THE AWAKENING
1631 Words
Her lips was wet, soft, and electric.
For one second, it was perfect. The silence of the Null Zone held. The universe was just the pressure of her mouth and the heat of her breath.
Then, the nature abhors a vacuum. Kael was a void. A black hole of twenty years of engineered silence.
Adia was a star. A reactor of unbridled, chaotic fusion.
The seal broke.
The equalization began.
It was a hull breach.
WHOOOSSSHH.
The sensation hit Kael first. His pupils blew wide. The iris vanished, swallowed by black. A chemical tsunami crashed into his brain stem. Cortisol. Epinephrine. Norepinephrine. The cocktail of survival and fear.
He gasped, trying to pull away, but he couldn't.
The magnetic pull of the transfer locked him in place. His muscles seized. Every tendon in his neck pulled tight, turning to steel cables.
His mouth opened wider, involuntarily, a drowning man trying to scream underwater. He was inhaling her. And she was pouring into him.
Adia’s eyes snapped open.
Gold met black. The warmth of the embrace vanished instantly. She felt a tug in her chest. Deep behind the sternum. The Source was screaming. She felt the light leaving her, being sucked in, drawning out through her lips, her tongue, and the very skin of her chest pressed against his.
Freezing, biting cold spread through her veins. The Winter wasn't outside anymore. It was entering her bloodstream.
"Kael..." she tried to say.
The sound died in her throat. Her knees buckled. She slumped against him, her weight entirely supported by his rigid, seizing body. She looked at her hand on his chest.
The incandescent white glow was fading and dimming, slowly turning yellow, then orange, then a dull, sickly grey.
She was emptying.
Fast.
Too fast.
"Stop," she thought. "Please stop."
She tried to push him away. Her arms didn't work. The muscles were jelly. The energy required to move a synapse was gone, eaten by the void in front of her. She was a battery shorting out. She felt the Joy leave first. It tore out of her like a rib being removed. Then the Anger. Then the Lust. She was being hollowed out. Scraped clean.
It hurt. God, it really hurt.
It felt like her soul was being siphoned through a straw. She stared at him, terrified.
Kael didn't want it. He wanted it to stop. The feeling wasn't a trickle. It was a dam breaking. Images flashed behind his eyelids. Not his memories, but hers.
A sunrise over Sector 7. Pain.
The taste of real sugar. Terror.
The smell of a mother she couldn't remember. Agony.
His heart, a muscle that had beaten at a steady, rhythmic 60 BPM for two decades, stuttered.
DA-DHUMP…
DA-DHUMP…
Arrhythmia.
The biological pump couldn't handle the fuel. His chest burned. Not the heat of the armor melting. The heat of blood forcing its way through constricted vessels. He felt the walls of his arteries stretching. His brain was on fire.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[EMOTIONAL CONTAMINATION: 100%]
[LOGIC GATE: FAILED]
[SUPPRESSION PROTOCOL: DESTROYED]
[STATUS: CRITICAL]
The HUD in his mind flickered and died. The scrolling numbers vanished. There was only The Feeling, and it was a monster.
It clawed at his throat, ripping at his stomach. It made his hands shake so hard the vibrations rattled Adia’s teeth against his.
He had never felt fear. He had analyzed it. He had quantified it in others, but he had never tasted the metallic tang of it on his own tongue.
He was falling, really falling.
The ground was gone. The sky was gone. There was only the abyss of sensation that made him screaming.
The sound was muffled by Adia’s mouth. A guttural roar of absolute panic.
He shoved her.
They broke apart.
POP.
The sound of the suction breaking was audible.
Adia fell back.
She didn't catch herself, hitting the wet gravel hard. She just lay there. Her eyes were open, staring up at the invisible barrier of the Null Zone.
She was still shinning, but dimmed. Her skin, usually a beacon of gold, was translucent. The veins beneath looked almost faded.
She tried to breathe.
Her lungs hitched.
Then... Empty. She was empty.
The Source was a dry well. Just a dark, echoing pit in her chest.
She shivered. A violent convulsion that racked her entire frame.
"Cold..." she whispered.
She couldn't feel her fingers, nor could she feel her toes. The Apathy Snow outside the bubble seemed to be calling to her. She understood them now. The Hollows. The Greys. This was what it was like to be nothing, to be just meat and bone without the spark. Tears leaked from her eyes, and they were cold.
"Give it back," she whimpered. "Please... give it back."
Kael staggered back.
He hit the brick chimney of the roof vent. He slid down it, clutching his chest. His hand, bare and shaking, dug into the burned skin over his sternum. He was clawing at his own heart, trying to rip it out to stop the pain.
"Make it stop," he gasped.
His voice was unrecognizable, high and thin. He curled into a ball. The fetal position of the universal posture of trauma. He was hyperventilating.
Hah-uh. Hah-uh. Hah-uh.
Every breath was a knife. The air felt too thick. The ground felt too hard. His brain couldn't filter the input. He could feel the individual grains of gravel digging into his skin, hearing the blood rushed in his ears like a roaring river. He could smell the rain and the fear coming off Adia.
It was too much.
He squeezed his eyes shut. But the darkness wasn't empty anymore. It was filled with red strobe lights.
Terror.
Why was he afraid?
He didn't know.
That was the worst part.
The terror had no object. It wasn't fear of falling, nor was it fear of death. It was the fear of existing. The sheer weight of being a sentient creature with a soul crashed down on him.
"I am," he whispered.
The realization broke him.
He slammed his head against the brick.
Once.
Twice.
Trying to knock out the sensation he felt. But It didn't work. He was infected.
The Null Zone flickered.
The invisible bubble that protected them wavered. A drop of freezing rain broke through, hitting Kael’s shoulder. He flinched as if he’d been shot.
"No," he moaned.
He looked across the gravel. Adia was lying ten feet away, looking like a corpse. But her eyes... her eyes were locked on him.
And he felt it.
He could feel her emptiness. It pulled at him.
The Hole inside him, the bottomless pit he had carried for twenty years, was full. Sloshing with the liquid gold he had stolen from her.
It was burning a hole in his stomach, like acid. He needed to purge.
He retched. Dry heaved.
Nothing came up but bile and a sob. A jagged, broken sound that tore his throat.
Adia watched him.
She saw the monster crumble, the statue weep. And she felt a flicker inside him. She felt his terror. And because she had space for the first time in her life, she absorbed it. So, she took a breath and drank it in. It tasted bitter.
But it was fuel.
Her finger twitched. She dragged herself up. On her elbows.
"Kael," she croaked.
He looked at her.
His eyes were red-rimmed and wild.
"What did you do to me?" he screamed.
The anger spiked.
Adia felt that too.
She fed on it. She was a vacuum now. She was becoming what he was.
"I woke you up," she whispered.
She crawled toward him.
Slowly. Painfully.
Drag. Gasp. Drag. Gasp.
"Stay back!" Kael yelled.
He kicked out. His heel scraped the roof. He was terrified of her because she was the source of his pain.
"I can't," Adia said.
She needed him.
She needed to take it back. Or give him more. She didn't know. She just knew that being apart was killing them both. The polarity had reversed and now, she reached out a hand.
Trembling.
"Help me," she begged.
Kael stared at her hand.
He wanted to take it with an overwhelming urge. Like a child reaching for a mother in the dark.
He reached out.
His hand shook violently.
Their fingers brushed.
ZAP.
Static discharge.
Visible blue lightning arced between them. The reaction was immediate.
Adia’s eyes rolled back.
Kael’s back arched.
The energy oscillated back and forth.
Gold to Grey.
Grey to Gold.
Terror to Joy.
Joy to Terror.
A feedback loop of infinite velocity. They were mixing. The Well and the Hole collided. The pressure in the air spiked. The Null Zone shattered.
CRASSSHH.
The storm rushed in. The freezing rain hit them both. But they didn't feel it. They were burning from the inside out. Kael’s heart gave out.
It stopped. One long, final pause between beats.
The blood flow ceased.
The brain starved of oxygen.
The terror peaked, then vanished into white noise.
He slumped forward.
Face down in the gravel.
Adia watched him fall.
"Kael..."
Her vision funneled.
Black vignettes crept in from the edges.
The world tilted on its axis.
She felt the drain stop.
She felt the fullness return, but it was wrong. It was tainted and heavy.
She collapsed.
Her head hit his shoulder, lying there.
The storm howled above them, sensing the weakness. The Apathy Snow began to pile up on their bodies. Covering the grey skin, the burned chest. Burying them in the white silence.
One second passed...
Two...
Five...
Ten...
They didn't move, nor did they breathe.
Deep in the wet dark, beneath the skin, where the blood had stopped moving...
Something new began to hum.
A resonance.
Low.
Dangerous.
And totally out of control.
...
- Writer
