- Joined
- Jun 13, 2022
- Posts
- 168
- Awards
- 5
- Essence
- €22,181
- Coin
- ₡9,200
- Tokens
- 0
- World
- The Beyond
- Profile
- Click Here
The apartment wasn’t much. There was a stove, and a sink. There was a table, with three chairs. There was a pile of pillows and blankets in the middle of the room that they used for sleep and for complicated sex. There was a cabinet, for clothes and food, and a bathroom in one corner – tiny, but with all the things you hoped a bathroom would, at minimum, have. There was a work-bench, covered in tools, electronics, and guns in various states of disassembly and repair. The walls were bare concrete, covered by heavily-annotated charts of geological strata and posters of lakefront scenes held in place with little blue dots of putty.Jewels has night-terrors almost every time she goes to sleep. Some of them, however, are more significant than others. For posterity, those will be recorded here.
It was cramped - But it was theirs. Secure and warm within their pile of furnishings, Jewels nestled closer against Krade’s brawny chest, making a contented little purr as she traced the arc of his collarbone with one hand. The surveyor felt Flipper stir in his sleep, the most petite of their trio reactively molding himself against the arc of her back, wrapping an arm around to clutch possessively at her breast as he nestled his face against the nape of her neck. He made a soft little sound, a long, drawn-out squeak, like a quietly deflating balloon.
She giggled fondly. Even in his sleep, Flipper was a dork.
Sandwiched between them, Jewels felt safe and warm; She was needed, and she was loved. As a permanent resident of Inverxe, she lived in hell, but not a day went by when she didn’t have at least a moment where she was grateful. As long as she could come back to this little room, to watch terrible holo-novelas with Flipper, and help Krade learn to box, to play cards, and make plans, to sing, and eat, argue and complain, to fall asleep in a knot of tangled limbs after fucking her boys ‘til her eyes rolled back in her head and she forgot how to spell her name, Jewels could endure anything this horrible little moon had to offer.
The building shook, a minor tremor. It wasn’t unusual, and FP 428A was built to withstand them. But then it shook again. And again.
Some of Flippers tools slipped off the work-bench and clattered to the floor. Krade’s favorite mug leapt off the table and shattered to pieces.
It didn’t feel like a quake. It was too rhythmic – too regular.
The tremor came again, and cracks raced through the walls. Abruptly, Jewels was alone in her nest, the absence of her lovers a deafening vacuum, far colder than any mere lack of warmth. Another tremor, and the blankets were gone, another, the pillows – the work-bench, the stove, the posters and charts.
Jewels didn’t understand what was happening – where were Flipper and Krade?
The ceiling began to cave in – stalactites and slabs of stone shattering all around her as she sprinted, barefoot and weeping, for the door –
And emerged onto the streets of Markov. It was night – the backalleys and markets lit by neon. She was no longer nude, but clad in her old surveyor’s outfit – thermal envirosuit, utility belt and mask, boots and goggles.
The street shook, and the lights flickered – the neon taking on a distinctly golden hue. The crowds milled around her, unheeding, going blithely about the business of the night.
Jewels grabbed the nearest person by the shoulder – and was surprised to find it was someone she knew – the woman who’d lived down the hall in her building on Inverxe. Her midsection yawned wide, from pelvis to sternum a jagged gaping hole, but neither she nor Jewels seemed to think this was unusual.
Jewels asked her neighbor where the boys had gone, and why the ground kept shaking – but the woman just shook her head.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said, “how the living only ever ask the obvious questions?”
The dead woman wandered away, trailing snow and bits of ash. Unpurturbed, Jewels moved on.
The streets shook again. And again. In the distance, something hit the ground with an apocalyptic crash, shattering glass and broken concrete, and plumes of smoke began to drift across the sky. Strangled and mournful, a siren began to blare.
Jewels continued her search. Faces moved around her, half-remembered, mortally injured, people she had known, on Inverxe and on Cevanti: her parents, their skin and eyes yellowed with jaundice, eight years gone to alcohol and despair. Her boss, Ted, with his head turned ‘round backwards and his chest clawed open. Her childhood friend Dala, dead of an Akata bite at age nineteen.
None of them could tell her where the men she loved had gone.
She was growing desperate. A deep conviction, a gnawing certainty that something awful, unspeakable, had happened, was growing in her mind, and she couldn’t handle it.
If she could just find them, then she knew they would be safe.
A mist had begun to roll the streets, refracting the soft golden light of the increasingly monochrome, and increasingly unreliable, neon lighting. It cast alien shadows upon the walls, rendered the tenements and skyscrapers of Markov strangely liquid to the eye.
The crowds began to thin. Now it seemed that every person who caught her eye was either Flipper or Krade – until they turned around, offering only the face of an oddly familiar stranger, but never the same one twice.
The ground shook. A bolt of golden lightning as wide as a city street split the sky in a continuous arc, carving a swath through the neighborhood. Everything it touched that was not instantly incinerated detonated violently in its wake – and now, as far as Jewels could see, the entire city was on fire.
Still, Jewels searched. On and on, until there was no-one left to ask, nowhere left to look. The city burned to its foundations around her, and she strode an endless plain of burnt and twisted corpses, their carbonized flesh melted together, ravaged faces twisted into unrecognizable caricature.
It was all the same two faces – the same two bodies, copy-pasted across the planet entire. They didn’t look like anyone she knew, yet they filled her with such a tremendous emptiness, a grief and rage that jammed her psyche, assaulted all sense and order – and they were inescapable: They were everywhere she looked, the very ground upon which she stood.
The tremors came again, a thunderous tread, a titan’s footsteps. Everything now was cloaked in mist, lit in shades of limpid gold.
“How… curious.” Hissed a voice, bypassing her ears to echo in the bereft and ravaged chambers of her heart and mind.
“What, I wonder, is something so tiny and broken as you doing inside our dream?”
Last edited: