Promise the Sky

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Kiara

 

 

A.N. (04/07/12) Many people have found this chapter confusing and it will get a RE-WRITE. However, I have to actually take the time to think about it, and about what I want to say before I can do that properly. So my apologies if you struggle with this chapter, or if anything else is unclear - I've already written it 4 times over and I'm still going :P My advice is to read it, see what you think, ask any questions if you need, and then go on the the next chapters - everything becomes quite clear, I promise :) 

I open my eyes warily, as though my continued unconsciousness could somehow protect me from the terrors of this place. But there is no such luck, not for me, not for a girl that was born cursed, lived cursed, and died the same way too.

It is strange, to wake with the knowledge that you are dead. Waking seems wrong, this whole thing seems wrong, but dead I must be.

I take in the lands of the beyond and know that there is no doubt I have come to rest in the kingdom above the clouds. Everything is bathed in dark blue; the kind of colour so unnatural to the living world, that it can only be caught deep in the skies at midnight. I had never thought colour might have the ability to affect me so, but there is something terrible about the shade of this world, a world that could be so similar to my own if it were not separated by such a thin layer of purple. It tears at my heart, to look out across a land lit by sunlight the colour of misery.

My hot breath affects the air in a way it never would have in the land of living, birthing life in the form of hundred silver sparks. They skitter across the sky the same way that fish dart through the shallows.

And I cannot quite believe that I am dead.

It is difficult to remember such a crucial fact whilst my heart beats so loudly. Too loudly.

Too slowly.

Prickles run across my spine as realisation dawns, every single hair lifting to stand proud.

It is not my pulse. And that breeze across the back of my neck is too warm, too moist, to be wind.

My breath catches in my throat, my whole body freezing, inside and out. The rush in my ears continues, however, only confirming what I had suspected already. Something nearby is existing too; something close, something far larger than I.

And I wonder why I am so terrified. What is there to fear beyond death?

Everything that I was ever scared of, all those years; dying without the chance to taste the horizon, being hated, hunted, for my disability, existing as little more than a loveless nothing in a meaningless life. It had all happened, every single part, as though some distant God had taken my every prayer and turned it on its head.

And now that it is over, it no longer seems so bad.

Hot breath tickles through my hair again, and I realise that whilst I do not know what reason there is to be afraid, I still am.

Very. Very scared, very alone, very dead.

That deep heartbeat seems to fill my head, and horrible blue continues to saturate this world. A wind highlighted by silver fish dances through the grass and that colour, that terrible, portentous colour, almost seems to throb with it. It has turned grass that should have been vibrant green into darkest black. It has turned the distant sea into some broiling parody of night. And it has turned the horizon, my horizon, into a knife edge; sharp, distant, hideous.