Ever since that day, your purpose has been clear. You must kill them all. All of them. And you won’t stop there. You will kill their leader as well. Countless lives have been taken by your hands, but they know what they’ve done. They know they deserve it after what they did to your children. They were everything and they took them away from you. And after years of death, you’ve killed it. The leader. You rip the mask off it’s corpse and wear it. The crowd of murderers goes silent. You are in control now. Nobody can stop you. You start a rampage, picking up and throwing the multiple spears and grenades and give them all the torture they’ve made you go through. The crowd screams as they trample each other to escape justice, but you got as many as you can. Strangely, you feel as if you are trapped, but you ignore that feeling.
The battle made you tired, so you sit on its throne and stab its drone until it becomes a mangled mess of wires. You sit down, and suddenly, you realize something. You made it your life goal to be at the top, but now that you are there… is there anything left…? And most of all, if your children were to see you now, what would they see? You are not the same slugcat you were years ago. You’re a monster. You killed them all. Would your pups even want this…? They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t even recognize you as a mother. You cup your paws to your face and cry. Is this your fate? To sit on the throne of a fallen king as you sob over lost memories? You can’t do that. There has to be a way out. You remember what that strange, floating, and glowing black and yellow being said atop that high tower two cycles ago.
“An unrewarding battle awaits, culminating in a path of no return.
A perpetuity of struggles begetting more of the same.
Find a way out, if you still can.”
It said you needed to find a way out. It may be a stretch, but you need to do this. You step outside while wearing the mask and go to the toll you saw upon entering the dome. The scavengers turn and freeze, petrified with a pleading look. You don’t care. You kill them all and check until you find the one with the most energy around it, and leave to look for a path to end your cycles.
It’s been so long and you have looked everywhere. The silence throughout your journey to explore has felt horrible. Sure, you weren’t being nearly killed on sight, but the silence haunts you with the side affect of thought, thinking of what could’ve been, thinking of you having a nice meal with your children, playing with your children, your children… the terrified looks of your children as they look at you now… your children… your…
You finally found something that might lead somewhere. A giant drill leading down into the earth. You slide down, grasping the corpse in your other paw until you reach the bottom, a dark, open space. An odd liquid drips from the ceiling. Touching it makes your skin feel a burning sensation. You begin walking, and the liquid you saw seems to become more frequent, and you see large amounts of it reflecting gold light onto the floor and walls. Collapsed structures and monuments are spread around corridors, odd beings wearing masks with an X symbol on the foreheads, torches that seem in perfect condition, and even a shrine. You continue until you come across large, floating beings with black, draping cape-like robes that seem to disappear into nothing the further down the threads go. They have black, rectangular heads with the same X symbol you saw before right on the center of them. You grasp the corpse of the scavenger, still feeling the strong energy, and slowly walk past the beings. Four arms stick out from the robes, seemingly made of pearls that sway from side to side as the beings move their arms in patterns that make you feel dizzy, but nothing happens. You enter the pipe they seem to be guarding.
Before you know it, you come across a giant sea of the odd fluid. Gold intensely reflects onto the walls as the sea ripples. Something tells you that you found a way out. Cautiously, you dip your paw into the fluid to see if it burns, but it doesn’t. You let go of the scavenger corpse and the fluid suddenly burns like it did back there. The grab the scavenger and look into the sea, knowing there’s no way but down. You jump, corpse in hand, and dive into the sea. It shifts between warm and cold like a circle. The cold oddly gives you visions of intense snow, and the warm gives you visions of civilization, alternating between the two randomly, but you have no time to figure that out. You start to swim down, but something makes you let go of the scavenger. Your whole body starts to sting uncomfortably, but it’s manageable. With no other choice, you continue to go down.
You go down until you can see into a void, and not just gold. The void makes you feel like a grain of sand in the garbage wastes. For the first time, you don’t feel threatening. You feel small. In the void, odd and large white worm-like figures swim hastily around. You swim down more. The swarm of worms is like chaos. It feels like they dong know you are there, and they are just moving at high speeds. You find your body being tossed around and pushed like garbage as you swim further down. At last, you make it out of the swarm and swim further. Suddenly, a bright light gets brighter and brighter behind you. You turn around and are face to face with the worm. The odd head at the end of its body seems to examine you, as if it can look into your mind. Suddenly, it’s eyes squint almost as if in disapproval, and it simply swims back up, intentionally or not, knocking you aside in the process.
You swim further and further until the lights of the worms starts to dim. Suddenly, an overwhelming sensation of burning overcomes your body. You frantically swim down, staring into the void as the pain becomes unbearable. You feel parts of your own body dissolving into golden string, before disappearing into the void. You feel yourself crying because of the anguish, but your tears instantly dissolve. You can’t feel your legs anymore, so you move your back back and forth to try to swim better.
In the darkness, you suddenly see two lights. One green and one blue. It almost looks like… oh. O- oh my… you cry more intensely, but not because of the pain. You swim as fast as you can until you see their figures. Two small slugcats with dark eyes and small noses. They turn around and see you as you float face to face with them. You don’t know what to say. You expect them to look afraid, but… they… they don’t. Their softly glowing figures float to you and you shakily wrap your arms around them. They wrap their arms around you as well. After all the horrible things you’ve done, after all the suffering you caused, they forgive you. As your body burns away, for the first time since they died, you finally feel… happy. As you continue to hug them as strong as you can, you manage to stutter out seven words.
"I- I’m so s- sorry… Th- thank you… for everything."
Your body dissolves away, but you don’t feel sad. You die in the comforting silence of the void and the warm embrace of your lost children.
theartofmadeline
gracieabrams
amandla
gummygunk
stormborns
