Rare Dawn

A dark tale on liminality

I’ve always wanted to create a companion story score, and this was the perfect opportunity. It’s a relatively ambient track but hopefully adds some haunting dissonance. For maximum dread play this audio while you read. I’d suggest speakers over headphones. Go ahead, hit play.

Narration and Underscore

Ambience Only

2 AM 

Learn to keep one eye open Ida. Keep watch as the long night presses down on you like the weight of water. Scan the murk, twitch and jerk. Ready your pole and reflector in vigilant poses and pre-imagined countermeasures. This, while you curl into the underlid, your sleeping eye wrapt with dream fuzz and the syrup of sweet abandon. 

A rare dawn approaches. An inevitable transition ticking closer at the thousand-year turn. You anchor your stance as the slow dark roll of the Umbraworld crawls beneath you. This realm, a crypt of shadow, a dim dimension in terminal repose. 

The morning will burn cold and pale, they say. The turn has come, all devils die, and the seraphic host will reign with wretched radiation for the next millennium. This is the cycle. You'll do battle if you can. And you'll lead the charge because there is virtue in the violence.

You imagine a slash of inquisitors ripping through the gloom, invoking grotesque transformations shrieking on heaps of rubble and despair. You squint at the dead horizon, waiting with your nails in your skin.

Your companion, June, is counting arrowheads in the bottom of a concrete basin they once used to wash the blood rust from ancient animals. You can hear her energy flitting and scratching in nervous skirmishes as she tries to round the corners off the bone-white dread she knows is coming.

Eugene has cocooned himself inside the carcass of a derelict sofa. Ria and Bloom left months ago. You can still hear their mournful whistle as they wandered into the western sky. 

You envy the thralls that bore this dismal place. Their apathy, a salve. The daybreak, a mere glitch in their revenant consciousness. Their lives barely beating, they will shuffle around like moaning lost children. This will change nothing for them.

You feel the vibrations around the block in your molars and ribcage. The denoised murmurs and mumblings of an existence on the precipice of disaster drown out your own heartbeat, jumping irregularly in your throat.

3 AM

Sweep the ashes. Beat the rug. Wipe the hard drive. Rub the thug. Pour the jelly. Lick the spit. Shuck the fibre. Mix the grit. Trick the lightning. Roll the ball. Loose the tightening. Burn the doll. 

Haunted affirmations—you find some peace in the meditation—a drum beat of uncanny incantations. An anxious crowd has gathered, also finding some comfort in your mantra. They clog your threshold with damp and dreary bodies. You continue at a measured pace. Don't stir the pot too hard. Bubble gently like a simmering stew. They'll join you on the eminent front if you keep their focus. Skin the dragon. Pack the grease. Pull the wagon. Stain the sheets. Rake the pages. Suck the smoke. Tap the gauges. Drain the yolk—you trail off, momentarily slumping out of your rhythm by the sheer gravity of the trance.

"It's too little too late! This isn't helping," blurts Lolly, stabbing into the lull, "we might as well jump in the shredder right now. I don't wanna see the dawn!"

You're not surprised by the interruption. Lolly has always been melodramatic. A trait you find performative and obnoxious, especially for night creatures. You are a daemon with higher expectations and considered action. A bright shade in the purple void, June once said. But what did it matter now? You try and reassemble and quiet your mind, but thanks to Lolly, all you hear is the stochastic echos in the cloister repeating the refrain, "don't wanna see the dawn, don't wanna see the dawn," as the group peels away in reckless spasms. Presumably to pre-empt the impending cataclysm. By shredder, shiv or shotgun.

4 AM 

You're alone again. Or at least it feels that way. Like a thin transparent veil, floating down helplessly into a well of ambivalence. The anxiety cramps through your muscles, squeezing out sweat like you're ringing a towel. It smells like camphor and chlorine. Don't gag. Don't choke, there will be plenty of opportunity to do that in due time. Due time. It's hurtling toward you. Some heraldic menace in white aprons and faerie boots pulled by crazed silver oxen, paranoid and pustulent, oozing with the slime of kindness, trampling your village with the wrath of heavenly service. You mash your internal reset button—hold the night, fight the light, but more terrifying premonitions cut into your periphery. Headless winged astronauts descend on crystal wires. A vast curdled crust of milk and sour cellulose envelops the landscape. You're forgetting to breathe. Your panic is stacking. The madness is starting.

5 AM 

"Here comes the sun doo do doo do," sings June, now joining you on the parapet. It feels creepier than it should. Her voice cracking, strained and crispy, she sounds like a seizing diesel. And you want to sing back, It's alright, but it's clearly not. The deep purple is fading. The nocturne blur is degaussing. You've heard that disintegration is really the best way to go. Fast and fleeting. But you're not sure you should give up so easily. You hold June's hand and realize it might be for the last time. Then you reel through all the other last times that have already happened and sink into your feet. Your last feed, last bleed, last dastardly deed. The penumbric crescent taunts you. The squeal and grind of death machines drone low under rifle fire and the self-inflicted last-minute throws of surrender. But still, some horrors hang, pace and fidget in tentative troops on rooftops and towers. Prepared to claw, bite, and swing till the very end. You feel bolstered yet somehow, in this moment, benign. What's left in you? Is this all there is? Then—

What will become of us? you wonder aloud. 

June thinks about it, blinking slowly, she notches a bolt and doesn't answer right away. A sickening glow reflects in the white of her eye. A seam of ivory fire cracks in the distance. The sound rips into your ears, and tears through the sky. A saccharine symphony of horns burst through the ozone, evaporating the fog of anguish that obscures the land. You ready your mirror and tilt your spear, lower your battle helm and raise your voice— last hell cry, last stand. Then in some awful gesture of consent, June drops her bow, and so you turn to look at her. The blistered edges of her face pointilize, dissolve and disperse into the twilight forever, but not before she tells you, "Nothing Ida. Nothing is what becomes of us."

---

Very honoured to win the first ever Wicked Writing Contest. Massive thanks to

Jeff Kinnard

for hosting and

The Chronicler

for judging

And many congratulations to the other winners

John Coon

,

Jessica Maison

,

Jennifer Morrow

and

Christopher Freeland