The Snowglobe Conspiracy #014: Trudging Against The Wind free porn video

I approach the threshold of the door.  Within seconds it is technically open wide enough for me to squeeze through.  As I traverse the gap I have to pull my breasts to the side in order to flatten my chest and create the necessary space.  There is literally no time to waste.  Once outside, I look from side to side first, checking the illuminated space by the walls, hoping in vain that maybe he just desperately needed to relieve himself, or something else stupid and obviously untrue.

Come on.  Get back here.  I look carefully through all the available light.  I don’t see him and he doesn’t respond when I call to him.  Fuck.  I hear it.  A deep, breathy hiss.  Like the first gust of air from a long sealed tomb.  In the movies, I mean.  Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck.  This is… extremely frightening.  To say I’m not one for prayer would be an egregious understatement, but this whole experience has me seriously thinking about switching sides.

“Hey!” I yell into the darkness.  I yell again and again, so loudly that I hurt my throat.  He doesn’t come.  The wind picks up, and with the sound of the doors straining against their own plodding pace it is easy to believe I wouldn’t be able to hear him.  I can’t lose him, obviously.  That would be completely unacceptable, at best.

The gusting about me increases, and though the breath of the wind restrains its voice to some extent, it whistles menacingly at me through its teeth.  Soon I am being buffeted outright, and with that force, there is something new that I cannot explain.  The impact of the air is coming in waves, but those waves are coming from many directions.  I am blown back against the edges of the doors, and it hurts.  A lot.  It’s going to leave some dark lines that will later turn into dark bruises.  Fuck.

Ow.  Seriously.  Okay, fuck this.  I’m going in, fear be damned.  Either he needs my help or I need his.  Probably both, but if he’s being ripped to shreds by a hellish beast I don’t really want to minimize the assistance he needs from me by thinking of my own needs.  I can suddenly hear screaming, and I am increasingly concerned that some permutation of that anxiety has transformed into reality.  His voice is distressed and distorted, but I can tell he’s calling to me.  For me.  Why has hell dropped its veil of paradise?  Is it seriously just nightfall that douses us in this extra madness?

I feel sick.  I don’t know where he is, and the deeper I step, the stronger the night’s claim upon me becomes.  The darkness behind me is closing off – swallowing me, clenching around me like a strangling hand trying to make a fist with me in the center.  Five steps is all it takes for the bright lights at the wall to fade.  Five more and they’re gone.  I can’t smell smoke, or anything else.  I don’t feel dust or soot, and it isn’t hard to breathe.  It’s just cold.

Whatever’s blocking the light is a mystery to me – yet another I haven’t the time to investigate, let alone solve.  The wind is biting.  Almost literally.  I can feel its teeth, but I know they aren’t real.  The clenching of their jaws is a unique and curiously certain sensation.  So clear that I can almost see them, despite the total lack of light.  Surrounded by a swarm of invisible, animated, fanged dentures, I continue my search.  

In a deeply unfortunate twist, something about this sensation feels strangely… good.  It does.  I can feel the cold sensually tickling the nipples it hardened, and, well, it’s hard to deny that I love to be bitten.  The whistling about me turns finally to the howl I knew it was holding back.  No matter.  His screaming is more audible, but I don’t think it’s louder.  I’m getting closer.

I call to him.  “Where are you?”

His voice emerges miraculously from the darkness.  “Violet?  Over here!”

“Keep talking!”

“Violet!”

“You’re getting louder!  Keep talking!”

The fear in his voice is far more obvious than that in my own.  “Fuck!  Help!”  A horrific, high-pitched snarl curls through the air, slithering around me as would the narrow tongue of the beast that could make such a sound.  It wants me.  I think it wants to hurt me, and I can almost feel that tongue licking me.  Brief strokes of moist, warm air whip me amid the dark and icy cyclone.  He groans in pain, and that groan gives way to a low, resigned scream of agony.  I don’t know what’s happening to him, and I’m not sure I want to.

I have to, though.  I need to find him, and of course I’ll help him through whatever injury or aftermath that he’s forced to endure.  I just need him to say something.  Perhaps we should try something more conversational.  “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he groans, “Whatever’s happening to me hurts, but think I can still move.”

“Come toward my voice, then!”

“I’m trying!  The compass rose doesn’t seem to be all that rational in this cloak of darkness.  I’ve walked and walked.”

“You’re so close.  Hold still and say something.”

He pauses for a fraction of a second longer than I’m comfortable with, and just as my heart arrives in my throat, he croaks the short words “I’m scared.”

With that, I extend my hand and find him.  I take firm hold of his wrist.  My tight grasp lets him know that I am here and that I have him.  The relief in his body is palpable through the muscle of his arm.  I can feel the hostility of the atmosphere quicken.  Larger bits of debris are getting caught in the currents.  This thing, this… incorporeal disturbance that has an interest in us.  Personally, I mean.  It wants us.  It wants to hurt us, but I can feel that it also just wants us.  I can feel its fingers on us.  It’s whispering the things we want to us.  To each other…  ‘Wait.  What am I thinking? What does that even mean?’  It doesn’t matter, though.  Sense will soon take its leave of me again.  I can feel its fingers.

“Come on!” I say urgently in defiance of my apparent cognitive deterioration, my words accompanied by a strong tug.  To one side of me the weight of him against my pull changes as he stands, and to the other, I hear new voices.  Voices that aren’t coming from the wind, I mean.  Everything happens too fast.

“Violet!  You in here?”  It’s Ash.

“Who are you talking to?”  And Ash!

Just as I am about to answer them, he starts slipping away.  I turn back to him and in a fading flash of penetrating moonlight, I see… something.  I’ve never needed a word for “bafflingly terrifying” before.  Never.  The sound of the words behind me are stretched greatly but their pitch doesn’t lower.  The hand in my hand seems to dissolve.  In the fading, cool, light his body turns from man to mist, and from substance to something else.  Before what was he vanishes in the wind I can see the whole portrait of him, rippling in a unique, apparently gaseous medium.  As it disperses, I simply start crying.

Tears stream down my face, seemingly into and out of my eyes at once.  It can’t be sweat from my forehead.  I’m freezing.  Possibly literally.  I really don’t know how else to feel.  Startled by a sudden hand on my shoulder, I scream and throw an elbow toward my perceived assailant.  One left hand catches it, and another left hand intercepts my wrist and quite suddenly my arm is locked behind my back.

“Violet!”

“It’s us!  Come on!”

“What?” I ask as they release me.  “Who?  Ash?”  I know it’s them, but I can’t… I… can’t… can’t… think.

“Hey,” she says to me, and takes me gently by the shoulders, “I know this is stressful.  Scary, even… but you need to switch on that beautiful, confident, perseverance I know you have in locked up in there.”  She touches the side of my face with the back of her fingers, then kisses my cheek.  “You got this, okay?”

“Yeah,” I stretch out a gap between words but don’t pause, “I got this.”

They each take a hand and lead me toward relative safety.  Something strange is happening.  Despite the terror, the sorrow, and the freezing cold, I can feel a warmth in me, and one I don’t care for.  It’s inappropriate, to say the absolute fucking least.  I can’t help it though.  It’s there.  Not even an urge.  Just a sensation.  A tingling low in my belly.  The wind is teasing me.  Viciously, at that.  

At first, we move slowly while they wait for me to truly find my footing again.  Soon though, Ash, Ash, and I are running for the entrance with such momentum that I know that I will fall on my face if I don’t arrest my momentum with the utmost care.  The lighting on the exterior brick is bleeding back into blurry visibility.  For the first time since I left the building, I think I actually know where I’m going, yet I’m increasingly debilitated by the physical pleasure flaring between my thighs.  Even in my thighs.  Everything feels so… erotic. Romantic, even.  The way it wants me, the things it whispers… I will belong to it if I stay much longer.  The wind is pushing me back, but it is drawing me back to its core as well – seizing me by the substance of my mind and dragging me backward.  It is unbelievably hard to resist.

Oh, fuck.  Fuck everything.  There’s someone inside the door.  They’re waving with both hands above their head and screaming.  I can’t hear or read what words they are spraying recklessly into the darkness in the hopes there is someone here.  I can’t hear Ash or Ash either. Something is distorting all the sounds I’m trying to hear, even when the voice of the wind quiets for a moment.  As the light grows and my eyes sharpen, I barely believe what I’m seeing even considering the unreality of this place.

Right now the door is open, but it looks to be closing in an inconveniently and uncharacteristically alacritous manner.  Straining against the near physical viscosity of the sourceless shadows takes increasing effort as it tightens its grip on us – tightens its grip in me, coiling around the most sensitive places inside and stimulating them just so.  It is relentless.  It’s desperate.  Trying every tactic it can think of.  Oh… It feels so good, though.

I can only hope that Ash and Ash are still back there.  When I cast a glance over my shoulder I can see nothing behind me, as though the impenetrable darkness is bending the light around it.  For all I know it is.  Maybe this is all a bizarre illusion my mind has dreamt up in the tiny pieces of seconds immediately preceding my being crushed in the event horizon of a quantum singularity.  How a black hole would form where ever I was before this is a grand mystery, but I don’t know that it’s legitimately more or less likely than any of my other theories.

The labor that goes into each breath as I push to the final edge of the barrier is nearly overwhelming.  “Keep moving,” I tell myself.  Over and over, very quietly.  “Keep moving.”  Icy air is tearing at my dry throat as I rip myself finally from the grasp of the shadows – like pulling away from something that is a little too wide for my throat.  I’m sore, and a little raw from what it’s doing to me.  It isn’t actually unpleasant, but it’s very uncomfortable.  Pushing the boundary between discomfort and pain, if I’m truly honest with myself.  

With its final grasp, it almost feels conflicted.  It wants me.  I that it is compelled to destroy me.  Maybe it even wants to.  What I can feel though is that it wants me for later.  We pique its curiosity in the most alluring way.  It all but says so.  The whispering becomes louder and sharper.  It begins to sting as it fills all the empty places in my mind.  Now it has me.  For a moment, at least.  We’ll see if I can break away,  Maybe it will just let me go once it takes whatever it wants from me.

One week.  That’s all it took for me to just accept whole new layers of near unbelievability to my reality as though they were an expected, everyday occurrence.  I am its.  Just for a moment.  I only have to remember to take myself back once I get what I want from it.

Whatever is happening right now, feels amazing.  I am away from myself.  I know that everything is falling apart still.  The wind is literally blowing crumbled flakes of concrete off the walls.  I can feel them slicing daintily at me as they flit by.  Ash and Ash are still in danger, and I don’t strictly know who is waiting for us inside, even if I can guess and hope… but it doesn’t matter.  

I’m frozen in that moment when your love takes your shoulders in their hands and tells you “it’s okay”, just as they start to squeeze.  Interlacing webs of sensual deceit descend in the storm, enshrouding me in a nearly tactile sense of delight and safety.  Ninety-nine percent of me is certain that I’m home in the erotic embrace of chaos manifested, but the one percent of me that knows that’s false hopes it can hold on tight enough to remove me.  It’s like the final burst of warmth and euphoria before a person freezes to death, except that if I maintain the right balance it’ll be everything I’ve ever wanted to feel.

…Or something.  The tightness in my chest is scary, but it feels good.  Either that or it makes everything else feel good.  Warm, sparkling, joyous pins dance across my skin.  I can tell by the way they ignore my clothes that they aren’t, but they feel quite real.  The heat behind my eyes rides the edge between good and bad with expert skill.  I am deeply involved in what’s being done to me, but I have next to no awareness of what’s happening to me.  That part of me which cares is growing weaker.

It feels so good.  It hurts, but only in extraordinary, perfect, delightful, delicious ways.  Making myself an object of desire has always been a favorite hobby, but being an object to someone who desires me has always made me melt.  I guess in this case ‘something’ is just half a step away from ‘someone’.

The power that it takes me with… The feeling behind each motion, it’s a smooth combination of passion and fascination.  Now in the whispering, I can hear the dissent in it, and I can feel how that fuels the chaos that surrounds us.  The fuel burns hot enough that the wind lifts me up, and turns temperature from icy to balmy in an unnaturally few moments.

As the temperature shifts so does the tone of what’s happening.  All the sinister reasons that it wants me they’re a… No, they’re not… a facade, but… There’s something else now.  Something far more frightening.  It’s afraid in its own way.  It’s doing harm, and it doesn’t know why it must.  It’s seeking a release, but I don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to do.  We’re so close now, I can almost feel thoughts alongside the passion, fear, and rage.  Becoming closer to it feels like I’m being gently pried from corporeal existence like a mussel from its shell.

Locked in a contest of will for the very substance of my being, I find this particular stress has a focusing effect on my mind.  Rather suddenly, I can feel myself go from being unprepared for a fight to prepared.  I stand by it, but what I don’t anticipate is that opening my mind to defend myself means opening the gates to the enemy.

Normally it defeats those it encounters with no real challenge, but it doesn’t get to play with them.  If it does it will hurt them too badly.  Me on the other hand… I guess I’ve got something substantial to offer.  “You ready?”  I ask it with an acerbic preemptive satisfaction.

It answers me with grand hostility, the crash of thunder, and an echoing whisper.  It’s not a sound that a human throat could make, but that definitely sounded like a word on the wind.  This is it, I guess.  And… Fight.

As a tendril of frigid breath slips through skull and brain to reach straight into my consciousness, I think to the both of us that it might have been foolish to issue so sporting a declaration of my intent to persevere.  It tickles a sensitive spot in my memory and it almost makes me sneeze.  Oh… That would be too good to be true.

It’s reaching into every part of me at random now.  I feel it in my body and my mind.  The temperatures of both are in violent flux.  My muscles lock.  There’s no warning at all.  Every fiber gracing my skeleton has seized up, and the fluidity of my mind and turns momentarily to rigidity in sharp reflection to some sort of electricity, whether real or imagined.  As I recover, the darkness around me deepens somehow, and I feel I am starting to lose the game.

That’s it.  Freeze everything.  It doesn’t have to be combat.  It’s chess.  As I realize this quietly, the Whirldark takes the much louder bait that is the ringing echo above my thoughts caused by that awful shock.  It attempts to quiet the shrill results of its own attack, and I make my escape.  Didn’t need those pieces anyway.  Right now, I mean.  I better get those back at the end of the game.

For sanity’s sake, I elect to believe that my adversary will play fair when it comes to the end.  That same sanity is already taxed by its ability to feel it wriggling around, searching for something to manipulate.  The strain of my thoughts holding their own homes together distracts us both with the physical sensation of anxiety it induces.

Amid by the furious exchange of thought and emotional violence, I can hear outside the confines of me for a moment.  As we mentally exhaust one another, my focus and its are failing as we collapse into a more physical interaction.  I feel the icy soul of it slithering about me, and the moment it takes hold of me is the moment I become certain that I am dealing with a living, intelligent thing.  It’s not an intelligence at all like my own, though.  Or any human’s I’d imagine, but I’ve never been quite so literally inside another’s mind before.

Each of my limbs is seized simultaneously, pulled tightly apart from one another.  However well my gambit may have worked in out battle of will, this beast is now demonstrating me that there is no contest of strength between us that I could win.  Wits it is.  Oh, but first… that feels amazing.  Whatever it’s doing is meant as more than a restraint.  It’s relaxing me.  Feeding my needs to coax a surrender from my body.

I’m warm again.  It’s warm.  It tingles within me and caresses me from without.  Truly, I am saturated by its pleasure.  It's hostility as well.  The rage welling up within me feels as though it will soon flood over in a great surge of destructive passion.  Deep inside I can feel a familiar rush of heat, searching for the way out.

Conflicted about the manner in which this orgasmic storm is being coaxed from within me, my pleasure is muddled a bit.  Then again, that same conflict fuels my need for escape, and the sensations I experience seem to be distracting it.  I can feel its thoughts wandering as it feels every detail of what it makes me feel.  Everything in this week has been terribly strange, but this outpaces the rest by the length of a small continent.

Whoa!  What the fuck?  There is absolutely no explanation for what’s happening now.  Someone is going down on me.  Expertly.  Huge tongue.  Like… unreasonably, perhaps unacceptably huge… and hot.  It’s not thin, which is nice.  It feels firm, and even plump.  Like a wet, soft, solid pillow fluttering over my clit.  It coats my entire vulva with its slick secretions as it works me over.

This is confusing.  I don’t know if I like this, but then again, I suppose it must know that I like not knowing if I want to keep going.  Honestly though, this is right on that line.  Wow.  I mean… No, just wow.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to explain this truly, but I can feel the heat inside me turning to light.  Even if it passed the surface of me though, I do not believe it has the power to affect the sourceless shadow of this thing that surrounds me.

Whatever happens now is curiously familiar.  As though I’ve been plucked out of normal spacetime, my linear nature evaporates.  All which lies behind and ahead is memory in this moment.  This is almost unendurable.  As flesh and thought begin to meld into the fabric of the universe, it happens.

A sudden, piercing burst of illumination explodes from my body.  I don’t see it with my eyes, but I see it all the same.  Like golden, glowing dust flung into a howling, starless void, the physical manifestation of my sensory overload screams on its own.  The shredding sound of my voice rebounds, then echos about the rage of the storm, mocking me with the voice of my own ecstatic agony.

Toe curling, sole scrunching, soul bursting sensations streak through my body leaving sparkling trails of purified enjoyment in their wake.  Wave after wave of tremendous power is expelled, flung harmlessly into the absorbing darkness.  I am wracked with exquisite fire, moving so fast toward the peak of this experience that I worry I’ll fly off the top and fall to my inescapable demise.

Desire sustains me here, but it is need that drives me to escape.  He needs me.  They need me.  We need each other to find our way home, and the longer I stay, I can feel it stripping away the parts of my being that are unique – those which make me who I am instead of someone else, or no one at all.  This feels so fucking good though, that it’s almost worth being hollowed out in that manner.  Instead, though…

In one last great rush of Joy, I allow myself to crumble beneath the will of that which has me.  The burning, explosive nature of my pleasure is cooling rapidly.  It feels as though I am imploding now, both mentally and physically.  I’m drained, and nearly at its whim.  Despite the total darkness, it’s as though I can see myself shrinking, and shriveling.  I can feel my organs compacting inside me, and the stress on my bones is reaching what I fear may be truly critical levels.

Just as my body begins to truly crumple inward – as the jagged steps toward complete collapse lurch forward with snaps and crunches – it begins.  A final nova of radiant energy, the violent contractions stop abruptly and I can feel myself reform in whole with something of a deafening pop.  With this I reach the pinnacle of climax, and with it, that tingle behind my eyes returns.  Deep, confused inhalations precede the nasal reflex, and then once again, I sneeze.  My eyes snap shut as my abdomen nearly convulses at the experience, and I again find myself folded mostly in half.  In the midst of a shivering flutter of my eyes, I can’t find my body.  Frantically, I swim through the vacancy where reality should be.

Another blink and I’m on my feet away from where I was.  I’m still in the dark, but I’m free of its grip.  Disoriented though I am, it is time to move.  Running probably isn’t the best option yet.  Not with the wind speed and the weak-kneed stagger I’d estimate myself capable of in fair conditions.  It doesn’t stop me from trying, though.  As expected, I fall face first toward the ground, and I catch myself on the soft part of my forearms, arching my back to protect my stomach from any debris.

With slightly scraped and soon to be badly bruised knees and elbows, I limp closer to the edge thinking assertively to myself that it was still worth the try.  The pull is weakening.  I think the combination of my distance from it, and the distraction my orgasm caused my would-be captor has injured it, or at least impacted it.  The artificial quality of the darkness is fading slowly to simple night as I work my way gradually forward.

Trudging against the wind is a truly demoralizing activity, but as I finally penetrate the barrier of the shadowy amalgam’s edge there is a flare of discernible sound.  A deep, sandy whispering grows louder… The sounds of voices indistinctly overlapping climbs.  Each soft voice is speaking with great urgency, but their patience varies, much as their calm.  They are loudest at the moment I cross the threshold, and once I am out it fades in only a few seconds.

Ahead of me, I see what I can’t believe.  The figure in the door!  It’s him.  It is.  My fellow explorer.  I don’t know how.  I don’t understand.  What…?  Even though nothing makes sense the curious twits of fate’s knife still hurt sometimes.  It hurts knowing that no amount of logic or science or structured thought can truly help me.  

When I look back now, I can see through the darkness again, if only for a moment.  One Ash has fallen to the ground, and it’s clear they can’t see me.  I call to them, ask them if they need me, but they cannot not hear me.  They cannot hear any thing.

“Where were you?” The Explorer asks me with nearly hostile urgency.

“What?”

“Why did you go out there?!”

“I was looking for you!  Didn’t you hear me calling your name?”

“Yeah, while I saw you inexplicably running off into impenetrable darkness.  Didn’t you hear me calling after you?”

“No!  I heard you screaming out there!”

“I never left once you got me inside.”

“I never even saw – we’ll talk about this later.  They need my help.”

“Wait!” he cries after me, “Who?  You thought I was out there, too!”

As I doubtfully dart back into harm’s way I say “Hold the door for us!”

“You’re not seriously going back into that, are you?”

The darkness of this ultranight swallows me once again.  “Yes I am.  I’ll be right back.  Keep that door open!”

“FUCK!” he yells into the night.  His voice sinks in the atmosphere as though it is heavier than air, and I barely hear the word before it is gulped down by an inconceivable abyss.  In truth, I’m almost as incredulous as he is of my decision to run back into this mess.  I can hear them better than I hear him now, though.  Both of them are out here, for sure.  Nobody’s been destroyed or eaten, so thus far I feel okay about this choice.  Besides, they saved me when I was in the very same peril.

“Ash!  Where are you?”  My voice echos back to me in a staggered cacophony, as though it is bouncing off the wind.  Like the wall of a squash court, or an exceptionally dickish tennis partner.  I somehow expect that it the volume of sound which I emit bears direct impact on the force returned.  The scientist in me wants to test that theory, and the engineer in me wants… Oh wow.  What I wouldn’t give to be back home with a scientist and an engineer in me.  Mmm… Maybe that girl I hooked up with the other week.  She had such a nice dick.

Okay.  No more distractions.  Head in the game.  Where are they?  My body is swaying frantically as I try to maneuver in the hammering wind.  After what feels like minutes, I finally succumb to its whim.  What it may not know though, is that I have surrendered voluntarily.  Maybe if it thinks it has me in its grasp again it will simply sweep me to the same place that it took them.  I admit it’s kind of a Holy Margaret, but I don’t have a better plan.  Wait, no.  That doesn’t sound right.  This actually seems like a thing I should know.  It’s a sports thing and it’s a religious thing… Whatever.

Now that I’ve allowed the night to have me, part of this is actually a little pleasant.  But for the temperature, it would be outright pleasant.  Like floating on a the surface of a slow river.  It’s nice until you go round the bend and find rapids, or a falls.  As I gently levitate through the fickle storm of shadow I am periodically slapped by the air and tossed into a turbulent stream of even colder night.  At one point I think I’ve tumbled fully upside down, but since I can’t even tell if I’m touching ground, I really have no idea what’s happening.

This is unendingly, urgently bizarre.  I may be prone to the occasional flight of fancy or madness, and I may have taken the occasional psychonautical journey in my earlier twenties, but in the whole of my existence, I have never been so physically distant from the normal bounds of reality as I have been tonight.

“Hello?”  A voice calls from the heart of the shadow cloud.

It’s Ash’s.  Despite having only met her this afternoon, I am certain.  Just as I am certain by his moaning scream that Ash is hurt.  “Where are you?”

“Over here!”

I think I can tell where they are, and I am nearly certain that the current is taking me to them.  “How bad is it?”

“I can’t tell through all this nightmare,” Ash yells back to me, “It seems pretty bad.”

“Oh,” Ash chimes in, straining to penetrate his tears with the words, “It’s bad.”

Finally.  I’m here, and I extend my hand – a right and a left, but I’m not sure if I have them both, or just one.  “Do I have you?”

“Yeah,” she says, “And I’ve got his other hand.”

“Good.”

“You ready, babe?”

“I think so,” he shouts through the howl, “I think I’ve got it if you both help.  Just let me know before you pull.”

We do, and we pull.  “You on your feet, love?”

“Yeah. I got this.”

“Put your arm over my shoulder.  Violet’s going to take the lead.”

“I am?”

“You found us.  I just assumed you could find the edge again.”

“Yeah, but after a while, I just surrendered to the wind and let it carry me here.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.  Somehow I doubt it’ll carry us to safety if we try that again.”

“No,” Ash said through an audible wince, “I do doubt it.”

“Well, I love a woman with a plan, so… I guess I half-love you right now.”

Involuntarily and somewhat ironically, I roll my eyes at her.  She can’t see me of course, so I really let her have it in terms of my expression.  I walked back into this… whatever this is just to find them.  Wishing for a touch more respect in this situation I emit a weird growling manifestation of my injured feelings, but I’m sure that the whistling of the darkness muffled the sound before it reached their ears.

We begin to run.  I’ve taken the lead as requested – as instructed, really – and I’m moving as fast as I can without pulling too hard.  Ash’s hand in mine is… nice.  She’s surprisingly warm in the midst of all this.  Her palm is soft.  For a seemingly infinitesimal moment, the heat of her skin on mine stills my mind, and I can focus.  We’re almost there.  As the light penetrates the cloud, I see that he is still there… still waiting for me.  For us, I suppose.  A little more for me though, I think.  I can just tell.

“We’re almost there!” I call over my shoulder.

More carefully than Orpheus I fix my gaze on the desolate and stormy steps which yet remain, and do not look.  I can hear Ash’s acknowledgment, even if I can’t tell which one spoke.  They’re still with me.  They’re still a bit behind me, but my hand is still clasped in hers as I snap free once more.

Pulling them out is far more challenging than seems possible.  Where before it felt like battling viscosity, I now know differently.  I’m fighting gravity.  The pull of the earth beneath me is at odds with the force attempting to consume my arm and the experience is somewhat nauseating.  The stress on my shoulder is starting to burn.  

By hooking my other arm onto a textured, painted pipe running up the wall behind me I am able to brace myself appropriately.  Unfortunately, it has been my experience that the mass of two humans is not easy to pull back over a precipice, and this incident doesn’t seem to be breaking the pattern.  Still, the sense memory is facilitating a takeover of my thoughts and actions by experience over panic.  It’s… calming.  Soothing, even.  I can breathe.

With a great, heaving breath and the most forceful yank I could muster, I help Ash to escape.  She steadies herself on me as she finds her feet.  I can see she is as bemused as myself by the confusing impulse to fall in two directions at once.  “Are you okay?”

“I am,” she says, “I think.”  A wave of dizziness is working its way up her body from below, and I instinctively reach into the storm and curl my hand around Ash’s wrist along side Ash’s.  “No,” she says, “I’ve got him.  Get inside!”

“We’ll get him out faster together!”  It takes very little time for the two of us.  We pull him out with such force that he hits his head on the wall.  I shouldn’t think he’s too badly injured, but there’s going to be a sizable bump for sure.

As she helps him, Ash looks to me and says, “Go!”

I hesitate, and he adds, “We’re right behind you.”

“Move!”

Finally, I do as they are asking.  It looks like he’s on his feet and I can’t do anything else, so, hugging the wall, I slink between it and the Whirldark.  The cold of its skin against mine raises a field of goosebumps across the whole of me, and the cool latex paint on the wall teases and firms my nipples with each sliding step.

The Explorer is beckoning.  I can see him in my peripheral vision.  With a sudden shift in the wind, I can hear him. “Get in here!  Now!”

I can’t disappoint him again, but the new direction of the gale could be rough for them. I look behind me and yell into the shadows “You okay back there?”

“We’re okay!”  The muffled reply almost sounds like an echo.

Against my better judgment, I slip into the protective illumination of the generator’s limited reach.  “Get in here!” he says urgently.

I look earnestly behind me, but I can only see the faintest stirrings of movement in the darkness.  I can’t see, but I hear Ash’s voice.  She calmly and honestly tells me “Go!” and so, I do.  With as much grace as my bruised body can manage, I step, turn, and slip backward through the closing door.

He isn’t here, but I hear him rummaging in about the debris strewn about the room.  My mind returns to itself for a moment and my eyelids shoot apart as revelation reverses their polarity.  “We need to get this open again.  Like, now.”

“Already on it.  Help me find– How’s this?”  He’s holding up a what looks to be a long strip of steel trim from a door or arch.

“Yeah,” I say, “Let’s try it.”

I kick the closest piece of concrete that might fit in the remaining space between the doors.  It lodges for a moment, but the force of the glass against it soon crushes the ancient fragment to little more than dust and gravel.  Oh fuck… I can’t believe I got between those things while they were moving.  I don’t like that… Or that.  That was a forceful turn of the stomach.  I’m fine though.  I promise myself.  Self, I promise.

We both take firm hold of the metal and use it to create a lever, synchronously resisting the massive jaws of glass with the weight of our bodies.  To my shock and I assume his as well, we’re holding it, just a little.  I try everything I can think of to avoid thinking about what might happen if one of them gets stuck in it while it’s closing.  Without moving, I crane my neck to see around the corner as far as is possible.  It’s not much, but somehow, it’s enough.  I can see the shadows of movement as they step through the penumbra.

As they emerge I hold my breath so tightly that I barely feel it.  Smiles curve across their relieved faces as they take deep breaths.  Ash slips on and I just barely avoid a shocked flinch.  Ash helps her up.  My heart is in my throat, and, at the moment that she steps forward, it breaks.

For a split second, she doesn’t even notice.  He didn’t make a sound.  It happened so fast.  The shadows expand.  They move fast, and with tremendous explosive force.  Ash is engulfed by darkness.  In minuscule moments it recedes, and takes him with it.  If I hadn’t been in there myself I’d think it had simply consumed him.

Neither of us drop the lever, but we are momentarily weakened by the shock of what we saw.  When she realizes he’s gone Ash is instantly, violently frenzied.  She whips around and screams at the night, holding each of ten fingers rigidly curled as claws, prepared for battle.  Her voice reverberates arhythmically from her chest and her throat through her sinus.  The waves of vibration bounce off of every surface differently and blend into a self-echoing and bloodcurdlingly horrifying harmony.  I have never heard a sound like it.  Truly, I do not believe that anybody has before tonight.