Author’s Note: I wrote this for a contest a few years ago hoping that I might finish it sooner rather than later and submit a more complete version for another contest by not claiming it afterwards. No new contests arose however, and I wouldn’t have found the direction I needed in time anyway. It’s still not nearly done and won’t be finished any time in the near future. However, I think it’s time for me to claim this story. It may be very late but I greatly appreciate the detailed critiques from IRUN, Alf and Dark Pulse. Thank you for that. I hope that if anything has changed that it has done so positively. It’s been a fairly long time since I looked at that initial draft.
For those who have seen this before, the first chapter will be up soon, but for consistency’s sake, I’ll just post the prologue for now.
Anyway, without further interruption, I proudly present this old, new fanfic.
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Prologue…
Record 00: The Girl Who Wept in the Dark
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The Moonlight Room. It used to be a break room, but now…
Well… it was storage, once. Now it wasn’t anything. Just one of the few places left that those things hadn’t found. It would have been fine of course, except that the room was so far away from everything. She was only here because she had been trapped. She needed to get back to the others. It was her only chance, but… everything that would allow her to get back to the floor above was completely blocked off, whether because of a simple obstacle or because one of them was in the way.
But she knew one thing: She wasn’t going to die. Not yet. She wasn’t ready, she could still fight. And whether she could make a difference or not, she swore she would bring hell to the stragglers left behind by the man who took everything away from her. No, the monster that took everything away from everyone.
Then again… It’s not like she could do anything anyway. Not like she had anywhere to go. She or any of the others. They were trapped here, forever. There was no escape from this place. Its name alone made her sick. It had been a source of hope for her. Another symbol that she could look at to know that her family’s legacy persisted. But that wasn’t true anymore. Nothing persisted. It was over, and she had lost. Now all that remained of that name were broken dreams, and a door that led nowhere.
She remembered the day that shadow showed up in their midst and summoned the first of those horrors to rip the entire facility to pieces, killing everyone they encountered. Or worse…
Maybe the reason she heard it was because of the silence. There wasn’t any noise anymore, not unless she or one of the others were the source. Something about it carried a kind of horror. The silence was eternal, and if something broke it and you couldn’t see it, your life was guaranteed to end before you blinked.
It was a sound like… a hiss… or the kind of sound that she would have expected a flash of light to make, if light had a sound. She knew she should go investigate, but she… she was too… it was just…
She slid to her knees, furious with herself for allowing herself to be this weak. For not toughening up even after the world literally ended because she was such a useless, pathetic, hideous, obscene failure!
But she wasn’t strong. She was useless. She was pathetic. She was hideous. And most of all, she was, without question, the greatest failure to have ever lived.
She curled over onto her side and cried into her arms, pretending just for a moment that she would move her arms away and the lights would be on. That if she looked out the window, she would see a snowstorm instead of that horrid colorless expanse. That if she opened these doors, she wouldn’t turn the corner and see a hole that went clear through the floor. That the girl she never appreciated enough hadn’t been reduced to a flattened gory stain on the floor by falling debris. That the man she idolized hadn't tried to kill her, and that the boy she'd been so cruel to hadn’t managed to push her away and get taken in her place. She wished that she could have kept more than seven other people alive.
But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t just them. Everyone was dead. Everyone was dead… and it was all her fault. So she did the only goddamn thing she seemed to be good for:
She cried.
She cried, and wished for a miracle.
And deep in the darkness, a monster wondered how much she would sacrifice for one. It couldn’t help but grin at the prospect.
It was time to play.
Future’s End
The abyss cannot stare back, for even its darkness cannot escape.