//------------------------------// // Dusk N' Scratch // Story: Of Bass and Books // by Maverick Huntress //------------------------------// Once upon a time, in the ancient land of Equus, there were two regal sisters who ruled together, and created harmony for all the land. To do this, the eldest used her mystical powers to raise the sun at dawn; the younger brought out the moon to begin the night. Thus, the two sisters maintained balance for their kingdom and their subjects. But as time went on, the younger sister became resentful. Their subjects relished and played in the day her elder sister brought forth, but shunned and slept through her beautiful night. One fateful day, the younger of the two refused to lower the moon to make way for the dawn. The elder sister tried to reason with her, but the bitterness in the young one's heart had transformed her into a wicked being of darkness: Nightmare Moon. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> " You can run, but you'll die tired like the rest of your friends!" A voice thundered behind me, my mind to occupied with the job of dodging all these tree to even bother of thinking about looking back. I was in a forest of some sort, though it was clear that it wasn't a regular forest. Plants with jagged teeth and trees with claws leaped out at me, tearing at my flesh as I tore past them. I was running for my life, my throat dry and my breath raggedy. Every muscle in my body burned with the fury of a super-nova, my legs heavier then blocks of lead yet I still continued to run with all my might. As I continued to escape the perils of the forest I could not help but thinking that it was hopeless, the faint light I chasing after never growing closer but only farther and farther away. I wanted to stop, to lay down and to accept defeat but I was no longer in control. I was now riding shotgun in my own body, an unknown force compelling to follow the light which continued to elude my grasp. I felt the cold ground beneath my limbs as I ran, the sense of lingering darkness behind me growing stronger as my body grew weaker. Finally, much to my horror and joy, my body collapsed from exhaustion. I felt a burning sensation in my body as chest rose and fell, my lungs gasping for oxygen but to no avail. My vision began to fade as the darkness crept up on me, my eyes beginning to glaze over. Every fiber of my being begged for to get up, to run away from the untold horror that awaited me in the shadows. I felt it, the cold touch and the sense of hopelessness that it brought as it consumed me. I greeted it with open arms, no longer caring if I lived as my organs began to shut down. The last thing to go was my brain which resisted the darkness up until the very last moment. I heard a lovely but haunting refrain accompanied by a cello as I drifted off into unconsciousness.. ♪ Hush now, quiet now. It's time to lay your sleepy head. Hush now, quiet now. Rest as you'll soon be dead. Your friends lay in the grass Your hopes and dreams shattered. Their minds splintered like glass Your body broken and battered. And it was all for naught As they were all you got. In this world of pain and agony, the suffering unending…. Hush now, quiet now. It's time to lay your sleepy head. Hush now, quiet now. As it will soon be the end. Hush now, quiet now. It's time to lay your sleepy head, Hush now, quiet now. As death’s cold embrace draws you closer to the edge… ♪ As the song faded into nothing, so did my body. I felt my entire being evaporate into thin air, the hungry darkness consuming it with every passing second. Yet somehow my lips were able to form a single word before I blinked out of existence. “Octavia….” I woke up from the terrifying dream, my chest heaving and sweat flowing down my forehead. I quickly looked around me to see if I had awoken in the demonic forest, but I let out a long sigh when I only saw the comforting blue walls of my bedroom. “Phew, it was just a dream. No, wait. That’s not the right word…. Ah yes, Nightmare. That’s what it was, a nightmare. Nothing more.” I just sat there for a moment, repeating the phrase over and over in my head until my body stopped trembling. Wait, when did it start trembling? And why were my clothes soaked in sweat? “Oh yeah, the nightmare. Oh well, good time as any to clean up” I went over to my dresser and grabbed a fresh pair of pants along with a T-shirt. It wasn’t the first time I had experience a dream like that. I’ve had plenty over the years, with most of them being about my father and the gunmen. It was always the same. He would be smiling at me, his face full of joy. The next moment he was dead, riddled with bullet holes as the Gunmen advanced toward me menacingly. I’d scream, run, anything. Heck I even threw the vinyl records at them once but in the end it always ended the same. With me closing my eyes as I felt the cold steel of the sub-machine gun’s barrel against my flesh. Even thinking about it made a shiver run down my spine but none of them came even close to the one I had experienced. It was if I had been placed inside the dream in real life, the phantom wounds and pain feeling as real as any. I felt that it was important, that I was missing something that was obvious but I decided to think about it while enjoying nice, steaming hot shower. I made a left in the hallway, Dave’s room right across from mine and to the right of that was the office that I liked to call his little ‘Hibernation Cave’ due to him spending almost all his time in there. I heard the clanking of keys coming from the room as I shut the door, taking of my clothes. I reached for my glasses to take them off, only to remember that they were on my desk. I shrugged and pulled back the shower curtains, turning up the heat to high. I let out a pleasant ‘Ahhh…’ as the heated liquid hit my back, doing wonders for my tensed muscles. I leaned forward to grab the blue bar of soap at the other end of the shower when I felt something mushy on the sole of my foot. I looked down and my face morphed into a mask of horror when I saw it was a pile of ash. A shocking revelation came to me in the next few moments, my jaw threatening to hit the floor as I recalled last night's events. It had been real, the entire thing. Dave bursting into fire, me knocking him into the shower twice, Dave nearly killing me… Wow, how am I not in a hospital? I should have third-degree burns all over my body yet here I am, perfectly fine. “Man, can this week get any weirder?” I, again, decide to shrug this off like I did last night: By listening to some tunes. My hand shot out to the area above the toilet, feeling around until I felt a rough surface. I counted the buttons dotting it, pressing the forth in the single row. I heard the power up of the wireless blue-tooth speaker, a loud “!” alerting that it was active and reporting for duty. “Select: Tony's iPod, Playlist: three, Song: Shuffle.” I commanded aloud, smiling as I heard the familiar voices of the band members of Queen. I mouthed the words as “We will rock you” played, cleaning my body as I did so. The song had an awesome beat but was surprisingly short, much to my disappointment when it ended almost two minutes later. At this point I had finished cleaning my hair and next my body, banging my head as “Welcome to the Family” by Avenge Seven-fold played in the background. Few minutes later I stepped out of the shower, the song just now ending as I snatched a towel from the nearby wrack. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Dave, sometime after the fight, had duck-taped the curtain back together and replaced the burned textile with the original that had been in place when we moved in. “Have tape, will fix.” I said to myself as I dried my hair, feeling it spring back up to its normal shape as I threw the towel back on the rack. I walked over to the mirror just to see if my eyes will still the strange red color they had turned yesterday, and lo and behold, they were. I did some expressions, seeing if they drastically changed how they looked but aside from making me look even scarier when I made an angry face, nothing had really changed. Well, besides my hair that is. I looked closely at my hair, noting that it was definitely a different color then the chestnut brown I had seen last night. It seemed lighter, almost gaining a blue-ish hue to it. I thought about it for a second, then I remembered the blue soap. "Oh yeah." Is all I say, no more words necessary to be used on such a trivial matter. I grab my toothbrush and the toothpaste, laying on a good amount of the stuff. There was no way I was going to go through the same thing Dave did with his teeth. Its safe to say that I brushed for the next few minutes, polishing my teeth and spitting occasionally as Iron Man by Black Sabbath blared through the Bluetooth speakers. I spit once more into the sink, switching off my electric toothbrush and setting it on its charger. I looked in the mirror to examine my handwork when I saw that my hair color had changed. Again. It had lost some more of its brownish color in favor of a mid-hue blue, the color still underdeveloped.I grunted as I plunged my head into the flowing stream that was coming out of the faucet, eager to get rid of this atrocity that was taking over my hair. I looked up at my soaking wet hair and much to my disappointment, still saw the the blue tinge in my hair. I repeated the process again, but this time with cold water. I brushed the stands of blue hair out of my face and saw that it was, indeed, still blue. If anything, it seemed that it had grown a bit. My bangs were now covering the left side of my face, hiding my ear and part of my eye. "Great, magical soap that changes the color and length of your hair! All I need is a broom and I can be the techno-wizard/witch of the Western side of Atlanta!" I stared at myself in the mirror for a moment, my red eyes only helping me in my quest to look the world's most pissed-off DJ. Which I probably, was granted the time and the current situation I was in. I wrapped a fresh towel around my waist and kicked open the door with so much force I could of sworn I saw the hinges move. I looked in curiosity at my legs and why they were so strong when I saw that they looked a bit more muscular then yesterday, but not by much. You'd be surprised by how much heavy lifting I do with moving all the equipment around. I flexed my leg muscles a bit and smiled, but then I remembered my hair and my smile morphed into a frown. I felt like barging in there and just giving him the good ol' one-two but wearing at towel would really limit my fighting capability if he burst into flames again. Logic wins once more in my life and I go into my room, slamming the door behind me. I discarded the towel in favor of my comfortable jeans and white T-shirt, checking myself out in the small oval mirror that adorned one of my walls. I had to admit I didn't look half back with the whole unnatural-blue hair and red eyes, though something was missing. I scoured my room looking for this object of interest, letting out a 'Ah-ha!' when I found them. "There you are!" I dug my Numark RED WAVE headphones out from their spot under a pile of clutter, placing them around my neck. The black and red color went surprisingly well with my new 'do, though I looked a bit silly with my glasses which didn't contribute much. "I should probably get new frames along with new lenses. May I could get them in purple? Yeah, purple transition lenses sound cool." I nodded a few times, my hair bouncing up and down along with my head. Damn that felt weird. I opened the door and walked down to the office, preparing to knock on the door but I decided against it. It was time for some revenge. I quietly rotated the knob and shifted my weight to the balls of my feet, remembering how it was quieter then walking on your heels or flat-footed. I opened the door slightly, allowing me peek in on what he was doing which was probably gaming or surfing the net. What I found really surprised me. He was voice chatting with someone. Dave, being the extremely paranoid and anti-social person he is, never chats with anyone and never says or types anything that could possibly give away his identity or even a hint to his location. He always uses an alias or user name, doesn't even bother filling out the “Where I’m from/Where I am” or his profile info. Like I said before, he believes that there’s someone or something out there trying to kill him. But if he’s voice chatting with someone, I can only guess what he’s trying to do… which results in me ease dropping. I peer into the room and notice that its, well, clean. Clean as an alcoholic can make it I guess anyways. There were piles of chip bags( all-natural potato chips mind you), groups of beer bottles, stacks of papers, and various other things all neatly organized. Since when did he ever become neat? Or clean for that matter? “-so you think that these….hypothetical powers could manifest in reality under certain circumstances?” “Indeed I do. During the medieval ages there were reports of mages and wizards having most unnatural abilities such as controlling the weather, teleporting, and even moving celestial bodies.. To see one of those manifest in a person today would not surprise me in the slightest due to all the genetic manipulation and DNA-splicing occurring. Why do you ask?” "Damn she has a nice voice..."That was all I could think at the moment, my mind suddenly at ease. I guess I would let it slide just this once..... Nah, just kidding. “Well, you see… I-“ I kicked open the door, interrupting him mid-sentence. “-set myself on fire and got my ass handed to me by a totally awesome guy with red eyes.” I finished for him. “Oh uh hey… To-Stark! W-what are you doing here?” I watched Dave struggle to close out the chat box, a smiling forming on my face as he tried to cover it up. Tad bit late there boyo. “Nothing much, just thought I’d pop in and ask…. why the hell you did this to my hair!” I pointed to the blue mess that sat above my head. “I-I had nothing to do with that!” He’s an awful liar; always has, always will be. “Admit it; you were upset because I totally kicked your ass even while you were on fire! And not to mention your teeth got turned all…. What’s the word again? Vegetarian? Vegan? Something to do will plants….” “Herbivore-y?” “Yeah, Herbivore-y. So for revenge you bought some strange soap that turned my hair some weird shade of blue!” “Check again, my two-toned friend.” My snarky friend tossed a mirror my way which I caught with a trained hand. I looked at it and I was honestly surprised to see that I had one, no, two (count ‘em, TWO) light blue strips dividing the larger, darker sections of hair. I ran my hand through my hair, even more baffled to see that each and every strand was as evenly colored as the top layer. “The hell is going on here?” “You tell me Einstein, I’m just as clueless as you.” Dave pointed to his own hair, which had grown a considerable length and went past his shoulders. It was even stranger then mine, with multiple strips of purple but only one being a pinkish color. His eye color had also changed to a shade of purple. “Woah, looks like Barney took a dump on you and then barfed. Seriously dude.” “Well at least I don’t look I stuck my finger in a socket ‘Sparky’.” I bit my lip for a moment, trying to think up a clever retort. “Hey, I thought you called me Stark earlier, Twilight. I nearly fell down laughing when i saw how red his face had turned. It looked like he had eaten a handful of Ghost peppers or something. "I told you, I only watched the movies to see how Werewolves and Vampires were portrayed! I didn't know it was going to be so sappy and shitty!" Dave glared at me as I continued laughing at his face but I stopped when I heard a deep sigh come out of the speakers. I gave ‘Twilight’ a quizical look as spun in his chair and looked down at the program bar, his face turning a flustered shade of red when his saw that the voice chat was still active. “Oh, I’m sorry that you had hear all that Celestialbodies. I thought I had closed the chat earlier.” “It’s… not an issue. And you can just call me Celestia from now on.” “Whatever you say ‘Celestia’…." At least it was a decent name, and no where as near as bad as Pooplord or something like the names you usual see on the 'net. "So how did you and ‘Twilight’ here meet?” “Oh, we meet quite a while ago. Sometime last year if I recall correctly. Twas when we were playing the game Age of Chivalry, a mid-evil multiplayer game of sorts. He was an archer and I was Knight leading troops into battle. He would pick off stragglers as we cut our way through enemy lines, ensuring a quick and easy win. After that, I congratulated him on the strategy seeing how most arches just run around and get themselves killed while he actually worked with the team." "But I couldn't have done it alone, seeing how you were the one with enough skill to make a real-time adaptions to your battle plans as combat raged around you. I just picked off any that threatened to come up behind you." This was taking forever. "Stil-" "Looks 'Celestia', I was ganna let you finished but I didn't want your whole history. Now, what were you talking about before? It sounded very scientific and magic-y at the same time." "Oh, we were discussing the sudden disappearance of the loggers and how the companies involved knew that there had been strange reports of the weather suddenly changing and unnatural sounds coming from the forest. Its a shame to see people carelessly thrown away like that, such a waste of potential....” It seemed that her mood had suddenly changed from sad to serious at the change of topic. “Have there been any reports of a sudden feeling of dread overtaking anyone near it or living shadows?” I ask, recalling the horrible nightmare from last night.. I couldn't help but think that there was connection between my creepy dream and the forest. “Living shadows? You mean the Vashta Nerada?” Dave suggested. I hate you Dave. “Please explain what a ‘Vashta Nerada’ is, I have not yet heard such of a creature.” Poor soul thinks their real. “Something that's made up." I quickly answer, preferring not to dig through my memories to recall what they were. I hate to admit it, but I was a huge sci-fy fan a few years ago, watching everything from Doctor Who to Transformers. The first movie was pretty good but I hated in Dark of the Moon how they killed off Iron Hide. "Still, it would not hurt to know what they are." "Fine." Damn girls, always asking what things are all the time. "The Vashta Narada are microscopic creatures that live in the shadows, feasting on anything foolish enough to step into them. They're next to impossible to find unless you got a bucket full of chicken legs or you see someone with two shadows." "And what does it mean if something has two shadows?" "It's basically screwed." A simple 'Oh." was all I got in reply. An awkward silence follow suit but eventually 'Celestia' broke the ice and continued the friendly conversation. "Now, would you kindly tell why you asked about these “living shadows” and how they pertain to the disappearance of the loggers?” “Well, I had a pretty… bazaar dream last night but if you’re probably not interested...." “I’ve probably heard stranger things on my time exploring the internet, please carry on.” Did I mention that she had a beautiful voice? Because if I didn't I'll say it now: Damn she has a beautiful voice. “Alright, if you insist… When the dream, rather nightmare, started, it felt I had jumped into a high-octane action movie right when the hero is trying to outran the badguys, expect in this case it was not a concert jungle I was running through but an actual forest and I was sweating like crazy as I ran for my life. Everywhere I looked were these massive, creepy-looking trees in a place where the sun don't shine. I was being chased by god-knows-what but I never turned around, never looked back in the fear that it would be right behind me. I ran deeper and deeper into the forest, chasing a light that never seemed to get any closer. I kept running and running, trying to escape whatever was trying to get me but I knew I would not win. Eventually, I collapsed and just… gave up.” “You gave up? Why?” “My body ached more then it ever had before, every fiber of my being feeling like it had molten lead being poured onto it. I couldn't get up even if I had wanted to, so I just gave in. But it was just a dream, so no harm no foul right?” “I see…. And do you think that the Vashta Nerada is what got you in the end?” “Best guess, seeing that's what it must've been like to have the flesh stripped off yours bones in seconds but I don’t think they could shout so loud that you could hear from the other end of the planet or sound female.” “So it was something else then… Have you given it a name?” “Never thought about giving a name…. Didn't seem necessary at the time, though I guess it is easier to remember then ‘That thing that got me at the end of my dream that made me feel like my body was slowly disintegrating’.” Dave butted his way back into the conversation, not liking it that I had become so chummy with his new, strangely female, friend. “How about Nightmare, or a Nightmare seeing how that’s where you first encountered it.” I shrug my shoulders, neither praising the name nor discarding it. “Eh, if the crown fits…” "Now all we need is name for the forest, seeing that it is one of the major topics now floating around the 'net..." Now it was my turn to contribute. "How about the Everfree?" I heard someone almost fall out of their chair and it defiantly wasn't Dave as he was just staring at me. What? I didn't think it was that bad of a name... "Hey Celestia, you alright? You sounded like you just had a heart attack." "No, my uhhh... cat just leaped up on the keyboard and scared me, that's all." Sure..... "Whatever you say... So now what do we do now that we've established a designated title for the forest and whatever is lurking inside it?" Woo, go me for using big words! Wait, why am I trying to impress her? Should I? I probably should at this point. I mean if Dave was able to catch her metaphorical eye..... "Easy: Search around the 'net and see if anyone else has gotten information on the Everfree, ya know compile notes and stuff." "Since when did you care about this?" "Since I put two and two together! Our bodies began to change around the same time people starting messing with the forest, stupid. Besides, people just don't have nightmares about a forest that killed thirteen people right after reading the article." "How'd you know I read the article?" How did he know? Is he Snoopy? Sir Snoop? Sir Snoopsalot? How do Knight titles work anyways? "You left it on the top of the stack, it'd be stupid of me not to notice." Crap, forgot about how sharp he can be at time. "Your already stupid enough as you are 'Twilight', it'd be next to impossible for you to get any dumber." "Stop calling me that!" Ha, he looked funny when he was mad with his eyes being covered by his hair. It was like talking to a furball. "Only if you stop calling me Sparky. Call me Scratch instead." Always wanted to use that name, never found a good time 'till now. "Fine, but then what's my new nick-name?" Complained Dave. "How about Dusk? It sounds more... manly then Twilight for sure." Suggested Celestia. Man, she's full of good ideas isn't she? Wouldn't be surprised if he fancied her a bit, I mean I fancied her a bit.. Wait, wasn't Dusk the opposite of Twilight? Ah, I see what you did there..... Dave opened him mouth to protest but he bit his lip instead, apparently unable to come up with anything better. "Dusk it is..." "Alright, we'll it seems with that issue solved I'm gonna head back to work. See you two love birds later..." And with that I walked out of the room, grinning madly as calamity ensued. "Wha? But we-" "I'd never-" "Perish the thought!" "We're just friends!" Oh the joys of causing chaos. Besides, whats the point of being serious all the time if you can't fun every once in a while?