PART 16: Attack from the Inside
A tidal wave of snow. Flashes of red. An enormous supersonic crash. The whistling of the wind. The sounds of bones breaking. And the rumble of an avalanche passing over.
Those were the sounds that Kirby heard and the things that Kirby saw only seconds after the cliff collapsed. He waited for the avalanche to pass before he made a fruitless attempt to stand on his feet. Instead of standing, he flipped over onto the ground face-first. Slowly, he craned his head upwards just enough to look around.
Nothing. Just darkness. Just snow. Just a barren wasteland of death. His vision twitched and tilted constantly, always out of focus. He felt like his skull had been cracked open like an egg. The snow continued to whistle by him, and an eye watched him from the shadows.
Like the wounded soldier he had just become, he weakly crawled through the snow, leaving a trail of blood in it as he crawled forward with only his arms. His legs felt like they were at an incorrectable angle, but he moved onwards as quickly as his arms would carry him.
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The people placed Honey's body in a coffin, and this tiny coffin was placed inscription-side first into a graveyard room, filled with other coffins of the ones who had died. The shadowy men were not buried, though, since thier bodies were never found.
It was a few hours afterwards, scientifically 19 hours since the black fog had reached thier planet, when someone found something very strange in a storage closet. The person who had found it, a ten-year old boy who had been exploring the ship, had run from the closet screaming like a maniac, which in turn caused a few people to take a look inside the closet themselves. What followed this was unknown to every person in the ship. What followed was the most supernatural thing any of them had ever encountered.
To everyone who wasn't a foot away from the closet, the closet looked normal by the ship's standards. Filled with needed supplies and objects, silver sliding doors, plain with a single light. To everyone who was looking directly into the closet and was less than a foot away from it's interior, they saw paradise. Rainbows, water, cute and harmless creatures...it was like home again, and they stared at it in joy.
To anyone not looking directly into the closet and instead looking at the men, they saw the men's face contorted in horror as they backed away from the closet as if there was something utterly terrifying in it. What everyone outside the room saw was all the men run for thier lives, screaming.
But what the men saw was paradise. And most of the men were the remaining survivors from the funeral, and the missing and the dead were staring back at them in this paradise. It was impossible to believe, until one of the men's daughters, about nine years old, burst from the other side of the closet and embraced her father as if she was alive again. The man didn't know what to say. He was flabbergasted.
"We're looking at heaven, everyone. It seems to me our time has come." he stated, as he began to walk into the closet, hand-in-hand with his daughter, who had been shot by a misfire at the ambush in the funeral.
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Kirby began to sway side to side like an ocean liner. He fell to his side on the ground, only a few feet from where he had begun even after hours of desperate crawling. This time, he didn't get back up.
"I...I failed." he whispered, as he let his body fall limp to the ground, his blood flowing onto the snow. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and the medallion began to flicker slowly. With every flicker, the black fog would get closer and closer until it turned back on again, and the fog scattered. It began to stop glowing for longer and longer periods, the barrier around him becoming smaller and smaller...
In one final flash of white light, the medallion's light died, and the last light of hope in Pop Star flickered away.
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"Impossible." muttered Ribbon, smashing her tiny fists onto the table. "You must be able to do something about this."
"I don't know. I don't see YOU coming up with any ideas, little fairy." said a light-skinned, muscular, crown-wearing, trident-holding male mermaid from the other side of the table. Ribbon sighed and spun her red hair around her tiny fingers, metaphorically rattling her brain for an idea.
Nothing came.
"You're right...I don't have an idea. But the Star Warrior is dying...You can't tell me you can't do anything to save him...can you?" Ribbon asked, dreading the answer.
"You're wrong...we can do something about it..." answered a strange voice on the far end of the table. The speaker was not apparent, but was rather an enormous shining white void. At the answer, Ribbon sighed in relief.
"...But we won't." the voice finished. Ribbon almost screamed, but she held her tongue inbetween her teeth and clenched her fists angrily.
"Why? Why won't you?" she asked, trying her best to sound calm and collected. There was no answer for a few seconds.
"Fate has decided it should be this way. We can not change the way fate works." The voice said nonchalantly. Ribbon slammed her fists onto the table again.
"Traitor." she snarled. The voice did not respond, and she did not wait for it to say anything. She stormed out of the room, filled with anger and rage.
As the doors to the temple slammed behind her, the "void" turned a shade of black, and a red eye opened in the center. The eye glared at the doors for a moment, and everyone else on the table did the same.
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Greeted by every dead friend and relative they had ever known, all the men's doubts of this paradise in the closet were removed. Hand-in-hand with dead friends and family, the men walked into the closet and into the paradise on the other side, as the door closed behind them.
Inside the closet, the portal to the paradise began to contract into itself, slowly becoming smaller and smaller until you could see the end of the closet wall again. The portal formed into a small orb and detached itself from the wall. The orb was big and silver and reflected the aforementioned paradise. The reflections began to disappear, replaced by misty darkness. Almost like fog.
The orb opened a single red eye, and the lights in the room flickered and died. Inside the closet, only a red eye floating in the air could be seen. Sometimes, a steadly pulsating glow would light up the room as the eye blinked and sunk towards the ground.
On the other side of the closet, a black widow scurried out from under the door and scurried off.
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Kirby awoke in a black void, standing on a ground that didn't seem there, and staring at a sky that didn't seem there either. To make things even more confusing, enormous red eyes were staring at him from all directions and he couldn't move. He struggled slightly, and something in his brain spoke.
"DON'T STRUGGLE." It said in both a roar and a hiss. The voice reverberated around Kirby's mind, causing his head to pound like a drum. Kirby growled as the eyes stared at him in his torment. Without caring which was which, he desperately reached for one, screaming with his arms out-stretched, ready and willing to rip them apart, limb by limb, limbs or not.
"BASTARDS! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!" he roared. "YOU TOOK AWAY EVERYTHING FROM ME! YOU'VE..."
"Destroyed you?" said the icy voice in his mind again, causing more sharp pains all over himself. Kirby shook furiously and concentrated, trying to find the source of the voice. A huge red eye in front of him opened in a flash, the eye itself over two hundred thousand kilometers tall, it's enormous pupil focused on Kirby. All Kirby could see was the pupil. He could not turn his gaze from it.
In the pupil, a "movie" began to play. The movie was of Honey in her final seconds, as her eyes rolled into her head and became glazed and expressionless, as her face wrinkled, she thinned until she was no thicker than a garden hose, her entire body became paler than a spirit, and she flailed wildly as the beeping in the background became faster and faster until it beeped more rapidly than machine-gun fire...
And then it stopped. She stopped flailing. The beeping became singular and endless, and the strange shadowy man removed his lips from hers. Her lips had become dry, white, bloodless. Her expression was frozen. Tufts of hair had fallen from her head, rendering her mostly bald. Kirby watched in shock as the black fog floated out of her dry lips, her entire life inside it, making the fog glow and pulse.
The "movie" stopped playing, and Kirby roared into the enormous eye. The eye didn't so much as blink.
"Look around you." said the icy voice, sending more bolts of pain into Kirby's mind.
Kirby did as such, and saw millions of pulsating, glowing orbs all around the black fog. Souls. Spirits. Lives. An enormous claw appeared from the black fog with an orb inside it's grip. Kirby could see something reflected in the orb.
Tiff. Tiff was reflected in the orb. This...must be...
But just as he realized it, the claw squeezed the shining orb, and it shattered into pieces of glass, which another claw caught. That claw rose towards Kirby, and showed him the pieces.
There was nothing there. It was blank. In a sudden rush of adrenaline, Kirby broke free from his floating prison and grabbed the claw. He took the pieces in his arms and as the black fog watched, in shock for the first time, Kirby fell into the infinite void, the pieces of Tiff's soul in his arms. Kirby closed his eyes as he was engulfed in the darkness once again.
The medallion flickered to life just as Kirby flickered into unconsciousness.