Darkness, Are You Lonely?

Prologue: The Glass Coriander


‘You deserve to die.’

She remembered pain.

She remembered the fire that burned behind her eyes and seared her sight into a multicolored blur of agony.

She remembered drowning in a sea of blood that pooled without and within, swirling behind her eyes and clogging the back of her otherwise parched throat.

‘I brought you here to die.’

The world disappeared in a wash of silence, broken only by the rhythmic pounding of the rain sheeting down on the metal of the platform beneath her head. The sound cut in and out like the faulty audio on an archaic video cassette.

‘I planned for you to die.’

She struggled to breath past what felt like a mouthful of cotton, desperate to get air from one side of the invisible blockade to the other.

She rolled her eyes skyward and saw the face of a boy she knew once-upon-a-time, a boy whose eyes were filled with frantic worry. She opened her mouth to tell him to stop, to think clearly and her words met with a current of water that ran down her throat and nose, obliterating any sound but her own weak, frantic choking.

‘I knew you would die.’

She heard that same voice, filled with the manic certainty of absolute madness, repeating the litany that had become her death knell.
The boy arrived at her side and she smiled up at him one last time, focusing on that last, desperate cry as her world faded into absolute black-

‘You deserve to die!’

~*~


The darkness receded slowly, reluctant to relinquish its newest playmate to the merciless world above. Eventually hunger and restless motion won out and two blurry, uncertain eyes opened to a world of absolute white.

The disorienting, pale expanse above her filled her vision for barely a moment before a face leaned over hers. It appeared merely head shaped in her blurred vision and it's chin moved as though its mouth worked soundlessly and hidden. She jerked away, badly startled and opened her mouth to scream, only to discover her throat already raw and her voice long gone. She gasped uselessly for a moment before realizing that a third party had entered the room and begun to talk. The empty face had moved out of her vision, perhaps to near the hall. Somewhat calmed, she settled down and tried to listen into their conversation.

The newcomer’s voice came through in starts and stops of incomplete sentences, her syntax jarring and unpleasant to listen to. “…may be disoriented … have trouble with sensory funct…lose…at a time…certainly missing sev….”

Eventually she stopped listening and tuned out the small non sequiturs she could understand. She rolled her head in a slow circle, taking in the sterile, white walls of the room she lay in. She struggled for a moment, puzzling over where she was and how she got there. A hospital, she realized. I’m in a hospital. She grinned slightly at that, proud that she had wrestled event that tiny morsel of common sense for her memory.

Her head felt as though someone had stuffed it with cotton and even the simplest of thoughts took an eternity to complete. Fortunately, after those first, frustrating minutes everything began to speed up. In her present state, she had no idea what normal was, but she lay back onto the firm, unforgiving bed and closed her eyes, breathing deeply and allowing the memories to come.

She was in a hospital, she rationalized, so she must have been in some sort of accident. She felt almost no pain, probably due to the anesthetic pumping through her veins. That could also explain the fuzzy, white noise sensation in the back of her head. Having puzzled that out, she moved on to her injuries. She felt nothing out of place anywhere on her body, no uncomfortable plaster or tightly wrapped bandages. Reaching no discernable conclusion, she moved her hand up to her head, only to have it catch and tug back towards the bed halfway there.

She had no more thought to untangle it than a hand wrapped around her wrist and a face consumed her vision, staring down at her with frantic hazel eyes. She dimly registered the eyes, but the longer she thought about where, the sharper the pain in her head became. Finally she gave up and dimly registered that he was saying her name, somewhere far above her, above the din of beeping medical machines and the doctors sterile voice. The litany of “Fay” accompanied her into a deep, calming sleep, the last thing in her vision the face of a boy she should never have forgotten.

There, the first chapter of My Darkness, Are You Lonely? has finally made it somewhere other than my computer. I will try to update the whole thing in this thread, but feel free to comment. I love to know what people think of my work and what things I can fix!