LITTLE DARK AGE ― twd x tlou

- PROLOGUE

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PAIN IS DISORIENTING at first. It's quiet and unassuming. It weeps and cries and tears and burns passionately like fire and smoke, suffocating lungs and squandering heartbeats and burning skin; gruesome and bloody and terrible.

But the disorientation passes and is replaced instead by numbness. The terror dulls and stillness becomes you. It muffles your words and thoughts and existence and leaves an horrible emptiness in its wake. A fall deep into the darkest ocean, mouth open, eyes wide, unfeeling, unyielding. A relentless tugging into the deep abyss of blackness. There is nothing to break your fall; no legs to catch your stumble, no hands to close the distance, nothing to relinquish the rope that pulls you closer and closer to the clutches of your own demise.

Then comes the loneliness.

It grapples with your subconscious and projects thoughts of torment and anguish and leaves you with nothing but a horrible, incomparable aching. It feasts on your worries and fears and mocks your wrongdoings and warns you against those who may oppose its own oppression.

It sits idly by; watching, observing, waiting, nesting in the shadows of your own self-actualization. It reels it's head only once and promises redemption and absolution, a cleansing of your sins. But it lies and whispers and begs in the far reaches of your mind that you'll never truly be forgiven.

No one will ever ease your suffering. You will always be without hubris, cursed to exist in the desolate realm of short-comings and resigned pragmatism. It will eat away at your sense of self and replace you with nothing but a shell of the person you were before.

Before what?

You do not know.

Pain is all-consuming. Pain is the sister of guilt and the brother of selfishness and it tears at the seams of the person who most desperately deserves to be free of it.

Pain is soul-crushing and heartbreaking and will destroy everything in its wake. It is the foil of love, the absence of understanding, the future of tribulation and despair.

It has only one goal, one true intention:
to absolutely ruin you.

And the most alarming thing about pain; the daunting, appalling, brutal truth is that no one truly escapes it.

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i came up with this at work and it will be entirely self-indulgent so enjoy mwuahah