//------------------------------// // 3: Unobstructed Darkness // Story: The Humiliation of Quirk // by Achaian //------------------------------// Unobstructed Darkness She fled. An urge rose to his throat to plead with her to stop, but he strangled it before it could leave his mouth. He would not break that barrier. The unbroken chain of silence chafed against his desires, but his stern memories could not give ground. She had fled directly into the east where the sun would rise in many hours’ time, and the void of sound left behind seemed almost criminal. It could only have been his presence that made her stop the brilliance waving in the air, though, and that weighed on him further as he morosely returned to the bulge of the crescent by the pool he had first lain by. It was all just another miserable experience that he would have to forget. Nothing more. He closed his eyes and lay back down. He was devoid of any semblance of hope in that moment; a kind of apathetic self-disgust and piteousness rolled through his mind until he could not stand to exist in that darkness. He raised his lids, and the sight was no happier than his depressed mind. Trampled and crushed grass was abundant in the murky midnight, products of his exalted suffering. He may have left the causes of his hurts behind when he had consciously discarded all previous memory, but he had discarded any joy he had carried as well. The glorious song was now far absent from his mind. It would have been such a meaningful recollection; only the ending was a harbinger of regret. There would be no compromise between him and his atrocities, though; he could not preserve blank peace and anything of the previous life. He would have to forget. The bereavement of his past would have to pass. Fortunate for his fate, but not for his mind’s state, tangible reminders of something that was true were inerasable. It was the faintest light that bled out in the trees, that kept him moving… but it was still light. And in the stars’ disguised shining, he could distinguish- or perhaps it was the flicker of life in the distance- a print on the earth, a means of tracking. He would go back into the forest, back into the black-shadow, but for a long time prior the injustice of life would rot and rankle in his soul and he would think many terrible things. At last- after he had nearly asphyxiated in the sickening atmosphere- he set himself upright, and tentatively turned to track the timid indentations. It was a small victory, but it paled compared to the enormity of all the cutting, vorpal dissonance he had lurking just inside himself. The denial of unholy sentiments could not go on for long, and the fear in the shadow it cast manifested itself every time he thought he had lost the diminutive and flighty trail. Hope’s predilection was always that of success, though, and he stayed on the path. As long as he was supplied, his hope could not be blotted out. Burning brighter, his skills sharpened in the low ambience of the night’s dank and soporific image, but there was no chance of him stopping now, not when the path was clear and unambiguous. There was another print, and up ahead a broken branch that indicated the angelic pegasus's passing; further on there was a small indentation and scuffing in the grasses that indicated she had paused and observed the night for a while; and he did the same, guessing his position. He was completely and utterly unaware of his whereabouts now relative to the sun and moons’ ambulations, and he could not perceive accurately the stars studding, ringing and illuminating the void, but he was not bothered. He had been utterly lost even before he set out, in a mental way, and now that he had found a purpose he was surefire and he felt better about himself than he had in memory. Of course, he would only let his memory stretch back so far before it would run into a black unnavigable abyss. But that was no matter now; he had a place in this new-imagined world and that was to follow these tracks onto their end and… what? Find her? That seemed to be the logical end of the tracks, indeed, and certainly something else would follow after that. He could not get too far ahead of himself, or he might lose what was clear and obvious in front of him. Letting fall the matter, he took to the trail again. The hardest exercise by far was identifying anything in the murk. The plainness of the upset trail taken was easily and readily obvious to him, but vision out of all the senses had decayed in the passing of time. Sound was gloriously vibrant: owls, crickets, water-droplets falling in rhythms of variance, the crunch and snap of twigs with the soft steps he took. The night air prescribed no less sensation: it was cool and moist and hydrating; it relaxed the lungs and he was able to breathe easier. Smell was a phantasmagoria of foreign flowered scents; those same night-blooms sometimes subtly and sometimes soaringly ruled the air. All amplified the tentative touches determining the tracks, yet sight refrained from intensification. He continued on for a short while, gradually increasing his pace, and his awareness heightened until he was confident that he would find her soon- very soon. His pulsing veins quickened and cleared; the pure flow of energy was ecstasy, and around the next edge or corner he would find her, he was sure. Turn around a bend he did, but he slipped as an indefinable crack sounded; there was a great movement of the night’s disguised object, and he was pinned beneath what could only be a massive branch. He was trapped completely; the wooden mass was crushing him back to the ground. He could not move away, even though he struggled with great will and passion he could not. He could only breathe, lie down, and wait for grim exhaustion to take him. The long night was an aeon, and it was not long before monochromatic tendrils of shadow crept back into the conscious of the mind. The snares they sinisterly set were loaded with the most caustic venom, poised to spring, yet already diminishing what light that had assumed the fading specter of hope in his mind. It was growing cold in the bitter darkness. Light threatened to die inside of him.