Emergence: Chapter 20

The clock struck past midnight and Tors cheered, waking Pandora from her shallow slumber. It was Evacuation Day at last. Tors walked over to the window, before he sat in front of it. At this time of night, he couldn't see anything, but he figured that any ships would have landing lights on.

“You're not seriously going to sit there for the rest of the night, are you?” Pandora's voice contained more than a hint of ridicule.

“Yes. Maybe. I dunno.” Tors shrugged. “All I know is, I wanna be ready when they come. Where's Emola?”

Pandora looked over at Emola. “Sleeping like a baby.”

“Surprised either of you could sleep after seeing that...thing.” Tors shuddered at the thought of it. He remembered its shriek, and remembered the grating sensation that passed through his body as it did so.

Pandora knelt down next to Tors. “Look. Maybe there was something. Maybe it was just our imaginations, or a natural phenomenon-”

“-there was nothing natural about that thing.”

“Well, even if it's alive, its natural.” Pandora rolled her eyes. “But maybe it wasn't real.”

“It really was, though.” Tors hissed. “You know it. Deny it all you like, you know it.”

There was a flash from outside, followed by sudden silence. The winds dropped again. Tors's scales shifted darker. “It's back.”

“What?” Pandora seemed irritated.

“The winds died before, and it came for us.” Tors was genuinely afraid, his scales shifting between various shades of dark red.

Pandora put a hand on his back. “Tors, calm down.” Her voice seemed both soothing and irritable. A green flash from outside took them both by surprise. Tors moved closer to Pandora and she reluctantly put her arms around him, like a mother with a child. “Maybe they were real...” Pandora whispered, more to herself than to Tors.

Outside, green wisps of wind formed together in the serpentine shape Tors knew the creatures to be. He leant towards the window, both afraid and fascinated by this being. Its...head?...opened up, as it did before, but this time it didn't screech. This time was more of a whisper, as if it was talking to something else. This was when Tors noticed other wisps in the air.

More serpentine figures formed around the original and converged upon it. The whispering grew louder, mixed voices overlapping. Tors thought he could hear words in the winds, but he knew that it was just his imagination.

“The hell are they?” Pandora asked, more of a rhetorical question than anything else.

“What's going on?” Emola sounded sleepy and was rubbing his eyes as he came to the window; obviously the sounds outside had woken him. Then he saw the beings. “There's more of those things? Damn.”

Tors realised that Emola must be too half-asleep to care about these thing, especially as they did no harm before. Maybe, Tors thought, they come with all storms, but we can't see them. He noticed the creatures moving over to the decaying statue of Ardican in the town square. Craning his neck, he could just about see them as they separated and formed a circle around the statue. “There's eight of them now.”

“Yup.” Emola was still non-committal and vaguely dismissive.

Seven moved back, widening the circle, but one stayed in place. As Tors watched, it leaned steadily backwards, before lurching forward. As it did so, there was a flash of blue, like lightning, from its head. Tors looked away as it flashed, and when he looked again, the Ardican statue was cinders. Even in his shock, he felt Pandora's recoil. Her arms moved off of him and she stood up and stared outside. Even Emola was shaken out of his stupor. “My god...”

The offending creature shrieked, before decomposing into the wind. One other creature seemed to look at the cinders, before it lifted them into its own body. The others did the same, gathering the ashes into themselves. The ashes disappeared, but the winds grew darker, larger and somehow stronger. “Is this some sort of...feeding?” Tors asked, as if anyone else would know the answer.

“Looks like it.” Pandora was squinting, to try and see them more clearly. Her hair was wild, but mostly still.

As quickly as they came, the creatures disappeared, one by one.

The wind and rain returned, but not as strong as before. They sat for hours, barely speaking to one another, but just sharing a silent hope. Their hopes were answered hours later. Lights burned through the dark-grey sky, illuminating the battered house. In unison, they ran to the window and watched the giant cuboid-like evacuation ships land. Battling the winds, agents barged into houses and gently pulled people from their homes. Some people grabbed small items, mementos of a time gone. Neither Tors, Pandora nor Emola bothered to grab anything. As Tors ran up the metal ramp into the evacuation ship, he looked back out at Narcsia and his destroyed town. A pang of sorrow tugged at his chest; he remembered when it was beautiful, just months ago.

Putting that past behind him, he dragged himself aboard the ship, ready for a new and better life.