Darksiders: The Seed of Knowledge

Chapter One

It all started with a thought.  Not a typical thought, this.  More an impression of voices and images, of knowledge of events that no human could ever—nor should ever—have known.  A thought of carnage and war, of mayhem and destruction.  And with it came an order:  

You must survive.

Faith looked up from the midterm she had just completed, her features scrunching briefly in confusion before paling with dread.  She immediately closed her test booklet and gathered up her bag, then went to the front of the classroom and handed the test to the teacher.  As she did so, she looked out the window at the cloudy sky above Manhattan, her heart pounding with anticipation.

Behind her, one of her classmates scoffed.

"Of course, she finished early," the girl hissed.  "Probably aced it, too."

"Or she flunked it just to look stupid," a second girl whispered in reply.

Hearing her classmates' conversation, Faith turned from the window to the students and gave them her signature "leave me alone or I'll kill you" glare.  The second girl who'd whispered faltered and looked away.

Faith was dressed in black biker leathers with her bayonet strapped to her right thigh, even though weapons weren't allowed in her school.  She had a hook piercing in her left eyebrow and two in each earlobe, as well as a cartilage stud in her right ear and another stud on her right nostril.  Her complexion was pale but healthy, her nose sharp, her dark brows currently furrowed in annoyance.  Her steel blue eyes, framed by cheekbones subtly distinct, were coated in a thick layer of black eyeliner, her thin lips painted crimson.  Her hair fell past her shoulders in thick, obsidian waves, hiding the rune tattoo on her nape, the dimple in her chin emphasized by the scowl in which her oval jaw was set.  Her look was a façade, designed to intimidate people so that they'd leave her alone.

Sadly, though, it didn't always work.

The first classmate who'd spoken twisted her pretty features in disgust.  "You think being smart makes you better than everyone else?"

"I'm not the one with a superiority complex," Faith smoothly replied.

The other girl's face turned red and several other students snickered before the teacher told them to quiet down.

Then the alarm bell rang.  At first, everyone in the classroom assumed it was a fire drill and rose from their seats.  But then they started panicking when the principal announced over the intercom that the school was being evacuated and that everyone should proceed calmly to the nearest blah, blah, blah.

Faith didn't hear the rest.  Her eyes were on the sky again, widening at the ball of fire entering the atmosphere.

"No," she muttered, instantly aware of what the fireball contained.

She picked up a chair and threw it at a window.  The crash frightened her classmates almost as much as the evacuation order.  Then, ignoring the yells from her teacher to get in line, Faith hurled her lithe, mildly muscular, five-foot-four self out the window.  The classroom was only one story high, so she had no problem landing in a crouch on the sidewalk and somersaulting for stability.  A single rotation, and then she rushed to her brother's old motorcycle.  Donning the helmet quickly, she kicked the bike into gear and rode into the city at top speed.

It was difficult navigating through the clusters of people and cars.  Around her, the whole city was being evacuated.  The jumbo screens on the buildings declared that an unusual cluster of meteors was falling to the Earth.

Except, Faith knew, they weren't meteors.

She stopped and dismounted her bike in the middle of the crowded street, removing her helmet as she looked up at the giant monitor.  It briefly showed the live footage of a "meteor" before it was struck by one.