Lilith bolted into a straight-backed sitting position as she heard the voice and immediately regretted it. She held her hand to her head and looked around, her vision blurred and distorted from sitting up too fast.
"W-who said that!?" she asked after seeing no one but the unconscious woman in the room. Unseen by Lilith, a faint outline made of a deep darkness with three glowing pinpoints of light appeared in the window behind her. The shadow of a shadow spoke, its voice emanating once again from everywhere and nowhere.
"Something beyond your knowledge, girl! I have existed since the beginning and will exist until the end, even until this world falls into complete darkness!" With that, the unseen shadow dissipated.
"What do you mean? Who are you?" Panic began to rise in the girl's chest, constricting her breathing and causing her to hyperventilate. The disturbed voice terrified her, it brought forth an ancient and primal fear. A fear that had remained buried within the human psyche for millenia and only appeared in the young and the paranoid. The fear of the dark and of what roamed within its concealing cloak.
Her panic slowly ebbed away as the voice failed to sound again. Lilith lay back on her bed with her hand held over her still-racing heart and forced her breathing into a calming rhythm. She was light-headed and her chest hurt from adrenaline and hyperventilating, but the pain slowly faded as well. As she calmed, her eyes began to grow heavy and she fell asleep before long. Not long afterwords, the sickly doctor walked back into the room and sat at Lilith's bedside again.
As he studied her features, he realized that her story must have at least a little truth to it. She wasn't tiny and shrunken like the people of their world had become and her hair was obviously freshly dyed, a luxury that wasn't available in that world anymore. She had no off-colour blotches on her skin or any of the infected welts that appeared from eating the poisoned and feral plants. She did have gashes on her ankles and her clothes were torn where the thorned feelers of the plants had grabbed her and her arms had small cuts like the ones caused by the darts some tribes of humans had taken to using. Though the injuries were small, they helped to validate her story.
The doctor leaned against the back of his chair and sighed softly. "After all that's happened, after all we've been through...at least we had the advantage of knowing why this happened. Knowing that it's our fault and this is our reward for the wrongs committed...this poor girl has no idea what happened." 'Until yesterday, she lived within what our world was...if her story is to be believed. But if what she says is true...how did she survive?'
Kargoroc · Fri Aug 06, 2010 @ 08:33am · 0 Comments |