3. Awakening

The real alarm clock beeped. I woke up, faithless and godless. It was uncommon in me to wake up bellowing in anger; or was it pain? Anyway, the alarm clock ended up crashing into the wall. For the first time, I hated myself for being a social drinker and not having any alcohol at home. It seemed like the most logical path to force my mind into oblivion.

The routine kicked in. Every muscle doing what it had been trained to do for years on end independently of the state of my mind. That was me, a part of me, most of the time impervious to the state of my mind, doing the job.

In no time, I found myself walking the road back to the lab trying to keep my mind busy with the eerie world provided by the morning fog out from the river. Sunrise got me at the underpass through the river. The long tunnel filled with  thick brume refracting the nascent light in such a way that the passersby were rendered as mere blurry, inhuman silhouettes.

Time stop. I became no better than a piece of marble. Unmovable. All the silhouettes frozen at their places. 

That's when the infernal sound came. If pure, distilled pain had a characteristic sound, that unearthly cacophony would have been it. My skin wanted to crawl; it couldn't. A silhouette at the other end of the tunnel—no, not a silhouette, rather a dark void devouring all the scattered light—started moving towards my direction. Whenever it brushed one of the human silhouettes, the tunnel was filled with the hellish sound, and I felt this urge to ran away in every cubic centimeter of my body.

It advanced slowly, the silence in between encounters a periodic witness to its approach. The silhouettes of those in front of me getting blurrier as soon as my ears ringed again with the infernal sound. I thought of destruction... of undoing, but the silhouettes remained. Tendrils of pure darkness slowly creeping over them, slowly engulfing them. Everything in me begged to flee.

The black void stood in front of me. At its heart, a figure clad and hooded in a black robe stood.

A sleeve slowly rose until its empty end was in front of my face; a pale hand covered in thick, lively tendrils of pure darkness reached out for my face.

My skin crawled. Before I consciously registered the feeling and the though, I found my hand flying towards the hooded figure. 

My fist hit the mark and I found myself staring at Corruption itself. It had my face...