Subject: RPG Alone in the Dark and waking up to a nightmare Date: Wed, 10 Jun 98 00:08:49 -0400 From: Skyechan Prenent location: The middle of nowhere running like the devil westward. Clip swerved away from the human girl, nostrils up and head arched. There was something evil lying on the night. Something BAD that was pulling him to it. He dismissed the mortal with a bare sympathetic thought, but he was gripped in the sense of impending danger. He ignored the screeching cries of the owls and night hunters and the whipping branches that tangled and burred in his mane and tail. He didn't notice when the woundwort and moss was trampled underfoot leaving a half healed scar that slowly began to bleed again. The music in the darkness cajoled him on, a disharmonic symphony of destruction that threatened to destroy anything in its path. LEFT BEHIND Stana felt the tears well in her eyes as all her fears about the dark slammed into to her head in a jumble, demanding audience with her nervous system. She was a fine tangle of stress, ready to break out in hysteria at any moment. She hugged woodstock all the closer and silently repeated psalm 23. Then did it again. God was awesome and Great-but right now the Darkness seemed all the more real to her. She was slowly coming to think that maybe her life before now had been the real dream and she was just waking up now. That left her one option. They called her the "Ice princess" in High School. The chilly grad that refused the show of emotion. She had dove into the solace in oblivion to escape the pain of life, and forgot how to escape her solitude. Her heart lay trapped behind walls of frozen iron and she had felt safe that way. She had found a way out. And had never thought to need the frozen depths in her soul again. Now standing in the middle of the forest, noise and fear surrounding her, Stana withdrew into herself and hid behind those walls. She knew how to turn herself off to the outside once, she could do it again. And not get trapped. She hoped, prayed that she wouldn't get trapped. Elsewhere. Clip slowed, head tilted back as if listening. The pain in his leg came back full force reminding him of reality. For the moment he ignored it, switching his tail impatiently and waiting for that feeling to hit him again. He wasn't deceived. There was death in the moon and the stars. They were singing a requiem that only he could hear. If Death was waiting for him, Clip intended on taking the battle forward. Far off he heard the sullen silence as birds huddled in terror. Like a flash he was off. Running madly towards whatever he felt was calling his name.Without realizing it, he had reversed his direction and was very near his home again. He didn't place a name to the terror that gripped his heart with cold and icy talons, he only knew he had to get there. Wherever there was. And quickly. Time blurred, and endless trees waved by, bowing back and out of the charging Unicorns way. With a snort he leapt into the lightening field, squealing a battlecry. His ears were flattened, everyline in his body tensed and catlike in anticipation of a pounce. The sun glinted fiercly of his Alicorn and Clips' hooves flashed lightning quick. Appalled he stopped, and stared. The sun that would normally play off the emerald grass was now bathing the red blood of twenty dead and dying men. Fury at having his home invaded by mortals quickly intensified into outrage when he looked clsoser at them. From the forehead of each was a mass of blood and tissue. It was at that moment that Clip realized that these were not mortals but dying Unicorns that had been deprived of their horns upon the wounds they received. His screams tore the air and crackled on the sky. Still he searched each body. In the center of the circle he found what he was looking for. Golden hair. Human, frail and torn from the head of a girl child. He could almsot hear her tears as she was taken. After a century of careful hiding she had been discovered. Disavowal became moot. Clip went after the trail with blood boiling over in his veins.