THE CITY OF BLACK ROCK

THE CITY OF BLACK ROCK

**Earlier That Morning**

***

** Camila is standing by her bedroom window, just a few minutes after waking up from a restless night. She was watching the first light of dawn as it stretched across the sky. **

Her mind was restless, haunted by the echoes of a nightmare that had jarred her from sleep. She cannot quite piece together the thoughts and visions that occurred within the dream.

The images were fractured, slipping through her consciousness like shadows—impossible to piece together, but heavy with meaning.

Her tired eyes roll around and flicker at the sight of the morning sunrise, as she’s in a slight daze, and feels the need for a glass of cold water to quench her thirst and shake off the dizzying sensation in her head.

Her mind is racing, and it’s been only a few days since her last night terror, which seem to frequently disturb her sleep, and keep her focus at bay. As she yawns, trying to shake off the remnants of sleep from her fuzzy brain, trying hard to stay awake, a thought settles, unbidden, at the forefront of her mind:

"Every sunrise brings the promise of a new day, but the darkness of the past lingers, it clings on like a shadow, a silent whisper reminding me of the roads I've taken, all the difficult choices I’ve made and the roads I’ve taken. Back then, I was just a child—innocent and unaware of the twisted path that lay ahead. But some memories refuse to fade."

She’s feeling a little worried, as her gaze fixates more deeper into the skyline that is spreading out before her. While looking out through the glass at the most precious view in her life, the only view that keeps her life balanced and focused on the important things, the little things, and all that keeps her mind properly aligned with her missions.

Her eyes drifted from the vibrant skyline, alive with the pulse of the city, to the quieter corners of her thoughts. She clung to this view—the busy streets, the hum of activity below—like an anchor, a reminder of the little things that kept her balanced.

This is the famous skyline that stretches out the eye’s view into the vibrant city below. From her apartment you could see into the street of Black Rock Avenue, with the alleyway noisy and alive as always, busy with buzzing sounds of electric cars and automatic vehicles powered by natural elememts, some powered by hybrid forms of biofuel while some remained connected to the generic world of synthetic technology and biodegradable automation. Black Rock Avenue, has always been a part of the city that seem to come to life each and every morning, like a demon that has been summoned from the deeper depths of Navazzimin to feast on the ecological boredom and bring some seasoning to the overall heritage of this city. With a diverse economy of beings coming from all corners of the eternal realm and with some just mostly streaming from smaller villages around the country, others are gorgons who come from far towns over Elaris, who just form part of the fast-paced life.

But something felt different this morning, a sense of unease lingering at the edges. She tried to refocus, her gaze trailing a school of birds that passed over the horizon, their movement fluid and unhurried. Her mind, however, was anything but calm. It was a tangle of thoughts, a labyrinth of memories she couldn’t quite escape.

Was the scene she had memorized over countless mornings changing right in front of her eyes. It was her way of staying connected, even when everything else felt out of reach, but something is off today, a piece of this puzzle just was’t fitting well to the board at hand. The air didn’t feel right even though she knew how pawns can never work well in a city of mares roaming around like kings of the city, keeping guard on the masses with their self imposed ‘Lord man ship’.

She just didn’t think anyone noticed her coming in on the previous night from the lower market, or was she not even thinking at all, after all, she had a night terror and at this point, it just seems like all her pawns are down and she’s standing naked infront of a maiden queen with nothing but her underwear on, naked to any attack.

Camilla needs to keeps this economy as safe as possible, and with what she just saw on the newspaper the other day isn’t just something that’s going to go down the throat well without proper refreshment.

Her mind blurs for a second, her gaze has now shifted from the city view into a less alarming point of the city, more focused on a local city park as she watches a few toddlers run across the grass playing tag in a green garden made exceptionally for public amusement.

As she tries hard to clear her mind from the vision she had the previous evening, that caused a nightmarish blur in her mind. She closes her eyes and now watches herself walk motionlessly into a dark alleyway, through several compartments and stands firm looking forward as she faces a plethora of doors shes’s expected to open in order to win her mind from herself.

**She switches on a light bulb to brighten up the darkness in her mind, as she shifts to a blank door. The click of a switch echoed softly as she turned on another light, as she walks into another room hoping to chase away the fragments of her mind’s shadows left in the previous room. She’s found herself in a mental labyrinth passing through several chapters trying to get away from her memories when suddenly a light glowed in the far corner of her mind….

A door seemed to appear—one she had never noticed before. She reached out, and with a twist of a key, it opened. A world into her distant past unfolds, and she realized that she was no longer in her room but staring at a different world— a small house, a modest home in the quiet suburbs of Elaris comes into view.

Faint and ghostly, the headline ‘2024’ floated across a tattered newspaper, catching the dim light. She looked to her left, and on a desk beside her was a pile of magazines with ’2024’ written in bold on each and every sleeve of the different kind she was able to catch with that single glimpse.

Before she could process the vision, the door SLAMMED SHUT! It closed right in front of her eyes, and as she hassles in a hurry, she turns the key to open another door, a door to her right creaked open, dragging her into a cubicle bathed in the harsh, cold glow of a fluorescent light. She’s now sitting on a desk, trapped in a little box, that slowly morphs into one of the cubicles she remembers from her workplace in the city.

She’s looking straight into the column piece she was busy with the day before, and something about the title is unsettling, as the light bulb she had switched on goess off, and comes back on, before it starts flickering, like there’s an electric surge of some sort.

She pressed DELETE! on her keyboard trying to erase the entire column title from her screen, as the bulb suddenly shattered, plunging her into a darkness that was sudden and absolute. Everything slows down for a moment, before coming to a haulting stop, before her mind goes blank like she was hit by a sudden oversurge of power to her central processing unit**