Crumbling Dreams Part One

Hope's Grave

Muffled heavy breathing is heard outside the walls of the foundry. A shapeless bloodied sheet starts moving before being folded by the person that was contained inside, like a spider crawling out of a cocoon. She is pale as paper, fragile as lace. Her once-golden hair is now tarnished with dirt and blood. She shivers as her green fuzzy sweater lets a cold breeze run through her body.

She looked around, her arms crossed around her waist to give her some warmth, her blank eyes scanning her surroundings. She turned on her side to help herself to get up but was met with a horrifying sight. She wasn't alone. Three other people were under a sheet, outside.

She gently pushed one of them in the hope of a reaction. She was met with cold and numbness from the other person. An unexpected urge to throw up got her when she realized that she wasn't alone, but was the only one alive.

She noticed a familiar structure. The same rusty metallic stairs on the outside of the foundry. She was still there. Her last memory was a dark crowded room and cried before passing out. Then she remembered.

"Henry!" Chloe shouted.

She got up and a pain went through under her skin. She was still injured.

She looked down at her leg and noticed a piece of black fabric with a brownish tincture, preventing bleeding.

"That girl with the glasses must have made that..." She said as she bore the pain. "What was her name again?" She asked herself. "I think it was Iris? Or was it Ivy? Either way, they must be inside, I need to look for them." She began walking with caution to avoid injuring herself further. She looks up to the outdoor stairs and notices something dripping from the top, unable to see what is it, she gets closer.

A dark liquid dripped from it. A beautiful dark scarlet oozing to the ground. Chloe moved closer to the trajectory until a singular droplet hit her hand. It was blood, filling the crevices of her palm in red. Disgusted, she shakes her hand before wiping it on her navy jeans. She looked up to see the cause of this but could not see anything, the outdoor catwalks hiding whatever was on top of it. Chloe was tempted to take these stairs but due to the cold, she stepped inside the foundry.

Chloe vaguely recognized the pale concrete walls that she stared at when she was carried by Henry after she got injured by the trap. She looked around and started exploring the silent structure, she looked for people, she couldn't believe that they had mistaken her for a dead person, but she had the feeling that she couldn't talk freely, the blood dripping outside made her think that something grim happened in here, and she looked for clues. After looking around the large engine in the middle of the foundry, Chloe noticed a smudged puddle of blood in front of a metallic door under the stairs. When she approached it, she peered into the basement from a safe distance but saw nothing but a flashlight on the top of the stairs, barely in reach of the basement's darkness.

Tempted to take it, she pulled the door, lighting up the concrete stairs, just enough to see where to go. Feeling a sense of danger, Chloe reluctantly snuffed out her curiosity and inspected the blood instead. It wasn't dried but it wasn't warm either, whatever this is, it happened not too long ago. She looked up and noticed the bloodied railings from the catwalks and deducted that the person was pushed from above, she ascended upstairs, to investigate this incident. As she walked, she noticed other puddles of blood, scattered around the catwalks.

"What the fuck happened?" Chloe whispered.

She looked at the railings, bloodied hand prints were all around, and Chloe couldn't miss one. She noticed, after walking over a puddle of blood, that a part of the railing had been broken. A fight occurred, a violent one. But more surprisingly, no corpses. No injured people. But as Chloe got closer to the office, a cable hanging from the catwalks slightly attracted Chloe's attention.