Aria carefully stepped out the broken window and back into the cold night. High above a vast sea of twinkling stars watch as she makes her way down the road leading to the slaughterhouse and back onto the city streets. A part of her wishes that her car wasn’t parked so far away.
Right now all she wants to do is get back home and possibly sleep the rest of the night away. Although sleep is something that she got very little of these days.
As she walks along the crooked sidewalk she notices that a lot of the buildings around her aren’t as badly damaged as most of the others. She guesses these particular buildings must have been on the outskirts of the blast radius when the bombs were dropped. One building, in particular, catches her attention. A small, single-story building with a playground featuring mangled equipment.
She stops and stares at the kindergarten. Its front doors have long gone missing and inside there seems to be nothing but darkness. Yet, she can feel something calling to her. Something deep inside her very soul tells her she needs to go inside and investigate the building further.
Hesitant, Aria glances up and down the street. There is no sign of life, demon or otherwise. No one came running to the rescue of Nigel the con man. No curious souls have appeared to find out what happened to him. He’s just another wastelander who got wasted.
Sensing that she truly is all alone, Aria crosses the road and enters the playground of the kindergarten. Even in the darkness, she can see that the playground slide looks like it has been grabbed by some unseen hand and crushed into a twisted mess before being placed back down.
She turns her attention to the inside of the building. The darkness seems to recede as she moves closer to the entrance allowing her to see the collection of finger paintings and other childish artwork still attached to the walls.
As Aria steps inside the building, there is a blinding flash and suddenly she’s watching a tiny version of herself excitedly moving along with a large group of children as they head back to their classroom. The building has returned to its former glory and even the smell of pine disinfectant used to clean the floors hangs in the air.
She watches the five-year-old version of herself wearing a pretty white dress and hair neatly braided into a crown, as she heads down the hallway to her right along with the other children. Then there is another flash and Aria finds herself alone in the broken building once again. This time she’s facing the hallway leading to the classrooms.
The darkness seems to move out of her way as she slowly walks down the hallway, listening for the sounds that would tell her there was someone else in the building with her. But there isn’t even the sound of scurrying rats as she approaches the first classroom. There isn’t much to see. Anything of value has long been stripped away and only a couple of tiny broken chairs remain amongst the rubble.
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Turning her back on the small room Aria suffers another flash of light. Once again her five-year-old self and a group of children are making their way down the hallway. This time she can see that they are heading for the classroom at the very end of the hallway. The only one with a sliding steel door.
Aria follows behind the group, still awestruck that she can see a version of herself that should never have existed since she was born long after the bombs were dropped. But here she was reliving a memory of something that she thinks never happened.
The kids are almost at the steel door when everyone suddenly stops. The sound of warning sirens starts outside the building and then quickly makes its way inside. The excitement turns to fear and every one of the group runs for the steel door. The sound of their rushing feet and the siren quickly fade as Aria finds herself back in the present.
What the fuck is going on, She wonders to herself as she makes her way past the remaining classrooms and towards the one at the end of the hall. There isn’t much to see in any of the others so she keeps her focus on that steel door.
She realizes she can’t break her gaze from the heavy door even if she wanted to. It feels like someone has grabbed her by the head and is forcing her to look in that direction. When she finally reaches the door, to her surprise it slides open revealing a classroom lit with a bright red bulb. The teachers' table and chair are still where they would have been all those years ago. The tables and chairs have all been neatly stacked in one corner of the room.
Aria’s gaze drifts to the empty floor space. Her eyes widen as she realizes what she is looking at. On the floor, drawn in white chalk, was a large circle with a pentagram inside it. A pile of small bones, cleaned of all their meat, sits in the center of the pentagram.
Suddenly there is another flash and this time Aria can see herself sitting in the middle of the pentagram. The front of her white dress is soaked red with blood as she chews on the leg of one of her classmates. The remaining children huddle in the far corner of the room, shaking with fear and terrified to step out into the room.
The vision fades and Aria gasps with surprise. She rubs her eyes and tries to shake the scene from her head. What did she just witness? There is no way that child was really her. It just wasn't possible.
She stumbles backward away from the red-lit classroom and turns to make her way out of the building. For the briefest of moments, she is certain that she can see Myrle the monk standing at the top of the hallway. But as she gets closer she realizes that it's only the shadows playing tricks on her eyes.
Once she is back outside in the playground, Aria turns to look inside the building, and once again she is certain she can see the monk moving in the darkness. But his outline flickers out of existence before any words can leave her mouth.
Shaken, Aria turns and starts the walk back to her car. Right now she understood only one thing. She needed to sleep.