task 001 — Please post a paragraph or two about what your character got up to after the Horde and during Spring
Against all odds, all logic, Charlene had had hope. She didn’t know where it came from. God knows she hadn’t been searching for the hazardous thing, but one day — somewhere amidst overproofed moonshine with Emmett and Bobbi, amidst adrenaline-packed scouting with Minerva — she felt it, warm and flickering, licking flames against her ribcage. The first time she felt it, her heart twisted. She was keeping watch at the Sanctuary walls with her silver-mawed dog, Hank, when the first slivers of sun crept into the morning sky. As she basked in the orange-blue sunrise bleeding like watercolors into the atmosphere, Charlene exhaled. She closed her eyes.
But that was before. Before the undead infiltrated the walls she stood on and ate their way through her new home. In the span of, what? Hours? Days? Spilled blood ruptured her illusion of safetiness, and Charlene could only manage to run, to hide, to stab at unguarded underbellies, to survive in the ways she’d learned how. Eventually, the gunfire ceased. The groans that once emanated from rotted vocal chords were silenced, and chirping birds and cicadas filled the empty void of quiet. In the calm after the storm, while others reunited with friends and family, Charlene was numb. She clung to Hank’s broken body, limp in her arms, and rocked him back and forth. The smoking shell of House 103 filled her lungs as she sobbed.
Eventually, she allowed Minerva to pull her away, to wash Hank’s blood from her skin and assist with his burial. Later, she moved into a new house, and scavenged what she could from the charred bones of 103. She spent much of her time replenishing her possessions — carving bows and arrows, a hairpin, a wooden dog, out of branches of cedar and pine. In the night, curled painfully alone in her unfamiliar cot, her beating heart would ask, ‘What next? Where do we go from here?’ She’d turn away from the unwelcome question and clench her fists. ខ្ញុំមិនខ្វល់ទេ។. I don’t care.