Don't worry, Chapter 11 will be posted this weekend!
It was a long fall.
Their eyes blazed with defiance and contempt.
The word failure boomed into reality. Failure, failure. It had all been for nothing—all careful preparations, all precautions, all of it, incinerated within flames, its ashes blown away in thin wisps in a gentle wind.
It burned. As ironic as it was, as cruel as it was, it burned as it happened, as everything fell apart, as the world shifted underfoot to hold up the weight of a terrible fate.
It seemed that They had a sense of gleeful irony, amongst other things.
It was a long fall.
Emptiness was always there, ravenously engulfing all joy that lifted the heart, all safety that sheltered, all love that brought warmth.
The skies were locked away now, raining that heavy, heavy, heavy strength from above. Condemnation was to wallow beneath the cold, dark, crushing waters of the oceans.
The stars seemed brighter, the sun exceptionally searing—it was a taunt, a reminder of every moment of loss and failure and losing something essential, something vital, something that had been torn away and replaced.
Torn away on purpose. They took it on purpose. On purpose. On purpose.
Rage and helplessness were all that were.
It was a long fall.
Obliterated as it all was, there was still something there, a fragile shell of what had been.
Memories twisted and churned, warping amongst themselves. The waters were merciless, the monsters living in its depths just as cruel as their domain. The dragons of the sky were no better, eager to burn in scornful flames, just like before.
If only they listened.
But there was no empathy or goodwill, but wrath and fire. The only certain way to stay safe, to stay sane, was to mask it all under a blanket of safety. Tragedy would not deal a blindsiding strike again. Through these efforts, the creeping, stalking fear was kept just further out of reach.
And in that masking, a discovery was made.
It sang.
