The Battle For Blogland - Ch. 14: Reliving

It's FINALLY FINISHED.
So, the holidays are on now, so I'm hoping to have at least one more chapter up in the next two weeks. Hopefully. But meanwhile, enjoy this one.
As I said, it's essentially a recap chapter, but there are events important anyway, so yeah.
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Theme: 'Into The Nothing' by Breaking Benjamin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QOe9US4H6U
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14

RELIVING

In essence, Death asked us for our story, only that’s not how she phrased it. And she asked in what was probably the worst way possible.

“So who’s dead?” she had asked once the silence following the end of her story stretched for too long a time. The room seemed to drop at least ten degrees.

I’m not sure about the others, but I had fully expected Sparky to burst into a blaze of unrestrained fury and utterly destroy Death for asking such a thing. This, to my great surprise, did not happen at all. Instead, more silence followed Death’s inquiry.

“You’re going to have to tell us what’s happened sooner or later,” she pressed on, and so finally we decided simply to let her original phrasing go on forgotten.

“When this all started, we weren’t in the same groups,” I started off. “The majority of us were, but not everyone. Nixion, Sparky, Lynxia, Lavender, Ink, Flame, and me. That was our first group.”

“I reckon you have a pretty good idea about what happened,” Flame picked up. “Hollow Men came from everywhere – beyond the mountains, the lake, the volcano, the forest. Everywhere.  We fought back, but had to leave eventually. The gas was too strong. We were too tired. And there were too many.”

“We shouldn’t have left…” Nixion muttered. “We should have destroyed them…”

“Anyway,” I continued. “We couldn’t destroy them. So we ran. For two hours or so. By the time we stopped, the sun had set, and we’d found ourselves in some kind of place where absolutely everything was flat.”

“Some of us went off looking for food,” Nixion said. “Found nothing, of course. No food, no water, no shelter. And it was freezing.”

“Which is why I started a campfire,” Flame said. “To say it was freezing was an understatement.”

“Yeah, and it was still a stupid thing to do,” Nixion scowled.

“It wasn’t as-”

“Don’t start again,” I cut across him. “And stupid little arguments like that kept breaking out, despite everyone’s best efforts to keep quiet. Conditions were horrible, we were all confused and angry, and tempers were running high.”

“Lavender kept insisting we all ‘stop arguing and get along’…” Flame muttered with a hint of a amusement.

Nixion continued the story. “We decided to take it in turns to keep watch, considering we had no protection from anything. We couldn’t sleep anyway, so me, Mist and Sparky stayed up for watch.”

“It wasn’t fun,” I added. “The fire was dead, there no wind but it was still completely freezing, and we still had no idea how to process what had happened at Central.”

“I don’t think we really talked much at all that night,” Nixion continued. “And when we did, it was just to ask if we should move on or not.”

I took another mouthful of my drink and went on. “So I got bored and decided to do what I always end up doing – I took a walk. Wasn’t long until I saw a body in the distance. Take a guess at who it was.”

“No idea,” Death shrugged. “Who?”

“Dylan,” I said. “Just as Vlaedr left him.”

“Oh…” muttered Thrust quietly.

“Mm…” I said.

“So, there was this short argument over establishing what his name was,” Nixion said. “Y’know. Because he kept changing it.”

Death and Thrust both nodded in unison.

“We spent the rest of the night on watch, and woke the others once the sun rose,” I said. “We weren’t in any position to bury Dylan or anything, so we left him there and moved on.”

“The next day was stupidly, ridiculously hot,” Flame sighed. “Like, hot. Annoying hot. Really hot. Like-”

“I think we get it,” Thrust interjected.

“Us three that had stayed up on watch were pretty much wiped out,” I told them. “As Flame says, it was hot. Really hot. And it wasn’t as though we’d gotten sleep or anything.”

“So we spent the whole day trailing behind everyone,” Nixion continued. “Because the whole day was spent walking. Which was, as you would imagine, so much fun.”

“Well,” I muttered. “Sparky and I were trailing behind. Nixion wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t I?”

“Nah, you were with the others,” I said. “Remember? Still arguing about everything.”

“Oh yeah…”

“Anyway,” Flame continued, bringing the conversation back to terms of relevance. “It eventually started to rain. And I don’t just mean raining, I mean like huge, massive black clouds. And the rain was heavy. Like, super heavy. And thick. And dense. And-”

“We get the picture,” Death told him.

“In any case,” Nixion said. “You wouldn’t believe how much the rain helped everyone. It was cooling, sure. But we also drank. Everyone stopped arguing and things got better pretty quick.”

“And then, of course,” I said. “The lightning had to start.”

“We were still on the super flat landscape,” Flame explained. “So we kind of ran.”

“We stopped for the night again later on, and the terrain was different,” I said. “There were hills, and ditches and all that stuff.”

“So Lynxia, Flame, Lavender and Star all stayed up for watch that night,” Nixion said. “And me, Mist and Sparky slept.”

“We didn’t get much of it,” I said. “We each woke up a few times. There was a fire going again but we were all too wet and too cold to protest against it.”

“And then I came along,” Ivy spoke up for the first time in a while, cracking a grin. “To traumatize everyone.”

“In a nutshell,” Flame said.

Following that, Ivy took charge of the conversation and cut back to her own initial invasion battle. She explained that her own group had originally consisted of herself, Lorelei Fetch, Gabriel Cobalt, Johanna Remus and, for a short time, Dylan Silver.

“Weird…” Thrust murmured after Ivy had covered her own experiences up until meeting us that night in the rain. “So at one point or another, all three of our groups have had some sort of contact with Dylan?”

“I guess so,” Flame replied.

“He was originally with Ivy…” he said, frowning. “Then he met up with us, and was killed by Vlaedr… And then you guys found him dead?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Interesting,” Thrust said slowly.

“Is it?” asked Ivy.

He shrugged. “Gives some sort of timeframe to this whole thing.”

“Is that important,” Nixion asked.

“It could be,” he said. “Nothing we can really do with it at the moment, though. Continue.”

“Right.”

“Ivy told us about the City,” I said. “It was shelter, and they’d been staying there for a while, so it didn’t sound too bad to us. Not to mention we weren’t exactly going to go our different ways after finally finding other people.”

“So when the sun came up, we left again,” Flame continued. “Ivy, Gab and Jo leading the way.”

“Can I just say, I don’t know who Gabriel is? Or Johanna?,” Death interjected quickly.

“They’re some of our older friends,” Flame said.

“Only if they’re still alive…” Nixion muttered quietly.

“Regardless,” I continued on. “We finally got to the city which took longer than it should have because Ivy got us lost.”

“I didn’t get lost,” she scowled. “I don’t get lost, how many times do I need to say that?”

“Gab told me you’d never even been across the desert before the time you met us,” Flame piped up. “The fact that you ended up meeting any of us was a complete accident.”

“He was lying,” she shrugged.

“He seemed pretty certain to me.”

“This is so petty,” Death’s voice drifted over from behind the bar, emerging a few moments later with a second glass of beer.

“This isn’t petty,” Nixion informed her.

“We endured worse,” I agreed.

“Can we move on?” asked Thrust.

“Good idea,” Ivy clutched to his sentence and propelled the conversation onwards. “The city, yeah. That thing. When we got there the winds were starting, just because we’re that good at timing everything. Barely made it back to our basement, actually.”

“But we did. And once we were in the basement, Ivy, Gab and Jo pretty much told us everything she just told you.”

“And then we waited the winds out,” Ivy. “Loads of fun that was.”

“She kept flicking rocks at everyone…” muttered Nixion.

I’m fairly certain you can imagine how our explanation of events continued on from that point. While we were skimming over our rather dull adventures in the wilderness, we covered the days with short explanations, spending more time getting side-tracked than actually speaking within realms of relevance.

Explaining the whole Hollow Men and Explosives dilemma wasn’t too difficult. It was the most logical solution to the problem, but all the same. Talking about Star Inkbright properly for the first time since the City was beyond difficult, and with the knowledge that we still had Lynxia to cover made it worse.

In any case, the news of Star’s death came as a shock to Death and Thrust. She had been someone that simply everyone knew – more so any many other people that could have potentially been caught up in this. Her death affected them almost as much as it had us.

But they had not been there. They hadn’t witnessed what we had, and no amount of perfect detail or exact accuracy could put those feelings or those sights into proper depth. Those tides and waves of papery flesh. The enveloping chaos and panic that swarmed as we fled. The panic that followed as we regrouped, missing a member. And that final sight – of the city from the hill. That battered and dying city, darkened with gloom, decayed with ash, ruined by the storms, drenched with rain. That city, being enveloped by the final blast, the all-consuming light that took it and brought with it the winds and the heat that urged us backwards. And the empty, hollow crater that was left when the flames and the smoke had finally cleared, filling slowly with rain and signifying that both the city and Star Inkbright were no more.

We moved on, attempting to push our conversation away from the events of the painful and the sorrow. The spiralling depression and emptiness that had led us to the glowing forest, and that had consumed the majority of the group afterwards. The measures Lynxia and Sparky had taken to get us to snap out of it. Speaking about the mundanity of our situation following the horrors at the city was almost comfortable. We had been hungry, and empty, and still not nearly over the death of Ink, but at least it did not involve any deaths. Those of us that were doing the explaining to Death and Thrust seemed to take small amounts of comfort from that.

And then, of course, we reached the decision.

“Sparky made a suggestion,” I said. “She wanted to go back to Central. It was a fair point, all things considered. It had been a good two or so months since the initial invasion. Anything could have happened in that time.”

“There were only two people against it,” Nixion continued. “Johanna didn’t like the idea, and Gab thought it was dangerous. Said we’d be walking into another bloodbath. The rest of us wanted to go back, though.”

“So what happened?” asked Thrust.

“Well, we left,” said Flame as though it were something obvious.

“It wasn’t quite that simple,” Ivy followed up. “We took the night to think it through, and the plan was to leave at sunrise. By that time Lavender had changed her mind and decided she wanted to stay behind. So we left.”

“You split up?” asked Death, frowning. “That seems sort of… Dangerous.”

“Among other things, yes,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter now, it’s over. The rest of us left, and Lavender, Gabriel and Johanna stayed behind. We haven’t seen them since.”

There followed the second battle of Central. We didn’t bother covering the walk back. Why should we? It was simply a walk. We explained taking cover once Central was in sight and the idea to strike while the sun obscured our figures from the Hollow Men and the zombies.

And then came the fight.

We all know how it panned out. We fought and we failed. Nothing to be done about that. In addition to the Hollow Men, there were zombies, just as Ivy had entailed to us. Clouds of gas hung over the scene as the fighting grew more and more desperate.

“It was sort of a bad idea,” Death interrupted us, half way through. “It really just sounds like something you’ve all done out of angst. Sounds to me like Gabriel was right – you could have all been killed.”

“Can you blame us for doing things out of anger?” asked Nixion. “Star had just been killed. We were angry. We weren’t much but angry.”

“You still could have been killed,” scowled Death. “Anything could have happened. What’s happened to Lynxia? Did you misplace her? Did she decide to leave? Did she go off to find-”

Sparky shot across from her place of solitude in a flash and the next second she had Death pinned against the wall of the tavern, arm pressed hard against her throat. Bottles of assorted alcohol spun from their places and fell with crashes as the glass smashed on the floor.

“Lynx was killed,” she said. It was not a yell, or a scream, or a cry of rage. It was a lowered tone of pure, cold fury. It was worse than screaming. “Lynx is dead. And it’s all your fault. My fault.” She seemed to struggle with whether or not she was talking to Death or herself for a few moments, then she hardened her glare and stepped back. “Do not.”

She returned to her place without continuing and spoke no more.

“Yeah,” Nixion said, breaking the silence. “Lynxia…died.”

We explained the zombies, and the bite, and the futile effort that followed it in the briefest way we could, skimming over as much as possible. It was hard enough without knowing that there was the danger of Sparky bursting out into anger again. And then we were fleeing again, always fleeing, never able to overcome anything.

Of course, everything that followed Lynxia was easy. We walked for a time no one has yet defined. We found the Town. We found Death and Thrust and Lorelei. Easy. Simple. Quick. No dying. No loss.

And Death and Thrust accepted what they’d heard quietly, letting the silence that followed the end of our story ring out for several minutes, filled only with the occasional action of someone taking another drink from their glass.

Finally, when the silence became so great it seemed almost painful, Thrust spoke again.

“I think we may have a problem,” he said.

“What’s that?” asked Flame.

“We’ve lost track of time.”

Death cursed and bounded over the bar, hurrying towards one of the windows and peered through a tiny gap in barricades. She took a few steps back and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The sun’s setting,” she said. “Now.”

“And?”

“And,” she turned to us again. “There are vampires that hunt this place at night. Remember?”

“Shouldn’t these defences hold?” asked Nixion.

“We’re not counting on them to,” Thrust said. “Fact is, they’ve been straining for a while now. We meant to go out and grab some replacements today, but you lot came around and we forgot. Now that there’s more fresh meat up for grabs, they’re probably going to be a lot more aggressive tonight.”

“Then let’s go,” Nixion said. “I didn’t want to stay here anyway.”

“We’re in no position to leave,” argued Death. “You’re all a wreck and Lorelei’s had her ripped apart in case you’d forgotten.”

“Well we can’t stay, can we?” growled Nixion. “Thrust just said that!”

“You can’t leave either,” she said, shaking her head. “Where are you going to go?”

“We just explained how we survived for four months,” Ivy retorted. “We’ll find a way. You should come with us before you’re all killed too.”

“Thought you wanted to stay under cover anyway,” Death spat at Ivy.

“I’m not exactly fond of the idea of being torn apart by vampires!” she yelled.

“Well we’re not going back the way we came,” I said. “There’s nothing there. Better to go off looking for some sort of shelter where there’s a chance there could be something. How far is it to the other side of the town?”

“Maybe ten minutes,” Thrust said. “At a run.”

“Alright,” Nixion said. “Let’s go. I’m not staying here waiting for the vampires to tear this place down.”

“The defences will hold,” Death glared.

“Thrust said they won’t,” Ivy shot back.

 “Everyone shut up,” Flame shouted over the commotion. “We can’t stay. If the defences don’t hold then we’re all going to die. Even with eight people, we can’t completely hold off four vampires and a…werewolf bear vampire…thing.”

“Smooth,” Ivy said.

“Shut up,” he said. “Someone go get Lorelei. We’re leaving.”

Flame made a few strides towards the door of the pub, preparing to begin dismantling the barricades that held it shut, when a beast-like, guttural growl emitted from behind it, and the sounds of heavy claws slammed against the structure.

“They’re heeee-eeere…” Ivy said.