Chapter One – Sarah This is what I was. I was nothing; I was lost in the darkness. For a long time I was only the sharp bloom of agony, the rush of adrenalin, the light tingling of someone else’s movement against my skin. There was silence where I drifted and the quiet became vast in the shadows, it was bigger than me, bigger than everything. I was invisible against it, a fragment of black on black. And time passed. I felt it flowing past me like oil and had no way to measure its depth, its length. Until suddenly there was something more and I didn’t know where this other began or where the silence ended. I recognised its absence, yet did not see its leaving. Into that moment moved a shadowed hand in vague focus, a staccato beep, a sharp sigh of murmured platitude that shrunk the silence to something softer, more tangible. What I heard and what I saw, they were noise and shape, yet still unknown with their blurred edges. And abruptly it seemed that there were monsters of a kind in the darkness, roaring monsters with gaping mouths at the edges of a vision that seemed new and tenuous. I felt fingers grasp at my wrists and sharp teeth sink into my skin, I felt them pull at me, dragging me with them deeper and deeper into the billowing darkness. I was lost.
To The Edge of Shadows by Joanne Graham