The Nightscape

A Flicker And A Finding

"Lyra, don't you agree? Lyra? Lyra!" Anya yelled, snapping the girl from her deep thoughts. Lyra jumped, looking at her friend with confusion. She had an olive complexion that was a shade lighter than her friend's, with bobbed black hair that she had bleached and dyed a deep magenta, with heavy bangs along arched brows. Her eyes were a strange shade for her Japanese heritage, a sugar grey with purple flecks buried in their depths with long lashes, that her father said reminded him of her absent mother. She had a button nose and full lips, and a sharp jaw that she had always tried to soften with her haircut. Although the girl was a head taller than all her friends, her slumped posture tended to bring her down to their level in an unconscious attempt to not stick out in the crowd. Even her clothes, though stylish, always followed the current fashion, discarded as soon as they became abnormal. 

"Yeah, sure." She agreed half heartedly, fiddling with her charm bracelet and gazing blankly ahead. The group had organised this meet up at the mall a week ago, and even though her sleep had been patchy for the past few nights, Lyra had felt too bad about her already flaky nature to cancel. Still, she was struggling to keep her eyes open and had long since stopped trying to keep up with the conversation. And there was only so much coffee someone could guzzle before their heart rate entered the dangerous territory, and Lyra was fairly sure she had passed that point hours ago. 

"What's up with you today? I swear you're like a zombie at the minute." Miku, one of her other friends, remarked. Lyra gave her a half hearted smile. 

"Just tired. I'm going to the bathroom, back in a minute." She told them as she stood, striding off before any of them offered to accompany her. There were a few warning signs that she had learned to pick up on over the years, like a shimmering around the edges of her vision and the smell of blood filling her nose and mouth. The shades of purple in the world around her seemed amplified, quivering unnaturally as though filled with a strange energy. Her own body began trembling uncontrollably with pent up power, the air seeming to fill with static simply by being next to her. By the time she burst into a stall and locked it behind her, her breathing was fast and her entire body trembled with power just burning to burst out. 

"That was a close call." She whispered to herself, thankful it hadn't happened in the middle of the crowded mall. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she released the dormant power that was fighting to escape within her. A low groan tore itself from her throat as the world around her was torn to shreds, the modern and stylish building disappearing like smoke in the wind as the Dayscape pulled her in. 

As soon as the transition was complete, Lyra realised her mistake. This wasn't the first time this had happened at the shopping centre, a side effect of it being a popular place to meet up with friends, but usually she had remembered that there wasn't an equivalent structure in the other world, so went to the ground floor when she felt a flicker coming on. Now, having panicked and run into the upper floor bathroom, she was in mid air, around ten feet from the ground. 

She screamed as she fell, groaning when her tailbone impacted against the dusty ground and staring up at the sky in a daze. It was a sickly shade of green, the colour grass went after a week of summer drought, with the two bright white suns almost meeting overhead. The light was far too bright, and still lying down, Lyra dug into her bag to produce the shades she always carried with her just in case to shield her eyes from the glare. The heat was as scorching as it always was when it was the Dayscape, not a cloud in sight. When the throbbing in her back dissipated somewhat, she pushed herself upright, looking around with a frustrated sigh. 

The landscape stretched on to the horizon, bumpy and dusty, all acrid and lifeless soil that had been scorched of all moisture. Scattered over it were a few lone, dead plants, blackened and slowly decaying. What Lyra had always been more troubled by, however, were the various bleached skeletons she would find scattered about. And not all of them were animals, and not all of them were recognisable. The first time she had found human remains, she had screamed her head off until the hysteria abated and she was able to look at it more logically. From the way the bones were an aged yellow and had long since been picked clean, she had known that the person, whoever they were, had died many decades ago.