Instinct

Chapter 13 -- Crimson

It was all apart of the plan it is apart of the plan everything is apart of the plan you are apart of the plan your friends your family your loved ones your acquaintances are all apart of the plan you will become one with the plan you will become one with the ether's of this universe you will feed the starving underbelly of the Hells and Heavens and Purgatories and The Nothingness that we all are consumed by everyone feeds it and soon you will become the one to be the devoured prophet the harbinger of events yet to come and soon you will become one with all and one with Everything everyone takes for granted and you will witness eternal oblivions of suffering and dissipation of every molecular atom that courses through your soul and you will be torn apart and reconstructed until the end of Father Time when Father Time implodes and we all implode and we all become nothing and we are reborn again by the great Lords of Everything and you will be seen soon and born soon and ended soon...

He was dead.

He's dead.

My father was dead, killed, slain like some kind of ravenous human who wasn't capable of controlling themself. He was executed in front of everyone as some kind of martyr to show the city that everyone within it didn't amount to the ground they stood on. They amounted to where they'd end up below the paved grounds or the free air that whispered through every square inch of this godforsaken, treacherous, hell hole.

Without remorse...

He was shot before my eyes and his life was ripped away from him as quick as it was given to him. The place that he sought to protect for as long as he was alive was the ultimately the one in the end to murder him in cold blood without a second thought. All of the people he worked so painstakingly for to make sure their lives would be everything they could ever hope for would all look upon his death and mourn for the rest of their lives. Our family he created and put together by pouring his heart out into the molds of something that could save him from himself and the life we've been birthed into after years of building from nothing: to the constructs of a loving wife and two daughters that would be left without solace. Left without ever knowing the truth of why our foundation was ripped away so soon. Left not by choice, but by the will of our life force of this city, Zykard, by the hands of those who he brought up.

All of the things I never got to say to my father, everything that would be left unsaid by both him and I. I took him for granted. I took the very being of his life for granted because I always adopted the notion that he would be alive forever. That there couldn't be a life without my father. But I let my childish ignorance cloud the clearest fact that anyone could ever know.

Everyone dies.

Nobody was exempt from it. No matter the significance or the impact they brought to the world would deter from the inevitability of all of our deaths. It didn't matter what life you came from, how well known you were, how you were as a person...

Everyone truly dies, and it took my father's death to let that fact finally sink in and take hold of how I thought of things from now until the end of my time. From this point everything truly changed for better or worse, whether anybody was ready for some kind of monumental change was beyond their control. Beyond my control.

My sister...

Gods, especially my mother, she'd be absolutely devastated by the news of him getting murdered. She couldn't probably ever move on from the thought of a life without him again. She'd be stuck in a purgatory of eternal torture to her heart, eternal pain striking through her heart as I would suffer with for as long as I breathed.

And what was even worse was that Madelyn and I were now officially legal adults of Zykard, we'd be permitted to leading our own lives and getting our own homes and begin families of our own. There wouldn't be as much time to spend with her as we would if we were still kids. She'd barely ever see us again, and for that she'd grow ever so recluse and maybe even...