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The first thing she knew when she awoke was, ironically, darkness.
Thick, enveloping darkness, forming spots behind eyelids closed shut, stretching so silent that she couldn’t even begin to figure out where she was. Pressure seemed to form around numb limbs and forcing feeling back into them, drilling into her pounding head, and, oh, did she mention that the second thing she knew was pain?
If Dark (oh, right, that was her name) had thought previously that the cold, splattering blackness around her was all-encompassing, that idea was quickly dispelled as reality filtered back in around her. Debilitating nausea roiled in her stomach, but there was nothing left to throw up. Her limbs, though strangely numb and unable to feel the dirt underneath her in large patches, felt like they were being eaten away. Sputters of ash settled on her dry tongue, faintly warm, but it was not the comfort that she, for some reason that she failed to recall, expected.
Her head pounded, low, biting, aching, and she didn’t know why.
Instinctively, Dark tried to move; to raise her head, to get herself standing on two feet, to prove that she wasn’t knocked down that easily. (Faintly, she knew that if whatever knocked her unconscious was strong enough to leave her in a crater, this weakness was justifiable. Even more faintly, she wondered who she was trying to prove herself to.)
She immediately regretted this choice as soon as her hand— blackened with soot and what looked like disease but a tiny voice in the back of her mind whispered no no that’s not what it is— hit the ground behind her. Something like fire spread down her arm, overriding the numbness, and flickers of some memory fire and smoke and dust and some kind of addictive euphoria that even in memory she wanted to experience again and again and again and the face of another stick smiling-frowning-twisted in anger and what had she done wrong and, with a sound that she would never admit to making normally, she let herself fall back onto the dirt.
Dark’s mission statement still rattled around in her head; still, she repeated to herself, prodding at the thought like it wasn’t her own, still, like this wasn’t something unfamiliar, but it wasn’t it wasn’t someone did this to her and something about the thought sent hatred shivering down her spine, because that little thing in the back of her mind knew who did this to her (mission.The_Dark_Lord = destroy(The_Chosen_One) typed into an outdated box, character by character, and weren’t those words ominous, destructive, terrible?) but she didn’t know herself, which was infuriating, and her ears were ringing inside and out and—
Out?
There was a sound nearby. Briefly, anxiety flared in Dark’s chest, in time with her pulsing migraine— what if it was Chosen again, come to do away with her properly (but they had been friends but they were decidedly not friends but where did that thought come from?), what if it was whatever caused her to be lying in a pit and unable to remember anything solid past the past few minutes-hours-however long and unable to move due to the still-pounding pain in her head and the bloody sickness in her gut and she wasn’t scared, she wasn’t, she wasn’t.
And then she saw the hints of a red-tinted, spidery leg to her left, and something in her mind seemed to relax; that’s mine, it whispered, and she didn't bother to disassemble whatever that meant. The rest of the body came into view— heels up on four legs, bug-like in shape. A few others joined it, staring down at Dark and hissing in a way that should have been menacing but was instead weirdly comforting. The clattering, scuttling, bug-like noise then dissipated as the… whatever they were (that she knew, she knew, but the stabbing pain through her head and fuzziness of her mind kept that information away) seemed to consider their mission complete and how she wished she could do that to her own.
The newfound quiet nearly sent her to sleep. She resisted such a fate, with whatever mixture of spite and strength and fear she had left rattling around her head, because she could still see visions of water and red and light that was a curious shade of green and Dark decidedly did not want to know what horrors her mind could come up with in lieu of proper perception. In some sort of muted, heart-quickening panic, she pressed her hands into blood-stained soil and imagined herself floating into a red-tinted sky and almost got onto unfeeling feet, but she felt her elbows buckle and she collapsed to the floor, breath whooshing out of aching lungs, blackly tinted limbs (that was a new development, she was sure) trembling. She stared up at the sky. Grey clouds hung low overhead. Around her, those little mechanical… bugs chittered around the sides of her vision.
Maybe she could stay down a little longer.