Discription: Trapped in an endless abyss, Shylen recalls the choices she made and the path she took. She can't regret her decisions, she can only accept that they were hers and now, she must live with the consequences.
(Also, take a look at the prologue)
It started with a light.
My face was illuminated and my mind was active and comprehensive. Yet my legs felt limp, almost non-existent and my arms seemed to float at my sides, level with my shoulders.
"What's going on?" I tried to ask, but my words were lost, their meaning gone with my bloody broken body below. I knew I was dead but I didn't know how I died, where I was headed, why I was headed there, all I knew was the pain had passed and now I was here. Wherever "here" was....
Then a voice called out, a male voice, a familiar voice, a calming, soothing, knowing voice; "My sister, oh, Shylen... I'm so sorry you had to go that way."
It was at that moment when everything came back to me. My brother, Blaze's death years before, struck down at the age of 17 from illness. I remembered my father's madness just days after, driving him to kill my mother and then take his own life using an old-fashioned dagger. I remembered finding them both dead on the kitchen floor of our old house, my father coated in my mother's blood and a pool of his own underneath him, my mother a mass of tangled hair, bloody drool and welted bruises. He had bludgeoned her with the dagger's handle. Lord only knows why he hadn't made a clean kill.
But he had gone mad, like many had. The illness had taken so much from so many that it drove those who couldn't cope against those who could, a war with no plan and no rules, only to kill and to slaughter, to maim and to gore, to bloody hand after hand, cloud mind after mind....
And the illness... the horrific cross of bird-flue and the common cold, a disease with not only qualities of both, but with qualities of its own as well. A science lab concoction of a cure for both illnesses gone wrong, left unattended to by careless hands, leaving both sicknesses to mingle, to spread. A hybrid of highly contagious parasites with deadly, fast-spreading qualities. It attacked everything, the immune system, the sinuses, the heart, the lungs, the nerves, the mind.... It made mad the sick and also the healthy who simply had to watch.
Blaze had been delusional in his final stages of life, he tossed and turned, attacked inanimate objects, cried out and howled like an animal being tortured... and then one day, he was silent.
And that was how he remained.
"Brother..." I murmured, finding my voice and snapping back into the present times. "Brother, I am dead, they killed me... they-"
But Blaze silenced me. "Stop, Shylen! They killed themselves." I saw him then, he was glowing, illuminating, not at all like he was the last time I'd seen him.... Not rolling around in his own filth, not screaming or crying, not clawing at walls, trying to break "free". It was death that had set him free in the end.
"They killed everything...." I muttered, still in shock, still trying to comprehend more than my mind would allow at a time.
"You remember your death, don't you? You remember how they did it? They were sick, Shylen, you were too."
I shook my head but of course I remembered. I remembered becoming engulfed in my own clouded mind.
After the death of my parents and brother, I suppose I'd pushed all thought of the experience behind me, focussed on getting food and water from the forest since there were too many sick for it to be safe to make it to the stores.
I hunted with the very dagger my father used for murder and suicide. I'd forced those thoughts away for four years, until I turned sixteen.
My clouded, hazy, routine of an existence took a downward spiral that day, a spiral that came in the form of madness. I had caught the illness. I'd felt my mind slipping, I could no longer hunt, I could no longer see properly. Visions of my horrific past kept dancing in my mind, visions of blood and daggers, screaming and crying, beating and running, killing and maiming....
I began to notice the true state of my world, what Earth had been reduced to. Just a pile of rubbish and decaying buildings with only a handful of humans to tend to them.
In just four years time, my world had disintegrated, and through my clouded, hazy state of mind I hadn't noticed. I'd forced myself not to notice how horrifyingly quick the Apocalypse had begun.
Not Global Warming, not Nuclear War, not a second Ice Age, not a technological rebel but quite simply a disease brought on by our own carelessness and our own inability to cope with such a mass crisis, with all the world's leaders dead or mad.
-Then I remembered my death.
The madness engulfing me, the pain driving me to scream and run and lash out at anything I saw -or thought I saw- moving. I remembered withering on the ground, crying out to the heavens, screeching for help, for mercy....
And then they came for me.
The others, the mad, the ill, the confused. All of them, all dying, all crying, all reaching for mercy, all of them.... I screamed as they grabbed me, tears streaming uncontrollably down from my eyes. I felt knives, I felt stones, I felt punches and kicks.
I had no mind left, no way to see what they were doing....
"They spared me the humiliation... they spared me their deaths." I said softly and Blaze nodded.
"How many humans are left?" I asked suddenly. "How many are there?"
Blaze shook his head. "There are none." He sighed. "The rest died as I did, but you... you were spared the disgrace of a diseased death. You were killed. There's far more respect in that."
I blinked at him. "A disease is a killer too, Blaze. A disease cannot be avoided when it is already upon you. The only difference is you can't fight a disease with brute force. In a way, we died the same."
Blaze gave me a little smile. "Dead or alive, you've always been the philosophical type, sister." He shook himself. "But enough about death. When the others arise, Shylen, we will repair Earth. When one age ends, another begins. The time of the human is over. Let us embrace the age of wings and sophistication."
"Angles, Blaze? Is that what we are?"
"Not exactly. We are different. We were never meant for Heaven, perhaps another time, but not this one. We are meant for the new age, the new race, as are others."
"Others?" The word was barely out of my mouth before my vision filled with images of winged people, all glowing, all beautiful.
Blaze looked up for a moment, silver stars reflecting on his shimmering eyes. "We will live again, but first...." He seemed to grow darker, as did the others, all focusing, all with their eyes burning on me. I felt my legs again, felt them hanging underneath me. I felt my arms suspended in the air and my chest started to burn as I realized I once again had to breath.
Then it started. At first a subtle, dull ache in my shoulders and upper back, then it grew, blazing and burning with fiery, lashing, scorching pain. Something was riping my back, tearing into it, making me scream and and cry out all over again, as though I were dying for the second time.
I couldn't move, my arms were stuck in place, my legs dangled uselessly. I hollered and cried but it did no good, the pain continued, intensified, convulsed and heaved, forcing my back to arch. I felt as though something were tearing through me, ripping past my skin and flesh, growing too fast for any part of me to keep up-
-and all at once, the pain stopped.
Blaze was smiling, the others too and I blinked, feeling like I'd just grown extra limbs.
I had. As I turned my head, to examine my back, I saw them. Two beautiful blood-red wings, tipped with black and gold, dabbed with splashes of orange and yellow and speckled with dim shades of white.
I gaped, then stared at Blaze, who had unfurled his own wings. Pure gold and silver with a sort of eerie, clouded glaze about them.
"They heal quick, Shylen, any injury takes only hours to repair. Just don't let anyone tear them off...." He smiled at me and lifted his wings high. "Shall we begin?"
Apocalypse stories are never my favourite, but this had a very cool twist to it, and the dying-but-coming-back-to-life-with-wings-and-redoing-the-Earth idea is very cool indeed. Your writing flowed quite smoothly, and although this was mostly all telling, it wasn’t blindingly in-your-face telling. It felt like the voice over narration of a film, and that worked well, imho.