Fighting the Everdark

Fighting the Everdark

The room was black as pitch, but for the harsh glare of an aging laptop. It was the kind that would creak in eerie protest of the stress it's owner, the Author, was sure to impose upon it as her jagged nails tapped across the keys. The laptop, her instrument of discovery, washed the Author's face in a ghostly light. Her eyes were wide and dry and darkly rimmed. Her mouth was pressed into a hard white line.

Black letters poured on to the white page of the screen in a torrent of intense creativity. She ached. Her heart was full; overflowing with a thousand truths and a million images. She labored yesterday. She is laboring even now. She will labor until black death snuffs out her bright spark of truth and steals her breath.

The darkness presses in all around her, urging her on. But she can only create so fast. Despite the goddess in her heart and the demon that torments her soul she is only human. She fights. She flails. She rages. All in silence but for the incessant and never ending click click click click click.

Her lips, full and red like blood, pull back over her gums to reveal teeth like sun bleached bone. She snarls at the darkness that is roiling and growing and threatening to consume her world. Tendrils of oily black lick around the edges of the Author's halo of light. She fights all the harder with her double edged words.

Clickclickclickclickclick. Feverishly she presses on in her battle. She fights the blackness that cuts like obsidian as she wills black words on to the white page.

"Should the page not be black and my words white?"

Her thoughts strayed for an instant from her opponent's black blade and so the battle was lost.

The tendrils of evil Everdark slithered around her wrists. Her flesh sizzled under their deathly touch. Still she typed, pouring out her truths and emptying herself of her light so that maybe, just maybe, another might read and see and be filled with light enough to escape the cloying dark surrounding us all.

Oh how it burned!

No matter.

She clench her boney teeth together as the little vines of dark malice and hate crept along her hollow face and wrapped around her neck searing red lines into her skin.

A single tear ran down her cheek.

"I have lost."

Thick threads of black lurched forward, ripped open her mouth, & poured down her throat, filling her with darkness. She choked and seized and clawed at the tender flesh of her neck. Sheets of the hateful stuff shoved under her finger nails and filled her skin.

The tendrils formed into thick round cudgels and beat her one love, her instrument of light and truth in a world so devoid of any good, until it ceased it's whir of life and bled red wires and gray plastic all along the desk.

So there she lay; slumped and limp in the chair; her head tucked against her chest; her eyes wide; her jaw sagging.

All that was left in the room black as pitch was the smell of burnt flesh and the remnants of a paramount battle. A battle for the souls of human kind. A battle none but the Author and the Everdark knew was waged.

A battle that was first waged at the spark of humanity's first flame. A battle fought and lost a thousand times since and a thousand times hence.

"We are always losing to the dark."

There lay the Author. A creator. A champion of light. Lightless. Lifeless.