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The Gods Forsaken

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Author: Jake-Rabbit

Twitter: @DamnDirtyFurry

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Mia....Mia....wake up. Don't leave me. I don't want to be alone...please, Mia, I'm frightened. Please don't go.

At first there was only a haze, a fog settled in front of the eyes as oppressive and thick as the worst mornings in a Breston bog. Grey, impenetrable,and cold, it settled into Mia's sinuses, and made them burn. The fog itself began to roil, twisting, writing and turning in upon itself like a wounded snake. It slowly evaporated, the remaining wisps retreating into the corners of the room as if a ghost, hiding shyly behind broken furniture and piles of debris from where the ceiling had collapsed.

Mia found herself only able to take in her surroundings for a split second before her lungs reminded her that she hadn't been breathing. Reflexively, she pulled in a short, staccato breath, only to find her lungs full already. She was sent into a series of violent coughs to clear them, hacking and wheezing, clearing a foul mist from inside. It was as if she was drowning, and she nearly passed out from the effort of expelling the gas in her lungs, slowly lessening the sensation that a presence had been sitting on her.

The first breath she drew was the worst, and it felt like inhaling fire and smoke; she howled in pain, coughed more, and then drew in more of the burning maelstrom of breathable air It was how newborns felt, their first breath marked by a violent cry to let the world know they lived.

Mia whimpered and curled herself into a fetal position, every muscle in her body tense, burning, and at the same time, gloriously and painfully aware of its own presence. The instinct to pant as if she'd sprinted a mile took over. Mercifully, each drawn breath was easier than the one before, though marked by a decided tickle in her lungs, a wet, crackling cough to follow. She coughed and spit up onto the decking, drooling uncontrollably until she regained her senses.

She ached everywhere, and was fairly certain her arm was broken. Her forehead felt warm and wet; a pink hand that ventured across her scalp confirmed it; the fingers pulled back red, soaking through to her cream-colored fur.

She sat up, cradling her left arm against her belly while she winced in pain. Her fingers explored the bone underneath musculature, and with a sharp, stabbing throb, found where it had been fractured. At the very least, it was a distraction from the searing headache that she'd earned from breathing in the wrong gas. The Mus' fur was normally well-kept, with pale cream spots that ran up her hide and along the mottled features of her murine face. Now, all that fur was matted and greyed with grey soot, and a thin river of crimson ran through the light fur from her head and down along her chest. Her pink tail was scraped up and visibly bruised. The royal blue fabric of her robe was in tears, and only hung off one shoulder by a literal thread. The blonde hair she'd spent so much time putting up was a mess, tangled about a weakened braid, and strained red where her scalp had split.

She tied her robe around one shoulder as best she could with one hand. Lifting her left arm into the fabric, she'd use the most revealing part of it as a sling. Fashion didn't matter, and certainly decency was a distant concern.

When she finally had the presence of mind to look around, it came back where she'd been. She'd headed back to the guest quarters to relax; the party she'd been at had taken its toll, and she'd been developing a good buzz from the wine that kept finding it way to her by virtue of the ship's officers. Taking a breather seemed appropriate. She last remembered laying down, and then being woken up by a singular klaxon's blare. Then, she felt as if a gale picked up in her quarters, before everything went dead quiet. She'd woken up here and now.

Everything in the room had been thrown around, including her. Furniture was broken and piled against a wall, half of the ceiling was now located on the floor, exposing bent piping and cabling that hung in giant bundles as if the branches of weeping willows. The air stunk of ozone, and she could hear a faint crackle of naked electricity above her, hidden in the wreckage of the ceiling. Her pulse quickened, and a realization set in. She hauled herself to her feet and ran to the cabin door, palm repeatedly slamming against the door's actuator to no effect. She dug her claws into the door and pulled with everything she could manage, turning to push once the it started to give, reluctantly sliding back into its recess with a metallic grind. She put her good shoulder into it, and eventually found herself able to wiggle through the gap and into the corridor beyond.

The hallway was lit only by a fixture that hung by wire, spinning slowly in place. Mia stepped carefully over the wreckage that lined the hall, blue eyes darting from door to door, her mind making note of a pale purple field glowing around each; a sign that what was beyond was nothing but hard vacuum. Anxiety welled up in her like a geyser, building pressure in her, and forcing her to hyperventilate as she felt fear creep in. She had to check and make sure that the air wasn't becoming thin again.

She paused, hung her head, and swallowed a lump the size of a grapefruit. Willing herself to calm down was asking for the most Sisyphean of tasks; when she finally calmed enough to think, her mind snapped back to where she was, and what might have happened, and in that instant, she'd become a pouting, frightened child again. A subtle pressure to the fracture in her arm allowed her enough of a locus of pain such that she could focus - long enough to reach out and grasp her sanity again.

Her mind focused in, and she knew she had to go to the core of the ship. It was always safest there in the event of an emergency. So mother had said. She ached desperately to find someone else; an enlisted, an officer, anyone. Her mother especially. She picked her dress up at the knees and started to run, bare feet encountering jagged metals and plastics like so many caltrops, but she kept her pace.

She ran through the long, wrecked corridor, towards the turn that would take her to the observation deck. She'd been there, not long ago, sipping wine, laughing, eating, and watching lecherous old men gaze too long at her exposed chest. They'd make small talk to try and distance themselves from the fact their minds had wandered long before. She hated them. All of them. But it was part of the dance you had to do.

She felt her claws bite into the decking as she rounded the corner, expecting to see the large double doors to the observation deck, expecting to see a raucous party still going on, what with maybe a few confused guests, and a gaggle of apologetic and overly helpful Navy men. What she saw made her scream hard enough to make her lungs burn once more, and in a bid to stop her momentum as quickly as possible, she fell, falling forwards and just barely catching herself with her one good arm.

The decking was gone. The walls- gone. The bulkhead...the whole observation deck. It was gone, as if it had been ripped from the heart of the ship. She could see past a faint purple glow of fielding in front of her, and stared into at least two hundred feet of hard vacuum. Towards the other side of the void, there was the orange glow of fire boiling against the fielding opposite her. It was three decks up, and she could see even further. She could see clear to the top of the ship, a chunk of thousands of tons of steel taken out like a dragon had bit it out. Like the ship were just an apple.

She paused, and then inched towards the fielding, getting a better vantage. Structural beams hung twisted from the crater that was carved in the ship, more cabling, and smoke theat billowed out from some of the wreckage, more ominous than any cloud she'd seen, an orange, flickering glow inside a black tendril that extended slowly into the void, reaching out like a maligned tentacle. The wreckage itself was bathed in an intense blue light, and Mia leaned against the field to see where it was coming from.

Above the ship was a bright-blue star, far away, but luminous enough to force her to squint against it. The light throbbed with a steady heartbeat, and she could make out faint axles of light that caught the dust suspended in giant clouds of gas, looking for all the world like the spotlights she'd see at the coliseum back home. It was entrancing, and even warming, what with a predictable, gentle pulse in the midst of madness.

Movement caught Mia's eye and she looked across the void of what used to be the observation deck. The shadow moved slowly among the wreckage on the other side, and she could see it pause in place. Near the shadow, a field turned off, and the decking belched fire and smoke before extinguishing itself in a puff of air, turned hazy by frozen water vapor. The field turned back on, and the shadow moved again, into the light.

Mia kept watching, the shadow moving from deck to deck, mangled corridor to mangled corridor, systematically ushering out a belch of fire, smoke, and then misty vapor. Only when it moved into one of the bright, blue shafts of light from the sun did she get a good look, and still she had issues believing what she was seeing.

The shadow turned to face her, and she could make it out clearly; a Lapin female, fur as blue as the star, casting a pale glow around her body. She was naked in both dress and how she was carelessly floating in space, exposed to vacuum, radiation, everything that would kill a mortal. Her long ears perked as if listening in the vast silence of space, and her body moving like she was dancing underwater. Mia shook her head, and thought it a hallucination.

The figure started at her for a few moments with shadowed eyes, and she could see an intelligence behind them. She looked like an apparition, her expression souless but for a moment; until the figure moved in closer, and then Mia could see a mix of pain and empathy on her face. She had cherubic cheeks, hair as long as she was tall, and her form would have made a seasoned sailor into an awkward boy. She pressed an indigo hand against the field, and Mia held hers up as well, staring well into deep eyes set in a caring, soft face, and lit by the star in a halo of light. Mia held her breath in.

Once Mia had passed out again, the Lapin lady smiled. then went back to her rounds, beckoning the wounded beast of a ship to breathe fire into the night.

I'm sorry, Mia. I don't know what I did. I know it's my fault. I'm so sorry. I hurt. I hurt you. I'm so sorry, can't we just please go home, Daddy?