Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on Oct 8, 2010 2:33:46 GMT -5
One
TABHer world was a single, violent tone. High pitched an abrasive it screamed through her flesh into her consciousness, expanding in rhythm to her quickening pulse threatening to push her skull apart from the inside; it was silence. A silence so invasive it demanded her full attention. A silence so overwhelming she felt she would drown in its unfathomable depths.
TABShe did not consider having died; she did not remember having lived to experience death. She was as a soul awaiting birth. She was alone, utterly alone. Her consciousness was all she knew and all she knew of it was that she was conscious. Who was she? Where was she? Had she ever been anything else?
TABA small eternity passed and while her mind churned against the possibilities of her being. Slowly—ever so slowly—sensations came. Her throat, aching and parched, pulled open in agonizing fits to allow air to pass into her strangled lungs. She could taste the dryness on her tongue, there was dust and soil in her mouth and her labored breaths pulled it into her body. Spasmodic coughs followed immediately and pain erupted in her chest and limbs. Rolling onto her side, her hand moved reflexively to the area where the flesh stabbed and strained with each hacking outburst.
TABHer palm came in contact with something warm and sticky. She rubbed her fingertips together, marveling at the feeling of the fluid between the sensitive pads. Thick and syrupy, it thickened and became less viscous as she worked it in her hands, eventually becoming dry and seeming to disappear from the realm of touch.
TABThe coughing continued in silence, the aural spike in her head still throbbing. She braced herself on one arm and placed her other hand against her skull, as though the pressure of its touch could calm the chaos within and prevent it from breaking out. She felt air escape her body and the hint of a grunt greeted her ears as she continued her journey of ascension to her hands and knees; her left arm felt much weaker than the right and tried not to put too much weight on it.
TABThere the world—her very limited world of taste and smell and touch and pain—swam and she became dizzy. Nearly losing the balance of her precarious four-point stance she fought against the rising tide of sickness in her gut. It was no use; her body heaved and she felt its contents spill out from her mouth, splashing against her arms and hands. Warm, bitter bile was surprisingly welcome in her parched desert of a throat. It burned feverishly but cleansed her pallet of the dust that plagued her breathing. Slowly the action became easier. Her body objecting less and less to the motion with each passing breath. She stayed for a long time on her hands and knees, retching periodically, until the vertigo passed.
TABSpitting the vile fluid from her mouth she felt about her immediate vicinity for something on which to brace herself; she still could not see. Her eyes refused to open, or maybe they were opened and simply weren’t responding, she couldn’t tell. Crawling about on all fours she eventually located a large object; its surface was hard and cold with patches of soft, moist fuzz, her fingers traced rectangular groves in its surface. It felt study enough and she placed both hands against it—her anchor in the storm-tossed seas of her reality—and stood slowly, pushing back the need to vomit once again.
TABShe was on her feet. A sense of accomplishment washed over her as she took in her achievement, rolling against her anchor to lean her back against it. A cry escaped her body—she heard it—and the pain nearly drove her back to her knees. She winced away from the wall rolling so that only her right shoulder leaned against the cool stone surface. The left half of her body had never touched the stone, though pain lanced through her left arm and shoulder spreading down through her ribs and midsection. She reached around her left side and felt something protruding from the flesh of her back; again her fingers felt the blood.
TABThat’s what it was, after all. With time simple concepts had returned to her: stone, soil, vomit, blood, various small ideas crept into her mind slowly replacing the incessant screaming that reigned in their absence. Was that what it was; the sound of the Void that remained when all thought had dispersed? The idea sent tingles of dread down her spine. Though she could once again hear a little, the Void had been more than just an absence of sounds.
TABShe made a few noises with her mouth just to hear them. She couldn’t remember how to make words, so simple calls and clicks with her tongue sufficed to confirm that her ears were functioning once again, though her own voice sounded distant as though echoing to her in a tunnel.
TABFinally, she tried in earnest to open her eyes. She concentrated on her face, willing her eyelids to respond. Dust and grit rubbed painfully against the surface of her eyeballs beneath the lids and she rubbed at them with her hand, gingerly coercing them to cooperate. Slits of light appeared first, and then were gone. Then again she tried and the lights became brighter, wider, and she brushed some dust away with the sleeve of her shirt.
TABAll colors blurred together into an amber-brown haze that hung across the whole world. Though she couldn’t recall having seen anything in her life, she knew that what she was seeing was wrong. She blinked a few times and tried to clear her vision and looked again. Turning her vision to the wall beside her she could make out the grey-green color of the brickwork, the splotches of moss and lichen that adorned its surface in reds and deep greens.
TABShe looked down, examining her own body. Her feet were covered in soft leather shoes adorned with silver buckles studded with tiny gems and a belt of interlocking golden links wrapped her waist above a finely patterned skirt of emerald and silver; them hem of which was torn and ragged about her ankles. It was a good thing she had crawled otherwise it most surely would have tripped her. A pale-blue tunic draped her body, the left side matted to her skin in deep crimson stains that flowed from wound in her shoulder. She groaned audibly as she examined the chuck of metal roughly the circumference of her forearm protruding from her body just beneath the collarbone.
TABThe flesh surrounding the offending object was swollen and livid, blood seeped around it on all sides and formed a trickling stream. The flow of blood was not heavy, but constant and cascaded down her body to drip upon her shoe. She assumed, from the staggering pain she felt before, that this was the same object that jutted out from her back and that the wound on that side was much the same.
TABOnce again she turned her gaze on the world around her. The examination of her own form had given her vision time to sharpen and she was able to make out more of her surroundings, the remnants of walls, much like that which she leaned against surrounded her; a dwelling? A dusty reddish haze hung in the air on all sides and this same dust was slowly settling, like snow, on the surrounding terrain; some taller plants and wooden posts poked through the collecting dust outside the walls.
TABThe morning sun drove through the fog in concentrated beams that danced in accordance with the wind in its whimsical whirling. She could follow the ankle-deep trail through the fallout back to where she had awakened—she must have been half buried! Her assessment appeared correct as, in her careful exploration of her immediate surroundings, she located a body almost entirely inundated in the fine dust. Clouds erupted around her footfalls as she made her way over to the corpse laying facedown in the dirt. With some effort she rolled it over with her foot.
TABIt was a man with fine golden hair and delicately sculpted features. He wore a green satin vest with long tails over what would have been a white shirt and flowing black trousers. He had one black leather boot on his socked foot halfway laced up and another lay peaking above the dust-line nearby. A silver ring fashioned in brilliantly delicate knot-work adored his left hand. She examined her own hand to her surprise found a ring of similar design upon it. Had she known this man?
TABShe brushed some debris from his finely chiseled face and looked upon it for a few moments. A hint of a smile was on his lips and his eyes were closed peacefully, as though he might wake any moment. His countenance stirred her heart, though she could not in any way recognize him. She paused for long moments, kneeling in the soft dust, her face bent toward his in studious contemplation searching for any indication of what moved her about this man. A thin layer of falling dust accumulated on his body, and her own, before she gave up trying. She had no recollection of her own identity, it was little wonder she couldn’t recall his.
TABStanding, she moved outside the surrounding walls through a break where bits of splintered wood hung on bent and distorted hinges. She limped some on her right side, each step jarring the still bleeding wound in her shoulder. Her breath rattled in her chest as she moved, perhaps an injury exacerbated by the motion. She kept moving, through the dusty fallout that banked knee-deep in some places, through the dancing early morning half-light, until she reach an overlook not far from the dwelling she had left behind.
TABUpdrafts blew fresh cooling sea air across her body. She closed her eyes and breathed it in until her ribs hurt and let it out slowly. Again. She opened her eyes, slowly at first, then they shot open wide and she gasped.
TABFrom her vantage point she could see far into the distance, the winds pushing inland from the sea across the low lying plains below clearing the haze faster than up upon the ridge where she stood. A think blanket of red dust covered the landscape. In some places lying undisturbed like a freshly fallen snow, in others banked high again stony crags and low-lying hills. Lightning crackled in heaving dark thunderheads, reaching out to blacken the naked trunks of the few standing trees while massive vortexes rose skyward in towering twisting funnel-clouds, wandering the wasteland forming and dissipating at random. The great swirling winds lifted and rained larger debris; fragments of wood, stone, metal, anything the howling winds could unearth from beneath dry powdery landscape.
TABShe had no knowledge of damnation, and yet knew in her heart that she stared out upon the land of the damned and at it’s core stood its unholy bastion. From this distance it appeared small, a simple metallic tower standing almost vertical, rising from bedrock. Its surface was twisted and distorted, and in the swirling clouds and dancing daylight it appeared to breath. Around this tower were walls of metal and stone arrayed alternately in concentric rings emanating from the monolith. Beyond the walls the naked trunks of one-time forests lay smashed to the earth as though toppled by some mighty hand and laid out parallel to one another.
TABCrossing the dust-ridden plane like a tangled network of hardened veins, rivers choked with mud pushed their way laboriously to the sea far in the distance, following age-old channels when possible or breaching their banks and carving new paths when necessary. In places lakes formed a muddy broth that swirled and churned.
TABBut perhaps the most striking feature to greet her was the rift. The twisted iron tower stood at its narrowest point and from this point a great chasm stretching westward toward the sea growing progressively wider the farther from the monolith it reached. At its mouth, where it touched the ocean the fissure appeared so wide she guessed that to cross would take a full day or more on foot.
TABShe stood in mute witness, taking in the horrors before her, the blood beginning to puddle at her feet. Then true terror gripped her. She watched in silence as the seawater poured inland, into the massive chasm rent into the land, and she knew it to be wrong. This was not normal for this place, wherever this place was. This was not some Otherworld plane of torment eternal where this was simply the state of things. Her eyes widened at the realization.
TABThis was new. This just happened.