The Collapse
Incomprehensible corruption, flesh forbidden from life now alive, an assembly of cells not too different from the creatures...
No one really knew how it happened.
All memories had become a blur, crowds running, buildings burning, looting, killings, the slaughter of entire peoples in miliseconds, strange weapons of war altering reality, interdimensional beings flooding space...It took a long time for everything to truly become apocalyptic, yet at the same time it seemed like it took only seconds. Perhaps reality itself now longer considered time a means of measurement? That everything in the past had become condensed by some god, like a force of nature it did what its instincts told it, shortening time and altering memories, the perception of life itself...
Or perhaps stress and insanity had invoked such trauma few could reasonably calculate what had occurred, no one really knew what had happened in all this time- perhaps nothing happened at all? It was just a trick of the mind, a en masse hallucination event that made everyone a savage on some isolated realm while everything else was normal. Or maybe it was that life itself had been transferred from one universe to another, pulled away from safety as someone summoned the attention of some sort of dark entity, who took all too much interest in causing chaos...
No one really knew how it happened.
Even war had become merciful, for there were the dead, liberated from their hell. Now that liberation was gone as corpses walk...
In the countless existences that stretched beyond into the endless abyss that had become life, the darkness- seemingly alive and inclined on
moving forth like a wall of darkness, swallowing up everyone into it's cold, deathly clutches -had consumed everything. The word, safety, meant nothing, it was hard to tell if that word was still remembered by people as well, it's definition altered after countless thousands of years spent hiding away, safety seeming to mean more that "The walls wont extend with tentacles to choke you and there aren't rivers of lava with golems rising from the corrupted streams." rather than actual safety. It wasn't like you could live in one place for long anyway, creating safehouses and safe zones- there was simply too much out there in grandiose and murderous abyss that life had become, lurking out when they smelt even the slightest hint of joy or happiness, attracted to a sizable group of survivors like flies to a flytrap. And much like those flies, the various monstrosities that existed were driven by pure instinct, there was no negotiating, no pleading, no distracting. Only death.
Which is why it'd be astounding to hear of one message... that there was a chance to escape. Escape? It wasn't a word easily understood. You could escape from the various killers out here in this dark universe, but escape this Hell itself? It seemed all to good to be true, but so many different people proclaimed it to be true. Within the abandoned wilderness and remains of civilization, here were writings on walls, scribbles in some degree of language understood, there were encampments with recorded messages for other people, radios- voices faintly heard thanks to the endless storms -and road signs pointing in some sort of direction, towards a massive city, deep within the dense red fog that covered the universe.
It had to be a trick, that some elaborate trap was being set by a entity out there keen on gathering as many people as possible, but...was there a choice in the matter? The endless apocalypse only grew more dangerous, the city itself- now a likely destination for the thousand or so sane people left -had some form of makeshift barrier from the outside world and if other survivors had travelled there before, that they could get these messages out, then perhaps there was a chance it wasn't an absolute death trap.
Through the endless fog, ruins jut out from the ground like old trees, their histories long with stories no one will ever know...
Getting there hasn't been an easy trek, the wilderness surrounding the city is dense with trees and the cursed red fog, monsters and the insane lurk within, small abandoned buildings dot the landscape that could provide safe haven, yet seemingly always occupied by something desiring to kill. The roads, abandoned of bodies or wreckages, would be facing harsh winds that kept spreading the endless clouds of crimson. Strange screeches heard in the morning and even more at night, as well as the heavy breaths of unseen watchers.
Yet the get inside the city had been a sight even worse.
If all these disturbing things lurked outside, to have them all jammed into tight streets and small hallways, within residential blocks alongside all-too vulnerable survivors...The entire city was left to look like a battleground, that a war without end had been waged here. Gunshots, the cries of beasts, strange anomalies and packs of mutated flesh, the laughter of mad gods alongside the chants of their cultists, war machines with their lights blinking within the dark, strange people who watched from unreachable locations, immortal beings who merely sat and laughed at the chaos, flying monstrosities who floated down and captured people traversing the streets, a hovering eye who drove people mad when staring at them, convoys of men adorned in military gear shooting everything on sight, sapient diseases that argued with each other as the infectious spores floated in the air, city blocks flooded with strange green liquids that melted some and mutated others, a few original dwellers of the city not trying to go insane from it all...
And soon enough, there would be you.
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