For XxXRegretXxX's Start and Stop Challenge.
Phrase: "From the Darkness"
It's so much easier to fall into darkness then to come from the darkness, its natural, enticing, and powerful. Draco knew this all too well.
Power. That was all that mattered in this world, getting ahead and staying there. Fighting to the death, cheating and lying, killing, it was all just a part of a game. A game that he now played in, a performance he was forced to join.
His puppet progressed slowly through the story, the act that he played; each challenge he met was destroyed, in turn destroying part of him, the real Draco.
Each pull of his strings slowly pulled a piece of him away as well, he felt himself dwindle away from the pressure that progression meant, but other emotions meant more, success. He needed to win; it was all he had left.
He felt himself receding, the light fading from his entire being, until he felt barren, cold and so, so alone. But that was okay, because it was part of the game, the game with no ending but death.
But even death could be cheated in this game, because his puppet master, the man, no the thing pulling on the strings in his body and his mind, he controlled his life, he held it in his finger and twirled the strings around his digits. It was his game, and he loved it.
He toyed with Draco, playing with him until he felt the time to strike, he expected him to fail. He knew that he would. It was inevitable, Draco knew this.
He performed relentlessly as he was manipulated, maneuvered, molded into this perfect, lifeless servant. He felt less and less each day and that's how he knew it was working.
When Draco shut his eyes and the darkness didn't scare him, it called to him; it caressed his eyelids like a familiar friend. He was losing to the darkness. And he was winning in the game.
He knew this wasn't true when the darkness consumed him so much that he slowly began to realize that the game was inescapable, he was trapped to perform until death, or worse, until voidness, emptiness, nothingness.
Draco fell into the game unwillingly, but he wanted to win just like the others, he was willing to do what it took to get the job done, to win, to triumph, to succeed.
He had always fought it in some respects, he always knew that it was wrong, but he knew more that the puppet master, his master, played the game for him and each outcome was as bleak as the last, voidness, and complete darkness.
But the battle in life, the war outside his mind, was tied closely to that of the game, and when the puppet master was defeated, Draco felt the bleakness of life slow.
It took years to pull himself from the darkness, but getting out felt so much better than the prospect of winning the game ever had.
I really loved writing for this Challenge, and while this is my shortest published drabble hed story/challenge entry ever, I still had a really hard time deciding what I was going to write about. Thanks for reading!