𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐄.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: CLOUD OF DARKNESS.

Elara wondered what time it was as the darkness began to settle in deeper around the park. She had lost track of most sense of time, and it was a bit disorienting. By now she would have felt hungry, but she knew this wasn't any normal circumstance. She wondered if she ever got hungry in this realm, or if she was simply just a walking ball of energy that didn't feel anything. She thought she had been numb to feeling before - this was terrifying. She supposed she had taken her ability to feel things, even the sad stuff, entirely for granted.

Was she sad? Angry? She didn't know. Even as she tried her hardest to distinguish these feelings and put them into words in her thoughts, everything felt the same, other than an overall sense of dread. Well, that wasn't much different than how she was when she was awake, but at least here, it seemed natural to feel that way in the face of an unknown world. At least she wasn't entirely alone. She could feel Matt not far behind, who stopped to look around every few feet. She could tell they were both on edge, and understandably so. There was something strange in the atmosphere, something she couldn't quite place.

"I feel like something is watching us," he said as he looked out into the distance. She wondered how he could even see anything, it was so dark aside from the lamps lining the park.

She didn't have the feeling of being watched, but it was certainly unsettling. "I wouldn't be surprised. I've learned to stop being shocked by things."

They were near her car, which was comforting and frustrating. She went to touch it, but her ethereal form couldn't quite reach it.

"Dammit," she said with a sigh of resignation. She hadn't really expected to be able to touch it, but that didn't make it any less annoying. She scrunched her nose as she saw her body laying against the ground. She wondered how much longer it was going to be until she began to decompose, and the thought made her want to throw up.

What if she rotted out here? It wasn't like there was anyone looking for her. Was her spirit form going to be stuck here as an unhappy ghost forever? Was this really what her whole life had been leading up to in the end? There had to be something more, something she was missing. Sometimes her mom used to say that things happened for a reason, and she was just supposed to have faith that things fell into place the way they needed to in the end. What was the bigger picture?

She reached down to touch her physical arm, wondering if maybe she could catch a pulse. If she had one then maybe there was still some chance she could make it, but the likelihood of that was so thin that she didn't even know if it was worth getting her hopes up.

"Hey, Elara. Maybe we should start heading-" Matt began. She was only half-listening, her attention torn between him and her body. He liked to ramble once he got started on an idea, and she knew that he would just keep going whether she was watching him or not.

But she gasped as she noticed a movement from the corner of her eye, watching with horror as he fell to the ground, screaming as he wrestled with an invisible force in the cloud of darkness surrounding them.

"Matt!" she exclaimed. She forgot about herself for a minute, he was more important. She tried to run for him, fighting through the thick cloud that tried to get in her way, but the clouds were thick and suffocating like the smoke from the apartment.

She could hear him screaming, a sound that seemed to shatter the silence of the park around them. She reached for his outstretched hand, but her palmed missed his. She cursed her clumsiness as she reached for him again, but as she shouted his name, he seemed to vaporize into the darkness.

The cloud rumbled around her, making her thing it wasn't much of a cloud at all.

"Shit," she cursed as she stood up, looking around wildly. She couldn't see where it was coming from, but her heart was beating so fast it felt like it could break out from her chest, but that wasn't her biggest concern right now.