M
Cynder opened her eyes to blackness.
There was nothing else to it. It was just silent and black all around her. The ground she lay on felt firm, but when she lifted her head to look down at what she was on top of, she saw nothing but the absence of color. She felt no heat, nor any cold, and the ground didn't really have a texture. This was just pure nothingness, as if entropy had consumed everything.
But if that was the case, why were the scales of her body visible to her? Why was she able to see her paws when she lifted them up to look at them? Why did she see her tail-blade and crimson wing membranes, and her choker and anklets? Why was she the only thing to exist in this vast plane of solitude and desolation?
Too many questions circled her head, but as she stood up, she realized that she wasn't surrounded by just nothing. She just had yet to come to her senses. When she got all four paws beneath her, she could feel the cold, smoothness of stone bricks on her pawpads, and as her vision adjusted to the darkness, she saw gray stones forming a wall in front of her. As she followed the wall, she saw the same gray stones forming another wall opposite to the one she was facing, as well as a ceiling and floor. Each wall stood about nine feet from its opposite, and each stone was completely featureless. Cynder realized that the walls formed to make a tunnel, and she looked down the passage to see only the same blackness that encompassed her just moments before.
She was about to call out in the darkness, but ultimately decided against it and instead looked behind her in the other direction, only to see the crushing darkness that inhabited the other hallway. She let out a low growl of unease, only for the growl to echo throughout the empty corridor, making her scales bristle with discomfort as the echoes of the shaft made the sound more eerie. A cool breeze emanated from the tunnel she first looked down, making her turn her attention back to it. She tried desperately to see something, anything, in the soulless void, but again, she could see nothing.
With nothing better to do, she began to walk down the hallway, her claws echoing against the stone bricks as they tapped against the floor with each step she took.
She felt an air of unease as she ventured into the darkness. She didn't know why, but her range of vision spanned only a few feet; when she walked down the middle of the hall, she could barely see the walls on either side of her, or the ceiling if she looked up. When she looked over her shoulder to glance at her path, the darkness followed her as if it was waiting to snuff her out. She carried on, however, even as she started to shake slightly from the cold in the shaft, the bricks providing no warmth whatsoever.
Every once in a while, she'd glance over her shoulder, expecting to see only the infinite blackness, but instead she'd see what looked like a shadow moving in the darkness behind her. She panicked the first couple times she saw it, but after not doing anything to her after a while, she just chalked the figure up to her mind playing tricks on her and making her see things that weren't there. She knew she had paranoia, and she'd had hallucinations in the past, so maybe this was a product of both.
She continued down the dark hallway for a while, not even bothering to look over her shoulder anymore. She didn't even know how much time had passed or how far she'd travelled; everything was so monotonous in the long tunnel, she couldn't gauge how far she'd gone or how long she'd been walking in the same direction. It could've been minutes, it could've been hours.
Eventually, however, the shaft gave way to a large, dark room. Cynder looked around the vast, empty room, and for some reason there was a little more light in this room than in the hallway, allowing her to gauge that the chamber was about twenty feet long, wide, and high, the large area being a cube. Cynder shivered a bit as she stepped out of the tunnel, the temperature quickly dropping as she padded towards the center of the room, where she noticed a small fountain sitting unused. No water flowed from the four little spouts at the top, and it was only upon noticing them that Cynder noticed the thin ring around the fountain, where the ground was depressed slightly about an inch. She noticed that there were four small channels running towards each corner of the room, and when she bent down to examine these channels, she noticed that they were completely spotless. There was no dust, no cobwebs, not even a crack in the little groove.
It was then that Cynder noticed just how clean and tidy the entire place was. There wasn't a single sign of disturbance or use of any kind, as if this place was built, then promptly sealed off from the entire world. If that was the case, though, then what was Cynder doing in there?
Cynder shook her head of the question and looked around the room to see three other hallways, not including the one she just came from. She walked past the fountain and looked between all three corridors, trying to decide on which one to go down. She had no heading, no semblance of direction, no time frame to abide by, or distance she had to cover.
She was clueless.
With no real sense of what she was doing or where she was going, she picked a random hall and began to walk down it. This time, she didn't have to travel that far before coming to another room, though this one was different. Instead of the corridor opening up to the center of the room, this one came out from the side, and so that the right wall and ceiling were flush with that of the chamber she just entered, leaving about the same amount of distance from where she was to the ground of this room. There was a staircase at the end of the room, along with another doorway, giving her the option to either venture down to this new room or continue on the path she was on.
She padded over to the staircase and descended slowly, peeking over the edge every once in a while, until she came to the floor, where she saw two more dark corridors, one running parallel to and in the direction of the hallway she emerged from, while the other ran perpendicular to it. She walked to what would be the junction to the two hallways, looking down either one to gauge whether one of them was a better option than the other, but again, she could see no difference between the two. She decided to go down the tunnel perpendicular to the way she just came, wandering the empty halls for a bit longer before coming out into another dark chamber like the first one she came to.
Unlike the last two ways she came from, however, this room held nothing of importance. There were no other pathways branching out from it, and it held no structure in the center, nor any sort of grooves or markings.
Cynder turned to go back the way she came, but something was standing in the doorway that made her skin crawl under her scales. What she saw that was so disturbing was Spyro, but not her Spyro.
Instead of his scales being a bright amethyst hue, they were closer to indigo, and his chest plates and horns, which he always kept a pristine gold color, were dirty and muted. Black tendrils danced across his scales like dark, twisted lightning, all of them stemming from the area where his heart would be, and extending out as far as his hind legs. As Cynder looked closer, she could see all sorts of lacerations across his body, all of which leaked blood onto the clean floor. This blood, however, wasn't red and fluid; like the tendrils on his body, it was pure black, and even from a distance Cynder could tell that it had the consistency of tar.
But none of that bothered her as much as his glowing, white, pupil-less eyes, devoid and emotionless.
Cynder has so many things she wanted to say, ask, scream, sob, and do at seeing her purple hero in such a state, but all the words got caught in her throat, and her knees turned to jelly as her emerald-green eyes stared into his pure white ones. She felt as if she couldn't move anything, and her throat suddenly felt useless as Spyro began to advance on her. She took an unsteady step backwards as she stared in horror at her mate-turned-demon. She continued to back away from him as he walked towards her, until her tail-blade scraped against the wall behind her, signalling she'd been cornered against the wall, and yet still Spyro advanced.
Cynder started to pant as her heart hammered against her ribcage, her eyes filled with fear as she continued to stare at what was once Spyro. As he grew closer, he started to make weird rasping sounds as his mouth hung open, drooling blood as he advanced on Cynder, who noticed the rather nasty gash on his throat. She whimpered softly in both horror and sorrow as Spyro continued to approach her, wondering what he would do, closing her eyes as she hoped he wouldn't harm her.
That proved to be hopeless when she felt a paw wrap tightly around her throat. She snapped her eyes open to see Spyro choking her, staring into her eyes with his own as his foul breath blew in her face. Cynder thrashed in his hold as she began to claw at the forepaw holding her, but it was to no avail; his grip was like iron, and it was only becoming tighter as her windpipe was slowly crushed. She clawed at his face in a last-ditch effort to make him let go, and as her claws found their mark on his face, Spyro gave a raspy grunt and let her go. Cynder took the chance and darted past him, but before she could she felt something grab her tail, making her yelp in pain as she was pulled back, her previous momentum causing her to fall on the cold, hard ground as Spyro dragged her back to him, flipping her over on her back as he stood over her, his pungent breath once again invading her nostrils. Cynder once again struggled as Spyro wrapped his claws back around her throat, slowly but surely choking the life out of her as she writhed beneath him, one of his claws accidentally catching her throat; the cut wasn't too deep, but it was still there.
Cynder tried once again to slash him across the face, but as soon as she lifted her paw Spyro pinned it down with his free paw, taking his other off her throat for a second, before bringing it back up again to slash at her throat. He brought his claws down on her, and Cynder braced for the end.
M
Cynder jolted awake with a yell, panting heavily as her wide eyes frantically searched the room, her heart racing as she examined the dark bedroom she was in, her pupils being the thinness of paper. She heard someone call her name off to the side, making her look to see Spyro up as well, his amethyst eyes filled with concern as moonlight cascaded into the room.
"Are you okay, Cynder?" Spyro asked worriedly.
Cynder nodded as she got her heart rate under control, slowly settling down as her pupils dilated once more as she caught her breath.
"Yeah," she replied. "Just a bad dream."
Spyro put a wing around her and brought her closer with a concerned growl. "You sure…?" he questioned.
Cynder gave him a reassuring smile and nodded once more. "Yeah, I'm fine, Spy," she assured him, trying to not shy away from him after what happened in the nightmare. Fortunately, she'd had experience with doing so in the past, so it wasn't too hard for her.
Spyro smiled when she saw her do so, nodding as well. "Alright, Cyn… I believe you."
Cynder smiled wider before wriggling out of his grasp, slipping out of bed and padding over to the door.
"Where're you going?" Spyro asked her curiously.
Cynder looked back at him and said, "The bathroom."
Spyro nodded and laid back down. Cynder took this as confirmation and walked out of the bedroom, padding to the bathroom and closing the door behind her as she turned on the light, looking over herself in the mirror as she tried to shake the nightmare from his mind. However, something glistened slightly in the light as she turned her neck to the side.
Right there, on her neck, was a little cut, not too deep, but still there nonetheless.
M
Surprise surprise, I'm not dead. There was a lot going on in my life as of recent, and I decided to quit fanfiction for a while. I'm not back, unfortunately; there's still a lot of stuff going on in my life, but I hope to be posting here again at some point. I just need to gather the motivation to continue writing fanfiction. If you're reading this, thanks for your time, and have a good day/night.