I feel like a bitch for not updating... I mean... Ugh... Sorry... School and work have been killing me... But, I won't make excuses...
AN/ This chapter was hard. I had to restart and re-write and re-think and re-DO a bunch of stuff in general! On top of it all, I have yet to post the [SLIGHTLY] edited chapters. :/ *Sigh* But, Thank you all, so, so much, for reading! This story is rediculous, I know, but, finally, things kick off! I'm afraid most chapters will be shorter, (that's me talking, honestly I think practically all chapters STILL won't be under 4,000 words, heh heh) but that is simply because there is so much to this story! We are only in the first PART, [~Recpect~] which has 17 chapters as you know. There are 3 parts to this story- each part is longer than the last... Anybody wanna guess how many chapters I've got planned? XD Yeeeaaaah, it was my original intention to be done this story by the end of this year... I'm not sure if I will... Just letting you know... Heh heh. Anyway, again, thank you, thank you, thank you, for sticking with this! And a HUGE thank you to both Not a Guest (22) and lilseekergirl for reviewing regularily and being so encouraging :') All reviews, faves, fallows and just any of you reads mean so much to me. I promise this story will continue and will continue to continue until it is finished!... And it will make sense! Oh and P.S. to Valong: Thanks so much for your lovely review :3 I'm glad you're enjoying! Lol, it's fine- but Star's POV thingy's need to happen for many a reason I'm afraid- but it will all make sense! :D
Thank you for putting up with me, my unnecessarily long notes, and this odd, strangely long story. (that will make sense!)
Narrator: Hello there, thank you for reading! I'm happy to say the action is just about to start very, very soon. Our lovely protagonists won't be ignorant of this new, strange world for long! As well; the Author of this story has also constructed a map of Mebella, it's poorly and quickly made, but it's something and will be posted up on devianART next chapter when our favourite (one of our favourites- ?) Seeker comes across a little map of his own. Please check out Author's profile next chapter for the link that will lead you to her devianART page, that (hopefully) will also possess some of the art she hoped to make and draw for this story. Again, thank you for reading, please enjoy chapter 10 of this story~ Uninvited Guests. :)
The
Midnight Dawns
Chapter 10
Uninvited Guests
~Nightbird~
A different kind of darkness has settled over me. I cannot move. I cannot think. I am slipping away. Strangely enough, the oncoming unawareness does nothing to rattle my fear. I cannot think. Death itself was, not a moment ago, sitting but a few seats away. This does not shake me as it should, and I simply accept it.
When I can no longer feel my body, and am suspended in the blankness of space, a light glares from afar within the distance. Unlike the peaceful path of my Moonlight road that gently called to me, asking for my steps, this passage is deadly and dangerous, dipped down into the shallows of thickening anger. Fallow me if you dare, it says, growing more luminous and intense by the second, growling in its challenge. I shrink away, curling into myself and backing down. Come. It commands. I blink, heart wavering, feelings mixed under unease. The light grows brighter. It is a voice, calling to me, willing me to understand what I cannot... It is harsh, yet...true. I can feel it. It is almost as if it means to show me something, lead me to a memory among the black, awaken a knowledge from ages past, shed light upon the darkness. But I do no wish to fallow. I don't know why. I don't care. Clawing away, I begin to feel myself again. Protoform ripples, ripping me back to within my metal skin. Wings twitch low, fluttering nervously as a programming I can't explain blares to life, telling tales of danger and warning.
Run. Get away. Don't look back.
Now confided within my frame again, I run. Light gallops closer, streaking under me, clawing around walls of nothing. It twists and turns, warming the blackness, cradling it to white. Pushing faster I feel myself willing to give way, give up to the uncertainty of to where the light leads. No! An unnatural fear grips me. I just need to get away.
The light whips forward, grabbing at the blackness with swinging arms. Curling around me, I watch as digits latch into my armour, tugging me back, suffocating me in light. I scream. My plea echos against the blank terrain of nothing. Whimpering, I strive for escape, reaching out for the withering blackness as the light begins to drown me, seeping around my body and wrenching me back. And just as the light twirls across my frame, blanketing me in white, forcing my mind into the state of another, I see something.
Slim, green and opaque, a hand lashes onto mine! I'm pulled from the white, and am engulfed in an emerald of startling colour. Dazzled and shooken, my optics glance around the chiseled sphere in which I sit, and suddenly latch onto something that pulls against my frame. Cradling in my arms, is a liquid of ruby colour. When I touch it, I see it shimmer, but hold there in its wispy form. I forget about the raging storm of whiteness blurring outside. I forget about everything, the Witch, my companion, Lord Death...
Crushing the red to my chest, I glare at the emerald petals that suddenly blossom around me, and pull the ruby deep to within my spark.
Thank you, a voice I know but cannot place grins, now I see how you must die.
"NIGHTBIRD!"
I jolt online, systems humming to life as my optics snap wide. I try to push myself up, but I find my frame immobile. Confused anxiousness creeping into the shallows of my processor, I carefully attempt movement again. I can't move more than an inch, and it takes an uncomfortably long time to realize why. Arms push me to the ground, holding me against the cool marble of the floor. Concerned, bright ruby optics glisten mere meters from my flickering, yellowish ones. Starscream.
I immediately feel myself calm. "St-starscream..." I whisper, scratchy voice hoarse and heavy, though I'm unsure as of why.
Instead of a frown, smile, or other clear emotion, an unsettled quiver draws his lips to a thin line as his scarlet eyes trace lines within the shadows surrounding us.
Curiosity overcomes logical cautiousness. Neck-cables straining to allow my helm to tilt, I stare at whatever 'room' we sit in as of present. We no longer reside in the colourful courtyard, yet rather, a sort of archway. The stone-carved paths stretched out on either end of us lead nowhere, as far as I can see, and are peculiarly painted in the blackness of interminable night. Where...?
"We need to hurry..." Starscream's uneasy voice cuts through my pondering thoughts.
Snapping into reality, I try to speak, as clearly as I can. "Where are we?"
The answer is immediate. "Not far from the courtyard. When you passed out, I somehow manged to slip away in the confusion." Now paying me his full attention he nods at my awkward look. "Something happened, I don't know what, but some sort of crack echoed, and...everyone scattered... I know nothing of the details, simply that I grabbed you and pulled you through a back door..." His gaze drifts to the floor. "I didn't look back a-at her... I...couldn't..." Something I can't quite place floods his expression. Feeling oddly dizzy and uncoordinated, I grip his arm to steady myself, and force my frame to bend into a sitting position. Processor swimming, by shear will and iron grip alone do I keep myself upwards. I've somehow locked myself into an unsorted embrace with Starscream, and idly wonder why my head is hurting so bad, and why my mind is aching. Something...doesn't feel quite right. I can't grasp it. I don't understand it. I let go of it.
"Nightbird? C'mon, you can recharge later." My shoulder is shooken, causing me to open my optics. Funny...I don't recall shutting them. "Can you stand?"
I don't know, I think, but I must have said it aloud, for he nods and lets me go. I frown, wanting to feel the familiar embrace of his arms around my lithe frame...
I blink.
That something, the thing that just doesn't feel quite right sitting above me, suddenly seems ten times more real as it comes back. I can almost taste it. Thick and wavering, a mucky sort of substance sticking to my glossa holds me silent in its blindly simple complexity. Like the clawing arms, whipping through the blackness in myriads of eerie light, an unbalanced weight clutches at my intake, spitting in my face to wake up and remember. Remember what? What did I forget...?
My optics widen, danger and warnings suddenly blaring to life in my processor. The Witch! The Witch! That must be it, it must! What else could it be?
Breath quickening, my gaze darts back and forth. Where is she? Why hasn't she come yet!? I'm so afraid... So terribly afraid... The more I stare into the black eyes of the witch through my memories, the more my processor begins to pound. Dammit. It's back. Back again! What!? What am I forgetting!? Fear chuckles in my tank, clawing into my circuitry, causing me to forget myself. What!? What could it be?! I shake, body reeling under the oppressive weight of my thoughts. Red eyes glimmer above me. Shinning like scarlet rubies, filled with some sort of emotion I can't place.
Red eyes... Red eyes... Red eyes... The- same. red. eyes. That terrible, lonely night, when I first met Witch Mebella swallows my mind. Her eyes...they were scarlet, they were flames, they were his. Briefly, I'm drowned with the solitary emotions that plagued me upon that one cold night, but I push them away. Now is not the time to dawdle.
Mebella's gaze was not the ebony I had saw tonight, or the warm midnight of the maid I met so very quickly, but they were the fiery ruby jewels that shined just as Starscream's do. Though different in kin, they were his. But why? And why were they black this past night? Why did I remember them like that?
...Was that what I was supposed to remember?
A churning sensation rumbles through me. No. No it wasn't...
Though puzzled by the mystery of the eyes, I look away and into other thoughts. Nothing. I simply can not remember. The world spins around me, I feel sick, a woozy sensation parting atop of me. Damnit. What. am. I. forgetting? I grit my denta, the pounding in my head louder than ever! I can feel my body be gripped, shooken, whispered at, but I can do nothing. All I can hear is the beat of a drum. A beat that swallows my entire being.
Then all is once again black.
"Time to awaken, Shadow Stepper. I've saved you from yourself, so now you must do something for me."
My systems hum as they groggily online, though I wish I could still rest. I know that voice. It is the witch.
Lights floods my vision, earning a groan from parted, concealed lips. Pain throbs in my processor, optics shuttering as I adjust to the brightness. "W-what...?" Frowning in confusion, I watch as black swirls into the dotted sky, the tiny stars twinkling, bound to each other by arms of invisible length. They surround the sphere that, no longer painted black, glimmers across the violet sky in her shinning white.
I lie under the moon.
Chains rattle and I'm brought to myself. I find my arm attempting to reach to the midnight, but bound by metal ropes. Panic flashes through me as I discover I can barely move. Struggling, I kick, I squirm, my frame overheating as desperation begins to claw at me.
A chuckle slims through the air, brushing my audios in sweet, soft laughter. "There is no point in struggling, Shadow Stepper," red eyes open beside me, meting mine, "but I am certain you already knew that." Witch Mebella reveals herself, stepping into the light beside the stone that binds me. Leaning closer to my shivering frame, rose red lips grin,whispering, "My magic is too strong."
Intakes racing, I stare, optics wide and unsure. "What do you want with me?" I should be surprised at how smooth my words are spoken, whispered in a tone of unfamiliar sound, as if that of not my own, but I am not. I am simply terrified.
"To die, of course." The Witch answers, eyes level, hesitation nonexistent.
Something strikes me, it feels like a memory, but I see nothing. My optics narrowing, I puzzle over the breath of familiarity ghosting over my censors...
Mebella continues without being asked, "You see, Shadow Stepper, you are part of a plan, a foolish plot devised by the Air Walkers and Lords. They believed that you and two others would be enough to strengthen Mosko, to range the victors of the 'oncoming war'."
Optics narrowing further, I spit, "What? Ugh! Why don't you just explain to me what in the Pit you're talking about?" I forget my fear for a moment. I'm sick of being tossed around in this strange plot and understanding nothing of anything!
Unlike the night of which I first met her, the Witch seems much more complaint to giving me my explanations. "Very well, Shadow Stepper, as your obliviousness, and moronic confusion to the situation of yourself, you have proved your ignorance. So I shall explain."
I blink, anger twisting in my tank at the condescending words, though I say nothing... For a second there, I thought I was listening to Starscream...
Straitening herself, I watch as she circles 'round the cracked stone that I am bound to. It disturbs me how I can only see blackness in my surroundings as she walks in a spotlight cast from the moon. The night is all around us. And I feel as if it will never end. "I suppose I should begin from the beginning. Well, welcome to Meh-bella. My world." The Witch appears almost bored as she goes on, though I find myself captivated already, caught in the excitement with the possibility of finally finding some answers. "As of now, we are at war with Mosko, a part of Mebella, though, through laws of the Sea, a place of its own as well."
I frown. War does not strike me as it probably should- as most things dark, it feels familiar. Terrifyingly familiar. I know that I must have been programmed this way; to not cower at the concept of fightings and of death, and so it makes the Witch's words easier to accept. To not see them as that of a far away fairy-tale, a dark dream only to be excepted as a night-terror, but as a fact I was made to accept. Cybertron is still at war with itself- what's to say this new and alien war is any different?
"When I came to this world, risen from the so called evil of the core, and by a spirit of another across the stars, I took its discarded mess into my palm, and created order out of the madness. I drew a line, banishing those who were deterrent to the order, such as the Air Walkers and Lords. They refused to see the logic of my ways, the beauty of the silence I offered." The witch pauses, and her eyes meat mine. "You see, Shadow Stepper, when I first found myself in the Gray Mountain Range, caught in the longest valley - just as you were - I could hear it. The noise. It created an irascibility within me, and I knew I needed to stop it." She resumes her pacing, her words never stopping, their honey milked sound drenching my audios, forcing a barrier around my mind that allows nothing to enter; no thoughts no ideas no nothing.
"When I killed King Criwynne, taking rule of this land, the noise...stopped... As I said, order quickly fallowed from the noise and chaos of the original world, and all was good." She stops, as if considering something, and, surprisingly, a thought does flicker through my mind. Why did she hesitate when she said the so called 'noise', just stopped? Was this 'noise' the supposed 'instability' of this world? A memory suddenly graces me, one of the banquet that dined not a few hours ago. Lord Death...the one line he said... What was it?
"Everyone and everything will fade to black one day; whether it be by the thunder of the Ice Giants, or the silence that was once filled with song..."
What was he talking about?
I don't have time to think anymore. She is speaking; and I do not possess the will to do anything but listen.
"Except for Mosko. Much like the Air Walker's, they refused to see reason, and still do now. They are the rebellion I spoke of. They are the traitors that must be destroyed. Do you understand me, Shadow Stepper? This world was un-orderly and lame before I stepped in; if it were not for me, the noise would never have stopped; if I had not taken the royals and ended them and their folly-full ways, this world would only ever see black. I keep the Ice Giants where they belong, bowing by me. I keep the Throne intact with to where it belongs, secured to me. I keep the people in line, safe as they serve me. Without me, there could be nothing... That is why you must die, Shadow Stepper, I must stop what must be stopped."
A twinge of fear grasps me, but I can pay no attention to it, processor too busy shifting my thoughts into order. With all and what little I've learned so far... Something isn't quite right, I know it. I can feel it. There's something... I think back, back to before I ran and got Starscream and I into this mess... when...we where in...the chamber...
"Observe, our heart and mind burns with the poison of the Witch. What was once the beating Jade gemstone that controlled the evil in this world, is now stained with the ruby blood of Witch Mebella..."
I try to think what that means, what did she do? I remember the Jade stone, the beautifully diamond-cut gemstone, with that twist of a ruby floating within...
It is then that I am reminded of my dream... When Death vanished, I slipped from my body, and I felt myself running in the darkness, sprinting from the light that clawed at my frame and tried to drown me in its reckoning, white-shadowed face. And just as it was about to swallow me whole, that hand had reached out. That green servo wrenched me into the emerald that bloomed in petals. Ruby liquid cradled in my arms, much like the scarlet seeped into the Jade-gemstone...
Confusion has addled me, and I can only frown and squint at the sky.
I can make nothing out of this.
"Now," I hear the Witch speak, and once again, she claims my mind for her own, "Shadow Stepper, too much remains to be spoken of so I shall leave it in silence. But we are running out of time- the moon is still ripe, but she will not be for long..."
Fear suddenly jolts through me, wracking my frame, making my shudder under the pale light glimmering down sorrowfully above me. The light of the moon is gentle, as if hanging in apology... "Wh-what are you- g-going ta-d-do?" my voice is shocked and scratchy. I sound scared and afraid. And I don't have the courage to deny that I am.
Mebella steps into my line of sight, her black eyes forged of ebony as they narrow, dark and cold. "There is too much to say... I am not at liberty to give you hope, Shadow Stepper, so I'm afraid that that is all you need to know. After all, you will be dead soon- the information honestly should mean nothing to you."
Turning my helm, I peer into that black gaze, my yellowish optics stricken wide with fear.
She holds a hand in-front on my face, her perfect blue skin sapphire as she speaks. "Naweska limado, impatcha sancto," she pauses, then continues her chantings. I cannot think. I cannot move. I cannot breathe.
I feel a sort of blanket descend upon me, it blocks my audios so I can no longer hear Mebella, it covers my sight so I can only see blackness, it wraps up my body, so I can feel nothing but a cool, misty breeze settling over me. Colder it grows, blowing from a breeze to wind storm all to soon. I want to cry out, scream as the cables inside of me are gripped and torn at; ripped and grappled as they explode into shreds! Energon is everywhere. It dripples off of my clenched servos; it pools across my masked face and shuttered optics. Pain digs through everywhere, every part of both mind and body! It laughs, scorching me in the chilling ice as I am devoured into oblivion! It burns! The cold stings into my circuitry, burying itself deeper and deeper 'til I feel it break me completely.
And I shatter into a million pieces.
When I open my optics, it has not yet been a second. I know it. I can see it. I cannot feel it. The ice is gone, I am me again. I can see myself, in a mirror perhaps. I'm standing right there, though in my armour and not my dress, and in my pride. My wings edge the same, my yellowish optics glint awkwardly as they always do, my mouth and my face is concealed behind my purplish mask, hiding my features from all but one...
I turn to Mebella, and I speak. My voice is still the same, and I can only utter a few words. Strange, how I cannot hear them. Strange, how I seem so much taller, lying from down here that is. And strange, as I nod at the witch, and look down at myself.
Then, I can suddenly hear again. And I understand. I am looking in no mirror. That, is not me.
"Shadow Stepper," says Mebella, her tone devious and dark. "Meat Nightshade."
AN/ Okay... so what the frag just happened? Find out next time! And yes, this time I promise to not take 2 whole fuuuudddging months to get one crappy chapter out! Really, I'm pretty pissed at myself, and I honestly don't know what to say...
Well, here's a a big fat preview of chapter 11!
Chapter 11
Off With Her Head!
"You must come!" she hisses, grabbing me and pulling me on. "Your friend will die if we do not hurry!"
Confusion stuns me. "What?" I croak, stumbling after the maid down the black corridor. "I just saw Nightbird a moment ago, she-she's fine-!" I'm running now, the servant won't release her hold on my servo and is practically dragging me forward, forcing me on. I can see nothing of where we are going, though I can feel the dirt shifting beneath me, twisting back and forth, tilting side to side. My thoughts spin and my helm whips to the side as I suddenly fall to the ground! Impacting the hard floor, I groan, wanting to offline my optics and recharge.
"Up!" the maid demands fiercely, gripping my shoulder and tugging on me, trying to pull me to my pedes. It's no use. I'm much too heavy. "Up! Now! The witch can't kill you- yet, but she is going to murder your friend! Up! Up I tell you!"
This doesn't make sense, nothing makes sense. "No," I whisper hoarsely, feeling my frame go numb as it begins to power down. "...No, th-that's...not right..."
"Get up!" A hand swipes across my faceplate, shocking me from my daze. "Listen to me, you fool," she hisses in my audio, "you've been drugged by the witch's positions. You can't think strait, don't try to make reason out of this: Know you are in danger. Though the witch cannot kill you, not here at least, she can kill the Shadow Stepper, and she will. There is no time to lose! You must get up! There is someone that will help, he can give you a remedy to clear your mind; but you must get up! You will die, she will die, this world will die. So lay there like a fool, or get to your feet! Now! Choose!"
Well then! Starscream... I think shit just got real... Mmmhhhmmm!
Anyway... I know the chapter name didn't really fit... I re-plotted this chapter, so... Yeah... Anyway, I'm exactly sure if the next one will fit either but we'll see. (It'll fit, don't worry- and it will make sense too!)
So anyway- again! I will edit this chapter later. I'm posting it around 2:45 AM in the morning and I have work tomorrow. F! my life.
I'll see you soon, and I'm really sorry about how long this piece of scrap took... The next one will be better... Promise. Please... Forgive me? :'3