Along Came A Wolf [Teaser]
#15 of Sample/Teaser Stories
wanted to post something to say that yeah, I'm alive and I'm still working on the multitude of stories that are mired by my lack of drive.
At least two story chapters are close to halfway to being updated, however, I'm fighting several blocks being caused by crap irl that I won't bore you with.
Anyway,
this is a new story series that I've started
it explores an alternate reality where an dystopian world that is slowly rebuilding some of what was lost when it was covered by an unnatural blizzard that froze the planet.
This is a segment from the prologue I'm writing where those able have taken shelter in underground caves and shelters to keep from being frozen.
Kazel is one of these survivors that had taken refuge in a giant cavern below a research facility and goes looking for one of her colleague on the frozen surface...
It was then that she found herself in a Cold Weather Poncho, riding an elevator up into the upper sections of the old facility that they were under. The ride was slow, taking upwards of ten or more minutes as it ascended up the shaft. She never learned how deep the lower parts of the facility were, just that they were buried underground. Though the further up she was taken, the colder the temperature was. She could even see her breath now that she was close to the surface.
The elevator dinged and the doors parted to reveal a halfway much like one might find at a hospital. The normally pristine walls were coated in frozen crystals that used to be in the air, giving the facility a man-made ice cave vibe. While the walls had a glittering beauty to them, the floor had become a simple sheet of ice which made the wide halls difficult to navigate. More than once she nearly lost her footing on the ice, to say nothing of the nightmare that had been the stairwell that finished taking her the rest of the way to the surface.
The closer that she got to the exit, the colder it grew and the more she had to trudge through ice and snow to make it to the exit. Thankfully, there was a path that she could follow through the knee high snow drifts inside the building but the path had already been filling up with more drifting snow. Reaching the exit, she passed the sliding doors. Not that they could stop much now. The doors were frozen open and most of the glass in the building had been long shattered. Kazel continued to follow the path outside where the surrounding snow now reached up to her waist, which was easy since she stood below five and a half feet. Making her slightly smaller than her other, otter brethren. She often cursed her small size, specially times like now where a bigger build would help power through the dense snow on the ground. She certainly wasn't built for this kind of weather, but then again most others weren't but still had to deal with the sudden change. The path seemed to snake its way around the lab facility's grounds, seemingly leading to nowhere particular. She was about to give up her search when she came across something unexpected.
She knew what it was.
Ground Zero.
Feelings as cold as the air around her washed over her body as she looked over the gaping hole before her. The created chasm was more than sixteen hundred feet across and more than a mile around the edges. She couldn't guess how deep it was, but there were exposed labs and hallways where some of her former colleagues were just a few years ago. As much as she tried not to, tears welled up as memories both good and bad surfaced.
"Why...?" She sobbed to no one in particular. "Why did this happen? Why did things have to turn out like this? Why did we deserve to be punished like this? Why?... Why, why, why..." Kazel dropped to her knees as she started to cry in the snow.