Prologue: when the light goes out
"Biggest Midwestern storm in a century…"
"Like an inland hurricane…"
"Streets are flooded, Tom, businesses are evacuating the lower floors…"
"Not a storm! Some kind of…"
"Bah," the creature roars, a great, spindly, mass of brackish blood and tarnished brass, towering over the skyscrapers. "Bah," it says again, and the sky fractures. Rain sheets around it like a thick grey quilt and storm clouds churn overhead, rent by roaring bands of lightning whenever the nightmare speaks its word.
A building crumbles under the blow of one long, spidery limb, and the horrible, barbed monster strikes down every creature it sees with a kind of casual disdain.
People run, try to escape the storm-wracked city, but the nightmares' glinting, brass tendrils are waiting to snatch people off the waterlogged streets.
The police tries to fight it of course, and later the military tries too, but their bullets seem to have no effect, and the storm drags their aircraft from the sky, and dashes them against the city below. With every ineffectual attack, every terror-filled sob, it seems to get stronger. Barbed tendrils of brass and blood invade more of the battered city, and the hurricane gale waxes stronger. It shatters one great building after another, ropey sinews hurl skyscrapers like titanic javelins, and the artifices of man disintegrate under its senseless rage like so many match sticks.
But then, a light atop one of the ruined buildings. A girl stands before the nightmare, straight and unblemished amidst the mangled bodies. She is an inconsequential speck beside its vast bulk- young too, or short. She wears a hooded red sweatshirt and blank white mask over a simple, but elegant, silk dress. Of course, no dress looks all that elegant coupled with a hoodie. Her hair is long and straight, red, but dyed a cheerful electric blue at the ends. No one watching the news that day recognizes her.
The great beast blinks its thousand eyes, and peers down at her. No one can say what happens in its alien consciousness, as it stands there, contemplating that one little girl, but it only pauses for a moment.
A single, barbed, tendril stretches out, and swats at her experimentally. In a flash of bright flame, the limb is gone and the nightmare attacks in earnest. "Bah," it says, but the lightning meets a solid wall of flame. For a moment, everything seems to hang still as fire meets-and bests- lightning, but then the wall breaks, and the flames gutter and flicker feebly. The lightning is spent, but so are the flames, And an avalanche of twisted flesh and tarnished brass reaches for the girl, straining to rend and tear and impale, like it has done to so many others that day, and she is burning it away, but for every terrible protrusion that she destroys, she misses a dozen more. Soon, she is buried beneath thrashing brass and oozing gore- after all, what can one person do in the face of such elemental fury? The flames go out.
AN: In my opinion, stories should be able to stand up on their own, with little or no need for an author's note. In that, I believe I have failed spectacularly, so... sorry? This was intended as a prologue, but doesn't let people put up "chapters" without marking them as "chapter 1, 2, etc." Anyway, that's going to throw off the formatting for the whole story, but this is one of the few times that I think a prologue actually adds something to the story, so I've decided to just put up with it.
Also, I intended to set this somewhere between the events of the tv show, and mm: rebellion, but then I started changing things around to make the world a bit more sensical, then backstories started changing to work better with the new world, and now its basically an AU? Not sure how that happened?
On a less self-deprecating apologetic note, a review would be greatly appreciated; I'm writing this because I love writing. I'm posting it here because I want to know how to improve. Even if you decide not to keep reading, letting me know why would help me to be better in the future. Of course, follow/favorites/positive reviews are awfully encouraging, so the more I get, the faster the next chapter will come out :P
(they also remind me that this fic exists...)