Silence

Chapter One - Ethereal

ethereal

adjective

1. extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world.

Chapter One - Ethereal

It was four in the morning.

It was four in the morning and a boy was walking the streets.

His eyelids were closed over his eyes, not shut tight, just delicately pressed together. But he was conscious, although perhaps not fully there.

He stumbled along in his pyjamas, bare feet scuffing along the ground. Street lamps flickered as he walked past, buzzing softly as the light quivered. And there was a humming in the air. Like some old electric generator gradually warming up.

Still in this zombie-like manner, the boy continued forward despite the late hour and the chilling breeze. The path he was on led into the forest on the outskirts of town. Soon the rough texture of the concrete left his feet for a soft mass of grass and leaves. Early morning dew saturated the hem of his pyjama pants as his feet dragged through the forest floor.

He had probably been walking for almost an hour now. He didn't really know. Walking through a forest in the early hours of the morning in a drunken-like state really adds a sense of timelessness into the assembly.

The boy emerged into a clearing. A perfectly round circle of trees lined the edges, their branches reaching over towards the centre, creating a canopy of leaves that leaked only small amounts of light through the fronds.

He continued forward, stopping only when he reached the centre. Almost like a puppet with its strings cut, he collapsed to the ground limply. Small glowing orbs emerged from amongst the tree foliage. They fell with a feather-like manner, slowly drifting down to rest amid the grass and then rolling like marbles along the forest floor to surround the boy's lifeless body.

One by one, the lights seeped into his skin, forming glowing circles where they entered. As soon as the last orb retreated into his flesh, the boy jerked violently. He was pulled to his knees by an invisible force and thrust forward onto his hands. Suddenly he was conscious again. He let out a gasp, as though he had just broken the surface of some deep chasm of water, filling his screaming lungs. 

A thin wisp of blue light trailed out of his open mouth. It slithered through the air, darting along the early morning breeze with a kind of rhythm, like the song of the world carried it along. Mesmerised, the boy almost forgot to question where he was, or what was happening. Almost.

He leapt back. Long blades of grass clutched at his ankles as he tried to stand. In a panicked daze, he span around, taking in the green leafy surroundings that certainly weren't the four walls of his bedroom he'd fallen asleep within. His gaze shifted to his arms, which were still glowing faintly. His jaw dropped and a breath caught in his throat.

He would have jumped back in shock had it not been for the fact that his arms would follow. He simply continued to gawk at his skin, quivering slightly,  eyes wide and unblinking. It wasn't an unusual reaction to say the least. He tore his eyes away from the lights under his skin, still softly pulsating, and took another look at the glade. Lazy sunbeams had finally begun to emerge from the horizon. They brushed the leaves and splashed the forest floor in puddles of golden and red. The morning light brought with it a familiar and pleasant feeling. It was warm and comforting, like kisses from the sun and mother nature herself. His heart sank slightly at this thought.

At the very least it reassured him that he was somewhere on earth. Probably. He didn't know what to think anymore. There was a lot of material for his mind to spin together into some completely ridiculous explanation. Suddenly finding himself outside early in the morning with glowing skin having no recollection of actually getting there brought upon a lot of possibilities that there was more that just the ordinary occurring. Also the man walking towards him, surrounded by a billowing white cloak, really didn't add anything to the whole ordeal.

The boy jumped back, startled and threatened. Silently, the man raised his hands almost like surrender, as he approached further. The boy backed away, his bare feet catching on twigs and rocks. But the whispered uttering of a name stopped him in his tracks.

"Jaron." The man's voice was husky, as if it hadn't been used for a long long time. An eternity even. 

"What?" Jaron's voice was quiet and weak. It felt unused as well. "How do you know my name?"

"Jaron," he said again, voice stronger this time, obviously making a conscious effort to push past the question. "You." He took a step towards the boy who's back was pressed into a tree trunk. "Have." Jaron cowered further into the shadows, his arms shielding his head. "Been." A single long finger pointed at Jaron, its skin taut and stark white against the darkness of the forest. "Chosen." And the moment the last syllable left his tongue, a bolt of lightning emerged from the sky and struck the very spot the old man was standing. But Jaron didn't have time to consider the welfare of the man, for a ball of swirling mist had suddenly enveloped him. Something sounding like pained screams echoed around the chamber, roaring, swirling and merging with the white. The billows of white fog somehow resembled faces, stretched with pain and they drew closer to Jaron, pressing him into the forest floor.

Jaron doubled over, hands clawing at his head. The ground trembled with the waves of streaming energy surrounding him and his mind pounded as sound streamed in through shredded eardrums.

It was like a rocket launch in a nightclub was happening all around him constantly, almost to the point where the sound deafened him. It felt like it too. His bones rattled unnaturally in his body as the energy hit him with the force of an explosion. All his senses were numb. The sound was so powerful it was leeching into his other sensory organs, bleeding into his vision. A static threatened darkness in his eyes. His touch. No part of Jaron's body felt loose, it was wound up and distorted. Fire was dancing on his skin. His smell. He could only breathe in the blood of the dead and the salt of their tears and the bile of their rotting stomachs. His taste. Someone was slicing his tongue into slivers, drawing the blade back and forth. His mouth was full of blood. His own blood. Rich with a metallic sting. Nothing affected him anymore. His senses were so clouded up by the ever-growing dissonance, that even his existence could have been questioned and he wouldn't have had an answer.

Nothing was real anymore. Not to him anyway. He was so unaware of anything, except for the tidal waves of noise, that he didn't notice that his feet had left the ground. The mist, which was somehow embodying the noise, cascaded around him, encircling him, like a net thrown by a hunter. His limbs tangled like string as the mist looped around them with the accuracy and texture of a children's scribble. It clung to the boy's body, seeping into him like water to a sponge. It fused itself into his very essence. His very soul. The boy was now a part of the sound, intertwined into the vast web of energy, moving and spiralling upwards as the sounds infused into his bones.

The cacophony reached an absolute peak and then... it stopped. It didn't fade. It didn't quiver then break. It just stopped. Like flicking off a switch. The boy's body, still interlaced with the mist, was slowly lowered to the forest floor. The small orbs wrenched themselves from underneath his skin and clumped together, forming one larger ball of light, which flew away into the darkened corners of the woods.

Suddenly Jaron eyelids fluttered and he could breathe again. He woke up in the forest with no memory of how he had got there, not seeming to remember anything about the noise. So he pulled up his body and wandered off into the forest, hoping to find his way home.

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