Future of Calamity [Under Rewrite]

Chapter 8.5 - Oblivion

She awoke to a world not unlike her own. Gargantuan forestry coiled around the surrounding area, poised to stab at the ever-expanding smoky skies. Leaves flailed on their withering branches; browned, and dead. Any flora was skeletal - deprived of any nutrients - and circling akin to barbed wire. The wood was silent, and lifeless. Chilling winds cut at her paler skin, and her veil of black leather and banded hair flapped in whirring weather. How did she end up here? Where were the others? Who were the others? Who was she?

An endearing hiss filled her cranium, wisping between the unfeeling trunks that reached towards the night sky; the celestial body out of their grasp emitting a soft, sweet vermillion. The woman felt... something... yell from within her, an instinctual feeling that something was wrong. The skies that shadowed her shifted and lapped, like stormy waves in the endless sea, and the moon had suffered an ominous eclipse of twining miasma blotting out its everlasting gaze.

The whispers returned, and her heart tugged at her hazy mind, pushing her body towards the sweet promise. She didn't realise she was moving until her steel boots crushed a blackened stick fallen from its nest. She swear it shuffled under her weight, but it snapped the same way they always did. The woman didn't look back as it screamed. A fulfilling feeling molded within her husk, scratching nicely at the seams that kept her consciousness together. She wanted to let it out. She didn't want to let it out. Her surroundings shifted before her sight, the squelching of mudded soil switching to the familiar crunch of fresh grass and greenery.

However, what was green no longer held its viridescent glow - tanned and burned - as if it was cast away in the unshielded rays of sunlight. It was cold. But, she didn't feel it, only she did; the woman had been cold for a long time. As the stranger stepped onto the generated scene, a new feeling emerged from within. She didn't recognise it, but her mind did. Yet, she couldn't think. Why? What lay before her that she couldn't see, but feel?

All she knew was emotion, but held no reason.

An altar of dilapidated ruins had collapsed across the harrowing field of bloodied liles, dyed in the vicious glare of the supermoon at their backs. A howl came from the depths that the rubble encircled - so familiar but so inhuman - how could it be? The ocean cried, and the eyes of a thousand trees trained on her formless figure. At least, she thought so. With the cry of a vulture and echo of mania that she couldn't discern, honed steel sprouted from her wrist without command. Nature stared at her, cursing her very existence on such calloused earth as it fell apart from her volatile domain.

The moon scowled. And the stars thrashed in their stellar cages.

Without reprimand, her sudden weapon lashed out at the empty air - ivory spurting from the shapeless particles. It amused her. So, she did it again. And more came hurtling out like a beautiful waterfall. The woman decided to dance in the storm's eye, spinning and lunging around in practiced form, as her reward was falling crimson that splashed her ancient garments. Her instincts would flare, and she would sway delicately until the surge of dread that would displace the space.

Hel-

What was that? Her performance stilled, and she quizzically bore into the scarred environment, searching for the origin of such a strange sound.

Sto-

Again. The woman whipped around in irritation, failing to locate the annoying repetition that rused her. Fists furrowed and clenched, a buried anger boiling from within the wallowing darkness.

Watc-

Crash!

The indefinite floor gaped and shrieked from her unstoppable wrath, her bandaged fist burrowing into the harsh earth that opposed it. Golden eyes of emptiness pierced the area with acute attention, scanning the expanding rubble and ignoring the violent shakes of ground. A soothing feeling overcame her, as nature copied her pensive silence. Who was she?

"Velvet..."

The woman breathlessly gasped out, her voice hoarse from lack of use, as they came flying back. The memories. Who she was, who they were, what the world was.

"Laphi..."

He wasn't there, she knew it. But, his pristeen golden hair and innocent face flashed through her mind. An unfamiliar liquid pooled from her eyes, an unusual and abnormal sensation tickling the blackness that took over her sclera. His blood was harrowingly frozen in her desecrated palms, slowly slipping through the gaps in her spread out hands. Much to her building despair, another feeling scratched at the precipice of her sanity. Hunger.

Squelch!

The eerie sound punched her eardrums as her heart sank, and soon the taste of iron filled her mouth.

Velvet Crowe stood up from her position, ankle deep in blood-logged soil, her sins as deep as the ivory she trodded in. The blood moon's malicious grin bore down on the suffering landscape. "I get it..." she mused, a humourless glint in her traumatic stare.

"I'm in hell."

The daemonic appendage exploded out from its flexible vestiges, wreathing in the great volume of despair in the cataclysmic night. Thus, the curdling screams flowed effortlessly through the invading smog that settled on the Age of Chaos.

She awoke to a world of cruel snow and bleak ice, an uncomfortable sensation under her eye sockets that did not derive from the endless blanket of white. The daemon's eyes were cold, and no light shone within her sluggish stare.