Introduction: Hello, if you are reading this, you are reading my very first submission to Fanfiction dot net. I suggest you mark down the date and time so that on this day, each year from now, this moment may in your cup be freshly remembered. Paraphrasing aside, I hope you enjoy this. It is a highly experimental work, drawing heavily on influences outside of Digimon, and referencing no specific season. I hope in this to create a fully independent realization of the Digital world, and those within and without it.
Enough talk from me, time to let the story speak for itself.
Prologue:
Here, there is darkness. Not the half light of home, but true darkness. It is like ink upon the walls, flowing into every twisting crack until it seems the rock is but a frail shell wrapped around me, and beyond, infinity.
The feeling gnaws at me, snaps at the back of my neck like slavering fangs. I do not like it here, but that isn't my choice to make. It was, once, when I wrote the journal, and maybe I was a fool for making it, but it's all arbitrary now. Nothing to do but proceed.
In my hand, the glowstick grows dim again, and the shaking helps less than it did before. I know not what kind of man, if I could even have been called that, I was to have carried such things before, but as shadow and light begin to pull apart, I think I understand.
Still, even if the purpose is explained, the shape will always disturb me. Such small, frail things, the sticks and the journal, tiny and soft beneath my claws. It feels sometimes that so much as a breath will shred them to pieces, and all their secrets with them. So I breath carefully.
The stick fades to little more than a faint afterimage, and with great irritation I crack the next. As the light flares and burns my eyes, I cannot help but be glad that I only have two left. For all the dangers the darkness poses, at least it does not hurt. To think the journal complains at how faint they are! I almost dread finding this "surface" again.
... how I hate this journal. Such a bitter wrapping of questions. Layers upon layers of things I cannot imagine, things I don't want to imagine. Obligations, history, and towards the end, pained and disoriented gibberish. If it were not for that, I could almost believe it was some sort of joke by the others, some teasing prank to torment my amnesia. But the one thing I do remember is the pain, and the journal remembers it too.
So the duties within are my duties, and the steps within my own. Once when I walked them before, and twice now as I walk them again. Only now I'm going backwards... does that make it subtraction?
Agh! This glowstick grows more bothersome by the minute! At least it's brother had the good decency to dim over time, but this one burns more with every blink of my eyes! Wait, the color is wrong, and... I can see down the tunnel a ways. Is this... the surface?
