All Hallows Legacy (Sick and Twisted #5)

Prologue The Glimmer in the Gloom

Icouldn’t tell if the image was a dream or a hazy memory.

Slow moving fog stalked us across the grounds of Ford School of Medicine, the brume stained the vibrant red of fresh bloodshed by the sunset.

It crept over the grass like a serpent, clinging to the trunks of trees, tracing the towering might of an impenetrable hedge, and veiling the edges of the giant board laid out before us.

Now there was only darkness. Eternal, onyx darkness. I could barely remember the words I’d just thought, couldn’t stitch together their meaning from the sluggish, faltering mass of my brain. What was Ford? Who was us?

There were no shapes around me, nothing in the dark to tell me where I was, or what had happened to me. I floated as if in water, my hair splayed around me. I couldn’t see it, could only feel it. And I floated there for hours. For decades. Lifetimes.

I blinked, but there was no tickling sweep of lashes over my cheeks. I opened my mouth but forgot how to shape words. There was only the darkness I floated through, and nothing more.

Until a pinprick. A break in the shadow.

White light cut like a laser and snared me in its spotlight.

The second the glow touched me, the darkness splintered and gave way to a world of emptiness.

A realm shaped at the dawn of time, as empty as the darkest pocket of space, but white, not void-dark.

Pure, ruthless white. Emptiness surrounded me on all sides.

A lonely, blank vacancy where the world ought to be.

Where voices and laughter and bright, colourful life ought to be.

I strained my ears but heard nothing. Blinked and saw nothing. Spoke and heard no reply. Where was I?

Who was I?