Broken Allegiance | Transformers Prime [2] (On Hiatus)

𝟎𝟎𝟗

A/N: decided to post another one, since this is connected to the last chapter. You're welcome:)

✘✘✘

"Hello?"

Darkness surrounded me, an all-consuming void where no light could penetrate. It felt endless, suffocating, as if the very air had been ousted away. My heart thumped against my chest, the only sound breaking the oppressive silence. 

    "It is terribly frigid in here." 

I clenched my jaw and turned in every direction, searching for something—anything—in the abyss. And then I saw it.

A single red symbol, glowing faintly in the distance, pierced through the gloaming. It was some varying degree of ancient, the lines and curves of it foreign yet strangely familiar. The symbol pulsed with a rhythm—a rhythm that took me a second to figure out that it was matching my heartbeat. 

The edges were sharp and clear, but there was an ethereal quality to it, like it was both solid and intangible at once. And almost half-amazed, I couldn't bring myself to look away, entranced by its eerie glow.

Wait, is that a-

The symbol began to shift, its shape distorting, expanding. The once small rune transmuted before my eyes, growing larger, spreading outwards until the darkness around me was replaced by a vast landscape of a web of red magic that glowed with running runes moving like binary code. 

          Spell.

Curiosity and something deeper—an urge I couldn't quite place—compelled me to reach out. Slowly, I extended my hand toward the glowing mesh. 

These were in the books. The runes, everything I had kept in my journal, were hidden in my study. I was sure I'd seen the symbols before, but never knew what they meant and where I had seen them. But maybe if I could- the moment my fingers touched it- if I knew what they meant- a strange sensation washed over me. 

My hand began to fizz, flickering in and out of existence like a glitching hologram. I held in a gasp and yanked my hand back, looking from the rune wall to my hand which was now solid again, only adding to my confirmation.

      I saw this when she screamed at you not to detonate those missiles. 

                I saw this back in the interrogation hall. 

I remembered. Reality shifted and made weird things of my vision but I didn't dwell on it for long when a light hit me. 

"You disobeyed me," a voice shattered the silence, making me whirl around in alarm. 

There, wrapped in a bright red energy, was a figure. The light was so intense that I could barely make out the details of the figure's form, but there was something undeniably powerful about its presence. 

The voice that followed was warped, as if it were being distorted and remixed in real time, giving her words an unsettling echo. "You disobeyed me. But the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking rules," the being continued, its tone shifting to something almost contemplative, "but by people following them. It is people who follow orders that detonate bombs and massacre villages."

The figure lingered for a moment longer, its energy pulsing rhythmically, before it began to flicker and fade. The glow dimmed, and then, with a final flash, it disappeared, leaving me once again in complete darkness. But the darkness didn't last, because the realm shrank back, the expansive web of red magic retracting until all that was left was the single rune from before, floating alone in the void.