The Soul

BEFORE: Chapter One

     The stillness of the night was deafening in its silence, the sky a deep expanse of unexplored vastness, littered with the gleaming silvers of star souls. It was a deadly quiet, almost a sickly quiet, the kind of quiet that housed sinister monsters with equally sinister smiles.

A Note From the Narrator

     What humans fail to understand often, is that at times, Evil fears the quiet. You see, the quiet can be suffocating, closing its silvery limbs around the dark throat of Evil, drowning it within its own unforgivingness. Evil tends to thrive within the vicinity of others, growing and expanding in conversations, both murmured and shouted.

     Oh, do not be fooled quite just yet.

     That is only what Evil wishes for you to believe.

     If you want to make it through the telling of this story, you must not be so gullible.

     I might as well make one thing clear before you proceed any further: You will be lied to many times throughout the duration of this story. It is easy to lose yourself in lies, much harder to accept the truth. So do what you must to accept it; reread lines, pages, chapters if you must, to accept the fact that you have been lied to.

     Let's get back to what Evil does not wish for you to believe, shall we?

     In truth, Evil grows in a certain kind of quiet. What it feeds on, what it prefers to hunt, is the quietest mouths. Those are the ones that house the loudest thoughts, the most delicious feast for Evil to feed on.

     That is exactly why Cara made the perfect target, you understand: Her mind was a magnificently loud one, calling to the beyond. For this reason, she would serve as the start of the end of the world.

     But I'm getting ahead of myself, as I often do. Let's get back to the stillness of the night, and the silence alright?

***

     It was under this vastness, smothered in this silence, that Cara stood, on the edge of her apartment building roof. Her once-white Converse now looked a dusty gray under the moonlight, the tips so close to the edge she could feel where the ground ended and the night began. The summer breeze caressed the side of her face as she closed her eyes and leaned into it, swaying slightly. She had been here so long now, she hadn't the slightest idea what time it was. She couldn't seem to get herself to move, too immersed in the play of the moonlight on her skin, the feel of the breeze caressing her, lifting her hair up and then laying it down against her shoulders.

     At least that's what she tried to convince herself of; that her hesitancy stemmed from how immersive the night was and not her unusual dream from the night before. As the day had progressed onward, the dream had faded more and more the longer she stayed awake, as most dreams do. All she remembered now was the sensation of flying as her dream self had taken a step off of this exact roof. There had been no fear, no hesitation, just the knowledge that she would fly, and fly she had.

     With her eyes closed, Cara could almost feel how the breeze would rush against her face as she did just that; took a step off of the roof. But that had been a dream, and this was reality. Flying was not an activity of reality.

     Recently, it seemed that reality was out to get her, pushing her within the confines of its limits, forcing her to bend to its will. And she sure was; confining to its limits that is. She didn't quite know how to break out of it.