Threads of the Soul

It had been just over five months since the world ended, five long months that Jane had spent locked away in her apartment, never leaving for even a single day. In all honesty, it had taken her a few days to even notice it was happening at first.

She was a bit of a shut in with an online shopping addiction, especially when it came to her love of a good coupon saving. When she had first heard the announcement, she had been asleep after a night long, rom-com movie marathon.

She had no mutation to wake her up, nor any one or anything that lived with her to mutate either. She did have a plant on her window ledge, but her green thumb was actually quite black, and that poor plant had withered and died months before the world did, she just kept it there in hopes it would spring back to life. Even though she still didn't remember to water it to make such a recovery happen.

Jane only really realised that the messages in her mind were real when the internet shut down. That was a dark day indeed. Literally, her lights shut off and she had to dig into her candle stash, it was an utter nightmare. So many conflicting scents and aromas. Her sense of smell had yet to fully recover from such a sensation, and many things still smelled of coconut.

Food was no problem either, her coupon shopping left her with an entire room filled to the brim with far too many tinned products for one single person. Although after so long, she was starting to run out of her supply and had already began to seriously ration herself.

The real issue was the monsters. While she had stayed locked inside her apartment, there were many monsters that had come sniffing at her door or that she had seen flying past her windows. Thankfully, it seemed her aromatic assault kept many of the monsters at bay, and possibly hid her presence from them.

But she had been watching the videos on her... oh what did they call it, Communication gift? Yes, that was it. She had been watching videos on that of all the monsters being fought around the world, and it made her even more adamant to stay inside until she was nearly starving.

It was the thoughts of those monsters that were running through her head as Jane stood silently at her door, a cricket bat firm in her hands and her breath held tight in her lungs, as she watched the door handle shudder and shake. Someone, or something, was trying to get in.

It wasn't the first time, but they usually weren't this persistent.

Muffled noises, ones that sounded vaguely like voices, came from the other side of the door for a few seconds before they grew silent. When she saw the shadows move away from the door, she was about to let out a silent sigh of relief, when she suddenly heard a peculiar sound, like sand trickling through an hour glass.

Her blood turned cold as ice as her eyes drifted down to the lock of her door, where tiny shards of what seemed like black sand was ever so slowly trickling through the gap where the key should go.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the sand wasn't dropping to the ground. Instead it was slowly forming into a hand on the other side of her door.

The newly formed black sand hand slowly reached up, grasping around and began to undo her door bolts, before grasping the door handle and opening it without a single issue. After all, how could a simple cylinder lock hope to withstand the assault of thousands of sand grains working as one.

They were like the ultimate lock pick, able to move all the pins into place and turn the lock in one go, no need for silly tools.

The hand retreated back through the keyhole before its owner, whatever it was, pushed the door open from the others side.

As the door swung open, easily pushing aside the objects Jane had haphazardly stacked against it, she quickly swung her cricket bat towards the would-be intruder, hoping to kill the monster before it could do anything more.

BAFF

It made the same sound as hitting a pillow case full of coins, as the same black sand hand caught the cricket bat mid-swing.

The black sand hand wrapped tight around the bat, yanking it from her grip, but doing so in a way that made sure not to hurt her despite the monsters overwhelming strength. A detail Jane was far too terrified to notice as she stumbled back in fear, before tripping and falling onto her butt.

Sitting on the ground, with a dull throbbing pain ebbing throughout her tail-bone, tears streamed down Jane's eyes as she watched the monster slowly enter the apartment and glared down at her with cold, emotionless eyes.

Its body was composed of an ever shifting mass of particles, mainly extremely fine grains of dirt and gravel, all moving together to maintain the semblance of a human form.

It's arms were the only things not composed of this dirt and gravel mix, and instead were entirely composed of that strange, black sand that seemed to have an almost metallic glisten to it. If Jane had paid more attention at school, she might have recognised this as being iron sand.

The monster's face was non-existent. The only features it had were eyes, but even those were missing the concept of pupils or iris'. They were simply solid masses of one colour, or as solid as a swirling storm of dirt could be. It was as if the monster was aware it should have eyes, but didn't know exactly why or what purpose they had beyond seeing and simply had them for convenience and duty rather than any form of actual expression.

Just as Jane was about to break down into hysterics and beg the uncaring monster to simply kill her quick if it was going to eat her, the being composed of dirt simply tilted its head at her like a curious puppy.

The motion caused a few chunks of dirt to shift from its head, falling through the air, bouncing off its shoulder before dropping to the ground where it quickly crawled across the floor to rejoin the rest of its being as it took a step back to let something else through the doorway.

This something else was not another monster, like she had expected, but a human person. Honestly, after being alone for so long, just the sight of another, truly real person right in front of her was enough to finally push Jane over the edge and begin her hysterical tears. Although this time they were out of a mix of joy and shock, rather than fear at an impending death.

This human was younger than herself, easily by a decade since he only looked in his early twenties, and wore spectacles on his face. Spectacles that seemed utterly at odds with the strange, medieval styled armour he was wearing, that seemed to be composed of... God knows what. Some kind of pink tentacles holding together a grey metal plate, looking like exposed muscle fibre. Gross.

As the young man crouched down in front of Jane, he placed a tender hand on her shoulder and gave her a warm, friendly smile. A few seconds later, the divine aroma of one of her lavender candles gently wafted into her lungs. She knew it couldn't be possible, since she had burned through those candles, quite literally, in the first week after her discovery of the state of the world.

Yet her she was, gently inhaling that scent and letting it relax her body entirely. It was only when the man finally spoke, did she stop her indulgence in the familiar and oh so relaxing scent.

"Good, now that you're relaxed, I hope you could answer a few questions for me. Do you have any powers of your own? Is there anyone else living with you here?"

Jane bit her lip softly, glancing at the floor before shaking her head gently.

"No powers, No company. It's just me, it has been for years now, even before all of... all of this."

"Is that so? Honestly, I'm surprised you survived for so long, it was probably scary. But, we can help you with that. We are from a little town nearby. A new town, that is, not an old one. Civilisation might have fallen, but we remain and so we are building it back up from the ashes.

At least that's what our leader always says."

The young man chuckled to himself softly, his warm smile widening ever so slightly as he glanced over his shoulder towards the swirling dirt monster.

"Y-you're making a town? But Who... Who are you? And what is that... thing?"

"Ah! How rude of me, we break into your home and we don't even introduce ourselves."

Standing up, the young man brushed himself off before clearing his throat. Placing his hand on the shoulder of his travelling companion, he gave Jane another friendly smile and even puffed out his chest slightly.

"My name is Alfie, and this? This is my friend Bob, We are here to bring people like you back with us to somewhere safe, on orders of our wonderful Lord Crow. It's a pleasure to meet you. Now, what do you say? Would you like to join us?"