The Sound of Fear
Silence was all they could hear. The darkness surrounding on all sides crushing in its potency as their fractured mind struggled to piece together the remnants of their memories. But it was all in vain as it seemed their locked mind would remain so.
Slowly, terribly slowly, their mind began to clear. As it did they became aware of a subtle sound, a dull thumping noise like some pounding on a distant door. It sounded like the mighty fist of some behemoth on ancient castle doors, the very sound of it enough to strike a pang of fear into their mind. In response the thudding quickened slightly, as if in response to their perception of it.
Before they could do anything more another noise reached them, this one more of a faint hissing. The sound of escaping air they realised. Though how they had come to that conclusion they couldn't remember. They knew that they were in some sort of distress however, they looked around.
Their surroundings were dark, but not so dark as to be incomprehensible. Instead there emitted from one of the walls a small red light. The gentle pulsing of the light matched the low thudding in their ears, that distant sound a constant companion.
They reached out towards the light. The small red light soon obscured by their hand, and as soon as they touched it their eyes were flooded in light. They cried out in shock and a little pain as their surroundings were illuminated brightly.
Blinking through the pain they shook their head, dark hair obscuring their vision. In response they brushed it away, feeling two protrusions on the top of their skull. Their curved horns were smooth, this brought another fluttering memory to the fore of her tortured mind. She frowned.
‘She?’ she thought to herself quickly. Yes, she was nerivith, it was coming back to her now as she looked at the rose-pink colored skin on the backs of her long-fingered hands. Looking around the cramped space she was in she noticed her reflection on one of the side panels.
It was distorted and a little grimy, but she could make out her own features well enough. An almond shaped face with dark indigo eyes greeted her, her two pink skinned horns rising out of the raven black hair atop her head that she liked to keep shoulder length. A name floated out of the miasma of her memory and she spoke it aloud.
“Niev.” she heard herself croak. Her voice was that of a desiccated husk. Her mouth was dry, she only noticed just now. Looking around frantically she found a small line labeled ‘Potable Water’ and raised it to her parched lips.
She had expected a strong flow of liquid to repel the deadly desert in her mouth, but instead she was met with only the barest of trickles. She groaned but made sure not to waste a single precious drop of the stagnant, lukewarm water. She sucked on the line more, hoping to acquire more of the life sustaining fluid, but it was of no use. The water was gone, seemingly none remained and so she released it, a small tether drawing it slowly back into the recess from which she had pulled it. Her eyes followed the motion, that same dull thudding the only other stimulation to her tired mind.
Niev looked around again, this time able to make out much more of her surroundings than before. She was in some sort of small mechanical space. The walls to her left and right were covered in buttons, dials and a series of small digital readouts that spooled a constant stream of information across their diodes. But it all meant little to her. To her front was a large smooth panel, it looked as if it were designed to open as she could make out magnetic hinges at its top. Printed in large red letters above this panel were the words ‘Pull both yellow handles to open.’
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She cocked her head at that, was she in some manner of craft? Almost as soon as she asked it more memories came flooding back. She remembered the sounds of chaos, an explosion and screaming, possibly her own. It would explain her current situation, the ship she had been on had suffered catastrophic damage and she had only just managed to escape it on one of the ship’s escape pods. She frowned once more, this was not the memory she would have expected to have, it all seemed so out of place to her.
‘But what had caused the accident in the first place.’ She wondered to herself silently. She tried to ignore the subtle thumping in the background as she cocked her horned head once more. Niev reached out with an ungloved hand to the small screens before her and pressed a gently flashing blue button.
Almost immediately she heard a voice issue from one of the speakers, her voice. Full of panic and desperation as it wailed into the deep dark of the void.
“This is escape pod three of the cargo vessel COS Good Enough, the ship is lost. The crew is lost. I am.. lost. Please if you can hear this help me, included in the broadcast is my location, I am currently at 13.. Y-16.. …” The static that fizzled over the last of the recording worried her greatly. More-so than the subtle thudding sound that suffused all of her existence, it meant that the recording had been replaying for a great many hours, the source slowly becoming more and more distorted by cosmic rays and other high energy radiation sources from deep space.
She checked the Em-radio’s status and was dismayed to see its indicator light was a solid orange, meaning it had not yet made connection with another Em-radio in its admittedly short range of a few light weeks. But that was no reason to despair, she would just need to wait a little longer for surely there would be others listening.
This thought made her pause, how long had she been alone? She felt the dryness of her mouth and the weakness of her muscles under the bulky suit she wore. It must have been many hours for her condition to have deteriorated so far.
Niev turned as much as she could and looked at her supply readout, no food. No water. Only recycled air that was rapidly becoming too stale to sustain her conscious activity. She would fall back into a coma in a minute or two, in response to this information she felt nothing but a crushing sense of loneliness and not a little fear.
It was one of her ultimate terrors, one she had carried over from her own childhood. Death was not a large worry to her, nor to most of her people. What she did fear however was dying alone, especially in space. Her corpse would drift alone and undiscovered for as long as it remained in the depths of the void. Potentially forever.
The thought of her body lost into the depths of space made her shiver, the tiniest prickle of sweat beading her brow at the horror of such a fate. No, she couldn't, she felt herself breathing faster, the thumping becoming more pronounced as she tried in vain to calm herself. The air was heavy, and her chest heaved as she tried and failed to catch her breath in the thin recycled atmosphere of the pod.
She knew it now, the sound, the awful pounding in her ears that seemed to pervade all of existence as the end got closer and closer. It was her heart pounding in terror, the blood rushing through her veins like ice as the fear spread throughout her body. Her vision dimmed as she began to lose her tenuous grip on consciousness and she recognised that the sound had been her all along. Her subconscious knowing the dark truth far before her own tortured mind was able to catch up.
Niev closed her eyes, now only wishing for the fear to stop, she was lost in space, and there was nothing she could do to save herself. The last thought that left her fractured mind before she fell unconscious rang through her psyche like a death bell tolling. She was already dead, she just didn’t know it yet.
End of Story