It was a dark age for humanity, the black fog covered the horizon, sunlight peaking lightly through the dense of black crystals, distorted, and flimsy, creating pockets of twisted light waves like tiny blackholes floating through the ruin of once New York City, remnants of what a great urban, center of the world economy. Grey, and dull steel paint a bleak picture, however, in the eyes of a tall girl, walking lonely through the cracked street, it was a sight to behold. It was what she remembered, but at the same time, different.
Born as an inlander, she was one of the rare kids to survive the second Dark Fall, and the only one to survive the first Dark Condensation of black crystals among a small community that lived in an underground subway. Memories flashed, faces, names, a few flowers that her mother had managed to grow even without any sunlight, and then, there was ***. A tingling ran through her left eye, a deep, seeded emotion rose within her. It made her stomach agitated.
The girl cast her eyes over the abandoned street, overlooking the twisting shadows, wavering under what little light cast down from the sky above. The feeling remained, she squeezed her eyes shut, willing her mind to forget, to lock away that dazzling smile.
*** has always been a weird person, how could *** smile so brightly, even when all they knew were dark tunnels, aghast faces, angry shouting, and the smell, it was a pungent and acidic smell lingering in the tight spaces they lived in. Somewhere in her mind, she could still hear ***'s voice, a gentle and soothing sound that had sung her to sleep under so many cold nights. The warm cuddling that she, her mother, and *** shared in their assigned living corner still lingered on her skin.
An intense pain passed through her body, forcing her to take a step back, kneeling on one knee and taking deep breaths. She closed her eyes. Again, willing for the memories to go away, to go back into the locked chest where it belongs. She knows she will revisit it, she knows she will open the chest one day, to emerge herself in the feeling of home, and to embrace the feeling busting inside her chest that she can now name.
Hatred
Looking up, dread filled her heart, but soon, there was also anticipation. It had been ten years, ten years of living as an outlander, ten years of hiding and lying, and ten years away from home. She wondered if she should call this place home. High above her were skyscrapers that are now bare of what once was a replica of the galaxy. In her young mind back then, New York City was such a place, full of buildings that reflected the colorful galaxy, a rainbow of colors shining through even the night sky, but not the black fog, apparently. She had been so young, so young that she couldn’t even remember her father, who hadn’t survived the first dark fall.
Funny how the galaxy that she thought was full of wonder could be so deadly.
Cracking sounds could be heard ahead of her, the source of all her anxiety. Those sounds came from the dissolution and consolidation of black crystals in the area, caused by the rupture of space itself when an excessive amount of black crystals presented in any location. In the early days of the dark era, marked by the first dark fall, few surviving scientists had theorized that the black fog originated from a decomposed star from a different universe that had somehow arrived on Earth through a black hole. Call it a trick of fate, or some pre-destined destiny of all humanity like what the Dark Cult claimed to have known all along; the supposed harbingers of darkness, fathers and mothers of new humanity that will evolve to a higher form of existence to match the image of the Dark God. They were quickly executed, and all their doctrines were claimed to be heresy by the United Nations in an effort to suppress the wave of panic and paranoia. The irony is that the Dark Cult was right, humanity did evolve when the first dark condensation occurred eleven years ago. It just that there weren’t many left of humanity by that time, and the form we evolved into was not what the Dark Cult claimed to be.
Crackling sounds continued to invade the isolated street, ever clearer and louder as the girl walked closer to the supposed 13th street in New York City. A tall and wide crystal tower could be seen snooping around the corner, twisting in an unnatural form as its shapes continuously shifted and bent despite being as tough as concrete. What little light traveled through the gap between the girl and the monstrosity in the shape of a black diamond chandelier began disappearing into the void as the black structure composed of black crystals began to break apart. When they did consolidate, however, black chunks in the shape of bony humans with four arms, noodle-like legs, and no heads formed in the air, suspended by light itself. More and more grotesque figures continue to consolidate above an arena square made up of debris and fallen skyscrapers.
Time ticked by as the girl relaxed her breath despite the thundering heartbeats in her chest. It was not her first time in battle, and most likely, not her last either, however, no matter how many times she went through the motion of readying her body, preparing her psy-mind, and bracing her heart, there was always a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes, and her psy-mind, body, and heart finally found the balance that she had been waiting for. When she opened her eyes again, the world slowed down, and veins of darkness in blood red appeared within her vision. With her psy-mind now in union with her body and heart, the girl released her own black fog into the air. She directed her black fog to move along the veins, coated them in her own, and directed them to control the unconsolidated roaming crystals in the air.
Like a puppeteer, the girl moved veins of blood-red strings in the air and created a labyrinth of webs and black fog, her strings covered the black crystals, and her fog shaped them into giant lances surrounding uncompleted grotesque figures floating in the air. With a flex of her finger, her psy-mind commanded hundreds of black lances to skew the twisting chandelier along with its newborn monsters. Shattering sounds of glass met glass echoed through the broken space, millions of black crystals being broken and reformed at an almost light speed, destroyed, or just simply disappearing from this reality. The overwhelming sound temporarily deafened her, two lines of dark blood could be seen spewing down her jaw, but the girl remained adamant, standing in the center of the dark tornado that shreds even space itself. She knew what would happen, she knew what kind of damage was dealt to her body, but she also knew that she had already passed the point of no return long ago. It was her memories, her emotions, and her hatred that kept her existence prevailing in this circle of madness.
Time stretched into infinity as seconds became hours. Reality shifted to abstract images of past and future, the present doesn’t exist here, as she has come to realize. Reality continuously shifted in this realm that any possibilities flashed across her eyes could become the past or future. Making sense of anything beyond the self in this space could erase her existence and anything that she knew of from this dimension. She knew, she knew about this fact, it was encoded into her being when she was granted this ability during the first dark condensation. Therefore, she blocked off her psy-mind, it had completed its job. She closed her eyes, to avoid acknowledging anything around her. She closed her heart, to protect the last prestige of humanity left within her.
She despised her existence.
When she opened her eyes, the world had returned to its hollow desolation. There was no more black crystal in the air, the space that the black diamond chandelier once was is now a massive circular hole with at least five meters in diameter, and twenty meters deep. The girl was standing near its massive maw, her eyes unfocused and spiritless. The girl just stood there, motionless, and breathless, dead. One second passed, and then the next, her heart beat again, although it didn’t need to. Her body went through the motion of breathing, tensing in the realization that it was dead, and then relaxing again, knowing that it didn’t matter. Black dust slowly flowed into her body, her skin changed from white to black, then white again. Spots of black crystals could be seen on her naked body.
The girl finally regained her consciousness, her eyes raised, looking down at her naked form. With the last of her awakened psy-mind, she will a black dress created by the black dust to cover her form, after all, humans all wear clothes. The girl turned and looked into the giant hole in the ground, eyes still unfocused. Something flashed across her mind, faces, names, and a smile. A radiant smile that appeared as clear as the distant sun in her muddy brain. What even was a sun anyway? A memory of a golden sphere in the blue clear sky pops up in her mind, was it even real, or was it just a fictional reality that was implanted into her brain? The girl didn’t know, at least in that specific moment, when her existence still floating outside of her body, her mind had returned to that of a newborn child with superior intellect, questioning everything around her.
Then it occurred to her, that she was not a human. But if she was not a human, what was she? The question remained unanswered, unanswered until all the black dust was clear from the area and into her body.
She was a monster, the girl thought.
