Chapter 2: Eternal Night
1052 Words
Chapter 2: Eternal Night
February 24th, 2025. The world died without so much as a whispered warning.
No sirens. No desperate last stands. One moment only when the human race was supreme, then--as ink spilt over old parchment--the darkness fell to possess the Earth.
Everywhere chaos broke loose, armies rushing, guns firing at shadows that mocked steel and fire. Tanks were torn to shreds like tissue paper. Bullets and missiles? Nothing but sparks that are gulped by emptiness.
The darkness came like a plague of locusts, and wiped out resistance before anyone could cry out for mercy. Governments were swept away, leaders were muffled in a moment, castles were reduced to dust in the most merciless of jokes.
The great narrative of humanity was coming to a close, it would appear.
Until there was one man alone in ruin. An only survivor, who took death out of the jaws of oblivion, by slaying a monster of the abyss.
When the body of that first monster passed into nothingness, it gave forth a weird, ethereal essence--Vita, a misty life substance which crept into the air like a promise unspoken.
Nothing changed at first. Soon, however, Vita became part of the blood of the survivors, transforming body and soul with unimaginable strength.
Human beings had mutated and their bodies had been contorted with new powers that were illogical and hopeless.
The ensuing war was a ruthless m******e- a blood red wave creeping over the ruins of the human spirit to fight. Cities were blasted to pieces, hope was destroyed, despair became the second skin.
However, at the point when it was too late, that first man sacrificed himself. With the dying embers of his power he created a massive dome--a glittering wall that encompassed a third of the world--protecting the remnant of the people against the advancing darkness.
Within that dome life had scrabbled back to life out of oblivion, the order of nature had scrabbled to be restored. But defenses, as all things, had bore-flaws.
Three-hundred-ninety-five years have sunk into oblivion since that day. A new civilization emerged out of the ashes, weak but fierce.
Now, within the heart of this fragile world, Aric Blackthorn, ninth-born heir of House Blackthorn’s new generation, lay motionless on a grand, king-sized bed.
His outward calm was a brittle mask, for within his mind raged storms fiercer than any battlefield.
Aric was trapped in a nightmare.
The night was cold and merciless, the moon hung high yet betrayed no light, as though the heavens themselves had abandoned this forsaken forest.
Silence pressed suffocating and deep, broken only by the brittle snap of dying leaves and the howl of a wind sharp enough to slice bone.
In this void of sound and hope, a small figure clung desperately to a shadow speeding faster than any child’s mind could fathom.
His seven-year-old heart pounded beneath the white-hot grip of the woman holding him—a streak of silver hair flowing behind them like a comet’s tail, a living beacon against suffocating darkness.
Her grip was fierce, but trembling. Her heart hammered like a war drum against his back.
She was terrified. And her fear was a contagion that made the child’s own heart race with wild panic.
Glancing over her shoulder, his breath caught—behind them, an all-consuming black cloud devoured the forest with ravenous hunger, its progress swift and unstoppable.
The child’s small hands clenched tighter, clutching the warmth of the only refuge he had.
The woman sensed the tightening grip and surged forward, a white blur tearing through the choking shadows.
At last, they burst into an open glade. Aric’s wide eyes drank in the grisly scene—the earth stained with fresh blood, gore scattered like a cruel puzzle of death.
His body shivered violently as the woman brushed a trembling hand over his tangled hair, trying to conjure warmth against the freezing terror.
Her own eyes flicked around like a hunted animal’s before settling on the shattered remains of a carriage.
She knelt, lifting a small compartment from the wreckage with hands that trembled like fragile glass.
Their eyes locked.
Her face was a frozen portrait of sorrow and resolve, framed by hair whiter than freshly fallen snow. Her eyes, a piercing icy white, held a furnace of fierce love that somehow cut sharper than the terror surrounding them.
She inhaled, voice breaking but steady.
“Aric…”
His lips quivered, voice barely a whisper. “M-Mother?”
A faint, sad smile cracked her expression.
“I’m going to do something terrible now—something that will make your life a maze of pain and shadow.”
“I won’t ask for understanding. I won’t beg for forgiveness.” Her hand cupped his cheek, warmth against cold despair. “You have every right to hate me.”
“Mother?”
Her gaze softened as she brushed a stray lock from his face, her voice fracturing beneath the weight of a mother’s curse.
“But no mother in this broken world can stand by and watch her son die.”
“You must live, Aric. Promise me, you must live.”
“Mother? Where is Father? What is happening?” The child’s tears spilled like shards of broken hope, heart pounding in rhythm with the woman’s terror.
Words clung to his throat, strangled by the fear wracking his body.
Then, her palm pressed to his forehead, eyes glowing softly with fragile power.
A warm tide seeped into him, shattering fragile innocence and replacing it with bone-deep exhaustion.
“I love you, Kai,” she whispered, tears trailing down cheeks pale as moonlight. “Always.”
Her lips brushed his forehead in a final kiss before sealing him inside the compartment—his coffin and cradle.
His voice clawed at the dark, but his body betrayed him—heavy, paralyzed.
Faint, distant, her voice reached him through earth and silence.
Then came the cracking, the grinding of shifting soil as he was buried beneath the world.
Ten seconds of darkness.
Then the battlefield erupted in a symphony of fire and blood—explosions shaking the ground, tremors rattling bone and soul.
Her fight, his lullaby.
Thirty-nine seconds of war’s savage breath, then… silence.
Buried in the cold earth, powerless, useless, hidden.
Hating every second of it.
- Writer
