31_days | [November 2nd] [original] Zero Hour

Title: Zero Hour
Day/Theme: 2. twisting itself out of the abstract furls
Series: My original, post-apocalyptic-pre-industrial vampire story
Character/Pairing: Aamu
Rating: PG-13

The world groaned.

History folded, then unfolded back again in on itself, changed forever. Memories of what had once been were lost, never to return. Some resisted, fighting the power, yet they, too, lost. The world was born anew, but not quite so. It was like the canvas of history had been folded, layer upon layer forming a pattern, a symmetry, but then it had been picked up, scrambled from it's proper order, the seeming symmetry destroyed forever. Nature bloomed, renewed, spread wide from the corners of the world where it had been pushed off to, but not without dire consequence. There was a terrible price, the prize of tearing apart the fabric of the past and present and future. Nothing never quite the same. The power of change overwhelming, as it reached all around the world, into every hidden corner of it.

I felt it keenly. My mind fought the power which reached it's tendrils into my mind, my body contorting wildly, painfully, as that, which was me, which made up who I was, my memories of the world and myself in it were... someone was trying to twist them, bend them to their will. Like the folds of my life, like a pile of now ill-fitting but once worn clothes were being tugged this way and that, their ideally abstract yet confined structure under threat. I would not allow it. I couldn't. For if I did, I would lose something essential. I gasped for unneeded breath, all the stars dancing under my my eyes, snakes coiling under my skin, a stranger, a bevy of them pressing their will over mine. The word change reverberated upon the skin of the world, shouted, screamed, chanted, the ether yelling back.

I waited for what was to come, my mind panicking in the darkness. Would this be the end? This house on the outskirts of the country I called home, my final resting-place? Would I collapse here, in full view of the windows, my earthly remains to be scorched by the sun as it rose in the morning?

Would the world even see another morrow?

I lay silent, the small room filled with my panicked sobbing, my mind still resisting the urge to let go of all I had known, of ---

Then it was over, and I lay there, grateful that I had not met my final death. Every bit of my body ached, hurt in a way I would not have thought possible. My mind felt raw, as if scrubbed with steel wool until my brain bled. I did bleed, a little. Tiny trickles of blood coming down from my nose, smearing my lips. In the darkness, I suddenly felt violently ill, rolled over, and emptied my stomach, uncaring if I ruined the rug. Never mind one rug, when all the world had changed and shifted irrevocably.

As I lay there, curled up besides a pool of my own sick, thinking how that one bodily function was one I decidedly did not miss from my human life, I had not been sick like that for a long time, I became aware of the noise coming from outside my living space. I took my time regaining my strength, my senses were still overwhelmed by the magic which had washed over me. Who could have wielded such power? As the din intensified, the great cry of the world around me reaching volumes it often did not, I was afraid. I did not know what lay beyond my door, what had happened to the world at large. Being the unchanging creature that I was, every new thing threw me off a loop. I did not like it one bit.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but must have been less, I made myself get up from the floor. I swayed, feeling faint, but I quickly enough regained my composure. Wiping my mouth with whatever piece of clothing happened to be at my grasp, I looked around me.

No light. No light meant no electricity. I could do without. I could see the window, the only one of my apartment, from where I was standing. Looking outside, my eyes met only darkness. Not a single light was to be seen.

Not a single electric light, that is.

For there were sure enough fires, some just starting, others now widespread, in the distance and closer. Is this war? I had to dismiss the notion, mostly because someone magical had reached into my mind and rummaged there, trying to change who I...

I almost fell down again as realization dawned upon me. They wouldn't have! It was my first thought. Yet, in the wake of the magic still lingering around me, making my hair stand up on end, crackling, I had to admit it was a very likely possibility. I had heard the rumors circling around in the Mythos community. There had been whispers for the last nigh two hundred years. Ever since the Age of Industrialization. Having been so young, well, relatively young, at the time, I had not paid them no heed back then. But as the Millenium came and went without anything blowing up, I began to listen. What I had heard had terrified me, but as I wasn't a magic wielder, never had been even when alive, no-one confided in me. Because it had been talked about for so long, I guessed that there had been some special day that had been waited for. Now I knew. Who would have thought?

“Ei...” I whispered. I shook my head, as if negating would make it all go away. As I listened, really listened, I heard the cry of humanity, weeping in pain, and, as an undercurrent, the wail of nature, too. The whole world was in tears and flames. For there was reason for rejoicing, somewhere in the world. Some corner of it, which had been hiding. Never again did I wish more ardently that I could control Words. Even when the change upon the world was too great for one person to negate.

I tip-toed to the door, wanting nothing more than to not have to open it. I had a fleeting thought of simply lying back on the floor where I had lain, broken down by the sheer power that had washed over the world, just lie there and burn as morning came. But I couldn't. For I remembered. If I couldn't try and put the world back into what it had been, I could at least try and remember, hold onto a memory of what had once been.

There were footsteps behind my door and I hesitated, my hand holding the handle. Pressing my ear against door, I strained my senses. Only humans outside. Crying and yelling. Complaining about... I had a stray thought, reaching for my mobile. A little rummaging around the room and I found it. The screen had busted. That confirmed nothing, yet made me more jittery. I tried on every electronic appliance my apartment housed, none of which worked. I had no heating, either, but that was not a necessity, at least not for me. Finally, I ventured outside my apartment.

The corridor was in chaos. No light, not even the emergency signs which always glowed so familiarly green and comforting to humans. There were some candles hastily left to the floor, which in and of itself posed a fire-hazard. No-one seemed to care. There was some dim light coming out from the window by the staircase which ran down the width of the building, not inside it, as was common.

As soon as I emerged, a middle-aged woman whom I had never spoken with and did not even know the name of, grabbed at me and stared at me, sobbing. Her mascara was down her cheeks in black rivulets, but her eyes were what arrested me, they had a look so haunted it made me queasy. Had I been human, I would not have discerned even so much of her face.

“It's the end of the world! Jesus save us! It's the end of the world!” She cried, sobbing, clinging to me like I was the last person alive on earth, which I of course wasn't. Stunned, I comforted her as best as I could, wanting to explore, to find out better what had happened.

Soon, a man approached us, his face apprehensive. I had expected him to be holding a flashlight, instead he held a candle, which made me uneasy. The lack of electricity for appliances, heat and lightning was easily explained away, but most people had a flashlight of some kind and you could always borrow one if you didn't.

“Come on, woman, no use moaning to this young lady, she don't know you. Any case, Jesus won't come save you anyway!” His words were harsh, but seemed to startle the weeping woman out of her panic.

“We've sinned!” she cried to the man, “We've sinned and this is our punishment, God has struck us down!”

I extracted myself from her, gaining some distance. My paleness was easily explained by the circumstances, the lack of light aiding me in hiding it, but if anyone got too close, my cover would be blown.

“What's going on?” I asked the man, a forty-something with the beginnings of a beer-belly. He was still in some sort of over-alls, must be working in some building site. He looked at me, while trying to hold the woman at arms length from himself.

“Fuck if I know!” He spat at the floor. I could smell the reek of beer on him. Great. “Something happened, I don't know what. Nothing works and...” He was reluctant to say the next words and hemmed and hawed. “And I... don't remember.” And he cried.

I slipped down the stairs, away from the man now drinking his sorrow with some more beer and the woman, who was now thumping herself over the head with her Bible while chanting “Jumala armahda, Jumala armahda...”.

I stepped outside into a worm in flames, in every sense of the word. There were knots of people all around, sobbing, speaking with hushed, panicked, shrill voices, all of them, even those who did not cry, confused, scared and flabbergasted. I saw a great fire in the distance. The shrill cry of sirens should have rent the air, yet I heard none. Not a car in sight was moving. There were some people still inside cars, begging those without to break the windows so they could get out. The more I listened, the more chilling it all began to feel, the new order of the world unfolding.

A world which forgot. A world changed. A world where... nothing could ever be the same.

I crossed my arms and waited, sure that if I listened long enough, I'd make sense of it. I was among those who had seen the world change, little by little, over decades upon decades. I would weather this sudden shift in the nature of this world.

Or go mad.