Broken Chains

A suppressed shaking made its way through Scarlet’s whole body, starting at her hands and going down all the way to her toes. It was here.

As she knelt there in the darkness and listened, she strained her hearing as much as possible. At the start, she had been unsure if she had heard right and still wanted to deny the reality of what she was hearing, but then after a few minutes, it came again, and then again.

Baboom.

Baboom.

…

Baboom.

It was a terrifyingly slow heartbeat, shaking the eternal ice in a huge area while surely already spreading its influence. Until now, she hadn’t seen any tendrils of the inevitable darkness, but as the saying went: “Wherever you can hear it, it can also hear you.”

It was here, a heart of darkness. And where there was one, there were more of them. It was THE DARKNESS.

As the shaking of Scarlet’s body got ever stronger, buried memories of the past forcefully made their way to the surface of her mind.

The air went harshly through Scarlet’s lungs, going in and out in ever shorter and more ragged breaths. Looking to the side, Scarlet saw her two best friends, her companions in mind and spirit. A slight smile caressed Naktum’s inhuman face as he nodded towards Scarlet, ever showing the same picture of confidence. Kallum though, seemed like the complete opposite, he was even more winded than Scarlet, and it seemed like only the fear, the sheer terror, was still driving him on.

Scarlet, too, felt the terror. After all, IT was behind them, coming closer and washing over them with its presence. Risking a glance over her shoulder, Scarlet’s curiosity got the best of her. Objectively, Scarlet knew that it was a bad idea to look back, but her ideal, her magic, was rooted in curiosity and discovery.

What met her vision was not something a normal mind should be able to comprehend. There was darkness, creeping over the walls, fleshy tendrils with parts of the ice and glacier rivers mixed in. Holding everything together was a terrifying sense of greed, a need to expand and to incorporate. A need to make her suffer. A need for her to stand still so it could…

The next thing Scarlet knew was that she was lying on the ground, being pulled back by a tendril around her ankle, her friends coming to a sliding stop with terrified expressions. Knowing that it was the only way, Scarlet shouted for her friends to leave her behind, but they didn’t listen. Even the terrified Kallum went back to try and help her. Together, they hacked and slashed at the tentacle, and finally, Scarlet was free, but it was too late.

IT had caught up. Looking at her friends’ faces, Scarlet saw Naktum’s smile become just a tad sad before he fished in his pocket and took out an amulet Scarlet had never seen before. With one smooth motion, he hit it against her chest, and then after a sense of twisting and dimensional travel, she found herself far away from the scene of terror without danger, but also without her friends.

On that day, Scarlet hadn’t cried, not yet. And neither for the next weeks nor months. She had only finally allowed herself to cry when, two years later, she finally managed to find and destroy the reanimated corpses of her friends. That day, when she finally cried, was also the day her curiosity and sense of discovery died, along with her magic.

Puck had silently waited for what felt like an eternity, but when he saw Scarlet’s expression change into something terrified and her eyes seemed to stare into nothingness, he decided to try to pull her out of whatever thoughts she was stuck in. Shaking her shoulder, Puck wasn’t fast enough to react as Scarlet’s hand shot out to grab his wrist and twisted him around to land on the ground with a muffled umph.

Looking at Scarlet, he saw her face morphing back into her normal expression. For a moment, it seemed like she wanted to say sorry, but in the end, she only gave him a helping hand and pulled him up. Silently motioning for Puck to sit down again, Scarlet let herself plummet down opposite him.

Seeing a serious expression on Scarlet’s face, like he had never before, Puck became serious too as Scarlet started speaking.

“Do you know the true reason why nobody of your tribe is allowed to leave your region? Why your leaders tell you that you’re the last remaining tribe of Gremlins?”

Hesitant about how to react, Puck only slowly shook his head. He had always found the rules about not leaving weird, but he never had gathered his bravery to go against them.

“Well, even though your tribe leader is an eccentric asshole, I must give him that. In this, he made the right decision. For eons upon eons, a shadow, an eldritch abomination unlike any other, has spread and still spreads its influence through the eternal ice. Slowly, nearly unnoticeable in mortal timespans, but still, it spreads. In the last Gremlin generations, it finally reached your neighboring Gremlin villages and devoured them all. For some reason though, the darkness never gets too close to your cavern, allowing you to live peacefully as long as you stay there.”

Listening with big eyes, Puck did not know what to think. This all sounded too abstruse, too far away from anything he knew to be easily believable.

“Somewhere in this region where we are right now, within a radius of perhaps five kilometers, an extension of that darkness lies. It should be a heart of darkness. For as long as it exists, it will create new creatures of darkness and expand and devour as long as it can before it splits into two.

Finally getting where this was going, Puck started to feel both excited and terrified at the same moment.

Looking Puck straight in the eyes, Scarlet went on.

“Now the question is quite simple. Fight or flight? What kind of freedom do you seek?”