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CHAPTER 29: IN THE DARK

[Narrator]

In the entrails of an underground maze, surrounded by twenty immobile [Death Knights] and the scattered corpse of insectoid ghouls, a dark cloaked figure stood still, wrapped in coiling whips of shadows and considering the split path ahead. “Where…?” the figure whispered.

After a short while, the being’s lowered head rose a fraction. Hazy shadows billowed from underneath the hem of the cloak like eager tentacles which converged towards the left path. The being raised a sleeve. “This… way…”

Waiting no longer, the [Shadow Fiend] took the left path and glided further into the maze, followed by the clanking bunch of armoured undead. “Capture… the princess… Kill… the other one…” Soon the group disappeared into the darkness of the earth, leaving behind the gravelly voice of the fiend still echoing over the noise of rattling metal. “I… hate… repeating… myself…”

.

.

.

Shortly after the dangerous bunch had vanished beyond a bend in the tunnel, a small furry head poked from behind a rock in the tunnel they had come from earlier. The head belonged to a Border Collie puppy with glowing red eyes and covered in a faint blue hue.

The puppy peeked into the left tunnel, then huffed in surprisingly haughty disdain. He let out a low growl and suddenly rose another several inches… as the head of the black-furred, red-eyed goat he was sitting on also peeked from behind that same rock. The blue hue that coated the puppy also covered the goat. Unlike the calm canine, however, the ungulate looked positively terrified and about to bolt. She was shaking in fright and her dead eyes darted feverishly around—more a reflex than an act of any use for a dead creature whose sight depended on magic more than any physical organ.

Another quiet growl of the puppy went unnoticed by the goat. The puppy rolled his beady eyes and karate-chopped the black beast between her horns. Startled and indignant, the goat turned her head around and shot her passenger a wounded glare. Merciless, the puppy raised an imperious paw and pointed… at the right tunnel.

The goat heaved a surprisingly human sigh and trotted in the indicated direction, her hooves soundless on the stone ground. The blue shade covering both of them emitted no light onto their surroundings and soon, they too vanished from sight like the previous group, swallowed by the darkness.

* * *

[Main]

“You’re not… actually an NPC, are you?”

Two golden eyes are rooting me in place. There’s an intensity in them that differs from Athena’s usual simmering fury, something darker, which I don’t recognise. I don’t like it.

I can’t stand that gaze more than a few seconds. I avert mine. Guilt makes me squirm. My feet shift on the ground. I link my fingers in front of me and rub my hands nervously. I think she takes my guilty silence for the answer it is.

“Are you a player?” The understated disappointment I hear in her voice tears through me worse than any blaming retort ever could. There’s something else there as well, which again I can’t identity but makes me want to vomit.

I can only nod, head down, dishevelled hair curtaining my face. I don’t feel like I deserve to look at her right now. It’s a strange feeling. I don’t consider myself a very honest person. I lie— a lot—whenever it suits me, in fact, and even to people I trust. It never bothered me before, and certainly not to the point of near shivering.

Head lowered, I wait for the shouting or the punch or both, which I’m sure are coming.

…

But neither does.

After a while, I can’t stand it anymore. I look up. My eyes lock with hers and my guts sink. Athena is just staring at me, saying nothing. That golden fire in her eyes seems dulled somehow, glazed and shaded.

After a long stretch of tensed silence, she just asks, “Did you have fun?” Then she turns around before I can utter a sound. I’m not sure what I could say to that, though. Yes? No? I’m not sure myself…

She doesn’t go far. She walks to a wall and flops to the ground against it.

Unable to think straight, I finally say the only thing I can think of. My voice is shaky and even I barely hear it. “Thena, there are monsters… I still need to… I mean, the wards… We can’t rest now… here… I…”

She doesn’t answer. Though was that even a question? I see her body slump in the characteristic way players’ avatars do when they log out. “…Thena?” Of course, she doesn’t reply. It’s not her here. Just a husk. At most, an avatar without player can make some automated actions like eat, drink, and take medicine… Conversation is impossible, obviously.

Still, I keep calling out to her back for a while, in a daze, still trying to process what just happened. I’d anticipated many ways this could have gone, none too good, but this sort of quiet deception was not one of them.

It was much worse than anything I came up with.

For some reason, I have trouble breathing. I stagger to the wall and slide down to the floor myself. My head hurts and my vision blurs red. I gather my knees in my arms and sit there, staring fixedly at the opposite wall in silence for I don’t know how long, only feeling dull… and empty.

After an indeterminate amount of time, I distractedly mutter. “This is not fun…” Am I talking to myself, or answering Thena’s question? Who cares?

I drop my forehead onto my knees. “This is not fun at all.” My whisper floats in the dark, dispersing in the sound of silence.

No one answers.

* * *

[Narrator]

An unknown amount of time passed. Sounds of wheezing, uneven footsteps, dragging and scratching of nails against stone could be heard in the dark tunnel, approaching the alcove where the two unmoving players sat, one green and imposing, the other tiny and paler than death.

Quickly, the noise grew too loud to be ignored. The slightly pointed ears of the small white-skinned woman twitched. She half-raised her head from her arms. A pair of glassy blood-red eyes slowly shifted in direction of the noise.

Soon, a slow-moving mass of dead bodies, ghouls and some other undead monsters emerged from the shadows, crawling and stumbling towards the pair. Another twitch agitated the girl’s white eyebrows. Looking away from the incoming monsters, as if not seeing them, she turned to the slumped imposing form a coupe steps away.

After several long and slow heartbeats, she turned back the noisy monsters again. This time her gaze was sharper and focused, through still somewhat glazed and dull. A spark of emotion flickered in those soulless red eyes and her face twisted in a vicious anger even as her eyes remained mostly dead.

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“You’re too noisy. Can’t you fuckers see she’s sleeping?” The words came out a hateful hiss. “Get the fuck away.” When none of the dead complied, her expression shifted again, passing through frown and more anger to settle finally into a cold smile. In contrast, the spark of emotion turned into a demented brazier.

In a supple motion, something of a dancer or a feral predator, the girl rose to her feet. A soft chilling laugh escaped her pale lips. Nonchalantly, she retrieved a dagger from her Inventory and without even a blink, slashed her wrist open. Blood flew out, rising up and morphing into countless tiny blades. The flying blood shards started spinning and orbiting the dhampir in a dense deadly cloud.

The closest of the monsters bared its rotten teeth and, raising clawed hands towards the girl, gargled hungrily… and loudly. The girl’s eybrows twitched briefly into a frown, but her smile never faltered. She raised a single finger to her lips.

“Shhhhh.”

In the next instant, the tunnel was painted red.

* * *

[Evangeline]

“Eva. Eva, are you in there?” The calls alternated with loud rapping and rattling of the handle. “Eva. Answer me. Please!” Worry was clear in the voice muffled by the faux-wood panel, but none of it seemed to reach the girl huddled on the bed.

Eva laid in foetal position on her bed, above the covers, clutching an old battered stuffed toy that had seen one too many washes. Her breathing was ragged and her body was shaken by sobs, however not one tear marred her face.

Around her, the room was bare, with dull grey walls and “last gen” IKEA furniture, metallic and all round edges. Only a single poster of the band Faust above the bed and two framed digital pictures on the nightstand gave the room any semblance of personality. Otherwise, the decoration might has well have been copy-pasted into reality from a catalogue. 

These two pictures alone told a story—and not because each was in fact a short looping video of a few seconds, has had been the trend for the last couple decades.

One showed a couple and two young girls. The man, in his forties, had a wiry physique, glasses, messy black hair and an awkward but contagious smile. The woman had olive skin and barely slanted eyes, traces of some distant Asian heritage. She wasn’t a beauty by any standards but the laughing smile that lit up her face made that irrelevant. When the shot was recorded, she was trying to coax the older of the two girls into remaining inside the frame, despite the latter’s visible displeasure and vivid attempts at escaping.

Said girl possessed the same black hair as the man, but she had the darker skin of the woman. She also sported striking electric blue highlights across her spiked hair and dark makeup including a glaring overuse of purple eyeshadow. Her clothes were in black faux-leather with metal studs and her pants were ripped black jeans. The scowl on her face was far too strong to be anything but practiced. She appeared the textbook definition of a rebellious teenager.

In sharp contrast, the younger girl, who looked barely nine, stood well-behaved and almost still even in the moving picture. A bright childish smile lit up her face directed straight at the camera. Holding both her parents’ hands, she was dressed in a pink chequered skirt, her black hair separated in two twin-tails and happy sparks in her wide amber eyes, the same unusual shade as her mother.

This was a model picture of a happy family.

The second picture only showed three people.

None were the same man and woman appearing on the first picture. The older person here was a blonde woman in her early thirties, who shared similar features with the man from the first picture. She was smiling sincerely though a bit stiffly, as if smiling wasn’t something she was used to. Her slightly dark-rimmed and tired eyes showed her happiness, however.

By her side was a taller and younger woman, around twenty five, who swayed nonchalantly with both hands tucked in her blue-jeans back pockets. She sported an easy-going and roguish grin displaying her white teeth. Her clothes had gained colour over the years, leaving dark and gloomy behind, but still retained that same punkish-ripped bad-girl look she’d always favoured since she’d turn twelve, and her hair were died bright green.

The last person on the shot was a gloomy girl no older than twenty.

Her long black bangs cast a shadow on her eyes and her unflattering baggy clothes hid her figure and made her petite body look even tinier. Her lips were painfully hooked up in a forced smile that didn’t reach her troubled amber eyes. Without seeing both pictures side-by-side, almost nobody would recognise the grinning ten-year-old in this distraught young woman.

And now that grown girl was curled up in bed, facing the grey wall away from the pictures and crying tearlessly.

The person outside the door kept insisting. “Eva! Answer me or I go and fetch the axe! You know I will!”

“We don’t own an axe.” Finally the girl on the bed answered flatly. The knocking and rattling stopped. She imagined more than she heard her sister’s relieved sigh on the other side of the door.

“I’m sure I can make do with the toaster.” The other’s attempt at a joke fell flat, her voice too shaky for her amusement to sound genuine. She knew it too and gave up. “Eva. Open the door, please.”

“Go away.”

“Eva, what is it? Talk to me. Please.” Eva heard a dull thud and guessed her sister had leant her head against the door. “I can’t help if you don’t talk to me.”

“…I’m fine.”

There was a moment of silence, then another sigh. “Okay. If you say so...” Another beat of a silence. “Are you sure you don’t want to come down for diner? I ordered Chinese.”

“Not hungry.”

“……I understand.”

Eva listened in silence. She knew her sister was still standing behind the door. After a short while, she heard one last sigh and then footsteps walking away from the door. Her arms tightened around the old battered toy—a purple cat missing an eye and whose left arm had been amateurishly patched, incidentally by that same sister who’d just left after confirming Eva was still alive. 

Eva both loved and hated her sister for giving up so easily. Love because she understood her sister just didn’t want to upset her. Hate because… her sister didn’t want to upset her.

Eva hated that her family treated her like she was made of glass and any little bump would break her.

She hated that they were right. 

Above all, she hated herself.

She hated the mixture of fear and anger she felt festering inside her. It enraged her how pitifully afraid she was all the time. It terrified her that she might lose control of her anger and hurt someone. It had happened before. She’d hurt her sister once, badly, one day’s she’d thrown a cooking knife in a fit.

She hadn’t held any sharp object ever since… or cooked, which was probably for the best. She was never good at it anyway. She could even manage to fail boiling an egg.

You’re pathetic. Those were the words which crossed her mind every time she met her own eyes in the mirror. You’re a pathetic useless little shit. She could almost see those same thoughts in others’ eyes too. The hidden mockery, the disdain, the sneers they had to share behind her back. You’re disgusting. Worse than useless. You’re a burden for everyone you know. You’re sickening. Oh, the fun they must all have, tricking her with fake show of friendliness and then laughing behind her back.

Deep down, she knew she was being unfair. She had few friends, but because they were few and she obsessed over details, she knew they weren’t like that. They didn’t think of her like that.

But she couldn’t help it, and she hated that she couldn’t. She hated her paranoia and her persecution complex. It pissed her off to be this way, and she was scared shitless her paranoid fears might turn out to be true, as unlikely as it may be.

It was a vicious circle. Her whole existence was a downwards spiral, and no amount of therapy sessions or medication seemed able to change that.

Her therapist of the past five years—as some kind of last ditch effort, Eva was half-convinced— had recently suggested VR. More specifically, she’d suggested fantasy games, something as far removed from reality as possible. As the psychiatrist put it, it was a way to make a “fresh start” as “another person” to get a “new and unbiased view of her core self”. For that reason, and due to family circumstances, the third item in her bedroom that actually differed a bit from the overall blandness was a large Whatever gamepod which occupied a fourth of the available space.

Surprisingly, the therapist’s suggestion had shown some results. Even though Eva believed the actual impact on her real self was debatable at best, it was undeniable that—at least in VR—she didn’t feel as afraid and her anger finally had an outlet she didn’t feel guilty about.

But in the end, it still did little to improve her self-esteem. She was still the same pathetic, violent, useless woman who now cowardly fled the reality she feared and preferred to live a lie. At least, that was how she saw it. Her guilt simply changed its object.

She hated this.

However… lately… she’d thought, for the first time in a long, long while, that things had been looking up. She’d talked to a man while being in the same room, without screaming or hurling objects at him, and in the game, for the first time, she’d started to have something resembling fun, instead of just going through the motions.

But even that… Her hands trembled. She released a shaky breath. Stupid. She was just using you. In fact, who knew if even that guy wasn’t also laughing at her for how stupid and pathetic she was? You’re pathetic.

Disgusting.

Rolling over, she reached for the first photograph, the one with the happy family. She looked at the two adult’s faces. She knew every curve of them, from countless hours of polishing their lifeless moving image with her eyes, even as her real memories of them had almost all faded. Almost. And what remained she’d rather forget, but she wouldn’t let herself.

She clutched the picture to her chest. “Mom… Dad…” She sobbed harder.

But still, the tears wouldn’t fall.

* * * * *