MEGAVERSE

 

Someone is pursuing me.

I have no idea how I got here and why I am being followed. All I know is that my instinct is telling me that I’m running for my life and that my lungs are about to burst in this freezing cold. As I pant, small smoke clouds form and dissipate in the air. Beads of sweat trickle down my neck. The snowflakes raining down from the sky stick coldly to my skin and my face in particular isn’t spared.

While running, I dare to glance over my shoulder, only to see the familiar silhouette trailing after me. The person is cloaked from head to toe in a black robe, making it impossible for me to catch a glimpse at their identity.

“First, second, third, fourth wall … I’m breaking them all.”

Judging by the sound of the melodic voice alone, my pursuer must be a woman. Mumbling to herself, almost as if she is happily humming verses of a song only known to her, she’s eagerly scribbling down something in the black notebook she’s holding.

The worst thing is that she’s not even running like I am. She’s calmly waltzing. No matter how fast I run, she’s always behind me. Close by. Lurking. Sauntering towards me without a care. Catching up, even though that is sheerly impossible. It’s as if I can’t outrun her. Can’t hide. Can’t escape her grasp for whatever reason. It’s frightening in a way I haven’t experienced yet. And yet I can’t help but wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about a slow death.

“If I really were to do this … Dorn might pose to be a problem if I’d be up against him … Ah, maybe not, the way he was written, he wasn’t as clever as intended … Gessler might get on my nerves, personality alone, though.”

Despite the distance between us, I can hear her voice, especially her slight accent, ring in my ears as clear as the white snow surrounding us. She’s talking about people I don’t even recognize by name, let alone about something I would be able to understand in the slightest.

“Leave me alone!” I cry out in despair in hopes to invoke her mercy. “Whoever you’re after, you’ve got the wrong guy!”

But the cloaked woman just keeps muttering endlessly, completely ignoring my plea. Pen in hand, she’s too self-absorbed in what I assume to be her work. The fact that she’s following me while at it is giving me the creeps. As haunting as this whole experience is, I’m not going to give up and confront her head-on more than I need to. Something tells me that if I close the distance between us, I’m going to meet my demise.

“What about Xenon? Ah, his story isn’t written down yet. Just like Cole’s from Wicked World. I suppose they wouldn’t know both of them yet… I need to pick up the pace and tackle procrastination. However, Pandora’s Heart is top priority for now.”

All of a sudden, her rumbling stops for a moment and she comes to a halt. She looks around her surroundings, eyeing the snow. A black gloved hand reaches out and she snaps her fingers. A breeze of wind rushes by and carries with it more snow than I had thought possible. Hills and the few pine trees surrounding us fade from my vision into the vastness of a rising snowstorm, leaving me cornered in a white tempest.

My eyes widen in fear and unwillingly, I stop running.

Who on Earth is she?

“I like this environment. I might call this one Frostbite … Still not sure about the name, though,” she mumbles. Again, she’s writing down something with her pen.

Her head whips up, she stares into my direction and I feel my heart drop in an instant. My fight or flight response kicks in, emphasis on the latter.

“You.”

Hell no.

When I immediately turn around again to pick up the pace again, I hear her snap her finger again and before I know what is happening, I fall to my knees, plunging head first into the masses of snow below me to taste its coldness first-hand. Immediately, I spit it out before said cold can seep into my bones. I try to stand up, but my hands only grip at the pulverized white substance below me in vain.

How the hell did she do that?

My legs are trembling, but I can’t move. I can hear her black overknee leather boots crunch in the snow. She’s drawing slowly closer and the panic within me only surges with each of her steps. So far, she hasn’t really done anything to me yet except pursuing me, but the thought alone of what she might do is enough to cause me the worst of nightmares.

I feel one of her hands nudge my shoulder and I’m suddenly free to move again.

“Turn around and lie on your back,” she commands, voice indifferent.

It’s like my body is moving on its own, without my volition. When I arduously turn around as do as I am told, I see my pursuer for the first time up close.

As I already had expected, it’s a woman, I can see that much more clearly now. She’s kneeling next to me, curiously observing my reactions like a cat playing with a mouse would. When I look at her face, it’s hard to interpret what else she’s feeling, but I get the feeling she’s searching for something specific. The dark circles, shaped like upside down crescent moons, under her eyes take away the attention from their brown, muddy color. Her skin is as pale as the snow, as if she has been drained of all the blood in her body. Long, wavy hair, a tinge darker than the color of her eyes, make their way past her shoulders down to her waist. Two silver earrings dangle down her ears.

She looks like an average human, but at the same time it feels like she isn’t. A possibility dawns on me.

“Are you a God?” I ask, frightened. I’ve never been a huge believer, but her abilities speak for themselves.

“A God? Hmm. I guess for you I am,” she says, somewhat pondering as if the expression is not to her liking. “Creator might fit better, I think.”

I don’t like the way she puts emphasis on that particular word. Mindlessly, she pulls one glove off, only to toy with it.

“Creator, but no God? Isn’t that basically the same?” I question.

She scratches the hood on her head with her now bare nails. I notice the edges of them are white like limestone, in stark contrast to the slightly bitten skin, small red wounds dotted everywhere.

“Under normal circumstances, I’d say so. In my native language there is a term I like to describe what I am … I’m….” She pauses and for a moment, it looks like she’s leveling her eyes on me as if I could provide her the answer. “Your Schöpfer.”

“Native language?”

A foreign God?

Her accent comes to mind and I can confirm that her pronunciation is a bit too harsh. The words don’t roll off her tongue as fluently as they would if it was a native speaker.

“Tell me the truth. Who are you?” I ask. I don’t like how my voice is quivering and basically showing how frightened I am.

She raises an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you if you tell me your name.”

My name?

The realization hits me like a brick. No matter how hard I ponder, I can’t seem to remember my name, let alone if I had one in the first place. Instead of asking who she is, I should be asking who I am.

“I don’t remember.” I gulp, nervous.

She grins. “Exactly. It’s because you haven’t been given one yet.” All of a sudden, her expression turns sad. “There might be no point in granting you a name for now, actually. “

With the pen of her notebook, she writes down something I’m unable to see in my position. Her eyes level on me for a second. Immediately, I panic. My thoughts are somersaulting with all the possibilities on what she has planned. I’m completely at her mercy in my position.

The pen. Her power is the pen.

With as much strength I can muster up, I quickly reach for the pen with my hand, but it’s futile. She’s faster. It’s as if she has already seen this scenario of me trying to snatch it from her. Like some kind of future vision. The woman isn’t even mad at my attempt. It’s rather the opposite.

“Sorry,” she mutters and raises her hand.

Snap.

I cry out in pain and am forced on my back again. Out of reflex, I quickly reach for my abdominal area. A slit in my fur coat. The fabric has been slashed. When I take a look at my trembling hand, it’s covered in red liquid. My red liquid. My blood leaks out of the wound and trickles into the snow in the shape of droplets, tainting the ground deep red.

This woman. She’s trying to kill me.

While I’m getting colder and dizzier by the minute, she’s silently watching me writhe in pain. A bit of pity flashes in her eyes, but mostly, she scrutinizes me with curiosity, as if she’s still figuring out how to kill myself the best - or perhaps the most entertaining - way.

“Why are you doing this? I don’t even know you!” I manage to squeeze the words out between my muffled groans of pain.

Slowly, she shakes her head, clearly dissatisfied. My words have no effect. They ricochet off of her.

“We need more drama,” she assesses.

“Drama?” I ask, panting. She’s solely speaking in riddles.

Another snap. A third person enters my peripheral vision out of the blue.

“Brother?”

The voice sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. I turn my head slightly. A little girl, clad in a thick brown pelt similar to my own from head to toe, is standing in the snow. Her round eyes are glistening with teardrops and her mouth is distorted in a way only fitting for watching the sight of a family member dying and lying in a pool of blood. My heart is aching, but my mind is beyond confused.

Brother? Did I ever have a sibling?

How could I not remember something so important?

I glance at the woman and see her smirk in omnipotence, spinning the pen between her fingers with ease. It’s like my pursuer has rewired my brain at her whim, rewriting the spare memories I knew to shape it to her liking.

Now she’s nodding in satisfaction. “This will do for a tragic background story.”

I turn my head slightly. My little sister is kneeling beside me, frantically shaking me by my shoulders, begging me not to die.

“Listen, whatever happens now, don’t trust this woman.” I warn her. At least she should be spared. It’s the least I can do, even though the words coming out of my mouth sound like a piece of oddly scripted dialogue. “You have to run.”

“What are you talking about, brother?” The little girl wipes away her tears, but no matter how much she does, new ones start to roll down her cheeks right away, replacing the old ones. “It’s only the two of us! Was it a woman that did this to you? Hey, tell me!”

In between sobs, she’s inching closer, trying to keep me awake and alive. It dawns on me that I’m the only one aware of the woman’s presence. I curse silently.

She can’t see her. She can’t see her!

“It’s not the first time I’m killing someone off, you know.” The brunette woman blinks at me and rises to her feet. I can see a bit of guilt flash across her features. “Tragedy is as necessary here as it was with Liv in Replica.”

Again, she’s speaking about things I have no knowledge of. But considering this is for certain my timely death, it’s not something I want to get to the bottom of in the last moments of my own life. At this point, my sister’s weeping has become simple background noise. The more blood seeps out of my body, the more my mind is already starting to fade away as well.

“Who … Just who are you?” I croak.

The woman in front of me shoots me an empathetic look. Brows furrowed, she briefly touches her lower lip with her index finger as she looks down at me.

“You won’t understand if I tell you. But they will.”

She looks up at the sky with a sly grin. Her gaze transcends the heavens. It’s as if she’s … talking to someone else, even though no one else besides us two siblings is present. This whole thing feels like it’s meant for someone else. We’re just puppets in her grand scheme.

She turns back to me and her brown eyes pierce through me like a dagger, when she proudly makes her announcement.

“For you, I am called Krisha. You will make a fine addition to my Megaverse.”

Then, I see her snap with her finger and within a mere second, my mind fades to black. Forever.

≽ܫ≼

Krisha looks at the scene in front of her. The brother has died, his weeping little sister curled into a ball at his side. She’s screaming and suffering. Pain would be her teacher in the future. To her, he has been stabbed by an unknown person, causing him to succumb to frostbite afterwards, even though the actual truth couldn’t be further from that. Truly, that would certainly prove to be a good background for a revenge story titled “Frostbite”.

She closes her notebook, somewhat satisfied. Another idea to turn into reality down the road. Unbeknownst to the little sister, the true culprit departs, her overknee boots happily crunching the snow below her. Her black cloak leaves no traces of her presence behind. Like a ghost, she moves on and the snowstorm subsides slowly, dissolving into an environment of peaceful spring. She’s left that place behind for now.

In the palm of her gloved hand, she summons a small round sphere. As blue as sapphire it shimmers, scattered green patches of several shapes and sizes glow like an emerald. It’s a planet. Or, well, a replica of one. She likes the colors, but she figures it’s not exactly her style, so with a snap of her finger, blue transforms to red and green metamorphoses to purple.

Krisha can’t help but smile at the world in her palm. Perhaps this is the most sincere she’s been once in a while.

“I look forward to create it. This Megaverse.” She heaves a light sigh. “My Megaverse to fight my own characters, my very own creations.”

Chuckling a little, with a bit of irony, she adds in German,

“Meine Schöpfungen.”

≽ܫ≼

Somewhere in Germany.

A woman sits in front of a white screen, tiredly rubbing her eyes and the dark circles beneath them. It is a weird idea. Possibly too confusing to truly grasp the essence of what she is trying to convey and hint at. Truly, a writer’s worst worry besides writer’s block.

“I do wonder if they will understand…” she whispers, squinting her eyes at the wall of text, almost 2800 words long.

Like a cat, she stretches her sore limbs and yawns. A bit unsure, she skims over the written story for the last time. In the past hour she has been staring at it for longer than needed, brooding, meticulously searching for passages to elaborate and improve on or to simply eradicate them from existence entirely.

She shrugs her doubts off and takes a sip of her coffee.

“Ah, well, they surely will. A few people come to mind, who will understand this line in particular. Maybe they’ll even comment on it.”

She giggles at the thought of mouth agape readers staring at the screen in disbelief.

With her fingers gliding across the keyboard, the mouse hovers over a button on the all too familiar orange website. She clicks it. Within the blink of an eye, a notification is sent to 113 followers.

Krisha_Grim has uploaded “MEGAVERSE”.

With a satisfied grin, Krisha looks up at the ceiling, looking past it all.

“I told you I’d break every wall, didn’t I?”