REVIVE ▸ d. winchester [2] ✔

Chapter 1

0 HOURS

I've always hated silence.

Its unnerving, and too eerie. Like the calm after a storm.

Something will always break it, inevitably.

But there was something different about this silence. It held something unique, something that was just waiting to come out of hiding, unleashing hell upon everything.

I didn't like this silence any better than the first.

Yet as I stand alone, encased by only darkness, I have no choice but to listen to it.

And it's driving me insane.

I rip myself out of the dark, only to find a new environment surrounding me, just as dark, just as menacing.

My hands dig into the surface beneath me, it's hardness slowly crumbling away as my fingertips find their way into a cold and wet texture. Dirt.

I squint my eyes into the hazy gray setting around me. There's a feint light which allows my eyes to pick out the silhouettes of thick tree trunks and low lying branches, but I can't tell where its coming from. A misty fog seems to swirl through the air, rushing around me and brushing against my skin, mocking me. As I look to the sky, I find no sun, no moon, no stars. There's only a dark mask above my head.

I sit in this eerie twilight. It's cold. Not cold in the way that I can see my breath evaporating in front of me, but the cold where you are completely enclosed in a blanket of heaviness. You're alone, and the air feels empty.

Where am I?

I breathe in.

I breathe out.

In.

Out.

In.

And I don't let this one out. Because everything suddenly comes rushing back to me. Everything hits me like a punch to the gut, and all I can do is sit here in the dirt, the dirt that I can't even see, squeezing my eyes shut and holding my arms, holding that breath in.

"They call it the Dead Man's Curse."

I can't even help it as the breath I was holding in gets blown away, turned into a gasp of my own pain. My hands pull away from my arms and fly to my neck, fingertips gliding carefully over the now burning skin behind my ear.

Eyes squeezed tightly shut, I don't move as my head seems to pound with the blood rushing through my veins.

I sit and remember. I remember how I let him grab my hand and put his head on mine, giving me words of encouragement. Encouragement for everything I didn't want to do but was destined to do.

"It's time, Jackie," Azrael had told me.

"You are ready. Show them what it means to be my Shadow."

I remember how he looked down at me, his face a mix of pride and longing, something I never wanted to see in his eyes again as long as he was looking at me. I remember how he pulled away from me, holding my arms and looking straight into my eyes.

"There will be twenty. Twenty of my greatest Chimeras. Only at their fall will you become what you've always been destined to be."