The New Generation

Chapter Seven - This Broken World

Chapter Seven - This Broken World

As a child Maggie was scared of the dark. She never told anyone, because being scared made her weak, and she constantly needed to prove that she was strong. If you were weak everyone would give up on you and ignore you. There was no point in loving something that was going to die soon. So she endured the darkness, and willed herself not to care. She knew it wasn't exactly darkness that terrified her, it was the nothingness that accompanied it. In the dark it was as if she and everything around her ceased to exist. She hated the feeling when she opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness as if her eyes were still closed. The only solace to her fear were words. She'd talk to her sisters until they fell asleep, or she'd try to read the mildewed books she'd found in the mounds of garbage until the darkness crept up on the grey pages. Maggie had thought that the fear had dissipated as she aged, but she had been wrong. Her worst nightmare had come true.

The darkness was inside of her.

She was undeniably certain that this wasn't a dream. The darkness seeped into the tiny room. It took over, filling every corner with its intangible pain. She felt the darkness enter her mouth and nose and veins and lungs. Every single cell of her body shuddered and shrieked. It was biting and cool like the kiss of a steel blade on flesh. Everywhere it touched it left a trail of diamond-sharp, paralysing pain. Maggie couldn't even scream or writhe. But the darkness could. She felt it writhing within her.

It was like a liquid sickness that coated itself onto her every nerve ending. It twisted and took root inside her veins. Maggie was positive that any minute something insidious would shatter her body, and burst through her ribcage. She had nothing to compare this agony to; every injury she had ever had was less than a bruise compared to this. She wanted to scream from the horror of it as much as the pain, but she could do nothing.

She felt the shadows snaking themselves into the tiny network of nerves and capillaries that made up her brain. The pressure felt strong enough to fracture her skull. For a moment she wished that it would just end, but what then? What if the death is worse than this? Pain meant she was still alive, right? Or maybe she was dead.

She braced herself as shadows reached their gnarled hands towards her heart. Fingernails like tiny scythes, pried her apart rib by rib, cell by cell. The hands of the darkness was so terribly, terrifyingly cold.

Her skin was frozen and as delicate as a layer of frost on window pane. She was freezing to death, yet death never graced her with its presence. She felt her skin begin to crack. It began as little fissures, and then spiderweb cracks begin mapping her whole body. Thick blood, as dark and slow as cooling lava welled up around the cracks.

Her bones began to vibrate. She was finally able to move, but she had no control over her body. It was folding in on itself; caving in. There was only so much pain she could take before the prison cell of her body decided there was no point left in living. The bones (she wasn't even sure if they were her bones anymore) began snapping and splintering. The marrow in the bones became liquid venom, acid, mercury, lava. Maggie continued to fragment like melting drift ice.

It went on forever. She was pretty sure that this is what Hell was. It was never going to stop. The agony seemed to laugh at her. Just when she thought it couldn't get worse it did. Fire replaced ice. Singeing and blackening her bones to charcoal. She was quite sure the only thing left of her would be charred sticks at the bottom of a fiery pit.

A sound, half-strangled, broke through the darkness. Belatedly Maggie realized it was her own voice. "I REFUSE TO DIE!" she screamed and screamed. She screamed until the fiery tendrils shot through her, smothered her DNA, and made her blood boil. Steam rose from her body like a ghost and melted the glacier. There was a war inside her. Hammers, swords, and spears of ice tore through her like a blizzard while the inferno raged on. Maggie wasn't going to give up.