March from Darkness | ✓ (to be edited)

FOUR

     My eyes popped open on their own accord, the sense of what I had come to call sleep fading immediately from my mind as I stared at the sky through the French doors. It was still dark out, and the stars were bright, the moon shining like a pale yellow beacon in the sky. There was no clock in the room, digital or otherwise, and if I hadn't seen the amount of technology here, I would have assumed there was none considering the intense lack of external lighting.

     I wondered how cold it was outside. If this place was meant to represent what I could only assume was a purgatory for now until I was given a description, then it must be cold, or at the very least unpleasant. The heating was on, but I had a feeling that had to do with Phrer more than the temperature outside. 

     Without processing anything that happened before, I found myself outside on the balcony. There was a slight breeze, but I wasn't cold, even with the lack of clothing. The garden was illuminated in the light of the moon, everything shining with the glow of healthy and natural beauty. There were tall trees, a mixture of pines and oak, and there were even two weeping willows that stood on the shores of a small lake. It'd been a long time since I had seen so many flowers in one place. I'd been to groves before, sure, but that had been... years ago. It almost seemed like a millennium to me, and the sight of so many natural things not surrounded by city and modernization was seemingly foreign. 

     I couldn't tell the colours of the life around me, everything was just shades of grey. I almost laughed to myself at the irony. How fitting that the beauty I saw still had no colour to me as if someone had muted my ability to comprehend it. Even the inside of the room was just various greys now, the colors unable to process in lack of direct sunlight. 

     I stared at the garden for an indiscernible amount of time, but it seemed like hours before I heard something aside from the slight rustling of the leaves and blades of grass in the breeze. It sounded like... humming? Whatever it was, it was musical.

     I tried to find the source of it but to no avail. I wasn't about to jump down into the garden to find it, especially with the gut feeling that I would most likely incur the wrath of a creature that I probably didn't want to mess with; if these people taught me anything in the short amount of time I had been here, it was that appearances certainly fooled people. Just look at me and what I was able to do.

     I decided to go back into the room, I probably needed some more sleep anyways, but once I closed the doors, I realized just how badly I wanted to be out there. I wanted to be around that kind of nature, that kind of beauty, even if I couldn't witness its full potential yet. I needed to be around that. I paused at that.

     Did I need to be around that? What if I sullied it, tainted it with what I was, with the darkness that I carried around me? What if everything wilted if I even stepped near it? Or was I just that pessimistic that I wanted to stay away from anything that could try and show me something beautiful?

     No, I will not be that pessimistic. I want to see something beautiful to distract me from what I was, I thought as I pulled on a pair of loose harem pants. I want to see something that didn't remind me of death for once. Something that didn't remind me of how ugly I was and how ugly the world was. How terrible were the things that I had done that I was terrified of destroying the things that weren't me, terrified of corrupting them. I don't remember how I managed to get to the back door of the home, but as I put my hand on the brass knob to open the door, I froze like a statue.

     But what if I was right? What if those flowers didn't just wilt? 

     What if they died?

     What if they ended up like her beauty, crumpled and ragged like a shotty idea? Broken? Irreparable?

     I could feel myself trembling, no matter how much I wanted to, to prove to someone, myself, that I wasn't weak, that I was proud of what I had done to benefit people.