Living Night 1

Instructions

WARNING - May contain horror-like elements and unrealistic violence. Living Night Chapter 1 – Night alive, eat the sun. Arach Hashen ran across the dark alleyway street, his black cloak flowing in flapping waves behind him, lagging half a step where it shouldn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. The thought simply failed to stay put. “Come back here and return that precious article, Little!” a raspy, deep voice boomed behind him, as if not naming the theft made it better for him. The cloak. “Sir, it’s mine!” he tried to tell the man, despite the hopeless situation. The guard, of course, didn’t slow down a bit. My heirloom. He slid his arms into the sleeves, not caring to button it. How could they chase a child just barely able to properly handle a small weapon, trying to imprison him? He wrapped his fingers around the cold metal clasp high on his chest and pressed the shining button on the motif. Had the guard’s clawing hand been any closer, it wouldn’t have worked. The cloak gave him a ghostly appearance, letting him pass through things. There and then, he passed through the high walls that surrounded him all his life. He escaped the guard, even as he watched the man’s hand clamp around another himself left behind, fingers closing on something hollow and uncertain in the air behind him. Him there. His other him. A fading imprint in reality. He didn’t know how, but that was what the cloak did. He activated it, and it let him turn into a ghost, leaving his body far behind until it just vanished, like sea foam disappearing into ocean waves, waves that he had never even seen. The first thing he thought, while running across the fields, was library. It was a simple thought, but one that could change him. He had always seen his fellow, “Twinkle”, as the Masters called her, in the underground library in her free time, sucking up knowledge from the little books they had there. She could help. He had been running for hours. His legs could hardly carry his own weight, now. The cloak could free him from the weight... He carefully activated the cloak... just one more time. It led him twenty minutes, and the rest, however short, invigorated him. He remembered that he was going to the library. But why? He knew that he had to go there. He could sense urgency. Where did he come from? He was alone, in that prison, he remembered. Uncertainty pressed over the memory, though. He was alone, beside the Masters and guards, right? The great library loomed over him, a vast, beautiful building lit with warm light coming from the windows. He couldn’t bring himself to remember how he knew how to get there, but that didn’t matter now. There was probably something in the library, a book, maybe, that would remind him of what he needed to do there. He walked up the stairs of slate and opened the great oaken doors in the front of the building. He suddenly realised how cold it was, as the comfortable warmth drew him into the library. There was someone just a bit older than him wearing glasses, someone with dark, uneven hair and a book in hand. She looked recognizable. She glanced up at him with surprise. “Who are you?” she said. He dug through his memory... How could I forget my own name? He grasped at thoughts, “Um-quiet... little?” Then he remembered. Someone else, someone in the prison, called him Quiet. She now seemed very confused, to the point that she raised a brow. “You’re Arach.” That’s my name! “Wh-who are you?” Now, she was to the point of absolute speechless confusion, he saw from her expression. “It’s me... you know me. Twinkle?” She added under her breath to herself, “Gosh, I hate that name... my real one is gone, now.” “Your real name... you’re Elara.” Elara paused, assessing Arach for a moment. “You shouldn’t know that. Nobody should.” She dismissed it entirely after a second, but before that CONTINUED IN NOTES+CREDITS