No Exit

Posted on 16 Feb 2013 @ 9:09pm by Lieutenant JG Kestra Orexil

1,442 words; about a 7 minute read

Place: The Sienna Mindscape
Time: Mid-Season 1 through the present.

[ON]

Exhaustion permeated every fiber of her being. She knew, of course, that this was not reality, despite the verisimilitude of the dreams' details. It looked real. Smelled real. Felt real to the touch, but she couldn't feel it. Oh, she felt the deaths, every time, as they happened - battering at her consciousness and tearing cries from her throat. All the pain, the terror, the sorrow... those emotions flowed into her like rivers to the sea until she thought she might actually drown in them. But there was a sense, as there was in every holodeck program, of something waiting just beyond and outside of her immediate surroundings. She was inside of a maze of nightmares, but there was a way out. She knew there was.

The only question that remained was whether she would find the exit before the wrought and terrible emotions of this place tore her apart.

Day after day and night after night, she struggled through the changing scenes. Most were battles, gruesome ones - as though there were battles that weren't dread-filled - and those she might have excused as creations of her own mind. She wasn't in the habit of having nightmares, no, but she'd experienced enough terrible sights to invent reconstructions of her own memories. Men vaporized by phaser blasts. Blood pouring from batleth wounds. The maze that Kestra walked thickened with congealing blood every day. The blood felt like grief. Sorrow. Hate. Fury. Madness. It lapped at her calves, trying to soak into her skin. She denied it. Still denied it. But it was harder all the time to keep the force of those emotions at bay.

Oh, but she knew there was a way out. There had to be. This was no afterlife. She was trapped. Somewhere. It didn't feel Klingon, but it could have been. She didn't know what mischief they had been up to beyond their plans to steal the Sienna project and use it for their own means... Perhaps they'd managed to formulate some cage - a holocage with a hidden release.

She'd been through all this before, she reminded herself. Every door she passed was open, full of horrors both silent and screaming.

A marble house swayed on stilts in the middle of a dark forest, clocks of all shapes, sizes, and designs - familiar and unfamiliar - all of them beeping, chiming, speaking, cooing endlessly out of sync. His hand lifted slowly, wrapping the noose around his own neck, and he leapt. A crack. Kestra watched the man hanging below the house along with twenty other versions of himself as yet another was slowly driven insane by time itself.

Children died. Women were brutalized. Men were tortured.

The ship was fine, officers going about their business. She knew they were dead; she'd watched them die, but here they were fine as silk, at least until she saw the backs of their heads, empty, gaping, and dripping with gore.

She was so tired.

A woman woke up in a laboratory; she must have fallen asleep while studying the latest variations from the macroscopic viral sequencer. Shaking her head, she rose, going about her normal routine. Only something was wrong. The doors that should be closed are open. The drawers and cabinets are all empty. Nothing is where it should be. And there's some kind of sticky, green substance dripping from the vent overhead...

So very tired.

A man was studying himself in a mirror: his eyes bloodshot, skin pale, heart racing. Sick; he had to be. A doctor- He stumbled against the door. She watched as his skin grew over his eyes and a sinkhole formed in the center of his forehead for a spindly twelve-legged insect to emerge.

She wanted only to rest.

The woman was hiding. She hadn't seen him in years, and he hadn't seen her in even longer. She hadn't wanted him to. Hadn't wanted to look in his eyes or be forced to speak to him ever again. Yet here he was, here, of all places, and she felt nothing but panic. Her throat felt as though she couldn't swallow. "What is it?" the man at her side asked as she tried to use him as a shield. "It's him," she whispered. "It's him."

When had she slept last? She couldn't recall.

The Unseen, mere presences, lurked around every corner of the twitching penumbra. They were skittering shadows, swollen to unimaginable sizes, crawling towards him at a rapid pace, and try as he might, he couldn't regain control. They would catch up to him. And when they did, he would be nothing more than ash and bone. His heart swallowed by their darkness.

Words, thoughts...

There was no floor that she could perceive, only bridges hanging from the sky at various heights, and below, the abyss extended far beyond the reaches of the many dim lamps and torches. Everything was in motion, platforms swaying from side to side, ancient putrescent wood that threatened to buckle under her weight; she felt heavier than she'd ever felt before, as though her shoes were full of stones instead of feet.

If she could only rest for a moment.

An enormous spider descended from a rope, its numerous eyes set upon a broad-shouldered man with a frozen, terrified smile. Kestra could smell the spider's hair, asparagus and feces, roasted by a nearby torch. Depth and grace in its threatening gait, it clamored onto the platform. The man had no choice but to jump away, but there were myriad wasps below, buzzing around a nest the size of a waverider shuttle; its greyed, papery walls bulging under the pressure of the buzzing beasts. Perhaps he could dodge them as he fell, she heard him think. Just as his feet were about to leave the old wooden rectangle, however, the spider set its own hefty form upon it, and it snapped under the added pressure. The partial collapse was enough to ruin his efforts and she felt him tumble forward toward the darkness below, ever forward he went past the light into the blackest oblivion.

A second. A breath of air that wasn't acrid with the scent of-

Pins pricks, the iron of blood, rancid meat, faster and faster. Stronger, the ones she feared more, shaking, knees to her chest as tight as she could, already the girl was crying. Tastes and smells that made her retch, filling her mouth, so foul, she sobbed, there was no fighting it. Beautiful colours all around, every single one of them, cut across with violent screams, thrashing limbs, the terror that took her over.

Fear had a scent. She'd felt it before, but never noticed its particular fragrance, hidden beneath the others. Sulfur and chimney smoke. She'd never smelled a chimney in her life, but she knew the scent of the ashes that poured out of the column at the far end of the tunnel and that ash was fear.

Klingon battle cries and thick smoke filled the air, accompanied by the occasional green and orange flares of disruptor and phaser fire, and the disgustingly foul stench of burning flesh. From the opposite side of the shuttlebay, a man watched in horror as one of his flight crew ran helplessly across the tarmac, her body engulfed in flames while she screamed a terrifying sound of imminent death.

She couldn't touch them. There were not her dreams to conquer. Yet they crushed her between them, like maize beneath a grinding stone, wearing her down.

Blood that wouldn't stop. The man's hands were covered in it, helplessly trying to shove the liquid back where it belonged even as it squelched though his fingers and pooled at his knees.

She knew him, didn't she? She knew those hands...

She kicked and clawed, screaming, though no one could hear her. No one would. She'd had this dream so many times. Always so terrifying. Never so real. Her nails broke as she tore at the access hatch, trying to escape-

Kestra sank to her knees. Before this, weeks, months, years, however long she'd been wading through this river of horrors, every face had been a mystery. But there she was - Lilou - wide-eyed and screaming helplessly as hands gripped and groped at her. Kestra's heart broke. She felt it snap in twain, shredding as it tore apart, and then crumbled into dust. //Enough.//

[OFF]

LTJG Kestra Orexil
USS Galileo/Sienna Mindscape

RSS Feed