//------------------------------// // Resurrections // Story: Rise Again // by Duck //------------------------------// Chapter 1 Resurrections “…She did her best. I have no doubt that she did everything—everything—she could. Even when the world was against her, even when the people she called friends were against her, she did her best to do the right thing. She did her best. For all of us. Maybe if we did our best for her, she would still be here. We should have done our best. Even me. Especially me. “I’m so sorry.” Cold. It was a cold space, devoid of light and life. The air was stale, but touched with the scent of wood and flowers. It was a terribly cold and dark space, but it was far from empty. The space was lined with thick, soft cushions, and filled with gifts and memories. Pictures, notes, flowers, and knickknacks filled the space with love, sorrow, and regret. They framed the resting face of a girl with hair of raging fire and skin of palest amber. A single brilliant fire lily was pinned to the breast of the girl’s powder blue dress, custom fitted and elegant. A hefty tome with a sunburst design, the same on many of the notes, rested on her still chest. It was so terribly cold. The only source of warmth in the tiny space were the diminutive droplets that dotted the girl’s cheek. Droplets that were slowly disappearing. Eventually, the last one sank into the girl’s skin. She twitched. It was an… uncomfortable sensation. Not quite like pain, yet not too dissimilar. That sensation spread throughout her body, starting around and within her skull and slowly, slowly crawled its way down to her pelvis. Her cool skin distended as though hills were rolling beneath the surface, displaced as misplaced and mistreated innards were shifted, reorganized from a visceral pile of flesh into an approximate interpretation of anatomical correctness. Organs and bones were roughly jammed together and crudely fused back to their original positions, growths of tissue churning forth to fill any missing chunks of flesh. Occasional twitches and shifts grew into spasms, then into violent convulsions. The girl seized and thrashed in the tiny space, tearing cushions, crushing paper, and ruining slightly wilted flowers. Eventually the girl went still once more, as she had been for the past several days. However, unlike the days passed, cloudy, teal eyes stared into the cushions that loomed over her, unbothered by the residue of glue that had once held them shut, invisible beneath her makeup. Open eyes rolled in their sockets, focusing, focusing, then finally seeing gray cushions, gray clothes, and wilting gray flowers. She tried to gather her mind through a thick fog. Slowly, she reigned in her scattered fragments of consciousness, and developed her first coherent thought in what might have been ages. ‘What’s happening…?’ The girl turned her head. She saw a grayscale image depicting a number of creatures… humans. Yes, humans. ‘Just like me…?’ She couldn’t determine why that thought felt incorrect. These humans all had faces. They were smiling out at her from the thick paper. She reached across her chest towards the paper, hearing the rustling of papers, her dress, and a soft thud as a heavy object was dislodged onto the ‘floor’ on which she lay. As she examined the image—‘a photograph,’—she had a thought. ‘maybe there’s a human—a person—around…’ But how would she hail them? She couldn’t see any people, so they probably couldn’t see her… She shifted. Her clothes rustled once more. ‘Sound!’ she realized, the fog of her mind clearing into a confusing mist. ‘I could attract somebody with noise!’ She brought her hand before her face, formed a fist, and struck the surface above her. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. ‘This isn’t working…’ She wracked her swirling thoughts trying to think of another way to call for help—‘Call. Yes, I’ll yell! A lot!’ She squeezed her diaphragm and opened her mouth, but nothing came out. ‘Right, you need air, you dummy,’ she scolded as she sucked in as much air as she could, getting a hearty whiff of the stale, flowery air, touched with… something else. “Aaaah! Ahaauah! Aaaaaaaaugh…!” The girl screamed on and on until her lungs ran dry, at which point she refilled them with stale air and repeated the process. The girl eventually lost track of how long she was incoherently screaming and she began to lose heart. As she began pounding on the soft ceiling of her cold, lonely prison, she felt her desperation for escape overwhelm her senses. She needed to leave. She needed to leave! ‘Please, somebody, anybody, anything, please help me leave!’ A notable pain, a real pain, developed in her skull, tightening at her forehead, compounding her fears and increasing the ferocity of her struggles. Minutes turned into hours and those hours could have turned into days for all she knew. As her imprisonment grew longer, the pain grew to overwhelm all of her senses and thought. At the peak of her agony, the girl loosed a feral scream, and a crimson flash burst through the face of her skull. The space was briefly illuminated in an angry red light before vanishing, leaving behind only some papers, wilted flowers, and a well-loved book. She was cold. She was tired and she was cold. Or was she tired? Hm. She didn’t know what she was. She didn’t know what she was, how long she was, nor how long she didn’t know she was. But she did know that she was cold. She did know that she was always cold. She was so cold that she wanted to die. Maybe she was dead? “Hey, miss, are you alright?” a gruff voice rumbled with obvious concern. The girl opened her eyes, abruptly conscious to the rest of the world. ‘Not dead yet, it seems…’ She found that she was lying in a gentle field of green with a dusting of white. Some of this cold, white substance—‘snow? No, frost.’—clung to her dress, which she realized was in fact not gray; it was actually a powder blue, ‘A good color.’ In the field, a number of statues and stone slabs and structures rose from the ground, instilling in her a haunting sense of permanency. The air was freezing, but the skies were clear. The sun was bright, but not warm. She didn’t know how to feel about that. She looked up at the person—the man—kneeling over her. He was an elderly fellow with steely silver hair. His earthy skin was wrapped thickly in what seemed to be an excessive amount of cloth, making him seem much larger than he probably—oh, right. You do that when you’re cold. ‘Oh, he probably wants an answer.’ His frown only deepened as the girl’s mouth moved, but conjured no sound. “I’m calling an ambulance,” the man replied. For some reason, this caused a jolt of panic to run through the girl. The man stopped fumbling around in his pocket when the girl’s hand shot out towards him. Eyes wide and unblinking, she devoured a helping of air and tried again. “Mnauagh—!” she abruptly stopped, retracting her arm and clearing her throat in embarrassment. ‘Words, girl, form words, c’mon…’ Concentrating, she took a more subdued breath and tried again. “Mnnooo…” she groaned in a breathy voice, sounding not unlike an exhausted phoenix who would have rather stayed dead. “…Youu don’t n…nheed to doo thaaaht.” ‘Ugh, my voice… I need practice.’ “Are you sure? You don’t sound so good. Are you alright?” She inhaled. “Yesh. Nho…?” She held stiff, cold fingertips to her forehead as she slurred, “Mmy hhead doeshn’t hurt anymore…” “Ah,” he nodded sagely, “I understand now. Please, be more careful, miss. I saw you laying in the frost and thought you were dying of cold or something. Think of all of the work I almost had to do, ha!” he laughed awkwardly, before allowing silence to reign again briefly. “Aren’t you cold? As nice as it looks, your dress doesn’t seem that warm.” He was right, of course. While the dress did cover much, it didn’t cover her neck or ankles. Most importantly, it didn’t feel like it covered anything. Inhale. “Freezing.” Exhale. She pushed herself into a sitting position, legs splayed awkwardly before her. She once more turned droopy eyes to the stony field. In. “Where amm I?” Out. She was getting the hang of this. “You’re in the Canter City Gardens.” His answer was met with a blank stare. “The cemetery.” A nod of understanding. “I’m Old Flint, a grounds keeper. And grave digger,” he finished matter-of-factly, with some amount of pride. Old Flint unwrapped his scarf and passed it to the girl. “Here, take this.” “Thanksh,” she spoke out of reflex, coming out as a low whisper. She wrapped the beige cloth around her neck and face, imitating how Old Flint wore it as well as she could. On each end of the scarf was an emblem of a shovel resting on earth. It was very warm. She breathed deeply and told him as much. The woolen scarf smelled of sweet smoke and coffee. “I kept it warm for ya’,” he winked. She hummed in both appreciation and contentment as she relished in the lingering warmth of the scarf. Suddenly, she grinned. “Ha. Ha ha. Ha…” she laughed with genuine mirth, not caring about how pathetic it sounded. “Hm?” “I get it now.” Inhale. “’Almmost made you work.’ Ha. Ha ha.” “Ah, heh heh. I’ve not buried my sense of humor yet, it seems.” For another uncomfortable minute, the man listened to the girl’s pitiful, gasping chuckle. The laughter did eventually die. ‘I’m in a cemetery’ she thought, her grin slowly fading. A graveyard. A field for the dead to be placed in boxes in the ground with a monument in their name as a marker and reminder. ‘Boxes in the ground…’ she placed a stiff hand over her chest, feeling for any kind of—. “If you don’t mind me asking...” Old Flint started in a somber voice, “…was she a friend of yours?” She looked at Old Flint, a question on her face. He pointed to the upright slab at the head of her previous resting place. She stared at it, slowly recognizing the carved symbols as letters, arranging them into words, drawing the sentence and understanding its meaning. Here lies Sunset Shimmer May she find the peace that she deserved, but never found Beneath the words was engraved a certain stylized sunburst. One that seemed so familiar… “Sunshet… Shimmmerr…” There were tributes scattered at the base of the headstone. There were flowers, some wilted. Some were fire lilies—her favorite. Crimson and gold, just like her hair. ‘Just like my hair…’ She looked down at the withered fire lily on her breast. ‘I was surrounded by these in that place,’ she realized. Though they appeared colorless in… that place… they certainly were the same. ‘And pictures.’ She remembered the picture that she examined. In fact, it was on the ground right next to her. Sev—six girls, five of whom felt vaguely familiar, and one with red and gold hair that she knew—she knew—she would see again in a mirror. The name. That emblem. The ones on the headstone. They had significant meaning to her. The girl in the photograph wore it on her shirt. ‘Wait…’ The girl slowly, clumsily, removed the withered flower from her breast, revealing the same emblem that it was concealing. Just like in that picture, it was red and gold. Just like all of the flowers that were in and on her grave. The connection (most of it, anyway) did not escape Old Flint’s notice. “…Family?” he asked, apparently taking the extended silence as approval. He panicked when she collapsed again, clutching the dead flower to her chest. “Woah, are you alright, miss?!” However, his panic quickly faded then transformed into tenuous relief and guilty amusement when he heard her forlorn sigh, deep breath, and resigned, deadpan groan. “...Nnope, I’m dead.”