CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Chrysalis
Verona anxiously wiped the smears of dark oil that brushed across her skirt. She stared unwaveringly through wet strings of auburn hair, her stare unshaken as if she were staring at a beast down the barrel of a shotgun. Such a horror had she not seen before, and surely it was still only a fraction of the worst thing anyone else had ever seen; only to get worse before her very eyes.
Where had once lie Violet, no more than two moments ago, curled and writhing on the floor before her three spectators, there now lay a frightened girl with something terrible growing inside of her. Already Verona could see her eyes release the holds of vision and redirection of light, pulling down the blinds over her dotted pupils and burying them in the blue of her iris; it spread like berry marmalade across her eyelids and spilled onto her cheeks in pastel ribbons as the last of her warm blood drained from cheeks and lips, agape in a silent howl of despair.
"Bonka!" Charlie shouted, his shaking fingers curled into fists over his lips, "Make it stop! We have to help her!"
His silence was his answer, and if Charlie had turned to look he would see that Bonka looked as though coming to the girl's rescue was the very last thing on his mind.
The bubbling violet, pulsing pomegranates, bursts of sunlight blooming between ribbons of bleeding blueberries, the girl clawed her fingers against the cold iron platform beneath her.
Charlie shrieked, his cry as shrill and desperate as a trapped mouse.
"B-B-ONKA!"
The ring of his scream echoed from the wide and towering metal walls deep within the enormous room's shadows - the din bounced between buzzing and whirring machines and buried deeply beneath it every blip, blop, and drop.
The body's form was no longer decipherable, swollen and wet as a depressurized blobfish, its skin pressed fine and translucent; red and blue light emanated between the blackened lines of nerves and arteries. The children, and Bonka too, could see it inside of her: the cream Viola had poured into her stomach on the wrong side of circumstance, and they watched it boil and expand in tandem with the billowing balloon of stretching skin and chewing gum. The shape resembled a nucleus, or how Charlie's school textbooks had portrayed one, at least - but then, all it once, the sac split open like a broken bag of fish on the floor of the ocean. In a flurry of colourful sparks and the buzz of white static, emerged the fragmented carcass of Gregory Loop and the concretized strings of his intentions and perceptions. At first, the components hovered in the warm amniotic fluid of the mysterious balloon, in a beautiful display of spattered dust and orbs that hung, spread, into a beautiful solar system in the cold vacuum of the endless Space.
In an instant, a cloud of the void's ink swallowed everything inside the bubble. Black of the darkest night, so abyssal that the way through it seemed empty against the shadows of the sprawling walls behind it, so dark that Charlie and Verona felt as though their lives were being pulled backwards though their eyes.
"That darkness," Verona cooed weakly, "it's not empty -"
"- It's made up of all of the light you cannot see," Bonka finished.
Charlie nodded, his nerves silenced and his mind emptied by pulsing warmth of the heaving silence around him, rich with vaporized cream. "But I detect not the hum of contentment, I feel instead the clamor of its thundering ire."
An eternity passed them by as they stared at it, together in the darkness, freed from their egos as one entity of anticipation.
With a loud bang, a constellation of a trillion trillion tiny stars burst alive in front of each of them, brought together in a rough, scattered shape of a human being. The dots of sunfire were so close to one another, that from the woven threads of time and space and heat the children could discern a twisted face.
"80NKA!" The figure howled, its posture curling and stumbling, "SPARE ME THIS CORRUPTION! IMAGINAL CELLS OF TWO BEASTS IN ONE CHRYSALIS; CANCER'S CANCER!"
Charlie remained fixated on the display, but heard the squeak of Bonka's gloves behind him.
The light wailed, "I BEG, 80NKA, I BEG!"
A sharp prod of Bonka's cane between her shoulders thrust Verona violently forward, a jolt of pain that was lost and enveloped by the figure of stars that soon encompassed her sight completely; as the girl toppled and pushed the gleaming body over the edge of the dock, in the blinding light she consumed the colours that flashed swiftly through her eyes and ears, one sound resonated loudest from the rest:
"IT IS DONE."
Thanks for reading. It's been a while since I've last added to this story, but I hope this small chapter has you ready for the rest of what's ahead.
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