DRIPPING DARKNESS

Prologue

The air smelled of suffocating smoke. 

The entire morning sky was sad and ignorant of the life beneath its shadow, which made a dominant scar on the minds of people. Broad daylights, trapped far behind the hostile clouds, afraid to reveal themselves, didn't have the potential to penetrate them. 

The patterns made by the saturated dark vapors in the atmosphere gave a sinister smile. 

Not so long ago, this was the place where pigeons and bluebirds soared in the sky, spreading an invisible aura of happiness to the people underneath them, but now, it was different, the crows and ravens were ruling the sky while breathing in the darkness around them, and leaving behind traces of atrocity and hopelessness.

 A gust of dry wind winds blew through the maze of houses where the windows have long shattered in the weakness of their structures and rotting boards, some broken, others hanging, tried to cover the empty eyes of every abandoned home. The walls around looked like doubtless home to many in the fairly recent past, yet now it was an unfamiliar maze to all.

Weeds socialized across the cracking asphalt of every road, gathering and laughing at the lone pedestrians as they tried to weave around the catching fingers with every step.

The light fell on the words and revolutionary slogans that were simply the result of theatricality and deceptions by Monroe and her men, it was written by the common man against the supernaturals, that spoke to nobody, unaware that their audience had vanished, or that the streets lay silent beneath no boots at all.

It was as if God had stopped time, removed all the distractions so the people could see it for real, see how it really was, what it really was. 

And at that moment, all Lydia Martin could wish for, was another beating heart in this deserted city, another being of warm blood and flesh, one more pair of boots to walk next to hers.

The fearsome noise of the 17 feet large beast, The Fenris, at least a few kilometers away, roaring and ripping apart the city into bits, added a moody touch of anger and emotional pain at the same time. 

But the pain faded, knowing that going against it, would be useless at the moment.

 Aside from all the small doors that hanged on the few threads of their hinges and groaned with pain at every sway, the rusty pavement of the main road led its way to a clear but dreadful view of the symbol, the symbol of anarchy, which was lit with fire, drawn large enough on the glass windows of the tallest building in the city, to make it visible to every possible citizen in the city, dead or alive.

But it was no post-apocalyptic movie, not a premonition, neither was it a child's nightmare, all of this, the deserted streets, tumble-down stores, shutters hanging by once hinge bangs eerily in the gusty wind, dust,  tumbleweed, dark ominous cloud, dirt road that might turn to a river of mud in the coming monsoon, they were all real and visible with her bare eyes.

Right at the moment, Lydia was a nobody, she had no one aside from her to hold her steady. 

She felt her weak knees subconsciously bent and fell on the broken road of Beacon Hills after small images of her past one month quickly flashed on her mind. It was the darkest one month of her life, of her whole eternity. 

She felt like giving up the rest of her power to destroy every possible element on her sight, including her. So, she screamed, unaware of her limits which exceeded the pitch and amplitude of a normal person's voice.

Lydia screamed with everything she had left inside her...