Sorry I haven't updated in a while; my best friend Sophie and I have decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, and so my focus has been centered completely on our novel!!
Anyway, this chapter is quite sad, and probably one of my darkest chapters yet. I'm having an angsty night here, folks, so please bear with me. My grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer this weekend, and tomorrow is the three-year anniversary of the passing of my other grandmother (whom I was extremely close to). This band is quite dark, known as a "gothic" band, so...there's not really a way to make it happy... This is definitely one of my more dark and deep pieces, and I like it. :) My writing has grown a lot this past month! Thank you, NaNoWriMo!!!!
On the uphand, I have a date to the Christmas dance, and I only have two days of school this week!!
Staff Notes
By doodlegirll
...oOo...
Ice Queen
Within Temptation
Krys trekked across the cold, empty field, squinting and holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
There was no one there.
Krys had not seen a living soul in many days. She had lost Wilbur a ways back. Somehow they had become seperated, despite the buddy system they had developed to stay as close to each other as possible, and she had found him later near the stream where they had gotten water. The icy water flowed around his body, soaking him through, plastering his hair to his forehead. He had drowned, and the red marks on the back of his neck showed that it had been forced. He had been murdered, taken from her like a tablecloth from under a candlestick.
She had buried him beneath the small, dead fig tree that grew near the wall of the cliff, covering the grave with stones.
This alternate world was hell. A living hell from which she could not escape.
She took off her glasses, carefully polishing them, trying to avoid making the crack in the left lens larger.
The time machine had been the first to go. No sooner had she landed in what she thought was her world when it was snatched from her grasp and disassembled right in front of her, bit by bit. She was taken to the edge of what she used to call her home and thrown out to the outskirts of town, where she had run into Wilbur.
She didn't exist in this world. She should not be here. Her father existed as a teen - or at least the teen she knew as her father - but she did not. She didn't belong here. Not in this barren waste land. There was no Krystal Robinson here.
She had tried to gain the trust of the alternate Wilbur, finally doing so when she pulled a picture of the three of them - Wilbur, Lewis, and herself - from her pocket. The alternate Wilbur had gone completely sober at the picture, saying that his friend Lewis had been one of the first to rebel against the system that had overtaken the city, knowing it as corrupt. He and Wilbur had become rebels, only by name as organizations were tricky to form and gathering places were sparce. Lewis and Wilbur had been walking home when an official caught them. Lewis pushed Wilbur away, ordering him to run, and had been apprehended by the police. He had been taken to prison, where it was said he had died of unknown causes, most likely by the hand of a cruel officer. He had looked her in the eye, his brown eyes full of sorrow and fear - definitely not her Wilbur, whose eyes were full of life and enthusiasm. But a Wilbur nonetheless, and she needed him to help her if she were to survive in this time that was not her own.
They had set out together, trying to piece together what was going on, and Krys searched for a way home. Without the time machine, she was trapped.
They had snuck back into the city in the dead of the night when a few of the guards were sleeping at their posts. They had smuggled themselves through the dark alleyways, trying to gather information. An officer had spotted them, recognized them as rebels - how she had gotten herself branded as one Krys would never know - and tried to arrest them. Together, they were able to get away and back outside the now dark and dangerous place that had formally been known as Todayland.
The authorities pursued them, chasing them around the city's perimeter until Wilbur had shown her a way to get back to his family home. It was not the mansion Krys was used to, and she had found that Cornelius Robinson was not Wilbur's father, which had been made obvious from his tale of Lewis' fate. But his father had still been an inventor, and tucked within the pages of a copy of Les Miserables they had found some of his notes - specifically notes on alternate universes.
They had taken the notes, scrounging up whatever others they could find, before they left. Wilbur explained that his parents were somewhere in one of the prisons, and their fate was unknown to him. He still had hope that they were still alive, and that maybe, just maybe, Lewis was as well, and that they had managed to find each other. Perhaps this Wilbur and Krys's Wilbur were not so different after all. Dreamers despite the differences.
Shivering, Krys pulled the blanket firmly around her body, trying to shut out the cold. The previous months that had led her to where she was now had sobered her, hardened her. She was not the same girl she had been. Not by a long shot. She was not in any way beyond emotion and feeling; the pain of losing Wilbur coursed through her veins like fire. But she had come to expect it. Death was common here, and with each passing day, they stepped closer to their inevitable deaths. They both knew, without a doubt, that one day the police would find them, and then they would be done for.
But Krys could not allow the work she and Wilbur had done go to waste. In those months they had found others like themselves, formed a group against all odds, to stand up for what was right. They had split themselves apart, journeying into different parts of the city to spread their rebel message: Rise and defeat those that wish to make you slaves. They lost many brave teenagers, but none died for nothing.
The ruins of this world were all around her, a holocaust of apocolyptic proportions. The land was leveled, and no one was anywhere. Everything was dead, or dying.
But Krys was alive. And she promised she would stay alive, to herself, and to those that counted on her.
She would not become a ruin of this world. She would stand up for it, fight for it, die for it.
Even if it was not her own.
