of stars, of the distances between. [Walk; there is nothing here to hurt you, child.]

She does. Careful steps measuring out the room, feeling it out, and she realizes she is naked, barbed chill tongues of the shadows over her, a breath of air to feel out the room by. Tries not to wonder what else might have happened, and instead goes over what she knows happened.

Remembers walking through the park, lost in thought, in spiralling branching threads of story, weaving lines and words together in her mind in an attempt to burn them there until she made it home and to the light of her computer where they could unravel and breathe and catalyze more. Then, the footsteps she didn't notice until perfect hindsight, cold, strong hands around her mouth, and though she was taller than most men, though she fought [...fucking bitch, you hurt me...] he'd had a gun or a rock or something that hurt even still...

Her hands find the wall, feel along it. Behind her, a sound like claws ticktickticking across stone, like the hiss of a snake's belly across concrete, like a dog's low growl. Felt more than saw the things which were all those and more, the hundreds of thousands of poisondart eyes covering sleek shadow-forms, their alkaline smell and needle-sharp grins. Hollow whisperhiss of spines or scales or feathers as they flowed out of the corners, out of nothing.

And the voice, a man who wasn't a man but all of the black, all of the entropy and the hidden things and dark matter and energy and everything that is cold and black and frightening, and he watches her with such pride and love as her assailant turns a key in the door to her prison. As the hounds coil and laugh and wait.

First, a frame of light around which the shadows seem to swell in anticipation, and in the dazzle as her eyes adjusted, she could see him. Could see without fear.

[When you close your eyes, does the whole world go dark?...]

She smiled a small, secret smile. And then she turned away.
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, cut, since the text length scared people off, I do believe.