Light the Way

77%

August 6

The worst part about the Black Wave, I think, is the way it slowly rips pieces off your soul, off your life. It's sneaky, working in such small increments that it's easy to overlook. Lower Sector loses all light, and a piece of your soul is torn from your body. The streetlights don't shine bright enough, and a fleck of your sanity comes loose. Your bedroom light takes a number of tries to turn on, and you lose a slice of normality in the slab of your life.

And by the time you finally notice all the pieces of yourself you're mysteriously missing, it's already too late. The Wave hits you with reckless-abandon and everything in its path is decimated.

I can feel it happening to me already. It's the little things – dimming streetlights, flickering headlights – that really affect me, because I can sense them building and building, stacking up in a dark corner of my mind. And one day, I'll get to a point where it's no longer possible to ignore them and they'll overwhelm me.

It's like with today in school, where rumours about Lower Sector were spreading like wildfire throughout the corridors and classrooms.

My father's boss says the Black Wave has gotten into their bodies and possessed them.

Apparently it's affecting their minds too – they're all going insane.

I heard everyone's dying.

The words slid into my ears and another slither of my sanity, my soul, was lost to the darkness. It doesn't matter that we have no way of communicating with those in Lower Sector – the rumours, regardless of how silly they are, seem frighteningly real. Even though I know they can't possibly be true, they attack my thoughts like a disease, eating away at my rational mind.

Because the truth, the hidden truth, the real truth, is that the Black Wave hits long before the lights go out. Long before its presence has even been rumoured in neighbouring towns, it seeps into the heart of the city, into the minds of its victims, and plants seeds of fear among the people, and within their dreams. It starts all the way back in our youth, in our childhoods, when we are just learning how to think for ourselves and its name is first uttered by our parents.

Yet it's not until we grow up that we become aware that we're fighting a war. And when we do, we scramble to put up our defences, to create and build weapons, blindly and mindlessly slogging forward towards a goal we took too long to realise – one that, by now, is overshadowed by the fact that the dark, the Black Wave, is already winning.

And that is its greatest weapon.