From Ashes ✗ Stiles Stilinski [#𝟏]

𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐬𝐢𝐱 [ apocalypse, part three. ]

A/N: I wrote a little bit of this chapter every day since I posted the last one. The original plan for this chapter and what it turned into and the themes that grew from it make it one of my favorite that I've written. The cameos made me tear up a lil bit as I was writing it. I wanted everyone to have a moment. 

Anyway, I realize it's super late/early, so good morning. :D

Also, thank you for all of the comments on that last author's note I posted! As promised, a Staddie one shot is coming to Normal Again.  

Song Recommendation ["Roots" - In This Moment]
NOTE: For the full experience, I do personally suggest seeking out each song rec.

☽ † ☾

Maddie teetered at the edge of consciousness, and it was hard to be awake. When time came to her in hyper-realistic bursts, other things weren't real anymore. Watching her brother's stupid video games, breaking her arm outside the castle in Scotland, taking a bus to yet another monster-filled town...the more she fought sleep, the less real her world became.

Did those other passengers ever call 9-1-1? The thought rattled around in her skull and evaporated as her vision dimmed.

When she drifted from consciousness, Sunnydale became the dream- or nightmare, actually. The cautionary tale made to keep children up at night, hiding their tiny faces half beneath a blanket as if it could shield the entire world. It was a story made to keep little girls awake, asking themselves if these horrors would happen to their home too.

The double-edged sword that it was, the story kept her from drifting away. If Sunnydale was real, then she was real. Whatever was down here had to lose in order for Maddie to exist as she was. Slayers were chosen and won the day while The First Evil and its army lost the battle. A town crumbled to nothing, dying in order for the world to live.

Then again, Sunnydale wasn't just a town where terrible things happened. Demons were a symptom of this diseased, undying thing. It lured its prey, nourished itself on their evil, and kept their graves in its garden - more a cage than a place of rest. Whatever was here, they were as much prisoners as Maddie and her friends, rattling the bars on their cells backwards and forwards in time. They, along with their ancient, unending captor, would never go gently into that good night. They stewed. They remembered. They made sure everyone remembered.

Maddie was awake, lodged somewhere in the hellmouth's throat for all she knew.

She remembered everything, starting with the dead, but it was a different sort of remembering. Shadows in the fog, beckoning her, spinning around her in a grim dance.

A woman's face she knew from old photos, even if she couldn't place where she saw them. In the photos, she smiled at a man and cleaned counters in a strange shop. Maddie's head spun and in the fog, the same woman laid atop rubble, another broken piece of a town crumbling as her body lay there, split in half. Severed spine, arm falling away from shoulder, blood - so much blood flowing from the long, diagonal cut.