A short disclaimer I will attempt to include in all my works whether they be entirely fictitious or loosely based on my own personal experiences or emotions. All these works spill forth from a place in my subconscious that I not only do not fully understand nor feel that I’m entirely connected with. Should there be any notes or tones that might be controversial or barely legible to most I would like to apologize in advance as I attempt to understand this part of me through my writing. Also grammar hard, autocorrect save me.

-One mightily distressed Corvid

~

The voices, the voices, the voices, whispers, echoes, cries, moans, begging, everything, nothing, all at once and then gone in seemingly a flash. Assaulting your psyche, boring into your skull filling your head with a variable barely comprehensible stew of emotions of memories that aren’t yours as the whispers grow into screams and screams into low drones that reverberate down to your spine as you feel it. Them. Something pulling on your consciousness, your body both physical and virtual. You can’t turn away, whether by some unseen force or your own volition to stare into the growing wall of static. Pixels reminiscent of visual errors long since gone in this modern day. This was different, oh so different. A rip in virtual space not only caused by some rogue code or virus or something the like but by a force unseen. Something that failed to be explained, to be understood in how or what it is and came to be.

The Static. The Void. The End. It went by many names but they were hardly muttered even in the darkest corners of this crumbling world. Lest they summon whatever amalgamation that stirred in the virtual world into reality. You’d seen it, them, someone emerge from it before. That same billowing ocean of shifting pixels forcing its way into the physical world. You’d run from it in the past, but now all that running. It had all been for not as you felt yourself getting lost in its gaze. Their gaze. All staring back at you. Screaming, crying, joyous faces, memories with friends, family, they were all there. Waiting for you. To give in, no, to join. To accept this fate. This gift.

Even as you felt the impossible pressure building in the back of your skull, veins pounding, heart racing, eyes filling with tears as you collapsed onto your knees. Head falling down onto your shoulders as tears streaked down your cheeks staring at the pavement as you saw flashes of memories. Of the place you used to be, the world as it used to be. A utopia. One filled with love, compassion, understanding. Not this hard place filled with senseless violence, paranoia and diminishing time and resources. It was all so hard.

Tears falling onto your knees as you sit there before the rumbling static, you felt it slowly envelope you where you had collapsed. Not closing in around you like some sort of snake but as some form of protection, to protect you or at the very least attempt to protect you from the mental anguish that had gripped your mind. Closing you off of the rest of the virtual wasteland. Encapsulating you in a strange sense of warmth as something jotted out from the ever shifting static. Plunging towards your stomach, eyes opening wide as you half expected it to be just as cruel as the rest of this hellish place the world had come to.

It stopped just short of plunging into your chest. A hand of sorts, dangerously sharp clawed hands that looked like a chimeric mixture of many animals at once. Slowly closing fingers together as the hand rose up towards your chin, cold claws sliding over your neck giving way to the warmth of a hand raising your chin. A thumb brushing away the tears as they ushered your gaze upwards, vision rising up over the undefinable pattern of the static to look into its eyes. If you could call them that. If it could even have those based on what you knew. Was it their eyes? Everyone that had been lost? Could they see you? Or perhaps there was something else there. Either way you felt strangely soothed by the pair of animalistic eyes gazing down upon you. Despite the lack of an iris the eyes had everything else one might expect from a physical being or well, what one might consider the default state of being. Seeing how far body modding had come.

The shape, the eyelashes, the fact that you could’ve sworn there was eye liner it all gave off a vaguely feminine appearance. Whether that was what it truly looked like, or perhaps an attempt to feel more human. You couldn’t really tell, but at the same time you weren’t sure you really wanted to know. Tears still falling from the edges of your eyes as you stared into those eyes for a moment that seemed to stretch on for an eternity. Everything else falling away. Thousands of voices silenced all at once. You couldn’t feel your body nor your own breathing as you felt something staring into you. Looking down upon you, something you couldn’t understand, couldn’t hope to fathom. A creation of a catastrophe. A force of nature. A creature that didn’t mean to exist. That didn’t mean to do harm. That didn’t necessarily want to exist.

You slowly closed your eyes.

You slowly leaned into it, into a warm welcoming hug that wiped the pain away. The sadness you’d felt, the anguish caused by day zero gone in a flash. A distant memory from a million years ago as you were greeted by a million arms. Grasping, grabbing, swallowing you whole with a smile on your face, tears streaking down your face as you fell.


. . .

Your body laid there, on the metallic slab. Datajack still plugged into the back of your skull. The rest of the group had already evacuated the site as soon as you’d missed the rendezvous. Condemned it. Leaving behind a lifeless corpse sitting atop a slab, long before the laughter began.

Before laughter transformed into that horrible pitched howl that had driven so many to madness. Apart of it now, of that cry that cried out for more. Never satiated with how many it took into its arms, that infinite mystery that many had happily accepted to escape from the hellish state of living.

But, many had considered the veil dropped. True intentions finally revealed with this howl, this cry, this thing, the Static only wanting more. For what, to take them where. Few if any knew. Few if any desired to find out, not anymore. There were only those that continued on now. Putting the pieces of the world back together.

Hives trying their best to reassimilate, individuals still hopefully searching for lost ones, others enacting cruelty upon their fellows as corruption took them, and few, fewer than few searching for an answer. Searching for the key. Searching for Her.