Crystalline Melodies I: Undying Strains
[PAST] My Ineptitude For Optimism
https://i.imgur.com/FYW6XFA.jpgRECOMMENDED SONG ACCOMPANIMENT: "Silhouette" by Owl City
SONG LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwPmVgRUOCU
"Get up."
I sat up with a start. Something real intelligent popped off my tongue, like "Huh, what?" I barely had time to rub the sleep out of my eyes before a rough hand grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet, setting the room off like a top in my feverish vision.
"I said get up, laḍakī!" He muttered something in another language and began to pull me out the door and down the hall. I looked back frantically, my eyes begging Aria for help, only to see that Aria was gone. I stumbled on the threshold, and yanked my arm away.
"I can walk myself," I said, sounding much more confident than I felt.
The man looked like he wanted to hit me for a minute, then cracked a smile: quite an ugly one at that. "Māsṭara is going to like you." That terrible smile haunts my dreams to this day.
He started walking again, and I had enough sense to follow before he grabbed my arm again. Nearly dislocated my shoulder, that grip of his did.
'Where is he taking me?' I thought offhandedly. I wondered if he was taking me to the same place those other girls were taken to. Dear gods, I hoped not.
When we came up to the upper decks, what I saw confirmed the feeling I'd had in my gut from the second I woke: we'd docked. The irony of it was, I don't think I ever felt more free, looking up at the sky for the first time in over a week. It's funny how that works. You don't know what you've got until it's gone, and when you get it back, even the barest of necessities and the most basic things taken for granted have a new sense of specialness and awe to them. It's both terrible and beautiful.
He started pulling me again, much to my irritation, up along the deck until we reached the dock. It was bustling with people, and I wondered how on earth we were going to get through them all without being squashed into tomato paste. Apparently, though, he had quite a commanding presence, as people sort of just scrambled out of his way as he neared them.
There were so many different kinds of people there. A lot of them had very colorful outfits, and I almost all of the women were wearing headscarves and long, flowing dresses. There was much of cultural interest there, but I was thrust through it all so fast, I hardly got any time to take it all in.
He "guided" me through the crowd, giving a dirty look to anyone who wasn't fast enough to get out of his way. We walked for a very long time, and by the time we stopped, my feet felt like they were going to melt off.
The rest of the day passed in an agonizingly slow blur. I know that a lot of what looked like currency exchanged owners. That was a bit nerve-wracking. He stuffed me into the passenger seat of a beat up pick-up truck and drove a long ways to a small building that was in the middle of nowhere. He left me in the car and locked the door, entering the house and closing the door behind him. I waited an awfully long time before I finally fell asleep. When I awoke, he was dragging me out of the truck and stuffing me, Aria, and a few other girls into the back of a van.
Aria held onto me as if I were her life source, and only now do I realize how scary it must have been for her, being separated from me for a full day, not knowing if she would ever see her little sister again. Me? I was still in too much of a feverish stupor to really grasp what was going on.
That's probably why I remember so little of it.
The van bumped along a road for a ridiculously long time. The back -- where we were being contained -- was blanketed in almost complete silence. Aria cut off the bloodstream to my hand multiple times, what with how tightly she gripped it. I didn't mind though. I did it just as hard back. I think if she hadn't been there, I would have died of fright right then and there. But with her next to me, I felt surprisingly calm. Like nothing could get us. I wish that had been true.
It was just getting dark out by the time the van rolled to a stop. The men opened the back of the van and yanked each of us out one by one. My feet hit the ground hard, and I fell to my knees, the air knocked out of me. Aria grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet, ushering me along quickly. At first I was hurt by her harshness, but I looked around and realized that she was really saving my butt: the men had guns, and were giving me the evil eye for apparently slowing down the line. I shivered. I really, really didn't want to know what a bullet in the back felt like.
Then I remembered.
"Aria!" I hissed under my breath, afraid to draw attention to myself. "How is your shoulder doing?"
She reached back gingerly to touch it and winced. "I'll live."
I was completely amazed and ashamed of myself for not having remembered her gunshot wound, much less even noticing how much pain she seemed to be in. She was holding it all back for me. It took everything in me to not turn around and hug her to death. I felt terrible. 'I am so selfish,' I thought miserably. A new thought nearly stopped me in my tracks.
"Aria…what…it's been a whole week. Your gun wound…is it infected?"
She didn't respond. I saw how pale she was. Tears sprung into my eyes, and I felt like hitting myself all over again.
No time for that, apparently. We were rushed in a tight line along the dusty trail. The sun finally sank behind the black and menacing clouds, blanketing the world in complete black. The men turned on their lanterns and flashlights. The way they illuminated our captors' expressionless faces and machine guns scared the crap out of me. It was right out of a horror movie.
I gripped Aria's hand tightly, hiding slightly behind her the way I used to with Mom. She squeezed my hand before stopping at the gate. It was really hard to see what exactly the place looked like with how dark it was out, but I remember thinking that it looked an awful lot like Auschwitz.
'No,' I'd tell myself. 'These aren't Nazis. The Nazis were German. These guys are Middle-Eastern, I think. Besides, Nazis don't exist anymore. This has to be something else.'
Still, the resemblance was startling. There was a tall wire fence encircling the "compound". At the top of each of the supporting bars was a floodlight, kind of like the ones you'd see at a nighttime baseball game. They faced inwards, illuminating large sections of the interior and giving the more shadowy areas a creepy feeling, as though something threatening might be lurking in them.
There were buildings lined up on the left side in rows: completely bare of any sort of marking, rusty, barely-standing metal slabs nailed together that would probably have toppled over with the next gust of wind. These had people bustling about inside, entering and exiting with armfuls and basketfuls of unrecognizable items.
On the farthest side of the enclosure, sounds of metal clanging on metal could be heard, and a dull red glow that was probably firelight shone in a sort of haze from that same direction.
On the right side, several hovels were stacked against each other. Very similar to the buildings on the right, but made of concrete. It stank of urine, soot, and sweat. The whole camp was squalid and disgusting.
A man yanked me from Aria's grip and pushed me into one of the buildings on the left. I landed on my back with a little yelp, and sat there for a long moment, shaking from cold, anger, and fear. I could hear him talking to Aria in threatening but hushed tones for several minutes. She sounded scared, and I didn't blame her. Their voices faded into the distance, and I started to shake. They'd taken her. What on earth was I going to do without her?
A couple other girls only slightly older than me filed in, and sat down next to me silently. By the frightened looks in their eyes, I could tell that they were just as freaked out about this whole thing as I was.
A few minutes later, one of them grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the wall. Me, her, and a few other girls all leaned against it, huddled together for warmth and at least a small sense of consolation. That was a very strange experience for me, as we were complete strangers, but that didn't really matter anymore. We were all in the same predicament, and that kind of united us. We had a common enemy. And however strange it sounds, that was actually very comforting.
Several of them fell asleep almost instantly, but I just couldn't. Not with the freezing draft that came in through the doorless shack opening. Not with the loud clangs that could be heard from anywhere in camp.
Not with Aria gone.
I had a feeling I was going to be here for a very long time, and that it was going to be the worst time of my life. And I was right.
SONG LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwPmVgRUOCU
"Get up."
I sat up with a start. Something real intelligent popped off my tongue, like "Huh, what?" I barely had time to rub the sleep out of my eyes before a rough hand grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet, setting the room off like a top in my feverish vision.
"I said get up, laḍakī!" He muttered something in another language and began to pull me out the door and down the hall. I looked back frantically, my eyes begging Aria for help, only to see that Aria was gone. I stumbled on the threshold, and yanked my arm away.
"I can walk myself," I said, sounding much more confident than I felt.
The man looked like he wanted to hit me for a minute, then cracked a smile: quite an ugly one at that. "Māsṭara is going to like you." That terrible smile haunts my dreams to this day.
He started walking again, and I had enough sense to follow before he grabbed my arm again. Nearly dislocated my shoulder, that grip of his did.
'Where is he taking me?' I thought offhandedly. I wondered if he was taking me to the same place those other girls were taken to. Dear gods, I hoped not.
When we came up to the upper decks, what I saw confirmed the feeling I'd had in my gut from the second I woke: we'd docked. The irony of it was, I don't think I ever felt more free, looking up at the sky for the first time in over a week. It's funny how that works. You don't know what you've got until it's gone, and when you get it back, even the barest of necessities and the most basic things taken for granted have a new sense of specialness and awe to them. It's both terrible and beautiful.
He started pulling me again, much to my irritation, up along the deck until we reached the dock. It was bustling with people, and I wondered how on earth we were going to get through them all without being squashed into tomato paste. Apparently, though, he had quite a commanding presence, as people sort of just scrambled out of his way as he neared them.
There were so many different kinds of people there. A lot of them had very colorful outfits, and I almost all of the women were wearing headscarves and long, flowing dresses. There was much of cultural interest there, but I was thrust through it all so fast, I hardly got any time to take it all in.
He "guided" me through the crowd, giving a dirty look to anyone who wasn't fast enough to get out of his way. We walked for a very long time, and by the time we stopped, my feet felt like they were going to melt off.
The rest of the day passed in an agonizingly slow blur. I know that a lot of what looked like currency exchanged owners. That was a bit nerve-wracking. He stuffed me into the passenger seat of a beat up pick-up truck and drove a long ways to a small building that was in the middle of nowhere. He left me in the car and locked the door, entering the house and closing the door behind him. I waited an awfully long time before I finally fell asleep. When I awoke, he was dragging me out of the truck and stuffing me, Aria, and a few other girls into the back of a van.
Aria held onto me as if I were her life source, and only now do I realize how scary it must have been for her, being separated from me for a full day, not knowing if she would ever see her little sister again. Me? I was still in too much of a feverish stupor to really grasp what was going on.
That's probably why I remember so little of it.
The van bumped along a road for a ridiculously long time. The back -- where we were being contained -- was blanketed in almost complete silence. Aria cut off the bloodstream to my hand multiple times, what with how tightly she gripped it. I didn't mind though. I did it just as hard back. I think if she hadn't been there, I would have died of fright right then and there. But with her next to me, I felt surprisingly calm. Like nothing could get us. I wish that had been true.
It was just getting dark out by the time the van rolled to a stop. The men opened the back of the van and yanked each of us out one by one. My feet hit the ground hard, and I fell to my knees, the air knocked out of me. Aria grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet, ushering me along quickly. At first I was hurt by her harshness, but I looked around and realized that she was really saving my butt: the men had guns, and were giving me the evil eye for apparently slowing down the line. I shivered. I really, really didn't want to know what a bullet in the back felt like.
Then I remembered.
"Aria!" I hissed under my breath, afraid to draw attention to myself. "How is your shoulder doing?"
She reached back gingerly to touch it and winced. "I'll live."
I was completely amazed and ashamed of myself for not having remembered her gunshot wound, much less even noticing how much pain she seemed to be in. She was holding it all back for me. It took everything in me to not turn around and hug her to death. I felt terrible. 'I am so selfish,' I thought miserably. A new thought nearly stopped me in my tracks.
"Aria…what…it's been a whole week. Your gun wound…is it infected?"
She didn't respond. I saw how pale she was. Tears sprung into my eyes, and I felt like hitting myself all over again.
No time for that, apparently. We were rushed in a tight line along the dusty trail. The sun finally sank behind the black and menacing clouds, blanketing the world in complete black. The men turned on their lanterns and flashlights. The way they illuminated our captors' expressionless faces and machine guns scared the crap out of me. It was right out of a horror movie.
I gripped Aria's hand tightly, hiding slightly behind her the way I used to with Mom. She squeezed my hand before stopping at the gate. It was really hard to see what exactly the place looked like with how dark it was out, but I remember thinking that it looked an awful lot like Auschwitz.
'No,' I'd tell myself. 'These aren't Nazis. The Nazis were German. These guys are Middle-Eastern, I think. Besides, Nazis don't exist anymore. This has to be something else.'
Still, the resemblance was startling. There was a tall wire fence encircling the "compound". At the top of each of the supporting bars was a floodlight, kind of like the ones you'd see at a nighttime baseball game. They faced inwards, illuminating large sections of the interior and giving the more shadowy areas a creepy feeling, as though something threatening might be lurking in them.
There were buildings lined up on the left side in rows: completely bare of any sort of marking, rusty, barely-standing metal slabs nailed together that would probably have toppled over with the next gust of wind. These had people bustling about inside, entering and exiting with armfuls and basketfuls of unrecognizable items.
On the farthest side of the enclosure, sounds of metal clanging on metal could be heard, and a dull red glow that was probably firelight shone in a sort of haze from that same direction.
On the right side, several hovels were stacked against each other. Very similar to the buildings on the right, but made of concrete. It stank of urine, soot, and sweat. The whole camp was squalid and disgusting.
A man yanked me from Aria's grip and pushed me into one of the buildings on the left. I landed on my back with a little yelp, and sat there for a long moment, shaking from cold, anger, and fear. I could hear him talking to Aria in threatening but hushed tones for several minutes. She sounded scared, and I didn't blame her. Their voices faded into the distance, and I started to shake. They'd taken her. What on earth was I going to do without her?
A couple other girls only slightly older than me filed in, and sat down next to me silently. By the frightened looks in their eyes, I could tell that they were just as freaked out about this whole thing as I was.
A few minutes later, one of them grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the wall. Me, her, and a few other girls all leaned against it, huddled together for warmth and at least a small sense of consolation. That was a very strange experience for me, as we were complete strangers, but that didn't really matter anymore. We were all in the same predicament, and that kind of united us. We had a common enemy. And however strange it sounds, that was actually very comforting.
Several of them fell asleep almost instantly, but I just couldn't. Not with the freezing draft that came in through the doorless shack opening. Not with the loud clangs that could be heard from anywhere in camp.
Not with Aria gone.
I had a feeling I was going to be here for a very long time, and that it was going to be the worst time of my life. And I was right.
Notes
Okay, I have a new formula that will probably allow me to update more often (no guarantees though.) I've decided that since the Present story is longer than the Past story, I will make the Past chapters shorter so I can spread them out over the whole Present story. So they will be shorter, but it will allow me to update more often (hopefully).Also, I wrote this at midnight and haven't had the chance to either edit or extend it, so sorry for the crappiness.
If you enjoyed this chapter, please like, subscribe, comment, etc. It's your guys' encouragement that keeps me writing! (Seriously, my productivity has increased a ten-fold with all of this.)
We've missed you!!
1/19/16