It should have been normal to wake up.
Yet the world felt different. It did not pause for her to adjust and kept rotating.
She awoke knowing nothing and in meeting a man who thought he knew everything, discovered that the future was truly obscure fo...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Darkness always surrounds the beginning.
A matte space that neither moves nor stills. The chasm between living and death that existed surrounded the young girl. Floating aimlessly through the compass of nothingness she began to think. And from it, nothing came.
No faces appeared. Names, none were spoken and locations were uncharted, a empty space clogged her mind like suffocating gas. There was not a single speck of anything for an infinity. The girl clutched her head, bobbing back and forth to shake anything into her head once more. This emptiness, she couldn't take it. Something needed to be filled in the darkness.
A cloak hung from her shoulders, its fleece and fur curled her in and her mind calmed. It was not cold here, but the warmth seeping into her skin was cherished. Grabbing handfuls, she blanketed the cloak closer to her body, the first sensation she felt while being here ignited a craving for more. Her hands gripped firmly, and something new came about when she felt a tightening on one of her fingers.
Gazing downward, a luster was wrapped around her middle finger.
The ring was made from the darkest metal, it would almost be comparable to space if it hadn't been glossed. In the crevices of the outer surface, she could only see symbols. Strange runes carved with sharp edges gleamed at her and slithered around the circumference of the ring.
She flexed her fingers and the ring tightened.
A cry rang in her throat but never past her lips. Why? She asked in her mind. A thousand more why's echoed, yet they were not bounced back with answers. Just more space and darkness. She felt her eyes wobble when the ring clasped further into her finger.
Then the first heat came, and it roared through her blood as it burned from the ring into the endless depths of her mind. It seared with infinite voices, young and old, wise and fooled. Some tickled, others screamed in her head. Now the darkness was rapidly flooding with choruses. The girl struggled to rein them in or push them out, they all scattered in different directions as though they were a herd of sheep escaping from the shepherd.
They pounded into the walls of her skull in sharp knocks. Their conversations overlapped each other and she couldn't make anything out.
The space was suddenly shrinking around her, swallowing anything in its gaping terrain. She tried to move, but all was fruitless.
An invisible force started to squeeze her body into a fetal position. She felt like her ribs were being crunched and her liver threatened to explode as her head had when the voices continued to sing in every tongue known to man. Frustrated, she reached to grab the cloak, only to find it whipping above her head. The dress that she wore was trembling against her ankles. She was falling.
She didn't have to feel a gush of air to know that she was. Because here, in this black space that actively tried to consume her, the voices that were mellowing into soft whispers, and the ring whose runes began to glow blue, the madness that ate in between the movement and the still distracted her. It pulled her away from her body moving down further into the abyss where lighter darkness began to expand. Pulled her away from her long hair swirling around nothing that was turning it wet.
