Midsummer Shadows

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ⇒ Ｈａｄｙｎ ⇐ XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAnd in the quiet night XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIX hear a V O I C EXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXXXXSweet and

stirringXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXSinging the sorrowful song of the dEaDXXXXXXXXXXXX

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He wasn’t sure if they were following him. The roaring of the shadows roared in his ears, deafening him, drowning all else out, except perhaps the cries of the dungeon itself. It was frightening to him how the dungeon seemed like a living thing, how it had always seemed like a living thing. Living, breathing, feeding off their fears. And now it was dying.

 

Another wall collapsed. Hadyn wasn’t sure where. He felt the tremor beneath his feet as the dungeon shook in pain, felt the stones and debris shower over him. Around him was the mad frenzy of shadows, ripping the living stone beast to shreds from the inside. Its tendrils cut into Hadyn’s arms, legs, face, all over his body. Each cut stung with the icy chill of Death.

 

He pressed Rhiannon’s limp body closer, protecting her from the maddening storm, taking comfort in the warmth emitting from her. She was the only Life left to him in this place of Death, and he couldn’t let that Life slip through his fingers no matter what. Or else he would go insane.

 

His leg touched something, something living, breath, moving. It wasn’t the dungeon.

 

His hand moved, instinctively trying to reach for the sabre that hung at his side. Every nerve in his body screamed that it was a demon, every muscle screamed to lash out, to slay the monster before it could slay him. But he stopped himself. He would have dropped Ree, and there was no way he would let himself do that.

 

His leg drew back, prepared to kick the creature away like kicking a cat (only he didn’t expect the demon to run away as easily as a cat), and then the pale yellow glow of the lamp stones somehow managed to pierce just briefly through the shrieking darkness, falling upon a very human shape.

 

It was a hybrid. He wasn’t sure how he knew, why it couldn’t have been a demon, another threat upon his life. He wasn’t sure at all. He just knew, and there was no time now for any doubts.

 

Hadyn knelt down, well aware of the cell that was crumbling down to little sticks and stones only a few metres away from him. There wasn’t much time left at all.

 

“Go back!” he hissed, his voice trembling beneath the heavy note of urgency. “You have to go back. It’s the only way out.”

 

Something crashed to the ground right behind him, narrowly missing him. He looked over his shoulder, looked at the merciless darkness that surrounded them on all sides. He could see the faint yellow lights floating like lost lanterns on the dark, immeasurable Pacific, blinking on and off, in and out, clinging to whatever life they had left to them, but it was impossible to gauge the distance, impossible to guess how close or how far they were. They could have been on the other side of the sea for all Hadyn knew.

 

. What do I do? He turned back to the snow-haired hybrid, feeling the desperation weigh even more heavily upon himself. How was that even possible when the desperation had already filled up to the brim, had already spilled over and drowned him in its choking liquid?

 

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t leave this stranger here, this person who had never wanted to be dragged into this mess, this person who could very well die in vain like the rest of them, but he couldn’t help him either. There was no way. Absolutely no way. Call him selfish, call him heartless, call him cruel, but there was no way he was going to trade Rhiannon’s life for the life of a boy whom he had just set eyes upon scarcely ten seconds ago.

 

“Can you walk?” he asked, just barely able to raise his voice above that of the dungeon and the shadows. It was a useless question and he knew it; he wouldn’t be able to help the guy if the answer turned out to be no. The poor guy would just have to crawl after him (assuming the guy still had the strength left in his limbs and the will left in his spirit to do so). But still, Hadyn asked it, because he didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t know what else to do but to pray.

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[Mangaholic]

Beauty is a sin...

... But Sin is beautiful...

 

 

THINGS WERE NOT GOING THE WAY BYRN HAD PLANNED. NOT AT ALL.

 

She had expected the mission to go smoothly, to go easily. She had expected the little hybrids to fight back a bit; it would have been boring if they had all just sat there, stiff as stone with fear. She had expected some spice to this delicacy she loved above all else, some challenge, some fun, some thrill. But she hadn’t expected Zie to die so easily, hadn’t expected this damn dungeon to come crashing down on her just when she was getting started, hadn’t expected her cloths and her precious face to get ruined by that damn brat. Where was he anyways?

 

Byrn whipped her head about, her rat teeth baring in vicious frustration. Her human guise had slipped away now that the little red-eyed brat had fled from her, and the fact did nothing to calm her down. She wanted to tear his eyes out, to rip his face off for the indignity he had caused her. If that strange wintry-eyed girl had turned beautiful by Byrn’s hands, this boy was going to become, by far, her most hideous work of art.

 

The earth shook beneath her. She buried her claws in the stone bricks, clinging on as debris rained down upon her uncomely form. She couldn’t see the brat anywhere, in spite of her keen eyes; usually she had no trouble whatsoever picking her prey out from the darkness. It was one of the few great quirks about being a hideous Changeling. She always loved seeing the expression of sheer shock and horror on the faces of her victims when she leapt at them seemingly out of nowhere. It was like a drug to her.

 

But this was no ordinary darkness. It was thick, rippling, moving, alive. It wasn’t one darkness, but multiple, each with a mind of its own. Each with the single intent to destroy. Byrn couldn’t stay here much longer, or she could end up being destroyed as well.

 

She didn’t like the thought of running away. His Highness wouldn’t punish her fatally, she knew that. He wasn’t the type to do so. But the others, her fellow Changelings—they would be a problem, a major pain in the ass. They would take her failure as an excuse to rip her to shreds. They were such backstabbers, that they were—not that Byrn wasn’t one herself. It was like the stereotype of demons—that they would all turn on one another when there was nothing left to slaughter. It wasn’t completely true—the stereotype—but it ran pretty true amongst the Changelings. What a nasty batch they were.

 

Byrn thought of Zie then. Zie had never exactly turned his back on her, had never tries to backstab her. Sure, there were times when he had tried to kill her, but she had sort of deserved it (not that she would admit that), and in the end, it had always simply become a joke to them. Suddenly, Byrn felt guilty for having allowed Zie to die so easily. He had actually been a pretty great demon to have around. There weren’t that many other demons out there in the world that could have had the same said about them.

 

The remorse quickly evaporated away, however. She was a demon, and that’s how demons are. If they had to give something they turned out to cherish, they would give it, no matter what. It was for the greater good, after all. All their sacrifices would eventually add up to something great. No . . . wait . . . what was she talking about? What sacrifice? What greater good? She was simply paying back the debt of a thousand years, a debt burned into her blood, into her mind, her body, her soul (that is, if she even had one). A debt burned into every demon that existed on this Earth. It was their purpose, and they would have to heed it, no matter what. They were demons, after all. Still . . . she would miss Zie, as much as her demon heart tried to deny it.

 

She was going to have to escape now. She could always have her revenge on that brat some other time. She had a feeling that she would meet him again, and she sure couldn’t wait for that. Now, though, was not the time to dwell on vengeful thoughts that were probably going to ultimately kill her.

 

She scurried toward the cell doorway. In spite of the impenetrable darkness, she could tell where the exit was. It wasn’t too hard of a thing to figure out; she had already been facing the cell doorway in the first place.

 

She caught sight of something strange then, as she neared her escape: a mass of writhing shadows that was very much the side of a teenage human. That brat, no doubt.

 

A surge of demonic anger tore through her body, willing her to fling herself at the hybrid. But she didn’t. It wasn’t exactly the best of times to get herself into a fight, even if it was a fight she was pretty sure she could win. She crawled toward him, hoping to pass him without his notice. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction that his stupid shadows had indeed managed to scare her off.

 

As she neared him, she noticed something else. A little speck of yellow light. And another. And another. There were more of them coming. And that meant the other demons had failed as well. Byrn couldn’t help the feeling of glee that arose within her. Misery loves company, after all. It didn’t matter to her that they had failed, that this entire mission had turned out to be a failure. It was all to her amusement, despite everything that was happening know. She wasn’t too worried about the newcomers; she could easily sneak past all of them, what with the cover of dark and whatnot. What she had to worry about right now was the brat, who just happened to be blocking the doorway now. She was right next to him right now, so close to passing him, so close to escaping, so close to continuing the life of a vicious demon. Just a few more steps.

 

[lilyice]

• • 

 

 

♥

"Can you walk?"

 

The question was like music to his ears. When Gordon first heard—or thought he heard—a voice calling out to him, hissing at him and telling him to get out through the exit, he believed that he was hallucinating once again. He kept on telling himself that it was a voice inside his own head, but then his feeling came back to him. He felt a bump on his arm. It was warm—it was human. Right then, right there, he could have cried with joy, no matter how embarrassed he would've been later on (assuming that there was a "later" of course). Another person was down here, and he sounded like he knew what to do. Despite the walls of the dungeon that were cracking and the debris piling on top of them, Gordon was grateful. A sudden surge of adrenaline, added to his rekindled will to live, lifted the teen up onto his feet.

 

"Yeah, I'll be fine," Gordon replied shakily to his companion. His voice was hoarse from the long time spent silent, and not in the least stable, but it was true that his body was strong enough. From the corner of his eye, he noticed dim traces of light that seemed to flicker like a weak candlelight just about to be extinguished, just coming up behind the guy. More people? So he hadn't been dreaming after all.

 

With another shake from the roots of the dungeon, Gordon told himself to move fast. Turning back towards the way he came from, the teen lifted his arms up to protect his head, and trudged back—and past—his cell without a single look back. As he passed the cell door, Gordon was aware of a massive darkness beside him, and a different chilling and malevolent presence. A hybrid? A demon? He didn't care then.

 

Turning his head to make sure that his savior (it sounded so cheesy, but it was probably true in a sense) was still with him, Gordon made a motion with head. "Well, you lead on. I'll follow." As he moved to let the other person past, another thought struck him. "There are other hybrids behind us, right?"

 

He idly wondered if he would see the girl again. The one he carried to the carriage. Evelyn, he fondly recalled her name.

• • ♥

Edited July 11, 2011 by lilyice

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ⇒ Ｈａｄｙｎ ⇐ XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAnd in the quiet night XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIX hear a V O I C EXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXXXXSweet and

stirringXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXSinging the sorrowful song of the dEaDXXXXXXXXXXXX

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ His prayers were answered. The boy could walk.

 

It was almost refreshing how much of the burden on Hadyn’s heart had been lifted at the sight of the sight of the other young man rising to his feet. Had the hybrid been unable to walk, Hadyn felt sure he would have collapsed beneath the strain of all this. He wasn’t sure whether the relief was for the other boy or for himself, whether it was for the fact that the other boy still had a chance at surviving or that he, Hadyn, wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of leaving someone to die. Wh hadn’t he felt the same for the other hybrids when they had still been upstairs, when they had had yet to enter the anteroom of Hell? Why had he insisted so fiercely, without a thought to the present state of the others, that they head immediately to the dungeon, that they wait before catching their breath? They were hybrids, sure, but so was this one. Why hadn’t he cared enough about the others?

 

But the answer was obvious. He hadn’t been Hadyn upstairs; he had been someone else. Someone who had been forced to relive his past. Someone who had had to bear witness to the deaths of yet another family member, yet another fragment of his crumbling world. Someone who had gone insane in that small fraction of time, in that little grain of sand in the hourglass that meant nothing to eternity. What had he to care for when there was nothing left to him?

 

Besides, up there, Death had not yet been on their doorstep, despite the demons that were pouring into the mansion then; here, Death was. At any given moment, both of them could be crushed to death. And up there, the hybrids had had a choice. They could have followed him, or they could have simply stayed and hoped for the best. It wouldn’t have been his fault if they had perished or been captured for their decisions. But what choice had this white-haired guy had? He couldn’t choose whether or not he could walk. It would have been Hadyn’s choice whether or not to abandon him. If he died, it would have been entirely Hadyn’s fault.

 

His new companion turned around and began blindly making his way toward the end of this dungeon hall. It wasn’t long before they passed by the cell that held the Winter and Dark children; the white-haired guy must not have crawled very far before encountering Hadyn. Something dark whipped past Hadyn’s head, a blade of shadow, skinning his ear. The thing left such a cold, such a deathly imprint on his skin that he could literally feel the warmth of his blood trickling out of the little gash.

 

There was something crouching in the doorway, something wrapped in a cloak of the same belligerent shadows. A demon? No. It was one of the Dark children, one of the ones that was making the situation even worse for them.

 

Hadyn was tempted to peer into the cell, to see who else was still trapped within that cesspit, but another shadowy tendril flying at his head quickly changed his mind. He picked up his pace, almost running into the boy in front of him.

 

His companion turned his head back, perhaps aware of Hadyn’s near stumble. “Well, you lead on. I’ll follow,” he said, with a nod in the direction of the gate.

 

Hadyn nodded back and, without a word, began to move to the front. As he passed, his companion spoke again. “There are other hybrids behind us, right?”

 

The question surprised Hadyn. He hadn’t expected them to already know what they really were—not to mention, be so calm about it. Maybe Brunor and Belynos had told them more than he had expected. Which was a good thing, of course. That meant he had less explaining to do, less gaping mouths and disbelieving eyes and incredulous questions to deal with. On the flip side, he didn’t know how much they knew, or if they even all knew the same thing. It could have all been rumors, for all he knew. He was probably going to have to explain everything anyways. That was, if there was anyone left to explain to.

 

“Yeah. They were following me, but I’m not sure if they still are.” Hadyn looked over his shoulder as he answered, and a realization dawned on him.

 

There had been a hint of hopefulness in the other boy’s voice, not one of fear, as if he hoped that someone he knew—someone he cared about—was following after them, wasn’t tapped in the demon-infested mansion above.

 

Why? Do you know one of them?” Hadyn opened his moth to ask, then quickly bit back the casual question. Instead, he said, “Don’t worry, though. It looks like they are.”

 

In all honesty, Hadyn couldn’t tell what in the world the others were doing. The lights were still there, which meant the hybrids were still there, but it was impossible to tell if they were really moving or if that was all a trick of the shadows. Were the other hybrids just standing there, caught between Death and Death? He didn’t know. He was just afraid that telling the truth would compel the other boy to turn back, to try to find whomever it was that he cared so much about.

 

Something solid, something dark and flat, materialized out of nowhere, a shade lighten than the black that surrounded it. It was the wall. It was the gate. It was the match that rekindled the dying hope in Hadyn’s heart.

 

“We’re here,” he said aloud, unable to keep the relief out of his voice. And what was the point of doing so, anyways? He had the right to be unimaginably relieved, didn’t he? He had every right. “Thank God.”

 

He let his knees give way beneath him, kneeling before the gate that seemed like any other wall in this forsaken place. He set Rhiannon down on the ground, gently as if he were afraid to stir her from her sleep. He had nothing to fear, though; she was too lost in the realm of sleep to notice the movement.

 

With one palm, Hadyn traced the surface of the wall, as if to check if it were really there, if it weren’t a figment of his imagination. It was cold, frigidly cold, and yet calming, so unlike the cold of the darkness.

 

“Stay back,” he warned the other boy. He reached into his boot, pulled out the dagger hidden there, a dagger his father had taken from a demon, or so they said. He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves. Carefully wielding the dagger, he drew the blade across the palm of his left hand. Blood immediately welled up, and he pressed his palm against the cold wall. He closed his eyes. Calm down, Hadyn. You know the words. You know them better than Ceth and Ree. You can do this.

 

The words began to flow from his lips:

“Aranái na taérn, namine sialnur, namine kasur.

Dake mo cechái e ione mora naé.

Dake mo cechái e mine ta lorn.

Dake mo cechái e naminagh an rhiwen Áilleach.”

 

He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. He had said it, thank God. He had said it.

 

His blood rolled down the wall in dark streaks.

 

The wall. Why?

 

Hadyn’s eyes snapped open. “It’s not opening?” he whispered, almost in a daze. No! Why? Why isn’t it opening for me? Why? Did I say it wrong?

 

He closed his eyes again, pressing his hand harder against the wall. He repeated the summon again, the desperation growing ever more clearly in his voice. But the gate still didn’t open.

 

“Why?”

 

He stared at the blood trickling down the wall, the blood that was his.

 

Because you’re not an Áilleach.

 

The little voice in the back of his heart struck exactly the fear and doubt he had held in his heart. He wasn’t an Áilleach.

 

The gate could only be open by an Áilleach, for its guardian heeded only the words of that family. The only exception was anyone brought into the family. Liliana and Brunor were examples of that exception; Hadyn was the third. When Belynos had taken them down here to show them the exact path to the hidden tunnels, Hadyn had had the chance to open the gate himself, and it had indeed opened. Yet, something in the back of his head told him that he could never be a part of this family, that he could never been an Áilleach, that the gate would never open for him when he truly needed it. He was right.

 

A portion of the ceiling fell by the white-haired hybrid. Hadyn heard only the sound of it, amidst the sound of so many other things, and it did nothing to calm his growing panic.

 

. No. Please. Rhiannon’s face stared up at him, chalky white from the touch of Death. I was supposed to protect her. I wasn’t supposed to let this happen. Please, this can’t be happening.

 

His bloody hand curled into a fist; he slammed it against the wall, again and again, heedless of the pain.

 

“Damn it! Open up! Please open up! Please! You can’t leave us here!”

 

He pressed his forehead against the wall, leaning over Rhiannon’s senseless body, shaking with anguish and frustration. It was all over. It was all over. All because of him. In the end, he couldn’t do anything either.

 

Hadyn.

That voice again.

Hadyn . . . . What have you done to my Hadyn? Where is he? What have you done to him?!

 

Hadyn choked. Something dark, liquid, fell onto Rhiannon’s jacket. Blood. His blood, dripping from his mouth.

 

No. It was happening all over again.

 

The pain tore through Hadyn’s body without warning, tearing through every bone, every nerve, every muscle. It was as if his insides were being ripped out of him. He coughed, and more blood splattered out from his mouth, splattered over Rhiannon, splattered over the wall. And he kept coughing, kept choking up his blood, coating the apathetic gate with the dark liquid. There was no end to it. The blood just kept coming and coming and coming, a piece of himself flowing out with each droplet.

 

Something flashed before his eyes. Fire. Dancing. Laughing. Mocking. Someone screaming in the background. And then the pain. Would it ever end?

 

The wall rumbled, snapping Hadyn out of his vision. Blood coated his chin, still dripping onto his shirt and Rhiannon’s. But at least it had slowed. For some reason, it had slowed. And he was still alive. How? After all this blood loss, how could he still be alive?

 

The wall trembled again, and a fissure appeared in front of Hadyn, splitting the stone in half. The gate. It was opening.

 

For a second, Hadyn could only stare. Could only stare and wonder: Why?

 

He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it at all.

But it didn’t matter now.

 

Scooping Rhiannon back into his arms, Hadyn staggered to his feet. “Come on. We have to go,” he said, his voice weak and pained. He wasn’t even sure whom he was talking to. The words had just come out on their own accord.

 

He stumbled into the dark tunnel, into the embrace of the Earth, suddenly not knowing who he was anymore.

 

And behind him, the dungeon began to fall, falling piece by piece, about to crush any who remained in its once mighty chambers.

 

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ Translation: Guardian of Earth, save us from suffering, save us from death.

Translation:Take my blood, make it payment.

Translation:Take my blood, throw wide your gates.

Translation:Take my blood to keep it safe.

Edited February 21, 2012 by Mangaholic

[lilyice]

• • 

 

 

♥

He could see that his question startled the other person, but Gordon didn’t think it was so unusual to ask. He was just worried about their welfare, was that surprising?

 

“Yeah. They were following me, but I’m not sure if they still are,” the boy answered after a second of thought, his tone indecipherable.

 

The redhead then opened and closed his mouth, as if rethinking whatever he was about to say, before speaking again and reassuring Gordon that they probably were. The boy heard the unspoken question, though, but since the other guy didn’t ask, he didn’t feel a need to supply him with an answer. What would he know, anyway? Did these people even understand what love and care truly meant? Or are they all just so caught up in their own survival that they’d push each other forward as sacrifices each time danger comes knocking on their door? A sudden hatred and loathing for the ones who dragged them here, just innocent sixteen-year-olds, into this kind of situation, made Gordon bristle and clench his teeth in anger. A malevolence that the boy himself didn’t know he possessed arose within him, threatening to take over. His stance became stiff, and his grey-blue eyes narrowed into slits, hardening at the sight of his companion. He felt as if he could stop right now, and strangle the other boy to death. His whole being itched to do something, to harm someone.

 

Almost as sudden as it came, the feeling was gone. It was like somebody just drenched his head in ice cold water. What was that? What was happening to him? Gordon trembled involuntarily, and dropped him head in shame. What had he just wanted to do? This wasn’t like him, he would never want to feel that way, towards anyone. Almost as if in a trance, he glanced forward again, at the boy. For the first time, it completely registered in Gordon’s mind that he was carrying someone. A girl, by the looks of the long, dark locks hanging down from her head. It was obvious that she was unconscious. He cared for her, Gordon realized, as he saw the way he was clutching his charge.

 

That fact was even more obvious when the redhead suddenly stopped at a wall, which only looked like a dead end to Gordon, announced that they were “here,” wherever that was, and very gently placed the girl on the ground. So he can be tender and caring after all, Gordon marveled.

 

“Stay back,” the boy suddenly told him, but it wasn’t like Gordon needed any warning. At the sight of the dagger produced from his boot, the hybrid instinctively took a step back. Ironically, it reminded him of his own little “adventure,” he decided to call it, with the rat demon. Who knew hidden weapons were so popular nowadays? Gordon watched as the boy slit his own palm with the dagger, and pressed it to the wall. He couldn’t help but flinch a little, as the sickly metallic scent of blood wafted up to him. Ever since a while ago, Gordon had realized that blood actually had a smell. Or maybe it was just him being cooped down here for too long.

 

As he watched, Gordon thought the whole procedure was like something he would read from a fiction book. The ritual, the recitation… But then again, aren’t we all freaks that would only make sense in a fantasy situation as well? he chuckled mirthlessly. A sudden exclamation from the other party made him snap his eyes up, and Gordon could only stare in a sick fascination as the boy yelled at the wall in frustration, for it to open up, hitting it repeatedly with a bloodied hand. Gordon wanted to tell him to stop, that it was alright, but the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. Somehow, he felt that it would be wrong for him to speak at this moment. This was their territory, their pain, their troubles; he wouldn’t be able to comfort them in any way, regardless of what he said.

 

Suddenly, without any warning, the boy began to cough. A dark liquid spilled out from his mouth, and Gordon watched in disbelief. Is that blood? Is he dying? The white-haired teen wanted to do something to help, anything, but what was there to do? What does one do when another person is choking on a mouthful of their own blood? Pat them on the back and hope that everything goes well? Gordon made a motion to bend down, to ask if there was anything he could do to help (though the question sounded stupid even to his own ears), but he was stopped by a sudden rumble.

 

Quite literally, the wall tore itself apart, only to reveal a hidden tunnel on its other side. With his eyes wide, Gordon watched as his companion—who is still, amazingly, alive despite all that’s happened—dragged himself to his feet, now carrying the girl again, and ushered him into the tunnel, their escape route.

 

Gordon hesitated, standing at the tunnel entrance, looking unsure of himself. He wanted to wait for the others before he went in, to make sure that they’re all okay, especially a particular person. He had a feeling that if he went in now, there was no turning back, and he’d have to continue on even if something terrible was to happen. But it was as if Fate didn’t want to give him that choice, because just then, two tendrils of shadows whipped past his arms, slitting one of the them with such force that the boy stumbled forward, and into the tunnel. Gordon felt the blood trickle down his arm, but it was just as well, since the dungeon groaned once again, and a large block of stone fell right where Gordon was standing just a few seconds ago.

 

Taking this as an indication that he should move on, Gordon followed the other boy down. With one last glance back, he sincerely hoped that everything would turn out alright.

• • ♥

[lilyice]

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • 

In the middle of everything, Kathy had found herself holding onto one of those stone-like, energy-draining lamps. Or flashlights. Or whatever. The trek down to the dungeon was uneventful, thankfully, save for the heavy breathing that was all around her. She was aware that even she herself was breathing raggedly, but Kathy didn’t know if that was from the nervousness she felt, or the physical tiredness that her body was enduring. Probably both.

 

While mindlessly following the large group of people, the blonde reflected back on her last few days, a hobby she’d developed while bored at the mansion. She thought about what had happened to her, her transformation, Forest Park, the demons, the hybrids, the Umbralatronis, and especially her brothers. At times like these, she missed them so. They could always cheer her up, no matter the situation, and Jason always had a joke or two up his sleeve. They were terrible, but his sister never told him so. She’d always laugh at them, watching as Jonathan sternly told him to drop the idiocy because they really were dumb. Were they worrying about her right now? She’d told them that she’d spend two week at her friends’ houses, but…Kathy liked to think that they were indeed worried. She knew they could take care of their own food, but what about that useless dad of hers? The blonde sighed. She absentmindedly noticed that she was sighing a lot these days.

 

Suddenly, her surroundings darkened. Massive shadowy…things…whipped around her body, crashing into the dungeon walls and wrapping themselves around the group. Kathy wanted to scream, but a tendril of the shadow brushed past her face and a tiny sob came out instead. As if in response to the intruding attack, the walls of the dungeon cracked with a deafening roar, and pieces of stone came raining down on them. In front of them, the dreadful shadows only grew. It was as if they were alive.

 

“If we go through that, we might die or we might live. But if we turn back now, we’ll die for sure.” The voice seemed like it was coming from far, far away. Had they been separated? Was he still in front of them?

 

Well you aren’t exactly giving us a choice, are you? she grimaced, wanting to shout this out loud. What was the point of saying that when it was obvious they’d have to go on? Instinctively shielding her head with her one available hand, Kathy attempted to look around. She could see the forms of the others. Was that Danni ahead of her? Breckin? Mark? Sadine? They were still there, she could feel that, but Kathy couldn’t gauge the distance between them. She would just have to continue to walk in what she hoped was the right direction.

 

Lifting the flashlight-lamp up to her face, Kathy squinted ahead, and was sure she saw something like a cell. She hadn’t seen that before, so she must still be moving forward the right way, seeing as how this part of the dungeon was one-way only. By now, she’d lost all sense of where the others were, and her voice failed her. She tried calling out their names, but to her ears, her voice sounded like a whisper. Perhaps she’d actually said the names out aloud, but there were no answers in any case.

 

“Danni! You there? Sadine?” the blonde tried again, looking frantically around. Debris was still falling. The dungeon sounded like it was being torn apart, piece by piece. Most of the shadows that flew past her didn’t touch, but Kathy’s heart still fluttered in fear. They were deadly, she knew. Perhaps she’d just been lucky until now. As if the shadows could hear her thoughts, a tendril suddenly wrapped itself around Kathy’s ankle, and pulled with a strength a mere shadow couldn’t possess. The girl found herself tripping and scratching her knees, the cloth torn and bloodied from the fight before. Wincing with pain, Kathy pushed herself up and limped forward.

 

I will not give up like this. I have to live to see Jonathan and Jason. Oh God, please just get me through this. I won’t ever ask for anything else ever again. Since her mother’s death, Kathy swore that she would never pray to God again, because there was no God. God would not have allowed her mother to die, if He truly cared. But right now, she hoped. If there was indeed a God, she just wanted Him to get her to safety, and if she survived, she would worship Him for the rest of her life, because she had lived to reunite with her family.

 

Each step was agonizingly painful, and Kathy’s knees felt like they would give way any second. In the midst of it all, she thought she heard another groan from the wall up head of her. Her eyes must be playing tricks on her, because Kathy saw the outline of a wall split open. Still, it was the only way to go, so she took another step forward, and another, slowly reaching her destination, and praying that she won’t die before she does.

[Skarx]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

 

 

Slowly following Hadyn, the group only source of light was those stones and he was now too far for her to see him. She had no idea what those lights were, but she sure was thankful for them in this impenetrable darkness. She disliked this place. Everything about it was a subject for her wrath and hatred, though she could only look around in mild disgust having no real intention of just kicking a wall. She had been brought her by force, the people here weren’t nice, they were attacked by demons and now she had to face the darkness filled with yells and other similar sound. If only it stayed that though… It seems Murphy’s Law really was real. You think you just hit the bottom of it, but soon after something else just comes charging at you just so you remember you could always dig under the barrel to get deeper or worst the hole already was there for you! Something, ahead to further increase they bad luck, had started destroying the place! Pieces of the ceiling started crumbling and she noticed that the walls were slowly cracking. She squeezed Mark’s helping arm even more out of stress and fear.

 

“What now?! Even the place is against us now.”

 

When something completely black suddenly slashed the ground close to her she yelled by surprise. Something was ahead and that something was very dangerous she could feel it. Her instinct were yelling at her to turn around and flee, but reason made her stay there since she knew full well that behind them it was just as bad if not worst. She could not resist a demon’s power with so little power. She was so useless… Why was her power so weak? She saw some of them make lightning out of their hands, fire and plants. She had just managed to make a flying demon cat wet… There must be something she could do? Realizing she was holding on to Mark so tightly she quickly let go and took a step back. To her surprise she had recover enough to be able to stand on her own.

 

“I-I’m sorry…”

 

Then she heard someone close by calling some people. She quickly walked to that person; it was that… lightning girl? Maybe, but now was not the time. She was sure Hadyn was ahead and so was there only exit. She put her hand on Kathy’s shoulder to attract her attention.

 

“Let’s hurry this place is falling apart. Your friends might be already ahead of us. We need to run from here NOW!"

 

With this she started walking toward the slashing darkness. It was dangerous yes, but between the demons and this she found the choice pretty simple. Without a second thought she started running weakly through the darkness toward what she believe was their guide’s voice. She was not going to wait for anyone, they knew what had to be done and she was in no condition to baby-sit anyone. Scared she didn’t realise that the water on her wet clothes was actually denser then it was supposed to be, reducing the damage from the hits she received. As she ran she noticed something yelling in the middle of the swirling darkness. A person? If that was the cause of the danger she might as well try something stupid. She emptied the rest of her bottle of water and yelled herself as she tried to focus on her target like she had done to the cat, praying that it would work. She never had a chance to see if it did since one blade came quickly from the side hitting her hard on her shoulder and sending her on the ground a bit further. She could feel a deep stinging pain on her shoulder, but something caught her attention much faster. A door! On the wall there was a door and she could see some people inside walking away. She stood and yelled back from where she was to attract the others here with a hint of hope.

 

“Hurry! There’s an exit here!”

 

She then entered the cave and waited on the other side where she could not see the darkness. She hoped someone would get pass the darkness too and join them. She could not wait for long though as her guide was slowly walking away.

 

"Wait for us!"

Edited July 14, 2011 by Skarx

[Kira1]

As she followed Hadyn through the hall that was only illuminated by the lantern or flashlights or whatever it was that she held in her hand. The darkness seemed to stretch for forever in front of them with no end in sight. Hadyn said he knew the way, and Danni just hoped that he truly did. It would really suck if they became stuck down there. However, she pushed this dark thought from her mind. Thinking such things would do them no good now. She had to stay hopeful that they would make it out.

 

She hoped they would make it out. She wanted to return home again to see her parents and return to the life she knew. At first, she thought this wouldn't be any big deal, but suddenly they were being attacked by demons and then forced into a dark dungeon where even more crazy things were happening. At the end of this, there had better be something worth the while. Though, a this point it seemed answers were the best kind of prize she would receive after they made it out alive from wherever they were.

 

Her world was shaken again when a wall collapsed and something came out like a torrent. She had no idea what it was, but according to Hadyn, they had to walk past it in order to continue on. Gathering up whatever courage she had, Danni continued to follow after Hadyn, pausing now and then when she felt things slash at her skin. Instinctively she put her arms up to protect her face, dashing forward a bit before stopping again as she felt the icy touch of whatever was around her.

 

The walls groaned again and Danni wondered if this place was alive or something. She wouldn't put it past this place considering all she had seen so far. Checking ahead to see where Hadyn was, Danni noticed another person with him. This place was getting crazy so Danni didn't bother questioning who it was. For now she would just follow Hadyn.

 

She came to a stop when Hadyn did, wondering what he was going to do now. He muttered some words after setting Rhiannon down, and Danni waited in silence for something to happen. Though, what happened next wasn't exactly what she had been hoping for. She expected an exit to be provided and that they would then be safe. Instead, Hadyn began shouting about the door not opening before he began coughing.

 

Was that blood? Hadyn was coughing up blood!? She had no idea what was going on with this scenario and so she just stood there, still clutching her only light source. Eventually his coughing subsided and he seemed to be fine again. He picked up Rhiannon, saying they had to go, and stepped forward into more darkness.

 

Danni had hoped for light of a safe place, but at least they were moving forward. Her steps to get through were hurried when she had the distinct feeling that the dungeon they were in was going to collapse. Quickly she made it through the door after Hadyn, hoping that they would reach someplace safe soon.

 

She still had questions that needed to be answered, but getting to a safe place seemed like the ideal thing to do at the moment.

[Elsendor]

• • • • • • • • • • • • • 

Children have an innate sense of whether they are wanted and cared for or not. They can see past your plastered smiles, they notice when you check your watch because you’re in a hurry and you would rather be elsewhere. They know, better than they will know when they grow older, whether they are loved or just a nuisance.I wanna go home. I just wanna go home. Was that too much to ask? Fighting back rising tides of panic, he tugged even more urgently on the mud boy's sleeve. I don't like danger, I don't like darkness, and I definitely don't like blood. I don't even watch horror movies! I don't wanna be a hero. Can't someone else handle that? There had to have been some mistake, but deep down inside, he knew there wasn't. He was supposed to do something big, and God help him, he didn't want to. He was a little person, a normal person, a get up, eat breakfast, go to school person. He got A's and B's and one, inevitable C every year, he was nice to his parents, and he never, never did anything unexpected. Like dying his hair green.

 

But something big was happening, and cats weren't nice anymore, and he had something to do with it.

 

He gulped. Okayokayokay... think, Sen. What do you do when you get kidnapped by magical flying horses and attacked by demons and you're running for your life? What would Bilbo Baggins do? Why am I asking The Hobbit for advice? God, I should've finished The Lord of the Rings because the answers were probably there. Or something.

 

And then the voice of an angel broke sent his train of thought careening off the tracks. Or. Rather. Well, it sounded like one through all that chaos. Yeah.

 

“Never mind him. I’ll help you. Don’t worry. We’ll get out of here safe and sound.”

 

Fire flooded into his ears until he thought his hair would catch. Like a forest. It was green, anyways. Caught. Looking like a ten-year-old. In front of a GIRL.

 

"I-i-i-i'm fine. Really!" I'm sixteen. I'm a MAN. What made it worse was that she was absolutely sincere. Like, she thought he was some little fifth-grader who'd somehow unfortunately accidentally gotten caught up in this mess. And she was a little bit concerned about him. He'd never felt so humiliated in his life.

 

"I'll...um. I'll just be getting up and following the others now." Pretending to scratch his ears so she wouldn't see how red they were, he forced himself to his feet--OW--and stumbled bravely after the others, pointedly ignoring the lightrocks. Because sixteen-year-old men totally don't use lightrocks. Right?

Edited December 31, 2011 by Elsendor

[Elsendor]

 

Only a cravat?

Oh, my dear sir. A cravat is the apotheosis of all neckwear. A cravat distinguishes a man of refinement from the merely ordinary it sneers at the severity of the stock. It is the only item of dress the expresses true individuality. And whether is be made of lace or silk or the finest loom it thrives on ingenuity, on originality, and above all on personality down to the last skilled of twist of bow or knot.

- Percy Blakeney, The Scarlet PimpernelOdd's fish.

 

A shivering, shuddering vapor of a breath still hovered in the air as the hybrids began to follow after their Umbralatronis—master? captor? leader? It hardly mattered anymore, to the vapor called Ancadel. His beautiful physical form, his gorgeous, sleek violet fur that he had groomed so carefully, his eyes—oh, great Lucifer, his emerald eyes, that could set any lovely Myr queen swooning—all gone. Gone. GONE! And his own being, tied to his vaporous ashes (oh, what a good insurance policy it had been to bespell his very matter with his existence), was beginning rapidly to dissipate, for without eyes, nothing would anchor him and hold him together. His insurance had prepared him for stabbings, impaling, eye-putting-outings, death-by-torturings, and even flaying. No such death could kill him, could banish the life from his body. But incineration??? What good was it, remaining alive, tied to your every atom, if your atoms were scattered across the universe? A very simple, very plain word rose in his mind, and for once, he didn’t mind plain, because the word was a good, solid Damn.

 

All very like that Marlowe to leave him in this predicament. So like a Sidh, to leave him to his own devices, bereft of form, drifting rapidly apart and losing his hold on himself. The demmed thing. To leave his poor, defenseless partner like this, the soulless, heartless—who was he kidding? Dear Marley, a Sidh. Of course he was soulless. But heartless? With all that human tissue, there was bound to be a heart or two or three somewhere in there. Oh, he really was falling apart now. Unfair, cruel, traitorous—

 

Of course, Ancadel neglected this entire time the very insignificant fact that he had, as a matter of fact, never mentioned his insurance to the Sidh, which raised the question of exactly how said Sidh was to know he was alive at all?

 

He really was dissipating. He could feel whole millimeters between his atoms, and some of the hybrids had already disappeared.

 

Frantically, the vapor that was Ancadel began searching for a host. A host, a host, a body, a corpse, be it fair or mutilated (though he preferred fair), anything, anything with eyes, he knew he could take. A simple spell, to tie your being to a form with eyes. Clever really, maybe the only clever idea that human urban legends (oh, hell, Bleach, of all things) had come up with, but some hedgewitch had taken up the idea and run with it, and hence, he-might-still-have-a-chance-if-only-he-could-just-find-a---a---aarrrgh--- He felt himself drifting apart, and dove desperately for the nearest pair of eyes he could find.

 

Again with the damn.

 

Edited July 19, 2011 by Elsendor

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXX Sadine Leila PiromaneXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX♬ . ♪ • ♩´¯` ♬ • ♪ . ♫XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗

XXThere are those who say I'm impatient,

XXimpetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing.

XXWhether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself.

XXBut whatever I am —and this ought to be made very clear—I am a very serious woman.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX —Bella Abzug

╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX✿XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Sadine watched as the kid’s ears turned a brilliant shade of fiery red. What? Was it really that shocking that an older girl was talking to him? Okay, maybe an elementary school kid wouldn’t typically be exposed to that many high-school-aged girls, but still. Blushing? At a time like this? Really now?

 

Wait. What if he’s not really some random fifth grader? Now that Sadine thought about it, the rest of them were all about the same age. It would be really random if there was a little fifth grader mixed in with the lot of them.

 

Holy crap. Maybe he’s a high-schooler who just hasn’t reached puberty yet.

 

“I-i-i-I’m fine! Really!” he stuttered.

 

Okay, so let’s see. Was that an elementary crush his stammering was hinting at, or just absolute humiliation that she had just treated him like a little kid?

 

“I’ll . . . um. I’ll just be getting up and following the others now.”

 

Okay, that was definitely humiliation she was hearing.

 

The green-haired kid—or teenager or young man or whatever—stood up and brushed past her, limping slightly but stoically ignoring it. Like he was trying to regain the dignity that he had just lost. The dignity that Sadine had made him lose.

 

He has a really high-pitched voice, Sadie thought, as if that was the only thing she should have been thinking about at the moment. Yeah, I know it’s not. But seriously, he has a really high-pitched voice.

 

 

 

 

Sadine picked her way carefully down the dungeon steps. The exhaustion from using her fire powers had ebbed away for the most part, but her legs still felt a bit wobbly, and she didn’t like the idea of falling down a story’s worth of stairs, even if all those people at the bottom would probably cushion her fall, because hell, that would be mortifying, if nothing else.

 

Her foot slipped, just slightly; her hand shot out against the wall, regaining her balance. Stop it, Karma. You can embarrass me later.

 

Karma seemed to hear; the flame-headed girl managed to make it to the bottom of the steps, absolutely safe and sound. Well, safe from falling down the stairs, that was. There were still the demons to worry about.

 

For a second, Sadine looked over her should, back up at the iron door. Should she have closed it? There were still some other people out there—that loud-mouthed mud dude, for one. Yeah, maybe she should close it. Kill two birds with one stone. She was pretty sure everyone else would be really grateful if she locked him out.

 

No . . . Karma will probably make me fall down the stairs this time.

 

Her eyes lingered on the open door for a fraction of a second longer, and then she turned to follow the rest of the group. She could see the blond heads of Kathy and Breckin up ahead at the near front, in spite of their less-than-average heights. She had the urge to push her way though the group to catch up to them, but she stopped herself: she didn’t want the others to think that she was moving to the front so that she would have a higher chance of surviving should the demons catch up to them. Besides, if that did happen, they probably all had the same chance of surviving—nil—especially if the only one who knew exactly where they were supposed to be going somehow got killed.

 

Let’s not think so far, shall we, Sadine? she thought, sweeping her gaze over the dungeon cells. Save for the little lights at the front, it was completely dark—the damn gloomiest place she had ever been to in her entire life. She felt bad for anyone who had ever been locked down here. If she was ever one of them, she’d probably go crazy in an hour.

 

As they delved deeper and deeper into the tortuous maze, Sadine began to hear something in the distance. Something strange. Something ominous. Something that probably wasn’t very good.

 

Right on.

 

Sadine caught sight of the dark whipping things before the group suddenly stopped. They were shadows, something in the back of her head told her. Shadows. Alive and destroying the entire place. And they—Sadine and the other teens—were supposed to walk through that.

 

She was in the chaos before she realized it. Shadows all around her, cutting into her skin. The entire place howling, crumbling down around her. She covered her face with her hands, trying to protect it. Where was everyone? Were they still alive? Was she still alive? She didn’t know. She was so cold, so scared, so desperate. Where was the fire she had felt within her when she had killed the demon cat?

 

Someone was calling out her name—or maybe it was the shadows. She wasn’t sure. She opened her mouth, ready to call back, but a cloud of dust and debris caught in her throat, choking her. Her words turned into wheezy, breathless coughs, inaudible in the surrounding destruction. If she died here, no one but the shadows would hear her.

 

But she wasn’t going to let herself die. Hell no was she going to let herself die in this god awful place in this goddamn pathetic way. Hell no. Hell no!

 

Still coughing, still unable to breathe, Sadine pushed on. There were so many things she wanted to do, so many people she wanted to see. Breckin. Kathy. Even her parents, who had almost never been home with her. What would they do if she never came back? Probably regret all the times they could have spent together.

 

She caught sight of something then—actually managed to catch sight of something in this complete darkness. The wall ahead of her—it had split in half, and beyond the crack was a tunnel. The secret tunnel. So they really did have a way out of this mess.

 

Spurred on by this new hope, Sadine ran. She tripped over the broken walls, the wayward manacles, the things she didn’t want to think about; she scratched her knees, her ankles, her arms, her face; she screamed and cried and sobbed and coughed; but never once did she completely fall. Never once did she stop. Never once did she give up. And at last, she made it.

 

It was strange how the lashing shadows seemed to just disappear the moment she stepped into the tunnel—as if something was keeping them all out. But she didn’t care. She saw Kathy ahead of her, ahead of several other people, and she rushed to the blond girl’s side, ignoring the stinging pain stemming from the thirteen dozen cuts all over her body.

 

“Kathy! Kathy! Are you okay?” she yelled out, not caring what the others thought. And then she noticed something.

 

Breckin. Where was Breckin?

Edited July 19, 2011 by Mangaholic

[Mangaholic]

ㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨAlina Aderyn Tomescu ㄨㄨㄨㄨ

She wants to go home, but nobody’s home ㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨIt’s where she lies, broken inside

ㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨ With no place to go, no place to go to dry her eyes ㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨㄨ Broken inside ♪

 

 

Wasn’t it ironic that she hated the darkness so much?

 

She hated it. Absolutely hated it. Why could it go away? Why could it just leave her alone? Why? Why?

 

The darkness had terrified her since she was a little girl. Maybe that was normal. Maybe every other five-year-old child was afraid of the dark too. But something told her she shouldn’t have been. Something told her she should have been comfortable in the darkness, should have felt even safer in it than she did in broad daylight, in the sun’s warming, golden rays. But she wasn’t. She hated it, loathed it, despised it. Why did it scare her so much? Why did she just want to break down and cry every time they locked her up in it? Why? Why? Why?

 

Maybe because it had always tried to speak to her.

Like it was doing now.

 

Get up, Alina. Get up.

“No. Leave me alone," she whimpered back, hugging her knees, trying to shut out the insanity. But was it even possible to shut it out when it was already inside of her?

 

You’re going to die if you don’t get up now. And if you die, you’ll be trapped with us forever. Would you like that?

 

Her whimpers grew louder. The darkness was everywhere. What did it matter if she got up now? There was no escape from it.

 

Why do you hate us so much, Alina? We’ve been with you since the day you were born; we’ve been with you every time everyone else abandoned you. No one else ever stayed with you.

 

“My brother did.”

 

Not on that day. If he had stayed with you that day, none of this would have ever happened.

 

The shadowy tendrils wrapped themselves around her arms, tugging at her, trying to pull her to her feet. You better get up. You owe us your pathetic life. Get up, or we’ll make you.

 

But she refused, and suddenly the shadows engulfed her completely in their unkind embrace. She couldn’t cry, couldn’t scream, couldn’t bed, but they just wouldn’t let her. They just didn’t care.

 

They forced her to her feet, crawling all over her body, controlling her from the inside-out. There was nothing she could do to stop them. One leg moved, then the other, and then back again. Walking blindly in this darkness, this terror, this insanity. Walking, walking, walking, without a clue of where she was going. Without a clue of her destiny, her fate, her story. Without a clue of how this was all going to end. In insanity, most likely, because these shadows—these shadows she hated so much, these shadows that were her—would never leave her alone.

 

And suddenly, as if to prove her wrong, they vanished, released her, letting her fall to her knees.

And she saw it. Light. Precious, precious light.

 

She crawled toward the lights, toward the people who held them, completely unaware of the dungeon that had instantly collapsed behind her, that had completely blocked the entrance of the tunnel, that had sealed them all to their fate.

 

Because all she needed now was the light. The light that would eventually kill her.

 

[myahoo]

He reached the cell door and sighed in relief, grabbing a bar to keep from falling. The demon-creature hadn’t attacked him once the shadow tentacles started causing chaos and the dungeon started crumbling. From where he was, he could spot lights as they flashed in and out of his vision, shadows still occasionally obscuring his vision, and his heart rose; there were the rest of the teens who had been taken, as well!

 

Now that he could see them, he started calming down, but his shadow tendrils remained. They became less chaotic, but he put them out of his mind; he was now more concerned about getting out. Most of the other people had already passed him and he was exhausted. He started to stumble after them, the ground becoming increasingly unstable, when he caught the flash of white again. He turned his head and saw the white rat scurrying away from them. He paused for a moment before he remembered that the demon-creature had changed from a rat into the woman, and he snarled at it. There was no way he was going to let the evil little *** live.

 

Once more, he reached for that hidden corner and pointed it at the rat. Kill it, he hissed mentally, remembering the dead teens in the cell. Almost as though the shadows were alive, he thought he felt a question reach him (How?), and he found himself remembering a torture device he’d once seen on T.V.: the iron maiden. He saw, in his mind’s eye, the rat being engulfed by a ball of shadows and pierced by foot-long spikes, blood dripping down the spikes as it struggled. And then, it was gone, and he was even more exhausted than he was before. He couldn’t see the rat anymore, so he turned his back on it and followed the others.

 

As he approached where he thought the others were, he began to smell more blood, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to care much. He was barely moving as it was, but still his senses continued to inform him of the situation. He could hear the dungeon groaning and crumbling, rock rubbing against steel and rock, hurried footsteps, snatches of speech. It all smelled like blood and dust and, oddly enough, a confusing mixture of natural phenomena. He could barely see, but he could still feel the passing wind from the tendrils that wouldn’t hurt him and the other shadows that would. Detachedly, he noticed that his sense of hearing and smell had improved, since the changes had occurred, but he could think about that later.

 

Finally, he spotted the opening in the wall and stumbled through it, relieved to be out of the collapsing dungeon and the chaotic shadows. It was a little unnerving, how quiet it was, after all the groaning and shouting, but Adrian was grateful for it. When their guide finally stopped walking, the Dark hybrid gratefully, slid down a wall, pulled his legs up, and rested his head on them. Don’t fall asleep; you need to listen if they ask questions, he told himself sternly, but despite his best efforts, his eyes began to close.

[Elsendor]

[[OMG A CONCORD POST. Good luck understanding ANY of this dreck.]]

• • • • • • • • • • • • • 

You will know true beauty when you see it, because there is a fine line, if any at all, between beauty and terror.

A doll sang in the night, and etched her name into the faces of the living and dead. Screaming sounded in the darkness, and the snick of blades in flesh and the slow, sure dripping of blood.

 

Light was approaching, tiny and distant, but it would never reach him. He stood slowly, somewhere in the thralls of both the waking and dreaming nightmare, struggling to distinguish the threads and untangle them, before the shuttle wove both tapestries together and they could no longer be separated. The waking and the dreaming and living and the dead.

 

A single step, faint and tentative as a deer, but it was enough. Perhaps it was the heavy, cloying scent of fear that emanated from his body in waves. Perhaps it was the impossibly silent scritch that alerted the huntress, perhaps the scarcely perceptible movement of a butterfly that had slowly begun to shine with a soft light until it obscured the features and expressions of terror. The doll turned, its movements slow and portentous as death itself, and he was afraid. Oh, he was utterly, helplessly, morbidly afraid.

 

*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*

 

Tiny, pale fingers, slender as matchsticks and fragile as porcelain, creep along a white cheek tinted blue with cold.

 

Is he dead? The voice is like ice, but it sighs with the sadness of one whose touch freezes, like Midas turning his own flesh and blood to cold, unloving gold.

 

Laughter, cold as melting snow that trickles in rivulets to herald the coming of spring, new and innocent as the dawn.

 

Of course not, silly!

 

But he looks dead...

 

A hand as translucent as soap shavings runs gently, almost affectionately, over the boy's fine, sable hair. Lingers, like a memory, before it touches cobalt blue and snatches away, accompanied with light, tingling, cool laughter like lemonade on a summer afternoon.

 

Don't be daft, Lesi. Dead people don't cry inside, or shine with the stolen light of our fallen cousins. Dead people are prettier. They don't cry, and they don't hurt, and they never, ever fall in love.

 

Never.

 

*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*

 

The walls were collapsing. The walls were collapsing and he was trapped inside, just like last time. Cracking, roaring, creaking, bending. He wanted to scream for his mother, to warn her, but it hadn't happened yet. It hadn't happened yet, because the train was still collapsing, and the beam hadn't broken yet. She wouldn't die until it broke. It hadn't broken yet--had it?--but there was no beam trembling above him. It had already been ripped in two, and embedded in her stomach. He was already too late, and she was dead. He was five years too late. A figure lay impaled by shrapnel.

 

Five years too late. Only five years ago, he had heard nothing but the absolute, utter, pounding silence of the dead. Now he heard crying, the wailing of a child who had lost everything, the wailing of a child about to look into hell.

 

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

 

*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*

 

I want to get him out of here. Mother says he's special. She says she knew him, once before. In a memory of a memory, and a long forgotten dream, she sang to him. I want to sing to him.

 

Silence.

 

No. The voice of sunshine has gone flat, with an undercurrent of lightning and fire.

 

I will! says the coldness of the new moon, with all the petulance of a spoiled child. You just watch!

 

Shhhhhh... he is stirring.

 

The boy awakes, his large eyes like pools of sulfur, blue and bright of colour, but clouded, seeing the terror of dreams with his waking eyes. His gaze falls on one diminutive form, a will-o-the-wisp of a summer night, with tousled hair like dying leaves and sweet wine, and eyes like jade. A faery's lissom limbs and slanted features, and a faery's porcelain skin, but the tiny fae slows, lands like a shred of cloud, and drops his opalescent wings to the dusty stone. The hybrid's eyes have sharpened, and with the lucid clarity has come the sharp bite of pain and recognition, the likes of which the immortal has forgotten. Sapphire and cobalt blue are unfamiliar to him, but he has seen those eyes once before, has drowned in them, as they, once a soft grey-green, have drowned in his own. He is sure those eyes can distinguish the palest remnants of freckles that lie beneath his skin, can see, in their half-dreaming state, the scars and the bruises that once marred him. A single word, a name, a sigh comes to his lips.

 

Concord.

 

*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*~,~'~,~*

 

Elliot. And as soon as the word dawned on his lips, before it met the open air, the fae had laughed and somersaulted and tugged on his lashes and fallen to flying in dizzying circles just above his line of sight.

 

He had known they would meet, that they would lock eyes and know one another, and yet Elliot would not know him at all. He would glimpse recognition in the other's gaze, and hope, just for an instant, before the moment was lost. Perhaps it was the poetry, the tales of loss and longing that his mother had loved so, perhaps his own understanding of the world, with its ironies and its cruelty. He had expected this.

 

What he had not expected was his lost love's new companion. Hanging back, singing softly, with the glow of the northern lights in her porcelain skin, the same shade of cobalt in her white-blonde locks that streaked his own sable hair, the same icy Welsh blue in her eyes that haunted his dreams... and a fiery braid of Elliot's hair knotted around her wrist, a fae child, a she-child, claimed the attentions of the one who'd once gazed on him with such adulation. She smiled, the innocent face of an infant who'd never had the chance to grow old. His ears roared like he would faint, and his vision blurred. He failed to notice that the dungeon had collapsed, that he was trapped, that it was only by the slimmest favor of chance that he had survived at all, that only perhaps a dozen cubic feet remained, that he had unconsciously, at some point, curled into a fetal position to protect himself from debris and shrapnel. He failed to notice that he was completely alone but for these two small beings. What did it matter?

 

The wailing continued, but it was no longer his own. A baby’s tiny hand slipped out of the gash in his mother’s body, and the baby’s hand was bleeding. His hand reached out, trying to touch his mother, trying to grab hold of the little hand that peeped out of his mother’s stomach.

 

"...sister?"

 

The nymphet giggled, her voice like splinters of ice in his ears. Mother says she used to sing to you. She sang to me, once upon a time. Does that make me "sister"? She calls me Lexington, Lesi. Elliot called you Concord. Concord and Lexington, and the American War for Independence! Tears began to bead on his lashes as the fae, oblivious, began to recount the history of the Revolutionary War. He-who-was-once-Elliot chimed in on occasion, and it was then that he spotted the girl's platinum blonde hair braided around the fae's wrist, and closed his eyes and prayed that he would die.

 

Well, that ugly changeling is dead, and the rat is dead, and the children here are dead as doornails. Another giggle. Dead as doornails, she repeated. Lexington repeated. Can we keep this one, El? He calls me sister and he's the only one left.

 

Elliot's eyes narrowed, and a glint shone in his eyes. Jealousy? Lesi, he's a human. He'll die on you, like that goldfish last winter.

 

Lesi's expression fell for a fraction of a second before brightening again. Then let's just save it! Without waiting for Elliot, she grasped at one of the ties on the boy's hoodie and tugged at it. Come on!

 

Elliot rolled his eyes, but within a moment, tendrils of ice were already working their way up through the stone that trapped them, and the rubble that sealed the dungeon began to crumble. Lesi's doing. The warm summer heat that restored strength to his limbs... that would be Elliot. Concord wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry as he followed the two out of the dungeon, either his heart or his sanity shattering further with every step.

[myahoo]

Mark slowly made his way down the stairs to the dungeon, all the while supporting Sophia. The dark and cold made him want to shiver, but with Sophia using him as a crutch, he didn’t dare; he was sure she’d pick up on it immediately and there was no way he was going to give her more ammunition.

 

As they followed their guide through the dark corridors of the dungeon, Mark wondered about ‘their world.’ Was their recent battle going to be a common occurrence? What exactly were they supposed to do? Did their guide have any useful answers for them? Could he tell them about the faeries that they were supposedly descended from? What powers did they have?

 

He shook his head when he started hearing faint noises. What was it? He tried to peer through past the lights of the others, but he couldn’t see what was making those faint noises. Straining his ear, he tried to figure out what he was hearing. It was a rumbling? screeching?

 

They continued to move towards it, and Mark had a feeling that their guide hadn’t noticed it. At least until the entire dungeon groaned and a wall collapsed, releasing a storm of shadows. And with the wall’s fall, he could distantly hear screams and shouts from further ahead. What had happened down here, while they had been fighting? Were the others struggling against demons too? He barely noticed Sophia squeezing his arm until she let go, and then he had to shake out his arm, scowling. Thanks for cutting off my circulation, he thought, grumpily, to distract himself from the pained-sounding dungeon (Is that even possible?).

 

Their guide walked straight into the chaos, and, after a pause where Mark watched as Kathy, Sophia, Sadine, and a couple of others plunged through, he took a deep breath and darted after them. It was chaos: the flashlight-thing was almost no help at all because there were these whip-like tendrils of shadow thrashing all over the place, in addition to the whirling wind and dust, the falling pieces of rock, and the groaning of the dungeon. And the shadows were solid, he found, as he was sliced by their passing, the cuts on his arms beginning to bleed. He had no idea where he was going, but he hoped he was heading in the same direction as everyone else had gone.

 

When he spotted the doorway, he put on another burst of speed, and then, he found himself in a calm corridor. He turned to see what the dungeon looked like, and it looked about as bad as he felt it was. Even as he watched, he saw one or two more shadows of people approaching, and he wondered if they would be able to get out in time, as the dungeon really seemed to be dying. He put them out of his mind with a small twinge of guilt and hurried to follow their guide; he didn’t want to be left behind now that the way back was sealed.

 

As he reached the spot where their guide had stopped, Mark hesitated, before leaning against a wall and waiting; he didn’t want to be the first one to interrogate the guide.

[lilyice]

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • 

While running into the cover of safety—or rather, relative safeness—Kathy felt the brush of a hand past her shoulder, and someone said something. She didn’t bother to stop and listen, though, as the other person just went on running. It was probably something along the lines of “you better get the hell out of here fast or you’re going to die” anyways. Like she didn’t know that?

 

And finally, she did reach her destination. She wasn’t dead. Yet.

 

Kathy breathed a huge sigh of relief, and looked around her for the first time in a while, surveying her surroundings. A cavern-tunnel. Very medieval. How fun. We’re really living a goddamned fairy tale now. There was their guide, the snow-haired guy that separated with them because he was in another carriage—which, Kathy now remembered the old guy saying, was heading for the dungeons—the water girl, Danni, a gloomy girl, some dude she didn’t know, some other dude, Mark, and…Sadine.

 

God, was it good to see Sadine again. Her temporary roommate, Danni, and Sadine felt like her two closest friends on this journey. If they could be called friends. Which…they could, I guess. We’ve been through a lot together. They were definitely the first ones that came to mind when she was lost in that swirling mass of Darkness and Death. In any case, for Kathy, Sadine had a presence that could light up a room. Literally, actually. Maybe it did have something to do with her fey heritage.

 

As Sadine ran in through the opening, she was yelling something. “Kathy! Kathy! Are you okay?”

 

The other girl came up to her, and she nodded and smiled widely—though it may have been hard to see in this dim lighting—a bit too emotional to speak. It looked like most people would survive this, despite everyone probably covered in more injuries and bruises.

 

Kathy was just about to open her mouth to speak when she noticed the look on the other girl’s face. What was wrong? She looked frozen for one second, then absolutely panicked. It hit Kathy just a few seconds later.

 

“I-I lost him. Oh God. I lost him,” she stuttered and barely choked out the words, realizing their gravity. Breckin! Breckin had been there! Really! Just when they were descending the stairs, they were still slightly supporting each other. But as Kathy was going down Memory Lane, she totally forgot about her partner while her physical strength recuperated. She probably charged forward without thinking as the shadows came on. Breckin. Oh God. What if something happened to Breckin? It’ll be all her fault. Her fault. All over again.

 

The thunder hybrid pulled at her own hair, berating herself for not thinking more clearly in the moment. She should have at least instinctively pulled his hand and ran or something. Why did she just leave him? Why did she just forget about him?

 

“I’m sorry, Sadine. I know he means a lot to you,” Kathy muttered, looking down at the ground. She extended her hand and gripped it with the fire girl’s own hand, holding onto her and squeezing tightly. “He’ll be okay. We’ll wait together.”

Edited July 20, 2011 by lilyice

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ⇒ Ｈａｄｙｎ ⇐ XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAnd in the quiet night XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIX hear a V O I C EXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXXXXSweet and

stirringXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXSinging the sorrowful song of the dEaDXXXXXXXXXXXX

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

The thought of being inside a living thing had always crept Hadyn out. Well, technically, it wasn’t living, but it could still think and do things. That was pretty close to living, wasn’t it? What else were you supposed to call a spirit-slash-guardian-slash-god-thing that had lived—well, been—under your home for who knows how many centuries, how many millennia? Living seemed pretty accurate to Hadyn.

 

But right now, Hadyn didn’t care. Now that he was in the god’s belly, now that he was safe, away, if only for a minute, from Death’s hands, he was suddenly exhausted beyond measure. Every step he took seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, dragging him down, pulling him through the floor into the earth that was the Aranái’s flesh. He struggled to keep going, as far away from the mouth of the tunnel as he could manage. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. Twenty. He couldn’t take it anymore.

 

Hadyn stopped. He felt his body tip over, felt his should bang gently against the stone wall, and then his knees just gave way, and his back slid down the wall until it could no more.

 

The redhead leaned his head back, breathing and exhaling deeply. Damn, did he ache. His entire body felt sore, felt like it didn’t have an ounce of energy left to fuel its muscles. He was sure if he would ever be able to force himself up again. He couldn’t even find the will to lift his arm up and wipe the blood from his mouth—not that it would help in the least, considering his sleeve was already caked in dried blood. He let his eyelids fall shut. His eyes, dry from the dust and debris, burned like hell. Little tears formed at the corners, probably carrying away all said crap that had managed to get into his eyes. Still, the stinging sensation felt good, which was half as weird as it sounded, if one really thought about it.

 

“I can’t believe we actually made it,” he breathed out loud, more to himself than to anyone else. But the almost unnatural quietude of the tunnel magnified his voice, carrying it down the unknown stretches, over the deadened moans of the dungeon.

 

It was almost over—the dungeon’s slow death, that was. The shadows were growing stronger, more vicious, more powerful. Like arms, they lashed out, trying to ensnare any and all who ran through their fury, only to be stopped by the invisible fence at the tunnel’s gate. It frustrated them, infuriated them. And so, they worked to pull down the dungeon’s ceiling, worked to forever seal the gate, to trap the hybrids and the Umbralatronis in. Bricks and stones rained down on the heads of the teens who had yet to make it in.

 

And suddenly, it all stopped.

 

Hadyn opened his eyes. Save for the mumbling voices of the hybrids around him, it was silent. The dungeon was finally dead.

 

Rubble had poured in through the gate, preventing it from sealing shut. But the Aranái would grow a new mouth, a new gate, Hadyn knew. The only thing that mildly surprised him was the fact that the guardian had been able to keep out the living darkness and even the agonized howls of the dungeon, if only for the most part, but not the wreckage that came after it all. Perhaps its powers could only prevail against unearthly things.

 

I guess you really do learn something new everyday, Hadyn thought, too tired and relieved to feel in the least bit sarcastic. He rested his head back again and let his eyelids fall heavily shut. Since Ceth’s death, he’d probably only gotten three hours of sleep, if not less. He wasn’t planning on falling asleep completely—it was probably a good idea to keep his guard up around a bunch of strangers who probably all wanted to kill him—but a little bit of shut-eye could possibly hurt.

 

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXX Sadine Leila PiromaneXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX♬ . ♪ • ♩´¯` ♬ • ♪ . ♫XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗

XXThere are those who say I'm impatient,

XXimpetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing.

XXWhether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself.

XXBut whatever I am —and this ought to be made very clear—I am a very serious woman.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX —Bella Abzug

╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX✿XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

They always say, “Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”

 

Did Sadine love Breckin? No, she couldn’t call it that. It was too soon for that, too soon to decide that it was something more than a high school crush, if a high school crush at all. You couldn’t fall in love with someone that quickly, someone you barely knew, someone you barely met, except in the fairy tales. The happy ones, the childish ones, the ones that always ended in “. . . and they all lived happily ever after. The end.” Not this faerie tale. This awful, awful faerie tale.

 

But she cared about him. She knew that much. She cared about him more than she did about most of the people she had known throughout her life, more than she should have for someone whom she had barely known for twelve hours. Twelve hours. And it felt like a lifetime.

 

A lifetime cut short.

 

“I-I lost him. Oh God. I lost him.”

 

The words didn’t register in Sadine’s head; she stared at Kathy, watching blankly as sheer horror descended upon the other girl’s face.

 

And then it hit her.

Breckin lost. Gone. Dead.

It couldn’t be.

 

“I’m sorry, Sadine. I know he means a lot to you. He’ll be okay. We’ll wait together,” came Kathy’s voice again, distant, muffled by the deafening roaring in her ears.

 

Disbelief.

 

Why was this happening? Hadn’t they gone through enough already? Suffered enough already? How much more would they have to take before this was over? Before they got a glimpse—the faintest glimpse that reality would allow—of that “happily ever after” the fairy tales always ended with? Was it even possible? Or were they all lies—every single scheming word?

 

“I can’t believe we actually made it.” Another echoing voice drifted down toward her. Their guide’s.

 

Anger glared up in Sadine, anger tinged with hate. We? How could he say we? All he cared about was himself and that girl in his arms. He didn’t give a damn about the rest of them. They could have probably all been buried alive beneath the ruins of the dungeon for all he cared. Oh wait. Of course he would care. He needed them, didn’t he? He needed them to solve some damn problem his own kind couldn’t solve, and once said problem was gone, they’d all be thrown away like trash. Worse than trash. At least some trash was kept, was recycled and reused. They, the hybrids, were as disposable as to the Umbralatronis. It was all their guide’s fault that this was happening. All his fault. Everything. Everything.

 

Something squeezed Sadine’s hand more tightly, jerking the Summer girl out of her thoughts. Her golden eyes refocused on Kathy, and her rage dissipated. What was she thinking? She couldn’t push the blame on their guide. He hadn’t deliberately tried to kill them. He hadn’t wanted the demons to break into his home, hadn’t wanted the entire mansion to come crashing down on them. He was probably suffering too, just like the rest of them. She couldn’t hate him for that, as much as it would have made her feel better.

 

And Kathy. Why was she making Kathy feel worse? The blonde was hanging her head, guilt-stricken as she tried to comfort Sadine. Selfish. How could Sadine have called her guide selfish, when she was so selfish herself? She hadn’t given a single thought to what Kathy must have been feeling. She’s blaming herself for something that wasn’t even her fault, and I’m just standing her, too lost in my own feelings to care. I’m as bad as the people I want to hate.

 

Squeezing the other girl’s hand in return, Sadine tried her best to smile—a small, comforting smile. She cared about Kathy just as much as she cared about Breckin. They could have been best friends since kindergarten, almost, despite the fact that they had known each other for an even shorter span of time than she had known Breckin. Maybe it was this whole ordeal—this whole being thrust into a completely foreign world that neither of them understood—that had bonded them so closely together, so quickly, so easily. At least, that was what Sadine thought. She wasn’t sure what the other girl thought of her. Either way, though, she couldn’t let Kathy beat herself up for something that had probably been set into stone by Fate.

 

“You’re right,” said the Summer girl, letting the hope seep freely into her voice. Hope. She could have that much, couldn’t she? “He wouldn’t die that easily.” It was strange how she was talking about him as if she had known him for years, not hours. “Come on. If we’re going to have to wait for him to show himself, we might as well just sit down. It’s not very gentlemanly of him to make two young ladies wait around for him.”

 

Edited July 22, 2011 by Mangaholic

[Skarx]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

 

 

Sophia stood by a wall, not too far from the door, hoping more of them would pass. There was so few of them… She was very happy when she saw Sen enter the corridor and even more when Mark did. When he hurried himself to the guide Sophia followed him, worried about the blood on his arms. When he leaned on the wall she made her move and grabbed his arm squeezing it. “I-I’m so happy… you made it too…” He voice broke as she was finally getting of the adrenaline she had been on for all her run. She was tired, she was scared, she was hurt and she was lost. The last thing she wanted was to be alone and he had helped her walk, even if she didn’t want to admit she did need it. She then quickly released his arm and took a step back realizing she had suddenly grabbed him and her pride kicked in. “Oh my, I should be careful not to cut you circulation now do it?” She wanted to cross her arms, but she winced in pain as the cut on her left shoulder was forced to move. Leaving her arm on her side was not that bad, just feeling a bit numb and stinging, but moving it was very painful now. She put her hand on he shoulder and felt that it was wet with blood. She looked at her hand, at her blood.

 

She glanced at the guide. Could HE help them? They were wounded and lost. He knew what to do right? He had too! She walked to him, checking if her shoulder was bleeding more and was relieved to see it was not as bad as she thought. Once behind the man she inhaled, taking her courage and finally spoke. “Yeah. We made it. We made it WHERE exactly? What IS this place and WHERE are we going now?” She was surprised when the room behind from where they had come crumbled killing all who were still inside. She could not help but be terribly sad and guilty for those who didn’t have the chance to cross. She wanted to cry, but now was not the time. The demons would chase them soon right? “Stand up you! You brought us into this now you have to take us OUT of this mess your kind brought upon us so forcefully! Unless… You don’t give a anymore about us?! We’re just hybrids after all, who care about us when you have that girl you need to cry on!” She had snapped. She was almost crying when she was halfway through her speech. She wanted to go home! She swears she will never pick a fight if she could only just go to that time again! She felt something on her cheeks and realized she really was crying now. Thinking about her family, the other teens who just died and how desperate her future looked. “I want to get away from here… I just want to go so far away…” She muttered to herself. What a pathetic show she was making, covered on dirty, wet and bloody clothing, With a lightly scaled blue skin, green hair and crying like a little girl.

 

[Shirogane_Hikari]

The last chords of the song were hit roughly, the black grand piano letting out a strong sound that echoed throughout the empty room, and the mostly empty house. Leanna sighed, retreating her fingers and closing the lid over the perfectly white ivory, but not without covering the keyboard with a long, red cloth. She closed her eyes, listening to the last few parts of the song that still resounded within her head. It was a sorrowful, almost desperate sound. She sighed. The song was supposed to be relatively neutral, but she hadn’t quite been able to keep her emotions from showing in what she played lately. It had started yesterday, with that foreboding feeling that would only increase when she tried to push it further back into her head. Then that weird dream -or nightmare- that she couldn't quite remember, and the feeling that it had been important. She had woken up with a start, sweating, and with a lingering feeling that she should be running away from something. She couldn't go back to sleep after that, and those weird scratching noises didn't help either. She had been playing since then, it wasn't like the servants would dare complain, and her parents had been gone on some "business trip" for a couple of weeks now. She hadn't even gone to that one party yesterday. That feeling was only half to blame for that though. She wouldn't have known what to do without the constant pulling around and harsh whispers anyway.

 

Leanna stood up from the elegant piano bench, going to sit at one of the sofas in the room. She closed her eyes, moving one arm to shield them from the light streaming in from the huge windows. Within the now completely silent room, she could hear muffled footsteps and small voices, the clicking of silver against porcelain. They were taking her breakfast away from the dining room and back to the kitchen… so it was already pretty late in the morning. She shifted and let herself fall to her side, her head landing on one of the soft cushions covered with wine red silk. She had gotten tired of trying to shake off that feeling of slight paranoia that was telling her someone was waiting, somewhere. It was making the usual feeling of needing to get out of that house she always had even harder to bear.

 

She didn’t move from the sofa until the soft noises coming from the streets were the only ones reaching her ears, meaning everyone was pretty far away in the huge mansion. She stood and walked up the spiraling stairs, over to one of the perfectly white doors, which stood out against the soft peach color of the walls. People say a teen’s room can tell you everything about them – whether they’re messy, studious, fun, serious, creative... Turning the golden doorknob in her hand revealed nothing more than a blank canvas. Dolls weren’t allowed to have a personality that could have filled that room. They’re only allowed to sit there, earning praise, and let themselves be groomed into whatever the owner feels like bragging about to the rest of the world.

 

Leanna found herself staring out one of the windows, in a general direction she had never been allowed to go towards. The end of the “rich” part of the city was that way, after all. She let her fingers rest softly against the cool, perfectly clear glass, her eyes shifting to the ragged remains of her nails, and the hard, white bits of dead skin that stuck out from around them. She should probably cut those... Was her skin always this pale...? It’s probably some trick of the light… She sighed for the umpteenth time that morning, letting her thoughts wander. Maybe… maybe going out there, even just once, would help relieve her from some of that stress. Her gut twisted, and her fingers itched to open the lock placed on the window. This constant feeling telling her to go on, maybe it had been herself all along. Her own desire to escape, even just for a moment. Perhaps it was something else. Her gaze wandered outside, to a flock of birds flying away, into the horizon. A single white feather fluttered in the strong breeze the windows being pushed open made, still zigzagging towards the ground when two feet had already made harsh contact with the grass. Leanna stood up after having rolled on the grass to lessen the impact, brushing off some dust from her clothes and legs, as the white jacket she had thrown out the window before fell to her side.

 

Throwing the think jacket on, she hurried towards the tall, intricate black fence that surrounded the entire mansion. She had planned this escape for so, so long, without ever having been able to work up the courage to go out alone. She knew the one blind point of the cameras, the one area guards paid the less attention to, the perfect way to break out of this birdcage. When she could think clearly again, she was already running out of their neighborhood, and into the busy streets of the city. After what felt like an eternity of running, Leanna finally stopped to catch her breath. She started walking after a few seconds, her mind racing with mashed up thoughts. How long would they take to notice? What would happen when they did? How would she be able to sneak back without causing a commotion? Would her parents find out? She stopped walking altogether, closing her eyes and taking deep breaths. She could feel all the questions slipping away, overpowered by a feeling of excitement. She could worry about everything later, but now, for once, she was free. By the time her eyes opened, she couldn’t even remember what she had been so worried about.

 

After walking down random streets for a few minutes, Leanna started noticing how people would turn to look at her when she passed them. She was used to gathering attention for her looks, but their expression was… different. She nervously pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her hands, feeling like she was already sticking out. As she passed a small shop, she turned to look at her reflection on the glass. Her clothes weren’t too flashy. Now that her parents were gone, she had started wearing the least… “rich-looking” outfits she could find. Her skinny jeans were a washed out light grey color, with darker splotches of color near the knees, the bottom covered by expensive-looking high top sneakers. They were the only shoes she owned that didn’t have heels. Her eyes traveled up, to the thin white jacket that hanged loosely on her frame. It covered her jeans almost down to the start of her legs, and the sleeves were long enough to pull them over her hands, one of them having a black pattern that ran up and would have covered a little of her chest if the zipper wasn’t halfway open. A plain black V-necked T-shirt was visible through the opening. When her eyes finally met their reflection, she almost yelled and fell backwards from the shock. She stared at her face with her mouth hanging open, but without being able to emit any kind of sound. She pulled at a strand of her once black hair, which now, along with her eyebrows, was a flowing white, contrasting with the black inside of her jacket’s hood. Her skin was paler than usual, and even her coffee irises were framed by the same ivory color.

 

She took a couple of steps backwards, almost running into someone. She muttered a quick apology before hurriedly walking away, pulling the hood of her jacket lower over her face, and trying to keep her head low. Her thoughts weren’t close to being coherent right now, and the only thing she could make out was she wanted to hide, somewhere where no one would see her, and then she might be able to calm herself down and think this through. She had to give it to herself though, she was handling the situation pretty well. She wasn’t yelling or scared, just… nervous, that maybe someone she knew would notice her, and then her parents would find out and… she needed to hide. Hide and think. That was the plan.

Edited July 27, 2011 by Shirogane_Hikari

[MURDERcomplexx]

You are an etching upon a wall.

You are the grain of sand that begins a beach.

You are spidery cracks that mar the surface of glass.

You are Dave Harley.

Sleep drenched in black darkness unfolds with the grace of thorned roses upon a sea of engulfing, omnipresent nothing that one would daresay be held upon a grand pedestal of a cringing abyss. So unexplainably profound that—would one delve into such wordless depths—would surely drive them immeasurable amounts of mad.

He did not speak, nor think, nor wonder.

Wordless, soundless, as transparent as the thinnest crystal that laces sculptures of diamond. In which an armor so easily crackable that the slightest abrasion would shatter it into innumerable pieces guards a resolve undestroyable.

He wondered at times where he had gone wrong in the meticulous placement of his priorities. And then, like lead weights upon stagnant water, it dawned on him.

He had none.

Murmuring, once suppressed, flooded towards him. Hushed tones of varying degrees, muttering, snapping, a ballad of confusion and discord.

Dave himself was the only one who had not said a word. His presence was the unstable tip that dangled over a fleeting precipice that borders insanity. Were indifference not his only companion, he would have toppled long ago.

A rusted crown sat proudly atop his head. Deeper he sank into throes of apathy and sickness.

All at once—silence.

So deep.

So eternal.

So comforting.

So enraptured was he with this new quiet, that the moments between a time in which the beating of his heart deafened every passing second, and the breaking point of a lyrical, bloodcurdling scream went unnoticed.

That one scream shattered the gentle threading that separated them from hell.

But he did not move.

Blood fell all around him, upon him, tainting the powder cerulean strands of hair that his hybrid mutations bestowed upon him.

Everything was insignificant. And yet the driving force of survival overcame his nihilistic tendencies.

He moved only when the walls crumbled.

 

xx`⁄X⁄X≠˚µ

x⁄-`¨µ

 

He could smell only the sickening taint of his own carmine blood.

The lingering sentiment of a noise lingers on his lips, wafting, dying like a satellite broadcast upon a thunderstorm. For the thousandth time in the span of merely seconds, he bites fresh openings in whatever his teeth could tear into.

In the distance, a snicker sounds, elegant and feminine, with the refined dignity of wine collecting in the basin of finely etched crystal.

She is there, holding it out to him. A liquid more opaque than any he’s ever seen. She peers at him from within himself, a piercing onyx gaze laced with such immeasurable beauty, that he hardly notices the unorthodox thickness of her drink coat her lips sanguine.

Her lips part, a forked tongue lacing circles over rows of elongated teeth, and—

“The world is crumbling, dear boy. Will you be a herø?

xx`⁄X⁄X≠˚µ

x⁄-`¨µ

”

Her laugh is wrong, air breathing through no lungs, past the dripping static tar that washes from her fangs, dim like a failing tv set, electric ozone suffocating the air.

The tar envelopes her, down to the headlamp eyes that never blink, so fixated on Breckin.

And then…

Sound penetrates his senses. He is all at once ripped from the collective stillness that was a moment in which reality and insanity mingled. Her words cling to him like the morning dew upon a shivering blade of grass, but he captures only the slow blur of the stone tiles in his fading amber gaze.

He waits, soaked in apprehension, quivering with the haunting reprieve of his thoughts, all too aware of Kathy’s presence beside him.

 

There comes a noise so deafeningly loud, that such a magnitude of audible sound neutralizes upon itself, effectively becoming nothing.

The dungeon shatters, twisting tendrils of dark, undulating and lashing out against a blindly tumultuous expanse. Directly before him, he hears the call of their guide, speaking words that only serve to further blanch his colorless physique.

The frantic realization comes in, and for just a moment, presses heavily on the still concentration henceforth output on the part of Breckin.

Ever so slightly his lips part. Whether to voice an opinion, or otherwise goes unknown, his thoughts severed at the bud by the tendrils which separate him from Kathy.

She is swallowed up in the movement, without knowledge, without question. She never notices his fading presence.

A pain that blinds coils up around his chest, whitening his vision and closing around the hand that he reaches out so desperately.

Bitterly he notes his fearful quiver.

 

xx`⁄X⁄X≠˚µ

x⁄-`¨µ

 

He is water through an open hand, weaving transparently past a dying edifice, and a twisting dance of squalid endeavor. It is Dave Harley versus the pulsating destruction, and Dave Harley loses for no man.

The shortest of seconds allows for a tiny smirk to beset his features. Cockiness accompanies the bounce in his step, and teeth grit against themselves in a syncopated beat with the squeal of his shoes against cracking rock ground.

He’s almost there.

The door ahead stretches with a metaphorical luminous glory.

Harley, dammit, you’re almost there.

∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆

Suddenly he screeches to a halt, inactivity summoned forth by the symbolic voice that neutralizes external thought.

Images.

Hot jungles.

Melting inkpots.

VHS tapes aflame, joining a brew of electronic discord that gazes openly through the unblinking eyes of a car.

And the crumpled body of a boy that lays beside him, barely breathing, blood seeping from every orifice.

You can’t leave him behind.

And so he lets this boy’s body unconsciously latch onto Dave’s own. Wiping sopping blond locks from his bleeding forehead, and uncharictaristically pulling him over his shoulder, the statue breaks into a free spirited run, every footstep sparking static tar and broken glass.

Finally, finally, he skids in through a doorway, meeting disgruntled teens and bizarre fairy creatures alike.

The blond boy is warm, too warm. Dave slides him onto the ground with utmost care, examining the blood with a single, silvery raised brow.

For the first time in a shortsighted eternity, his mouth opens, and a voice tumbles out, gentle like the whisper of winter’s eve.

“Does anyone know first aid.”

Edited August 8, 2011 by MURDERcomplexx

[lilyice]

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • 

At the moment, Kathy didn’t think anyone was in the mood to be “gentlemanly,” as Sadine had put it, but she didn’t argue with the other girl. The conflict on her face was obvious, even if she wasn’t aware of it herself, and Kathy knew that the Summer girl was just trying her best to use a bit of humor to cheer herself up, as well as Kathy. And God knows how much longer they can afford to be humorous, so the blonde cracked a grin, smiled in good mirth, and sat down beside her friend. She was actually still marveling at the series of events that led her to be able to call Sadine a “friend.” She was so determined at first, when she was in Forest Park—which felt like a millennium ago by now—to shut everybody else out, get this thing over with, and go back home. Home. It sounded like a foreign word slipping on her silent tongue.

 

Instinctively, Kathy’s tongue snaked out to feel the rim of the round piercing on her bottom lip. The reassuringly cold touch of the metal soothed her, the only familiarity in this otherwise alien surrounding. It used to be a habit of hers to feel the piercing with her tongue when she was unconsciously nervous, but Kathy forcefully got herself out of the habit, as she thought it was a sign of weakness. Now, she was just glad that it was still there.

 

Then, a moment later, all hell broke loose.

 

While Kathy was still aware that the dungeon walls were crumbling outside the cave, somehow, it was quieter in here, which allowed her to momentarily forget the chaos outside. But with a very final, thunderous, and resounding crack, the last of the stone cage came crashing down around them, sealing the little entrance that led them into this cavern. Sealing the only apparent way out of the death-filled dungeon on the other side. Sealing the fate of those who made it, and those who didn’t. Sealing out debris and rubble, but sealing in whatever little hope they had left for the others.

 

Kathy could only stare, rooted to where she sat, in a half-crouching and half-kneeling position.

 

A sudden loud noise broke her out of her reverie, as the blonde noticed someone talking. Or rather, sobbing and yelling. It was a girl, one of them. Her desperation showed in her voice as she pointedly accused their guide of leading them all into this trouble, but unable to get them out. Kathy shared similar feelings, but she thought it useless to cry it all out. What would it do? Wouldn’t it just make their guide even more frustrated with them? How would it help the situation?

Pathetic.

Kathy didn’t know if that was directed at the guide, the girl, their situation, or herself.

 

However, Kathy’s mind was elsewhere, reliving a moment that transpired just minutes ago. He’ll be okay, she had said to Sadine. But now that everything was over, where was he? Breckin hadn’t shown up, hadn’t stepped through the door, hadn’t appeared in front of them. She didn’t even feel the anguish that she thought she would. It was just…emptiness. Hopelessness. She wouldn’t ever be hopeful again.

 

Then, another voice. A soft, strange one. Unfamiliar.

 

“Does anyone know first aid.”

 

Her eyes lifted in search of the new voice, and she found it wandering to where the doorway used to be. Behind the dust of the fallen rocks and stones and dirt, behind the remains of the endless rubble, stood two forms. A very recognizable mop of blonde hair stood out in Kathy’s vision, as if it was a siren flashing in the middle of the night. Though she couldn’t recall the name of the other boy who stood by the bloodied Breckin, she knew he was also one of them. So two more had survived. Breckin had survived. She didn’t cause his death.

 

Knowing that, a huge burden lifted off of Kathy’s chest, and she glanced back to where Sadine was. She was back in her all-business mode, because there were things to take care of. Breckin’s state, for one. “Come on, hurry, let’s go take a look at him,” she urgently gestured to the other girl. Then, her eyes swerved back again to the Umbralatronis.

 

“You,” Kathy extended a finger toward the boy guide, “don’t you think it’s time that you took charge? We’re injured here, you’re supposed to be the one who knows what to do. Get your ass over here and take a look at Breckin.” Her voice seeped with contempt, but Kathy couldn’t keep the worry out. What if he did nothing? What if he was too weak himself? What if…? What if…?

 

But at this point, she could only trust him, because there was nothing else to do.

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ⇒ Ｈａｄｙｎ ⇐ XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAnd in the quiet night XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIX hear a V O I C EXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXXXXSweet and

stirringXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXlXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXSinging the sorrowful song of the dEaD

XXXXXXXXXXXX

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

Don’t fall asleep, Hadyn. You can’t fall asleep now.

 

He tried to open his eyes, but for all his efforts, for all his willpower, he couldn’t force them open for the slightest fraction of a second, couldn’t banish away the lead weights that held his eyelids shut. He could feel Sleep’s spell creeping up his limbs, his body, making the darkness seem ever the more welcome. What would he give to just be able to surrender to that darkness, to follow Sleep into its realm with no worries, no fears? It was such an easy, such a simple escape, and yet he absolutely couldn’t let himself take it.

 

Open your eyes. Open your eyes, dammit.

 

But he was already starting to drift off. Sleep. How badly he wanted it.

 

And then there was a voice somewhere, speaking to him, pulling him back when he didn’t want to be pulled back.

 

He tried to ignore it, having forgotten already his earlier resolve. No. leave me alone. I’m trying to sleep here, dammit. He tried to will the words to his tongue, but his tongue wouldn’t move, his mouth wouldn’t open.

 

And the voice grew louder. Angrier. And the words finally began to register in his head.

 

Hadyn’s eyes snapped open.

 

There was a girl standing beside him, her damp sea-green hair dusted in debris, and her shoulder stained with fresh blood. Her skin was tinted greenish-blue, and as soon as the fuzzy curtain of drowsiness lifted from his vision, Hadyn saw that it wasn't so much skin as it was scales. Little, almost inconspicuous (well, maybe only inconspicuous in the darkness) fish scales. A Sea fey.

 

Hadyn had seen a number of Sea faeries in his lifetime, not as many as most Umbralatronis his age would have seen, but enough for him to be familiar with them. As a child, he had found their scales so strange, so alien, but he had never thought them to be ugly. There was something about the scales that seemed to fit the Sea fey perfectly, another little piece of their eldritch beauty, another piece of who they were. They wouldn’t be Sea faeries without them, after all. But this girl, looking so lost, so scared, so faraway from the grace of water, seemed absolutely out-of-place with those scales.

 

“Stand up you!” she was saying. The hitch in her voice grew ever the more obvious with each passing word. “You brought us into this now you have to take us OUT of this mess your kind brought upon us so forcefully! Unless… You don’t give a anymore about us?! We’re just hybrids after all, who care about us when you have that girl you need to cry on!”

 

The tears had already run fully down her face before she noticed them. For a moment, he just watched her, feeling a different kind of weariness set into him. Now that the immediate danger had passed, he was beginning to actually become aware of his reluctant companions.

 

Hadyn lifted Rhiannon from his lap and carefully set her down on the floor in front of him. Groping the wall to keep his balance, he pulled himself to his feet.

 

But before he could do anything but that, another voice, loud and disdainful, snapped at him. It was the blonde who had tried in vain to save Brunor.

 

“You,” she said, a finger pointed almost accusingly at him, “don’t you think it’s time that you took charge? We’re injured here, you’re supposed to be the one who knows what to do. Get your ass over here and take a look at Breckin.”

 

Hadyn didn’t move for a second; then he detached himself from the wall and stumbled over to the blonde and the small group that had assembled behind her. But before he did, he turned to the Sea girl and said, in a quiet, weary voice devoid of harshness—because, honestly, he no longer had the strength to be harsh even if he wanted to—“Did you ever give a crap about me, or her? Did you ever stop to wonder how we might have been feeling?” His voice grew quieter. “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed like an ass. It’s just hard to feel sympathetic when you’ve had to watch so many people you cared about die.”

 

Without waiting for a reply, he walked away.

 

Besides the blonde, there were two others who accompanied the bloody, unconscious body of the boy he assumed to be Breckin. The first was a guy with powdery blue hair; large sunglasses sat upon the bridge of his nose, concealing nearly the rest of the pale, gaunt face his bangs had failed to. The second was a girl, a redhead like himself, only her hair was a lot brighter and more orange than was his own. Tears streaked down her face as she shook at Breckin’s body, her trembling voice begging him to wake up, to not die.

 

It looked horribly like something he had seen before. Something he never wanted to have to see again.

 

“It’s okay. He’s not going to die,” Hadyn said firmly, putting a tentative hand on her arm to hold her back. “But you have to stop shaking him, because it might make him worse.”

 

She struck his hand away and, in her mad grief, began beating at his arm, all the while raging at him.

 

And he let her hit him, because it was so much better than what Ree had done. Ree, who hadn’t noticed when he had come running at her down the platform. Ree, who had just clutched at her head and screamed. Screamed until the whole subway, the whole world rang with her screams. Screamed and screamed and screamed and still never got an answer from the boy lying cold and dead in front of her.

 

How he had wished Ree would have hit him then, would have shrieked at him and taken her pain all out on him. Because he would have deserved it. He was the one who had let Ceth die, who had brought all that pain onto her. It was all his fault.

 

The red-haired girl stopped hitting him; she was just crying now, crying away like Ree had done that night, and all the nights that’d followed.

 

“I’m not going to let him die, okay?” Hadyn said to her, careful not to touch her again. “I promise I won’t.”

 

She didn’t answer. Hadyn wasn’t sure if she had even heard. But at least she was leaving Breckin’s body alone now.

 

Hadyn bent over the unconscious teen, examining him carefully. Numerous fresh cuts and lacerations crissed and crossed his body, but Hadyn’s green eyes slid over them; they weren’t the cause of his hemorrhaging.

 

Hadyn caught sight of it then—a splotchy purple-yellow bruise partially obscured by Breckin’s fringes and split down the middle by a thin rivulet of blood. The bruise extended far beyond the boy’s hairline, surrounding a large gash in his scalp from which the blood flowed. He must have been knocked out by whatever had caused that bruise, Hadyn concluded. He’s lucky to have survived. If that brick or whatever it was had hit him full-on, he probably would have died instantly.

 

But there was still a high possibility that he wouldn’t make it before the wound was tended to.

 

“I can’t help him,” said Hadyn, shaking his head. “He’s most likely suffering from head trauma, as well as severe internal bleeding. My powers are about as great as yours when it comes to that. If he were awake, I might have been able to do something,” he gestured toward the tear-shaped markings on Breckin's cheeks, before he remembered that the other teens probably had no idea what the Mraaden Sur were, never mind their fire-eating abilities, "but he's not."

He paused and took a deep breath. “Still, there's a chance we could save him. There’s a witch I know who lives near the end of this tunnel. She’s a good friend of ours. I’m pretty sure she’ll be able to help him. It’s a long way, but if we start now, we might make it there before. . . .” He left the final words unsaid. No one would want to hear them anyways.

 

 

 

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

[Mangaholic]

XXXXXXXXXXXX Sadine Leila PiromaneXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX♬ . ♪ • ♩´¯` ♬ • ♪ . ♫XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗

XXThere are those who say I'm impatient,

XXimpetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing.

XXWhether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself.

XXBut whatever I am —and this ought to be made very clear—I am a very serious woman.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX —Bella Abzug

╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX✿XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

It made Sadine feel slightly better to see Kathy smile at her failed attempt at humour. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if Kathy hadn’t smiled. Probably feel horrible inside, more horrible than she already felt.

 

Sadine sat down, her back against the cold tunnel wall. She pulled her legs up, wrapping her arms around them, and turned her head toward the rapidly closing tunnel entrance. Even the biggest, most oblivious idiot could see the terror and desperate hope in her dark golden eyes. Her heart climbed up higher and higher into her mouth as she watched each and every stone fall, sealing up Breckin’s escape bit by little bit. Each one made the sob lodged in her throat rise up a little more.

 

And then she saw him. She saw him before she heard the soft, alien voice of the stranger who had saved him, before she saw the frantic gesture from Kathy, before the other girl’s voice flooded her ears. Yet she was the last of them to move.

 

She couldn’t believe it. He had made it. He had made it in the nick of time, right before the tunnel had been closed up, sealed away, trapping any and all unfortunate souls still stuck out there. She couldn’t believe it. Was God really this kind?

 

No. He wasn’t.

 

Sadine noticed the blood then—the blood leaking from his mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes. More blood than he had lost up there, in the mansion. More blood than a living being could afford to lose.

 

He was dead, wasn’t he?

 

Sadine was by his side in a flash. “Breckin, Breckin, wake up,” she whispered, shaking him by the arm. Droplets of blood splattered onto her already stained white shorts and camisole, like a harmless polka dot design. Her quivering voice rose higher and higher just as the tears fell faster and faster. “Wake up. Please. You can’t die now. You can’t die now! We just made it. We’re safe now. You can’t die. You can’t die! Please, Breckin!”

 

But he didn’t move. He wasn’t waking up like he had last time.

 

Dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

 

Someone touched her.

 

She slapped the hand away and turned on the person, pounding his arm furiously with her fists. “This is your fault!” she wailed, all her senses washed away in her sea of disbelief and anguish. “Why did you do this to us? Why???!” Her fists dropped, and she buried her face in her hands, sobbing wretchedly.

 

“I’m not going to let him die, okay? she heard his voice, the voice she now loathed to hear. “I promise I won’t.”

 

Sadine didn’t reply. She hated this person so much, but still, she was praying with all her heart now that he would really keep his promise and save Breckin. Otherwise, she didn’t know how she could bear it.

 

[jaina]

Silence, that was the most prominent aspect of the mansion Shirayuki noticed as she stalked the halls. Already she had been separated from the rest of the hybrids leaving her to fend for herself as demons began to filter in and fill up the building. Three times she had already been forced into detours in order to avoid being found by the various demons that were running about. Now though, things were becoming more interesting so to speak.

 

As Shira made her way down a particular hall, a pair of shadows ahead of her informed her that someone or something was coming around the corner ahead of her. As she ducked into alcove by a door, she watched as two hunched figures came around the corner and turned down her hallway. clearly the two weren't humans or Umbalatronis or whatever, so Shira took her next step and slipped quietly through the door she was next to.

 

With fluid grace she moved through the room she was in, finding it to be an elegant study till she found a suitable hiding place. The place she chose was beneath a recessed writing desk next to the wall that provided good cover so long as she didn't make any noise or no one inspected it too closely. Shortly there after, she heard the door crash in followed by a pair of footsteps as the demons from the hall entered. These two didn't seem to take things seriously as they were talking to each other as they entered.