04-19-2016, 11:59 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-23-2017, 06:26 PM by Gildarts.
Edit Reason: GRAMMAR!
)
A blood curdling shriek erupted through the decompressing silence. It was female, and told of the most horrific dangers. There was no time to wonder why their eyes suddenly saw a sheet of black, why their breath could be seen before their noses, and why oh why weren’t they in that safe little room waiting for the professor to come in and start telling them how many pages they had to write to even just pass the semester.
Alive and in their ears, the shrill howl stretched far and wide over this new land, as though running from the very fear that had spawned it. The tune tore through the many gnarled and twisted trees that blocked its path and journeyed far beyond where their eyes could see. The scream carried straight into the ears of the monsters of the night.
Running, the thump of the soles of her tennis shoes was traveling at the same beat of her heart - and that was saying something. The mud of the moors squished and splashed below her feet, and mucked up with the flare of her jeans just past her ankles. Twigs broke under the pressure of her body, snap, snap! and echoed to the back of her mind. The adrenaline had made everything clear, and animate, but it had also numbed the feeling out of her jellied state. Somehow she held it together, as the thorns hung off of bushes like claws which were just long enough to scratch her and in her instinct of life or death she could not feel anything, nor the warm trickle of blood that came from these open gashes on her biceps.
Creeaaak... Crack! The girl with long black hair could not help but to feel the snapping of branches sounded much more like the breaking of bones. Brown eyes darted through the part of her wavy black hair, now dripping with sweat and moisture from the foggy climate, as well as broken pieces of twigs and fragments of leaves. The girl was no older than twenty, yet the fear that consumed her thoughts made her feel like an old man whose time was soon to be up. Her chin tossed over her shoulder, side to side, side to side, scanning for any bit of information about where she was.
It was just a dream, surely it had to be. This didn’t happen to normal people, right? It was... Just a dream. Damn it, then what was that ... creature you saw back there? Some figment of your imagination? What is what you’re standing in now, some very graphic hallucination? Sure you’d prefer this all to be some nightmare, or a joke, but you know the truth. You knew from when your eyes closed. You felt the shift of time, the switch of your mind, you felt the change of the world around you. This is no longer earth, and that creature... That creature you’re running from. It is entirely real.
The girl’s lips drew downward in a considerate expression, not that anyone could see, for filling her sight was a swampy set of fog glazed in moonlight, and around her were more of all the short, twisted trees she had just dodged. Breathing became easier. She did not feel impending doom just yet. So she took the time to clear her mind, but in order to fully overcome the fear, she needed to define it.
This proved to be quite easy. She had only caught a glimpse, but it was enough to last a lifetime, preserved in the deeply rooted instinct of her ancestors, the horribly lucid image was now ingrained in the backs of her eyelids. A black shape, dark and terrible form with powerful muscles and untamed fur, it had four long and beastly arms and a short whipping tail. It was doglike, but she had never seen a dog look or act like that. Attached to the arms were paws, and on those paws, oh such terrible claws. They had dug into the earth and flung soil as it tore through the night. Its eyes were on someone else though, that was the reason she had gotten away. It could not stop its momentum fast enough, and instead settled its mind on first getting the one it was chasing, and coming back to trail the scent of its next prey.
The scream. The girl remembered the scream as though it were live and it chilled her blood once more. It was one she could not forget, frozen by fear, that she had been forced to watch. Watch as a set of huge jaws frothing with white spray made contact into ruby red flesh, flesh she knew the name of. Clothed in a few nice-looking garments, and attached to a pair of heelless sandals. And now gushing from that image were deep red splotches of blood, parting of the creature’s maw was a river of it. It stuck to the carnivorous creature’s lips, molding in clumps with stands of its fur, and dying the muzzle of the fuzzy creature the color of wine.
Her body had jump-started itself, forget she was currently standing safely behind a knotty tree. She forgot she was not on the scene again, watching someone get murdered by something she could not explain. The college student had forgotten everything but the beastly look in that thing’s eyes at it turned its head to pause from the feeding, to look up at the girl. There was a rush of fear, and it struck her more directly than lasers, as the gaze of the animal now fell on her. What had happened next fell into a blur. A blur only measured by the pounding of steps she barely remembered touching the ground, and the sporadic beat of her own bursting heart. The girl’s entire body had been fueled by the imagine that flashed before her eyes. It was the gaze of the creature, it was almost sentient for a murderous monster, it had snarled as though she had disturbed its meal, and its eyes like yellow diamonds had shredded her hope like razors. She had gasped, and finally after putting together the dog’s face again, the gray fur spewing from its black ears, and the wrinkles of its angry snout had curled into one that would kill again. It was ravenous, wild, and she got the vague sense that it had lost it’s humanity. Wherever it was, wherever she was, of one thing she was certain, that thing had been a werewolf.
Back in the present, she found she had caught her breath, though it was hard for her to accept why she hadn’t already become the next one on the creature’s tongue. No. She told herself, I have a family, I have a future, I have enough to live for and enough to hope for, I will get out of this... Whatever this is... I will get out alive.
Her brown eyes scanned the scene, she had been resting against the bark of a nearby tree. Leaning on it had helped the sway of dizziness that started in her mind and weighed with warped gravity along her appendages. Heavy legs now found the strength to stand, she felt her adrenaline wear off, and that herculean power she felt fueling her muscles had now turned equally into the simple demise of fatigue. I must keep going, the girl straightened her gaze, her posture, but couldn’t help her thoughts from touching back on what had been so sweet of moments just before.
Christmas vacation had been wonderful, she had seen all her family, and was happy to be home at mom’s house with her nieces, nephews, grandparents, aunts, and two brothers. Uncle Ted had died that year of a heart attack and his place at the table would be missed. Other than that, there was the opening and exchanging of presents, they had set the tree and mom had made a fine Christmas feast with honey-glazed ham. There were cookies, a colorful selection of pies, and of course hot chocolate and wine glasses clinking on into the night. New Years had been even better, the family had gone and gotten Chinese take out, and before they watched the ball drop in New York, they had gone ice skating on the local pond. The girl who remembered this had not accompanied them or the kids, since she had a fractured femur two years before, and was still recovering from it. Instead she had stayed at the house with the grandparents and enjoyed the quiet until it was time to welcomed the kids home with hot cocoa to heat up the cold patches of red that had smudged their noses.
Then it had been time to leave her holiday behind, so she waved goodbye at the airport to her parents and two older brothers, and had a smooth flight back through the clouds of Chicago. When she had landed, her boyfriend greeted her. She hadn’t known him long, however they had exchanged notes from their psychology class the semester before, and it was enough to say that there would be less sharing of notes and more sharing of kisses. She embraced him as she got off the plane, and past the terminal. Once they returned to her dorm they hung out and enjoyed the silence, as well as laughed at the ugly sweater he had gotten from his Nana this Christmas. They held hands and settled in for the night to watch Die Hard and fell asleep on the couch. Just outside the glass of a window, clumps of snow had begun to accumulate on the sill.
The morning that her class started, he had seen her off, walked her to her classroom and held a lasting look in each of their eyes before smooching, and a grin catching on each of their lips. She had walked in her classroom alone and there were only ten people there, a bit small for a college class, but this was a small university. Last semester her psychology class had had twenty-five people in it, including her boyfriend. Though, she accounted for the fact that she was early, the professor wasn’t even in sight. A soft sigh came from her lips and she took a seat nearest to Claire, who wore a smile brighter than summer, and though there was a small dusting of snow on the ground last night, there was no trace of it this morning. Claire had manicured toenails that were shimmering through the straps of her heelless sandals. Over her shoulders was a pink jacket, a white tank top, and around her hips, a cute floral skirt.
Claire was friendly, but a little preppy, and had already started to clear off her desk to take notes on a lesson that hadn’t even started yet. The girl who was remembering this blinked and caught sight of the other familiar faces and one new one that she had not recognized from the previous semester. Nine in total. Hm.
After waiting so long, a rowdier boy, Johnson, started complaining loudly, “Hey, where’s this teacher at?” of course this was college, most of the class would be thankful that the professor didn’t show up and was late, since it generally meant less work for them tonight. Still, he had a point, thirty minutes late was bad, even if it meant there was less to be done. Worse still, the students could be held that extra time in order to get the course syllabus completely cleared. A couple grumbles and groans could be heard...
She had come to a clearing, the fog had dissipated, just enough for her to see beyond it. There was a fire, a shimmering flame, or it was her eyes that deceived her. She sprinted and sprung with effort on every step as a few human shapes could be seen against the light source. “Thank god, I’m safe!” she breathed as she ran. Several of the group had turned to meet her, it was everyone from class, save Claire.
Their faces wore the horror she too had seen. “Emily, you’re okay?” My friend Trisha asked, “Have you seen Claire? We thought it was her screaming but we couldn’t be sure...” she gulped and her eyes evaded mine, because they had thought it was me screaming.
Their pale faces danced in the warm flame of light, the color had drained from even Trisha’s blushed cheeks, and in that instant, Emily knew that the fear had been mutual. Emily felt Trisha’s eyes on her, scanning over every open wound. Her eyes fell over her Emily’s shoulders and stayed on the white t-shirt she had been wearing, it was now smeared with blood and smudged with mud. Emily’s jeans had a few small holes torn in them, and her shoes had been covered in black soil from this swampy place. Had it not been from this terrible ordeal, she would’ve looked nice on her first day back from break, a good start for their second semester. It was hard to believe what they were all experiencing now. Even though she had seen it with her own eyes, it was hard to believe it was real.
Em assured her friend she was fine, although still rattled from what she had seen. Sure, she had been nicked a few times in the arm, but overpowering the wounds that had dried, was the powerful sense of fear that was still fresh.
“But what about Claire?” Johnson’s deep voice asked.
It took Em a moment to put the pieces of the puzzle in her mind back together. The girl gulped and spoke with her voice still shaking, below her eyes large shadows drawn by the fire, and an expression contorted with pain, wincing as though she were watching her die again and again. Her voice broke as the words forced themselves out of her dry lips, “Claire’s..... Dead.”
Alive and in their ears, the shrill howl stretched far and wide over this new land, as though running from the very fear that had spawned it. The tune tore through the many gnarled and twisted trees that blocked its path and journeyed far beyond where their eyes could see. The scream carried straight into the ears of the monsters of the night.
Running, the thump of the soles of her tennis shoes was traveling at the same beat of her heart - and that was saying something. The mud of the moors squished and splashed below her feet, and mucked up with the flare of her jeans just past her ankles. Twigs broke under the pressure of her body, snap, snap! and echoed to the back of her mind. The adrenaline had made everything clear, and animate, but it had also numbed the feeling out of her jellied state. Somehow she held it together, as the thorns hung off of bushes like claws which were just long enough to scratch her and in her instinct of life or death she could not feel anything, nor the warm trickle of blood that came from these open gashes on her biceps.
Creeaaak... Crack! The girl with long black hair could not help but to feel the snapping of branches sounded much more like the breaking of bones. Brown eyes darted through the part of her wavy black hair, now dripping with sweat and moisture from the foggy climate, as well as broken pieces of twigs and fragments of leaves. The girl was no older than twenty, yet the fear that consumed her thoughts made her feel like an old man whose time was soon to be up. Her chin tossed over her shoulder, side to side, side to side, scanning for any bit of information about where she was.
It was just a dream, surely it had to be. This didn’t happen to normal people, right? It was... Just a dream. Damn it, then what was that ... creature you saw back there? Some figment of your imagination? What is what you’re standing in now, some very graphic hallucination? Sure you’d prefer this all to be some nightmare, or a joke, but you know the truth. You knew from when your eyes closed. You felt the shift of time, the switch of your mind, you felt the change of the world around you. This is no longer earth, and that creature... That creature you’re running from. It is entirely real.
The girl’s lips drew downward in a considerate expression, not that anyone could see, for filling her sight was a swampy set of fog glazed in moonlight, and around her were more of all the short, twisted trees she had just dodged. Breathing became easier. She did not feel impending doom just yet. So she took the time to clear her mind, but in order to fully overcome the fear, she needed to define it.
This proved to be quite easy. She had only caught a glimpse, but it was enough to last a lifetime, preserved in the deeply rooted instinct of her ancestors, the horribly lucid image was now ingrained in the backs of her eyelids. A black shape, dark and terrible form with powerful muscles and untamed fur, it had four long and beastly arms and a short whipping tail. It was doglike, but she had never seen a dog look or act like that. Attached to the arms were paws, and on those paws, oh such terrible claws. They had dug into the earth and flung soil as it tore through the night. Its eyes were on someone else though, that was the reason she had gotten away. It could not stop its momentum fast enough, and instead settled its mind on first getting the one it was chasing, and coming back to trail the scent of its next prey.
The scream. The girl remembered the scream as though it were live and it chilled her blood once more. It was one she could not forget, frozen by fear, that she had been forced to watch. Watch as a set of huge jaws frothing with white spray made contact into ruby red flesh, flesh she knew the name of. Clothed in a few nice-looking garments, and attached to a pair of heelless sandals. And now gushing from that image were deep red splotches of blood, parting of the creature’s maw was a river of it. It stuck to the carnivorous creature’s lips, molding in clumps with stands of its fur, and dying the muzzle of the fuzzy creature the color of wine.
Her body had jump-started itself, forget she was currently standing safely behind a knotty tree. She forgot she was not on the scene again, watching someone get murdered by something she could not explain. The college student had forgotten everything but the beastly look in that thing’s eyes at it turned its head to pause from the feeding, to look up at the girl. There was a rush of fear, and it struck her more directly than lasers, as the gaze of the animal now fell on her. What had happened next fell into a blur. A blur only measured by the pounding of steps she barely remembered touching the ground, and the sporadic beat of her own bursting heart. The girl’s entire body had been fueled by the imagine that flashed before her eyes. It was the gaze of the creature, it was almost sentient for a murderous monster, it had snarled as though she had disturbed its meal, and its eyes like yellow diamonds had shredded her hope like razors. She had gasped, and finally after putting together the dog’s face again, the gray fur spewing from its black ears, and the wrinkles of its angry snout had curled into one that would kill again. It was ravenous, wild, and she got the vague sense that it had lost it’s humanity. Wherever it was, wherever she was, of one thing she was certain, that thing had been a werewolf.
Back in the present, she found she had caught her breath, though it was hard for her to accept why she hadn’t already become the next one on the creature’s tongue. No. She told herself, I have a family, I have a future, I have enough to live for and enough to hope for, I will get out of this... Whatever this is... I will get out alive.
Her brown eyes scanned the scene, she had been resting against the bark of a nearby tree. Leaning on it had helped the sway of dizziness that started in her mind and weighed with warped gravity along her appendages. Heavy legs now found the strength to stand, she felt her adrenaline wear off, and that herculean power she felt fueling her muscles had now turned equally into the simple demise of fatigue. I must keep going, the girl straightened her gaze, her posture, but couldn’t help her thoughts from touching back on what had been so sweet of moments just before.
Christmas vacation had been wonderful, she had seen all her family, and was happy to be home at mom’s house with her nieces, nephews, grandparents, aunts, and two brothers. Uncle Ted had died that year of a heart attack and his place at the table would be missed. Other than that, there was the opening and exchanging of presents, they had set the tree and mom had made a fine Christmas feast with honey-glazed ham. There were cookies, a colorful selection of pies, and of course hot chocolate and wine glasses clinking on into the night. New Years had been even better, the family had gone and gotten Chinese take out, and before they watched the ball drop in New York, they had gone ice skating on the local pond. The girl who remembered this had not accompanied them or the kids, since she had a fractured femur two years before, and was still recovering from it. Instead she had stayed at the house with the grandparents and enjoyed the quiet until it was time to welcomed the kids home with hot cocoa to heat up the cold patches of red that had smudged their noses.
Then it had been time to leave her holiday behind, so she waved goodbye at the airport to her parents and two older brothers, and had a smooth flight back through the clouds of Chicago. When she had landed, her boyfriend greeted her. She hadn’t known him long, however they had exchanged notes from their psychology class the semester before, and it was enough to say that there would be less sharing of notes and more sharing of kisses. She embraced him as she got off the plane, and past the terminal. Once they returned to her dorm they hung out and enjoyed the silence, as well as laughed at the ugly sweater he had gotten from his Nana this Christmas. They held hands and settled in for the night to watch Die Hard and fell asleep on the couch. Just outside the glass of a window, clumps of snow had begun to accumulate on the sill.
The morning that her class started, he had seen her off, walked her to her classroom and held a lasting look in each of their eyes before smooching, and a grin catching on each of their lips. She had walked in her classroom alone and there were only ten people there, a bit small for a college class, but this was a small university. Last semester her psychology class had had twenty-five people in it, including her boyfriend. Though, she accounted for the fact that she was early, the professor wasn’t even in sight. A soft sigh came from her lips and she took a seat nearest to Claire, who wore a smile brighter than summer, and though there was a small dusting of snow on the ground last night, there was no trace of it this morning. Claire had manicured toenails that were shimmering through the straps of her heelless sandals. Over her shoulders was a pink jacket, a white tank top, and around her hips, a cute floral skirt.
Claire was friendly, but a little preppy, and had already started to clear off her desk to take notes on a lesson that hadn’t even started yet. The girl who was remembering this blinked and caught sight of the other familiar faces and one new one that she had not recognized from the previous semester. Nine in total. Hm.
After waiting so long, a rowdier boy, Johnson, started complaining loudly, “Hey, where’s this teacher at?” of course this was college, most of the class would be thankful that the professor didn’t show up and was late, since it generally meant less work for them tonight. Still, he had a point, thirty minutes late was bad, even if it meant there was less to be done. Worse still, the students could be held that extra time in order to get the course syllabus completely cleared. A couple grumbles and groans could be heard...
She had come to a clearing, the fog had dissipated, just enough for her to see beyond it. There was a fire, a shimmering flame, or it was her eyes that deceived her. She sprinted and sprung with effort on every step as a few human shapes could be seen against the light source. “Thank god, I’m safe!” she breathed as she ran. Several of the group had turned to meet her, it was everyone from class, save Claire.
Their faces wore the horror she too had seen. “Emily, you’re okay?” My friend Trisha asked, “Have you seen Claire? We thought it was her screaming but we couldn’t be sure...” she gulped and her eyes evaded mine, because they had thought it was me screaming.
Their pale faces danced in the warm flame of light, the color had drained from even Trisha’s blushed cheeks, and in that instant, Emily knew that the fear had been mutual. Emily felt Trisha’s eyes on her, scanning over every open wound. Her eyes fell over her Emily’s shoulders and stayed on the white t-shirt she had been wearing, it was now smeared with blood and smudged with mud. Emily’s jeans had a few small holes torn in them, and her shoes had been covered in black soil from this swampy place. Had it not been from this terrible ordeal, she would’ve looked nice on her first day back from break, a good start for their second semester. It was hard to believe what they were all experiencing now. Even though she had seen it with her own eyes, it was hard to believe it was real.
Em assured her friend she was fine, although still rattled from what she had seen. Sure, she had been nicked a few times in the arm, but overpowering the wounds that had dried, was the powerful sense of fear that was still fresh.
“But what about Claire?” Johnson’s deep voice asked.
It took Em a moment to put the pieces of the puzzle in her mind back together. The girl gulped and spoke with her voice still shaking, below her eyes large shadows drawn by the fire, and an expression contorted with pain, wincing as though she were watching her die again and again. Her voice broke as the words forced themselves out of her dry lips, “Claire’s..... Dead.”
![[Image: -Gildarts-fairy-tail-35651033-300-180.gif]](http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/35600000/-Gildarts-fairy-tail-35651033-300-180.gif)
"I have never met a strong person with an easy past." -Atticus