Breed and Burn: Faceless

chapter 26- hurricanes are free

Axel was losing his mind...again. He could feel his sanity unravelling and all the images of this perfect world he would return to was noting but a disarray of scattered thread on the floor. When he awoke, his eyes saw noting. His bones felt nothing. When Seven pulled him on his feet, Axel let himself fall so his knees slammed into the ground. As if an invisible drill was working its way to Axel's skull, his head shook and tremored forcefully. When figures with faces smeared like an old watercolour painting surrounded him, Axel tried to reply. But the static in his head kept getting louder. When he opened his mouth, the entire room held its breath. However, no words came. Just an eternal, silent scream.

His silence was his cry for help.

Just wait for death, Axel told himself. He would embrace it with welcoming arms when it arrived.

He let himself be dragged to a chair so the procedure could be performed. He didn't make a sound. Nor did he resist when the figures tied him down. All he did was shudder all over. There was no way he would be able to feel anything worse. This was a place beyond the pain. Like the white space only he didn't need to suspend himself in it. He was living in this clumsy numbness.

The insanity had come in waves but now it had consumed him entirely. This wasn't what Axel expected it to be. He thought he would be up the walls, clawing at the floors and hissing at anything that dare move. He thought he would turn into to this rabid killing machine that had no mercy. There was none of that. Just this emptiness were the pain should have been. It only needed to consume his mind and then he would truly be gone for the anger that was sourced from his mind allowed snatches of sanity. It made him human and a monster at the same time. Well that's what he thought.

There were no screams or shrieks when Seven forced its way into his head. Just soft trembles of realisation through the carriage. Pain. Axel finally knew what real pain was like. Pain was when you felt so much of it, you could no longer feel. Either your mind finds a place to retreat or you realise that there is literally nothing worse.

He was standing on an edge of a cliff and was looking over the verge. Waiting to take the final step. Waiting to feel that final lungful or air.

No light, no voice or word was able to penetrate the darkness that had taken over. He just saw death. The several types of dead: the children who had to kill to survive by order of the government, their parents who were finding it hard to find something to hold onto, humanity of those cheering Axel on in that stadium and Axel whose heart was just a cold pump that continued to beat despite the spark in his eye being distinguished. It wasn't just his world that way icy. Or Earth. Or the Underneath. It was everything about this wicked universe.

What finally snapped Axel from the nightmare he was living was a pair of bright blue eyes he had never seen before hovering in a fog. They were the only things his mind allowed his eyes to focus on. In them, there was a fire that had been dowsed in ice but somehow managed to add to its heat. Something about them was calling to him. They did not belong to a human; Axel knew that much.

When his vision finally cleared, Axel found himself in the corner furthest from the trapdoor in the carriage. He realised that the eyes belonged to Seven. Somehow. They were bright. Bright with the tears that were yet to fall.

For a moment, Axel stared at it unable to process anything else. Something drew close on every side. The air became hot and stuffy. His cry fell as if muffled by a heavy curtain.

Seven looked much older. In the last week, Seven's outward exterior changed for the better but now it was gone. It was filled with this terrible exhaustion that Axel guessed to have devoured his face too. "I Will not ask what you saw nor if you are okay for the answer is apparent. We are alone because I am about to help you find the memory that Will help your friends escape. By doing this, we Will die in twenty-three hours. I see you are in a lot of pain already so I Will grant you peace but you have no chance of saying your goodbyes or receiving the answers for the questions that haunt you. Do you give me permission for us continue forth?"