The Warp
"Father?"
The boy calls into the dark. He steps off the mattress, two feet at a time onto the wooden floor. They leave footprints of mist in the boy's wake, footprints that disperse within heartbeats of his passing.
There is silence. Nothing more than the eerie silence the boy drags behind him as he inches forwards in the landscape of his mind, in the blind darkness. His fingers grasp it, even though there is nothing to be grasped, searching desperately for a switch.
Every sound in the darkness scares him, pricks his skin like a thousand needles. Ventilation fans thrummed unseen, yet the boy felt their cooling breeze against his knees. Chirurgeon engines purred in the distance, outside his room, carried by the sterile draft. Experimenting. Creating. Breeding the Anathema's spawn.
Stopping.
The boy leaps into his bed. His weight stretches the steel frame underneath. He burrows deep into his blankets. They are soft and thick to the touch, but they have gone cold suddenly, just like the mattress beneath his back. His hairs are standing on their ends. For a second he listens, eyes wide in the darkness that he cannot see past. He hears a new sound.
A gauntlet tracing its fingertips against a glasscrete hull?
A stray branch from the tree outside, its gnarled twig-fingers clawing against the window of his room?
A monster outside his door?
The boy shuts his eyes. He pulls the blankets over his head and does not dare to look. Fear rises with every passing heartbeat. For a moment the motherly warmth of his bed coddles him, nourishing his heart.
The wind howls outside his room. For a moment, the boy thinks he can make out some voices. A language he cannot understand, yet astonishingly familiar on some ineffably primal level within his being—
—Patterns in the variation of acoustic frequencies in the wind. Nothing more than an illusion of the mind, and so he dismisses them. Not out of logical rigor, but of the fear of the unknown.
His eyes are closed. The boy sees flashes of purple against a veil of darkness. He is not staring at them. He is staring at the darkness beyond. He is searching.
"Father?" cries the boy into the dark, tears streaking his cheeks. The golden glimmer is gone. Desperation rises. He feels remote. Alone.
No matter where he looks, the boy cannot find the golden star in his blind vision, up or down or left or right.
Only flashes of purple against darkness.