-O-

The residue of disgust of the Abyss had been smeared away, though the emptiness that replaced it inside her soul and memories did not settle her. In the very moment Madoka touched the door's handle, she envisioned a translucent cylinder of metal. Then, an intense and lurching pull on her stomach followed. She felt herself yanked upward.

Madoka was sent through the cylinder's opening, and her vision became full of star light. Various giant bodies surrounded her as she spiraled through the tunnel, and more of those runes seared themselves in her mind.

A verse?

That is what the red letters appearing to her as she hurled through this Celestial void insisted they were. She recognized the writing. Her jumbled mind still managed to conjure meaning out of all of it. It was Pnaumic Scripture. Her body and soul felt like two intersecting lines that have crossed paths, never to return to each other again in this lifetime.

HORROR STAR, Verse 1

Something crawls across the Heavenly railways. A disturbance in the sterile safety. The universe was on track, traveling the back of a primordial system. It was not on a circuit— there was no way back to a previous station. No carriage, no passenger, no service will ever rejoin or be able to look back.

The picture cannot be taken again. There was an empty romance to this journey— A swelling of the heart.

Now, the longing has ceased.

The growth has reached the vertex, and is now accelerating back to the bottom, never to return again.

The Celestial monotrain speeds along regardless. These small tremors cause rust on the skin. At first, whimsical. Now, too far gone. The tentacles that reached out are too stiff and are no longer sticky.

The bump on the rail disturbs it all. The leg will outlast all of them, but the boundaries have been crossed. Loneliness does not have to be miserable— it can be comfortable in the solitude. Pylons both far flung like here, and the planets back then should not be fluctuating like this.

The realization for some individuals paying attention to this windowless details comes too late. There's still life here! Someone might exclaim. But by the time they try to commit the view to posterity, to take a snapshot or record the fleeting view or the peak they crossed— it was a moment. And always has been. The train carried onward into the river of time.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Something has awakened outside of this train, but no one knows yet.

But I have.

Horror Star? Just what exactly was that supposed to mean to Madoka? The shadowy clouds and obfuscated stellar bodies beyond the tubes became more distant, and a new vision appeared. That train track she saw in her dreams. A burning line, like a crushed centipede, extending forever into the horizon. The dividing line separated a world of grey ruins and a desert. Then, she was inside the train, hearing heavy rain pound the windows on the opposite side of the cabin, and moons, stars and all manners of other ascended stellar objects blurring into neon streams of light next to her.

When you love someone so much, you can wait for them no matter the distance, ergo, no amount of enumeration of excuses or encumbering encounters can stop this train.

Why did she see these dreams? She defeated the Witch, her mother, and she did not hear any voices in her head. No, not for a long while, she realized. So, now, who was daring to send her these fragments of thoughts and runes to her? A single name etched itself into her mind once she posed the question in her heart.

Pnaumen.

Pnaumen? The world? Or, the same being who Audrey had claimed to see? What could it want with a servant like her?

The meaning was probably not supposed to be questioned. Somehow Madoka was able to interpret the vision as such even in this twisting launch. Ascertaining the prophetic imagery here was meaningless, she was at least glad the rushing feeling was only that— a wild sense of being out of control and not a direct symptom of being sick.

She suddenly felt a bit more control over her body. The paralysis of being hurled in the sky was slowly lifting, and she could wiggle a phantom limb. Was it because she was becoming more at ease during this predicament? Madoka forced her hand out against her judgment, trying to breach the surface of the cylinder she was shooting through.

She felt nothing but air.

It was too far beyond her reach. Was she the passenger in a train? Was this the so-called railway? She found that she could move her head. Above her was an endless void. Below her was the same story. Audrey was nowhere to be found. Maybe she was flying freely in another tube just like this safely, she hoped. A profound sense of longing gathered inside her.

She had questioned Her Highness, cried, begged and embraced her. All the way, she never truly understood the princess's motive. Nor did Madoka even have time to acknowledge her own misunderstandings with her.

Audrey was fundamentally impossible to understand, yet an inescapable vortex that she was forced into. Did she care for the humans of her old world? From their time in the Uracksheegal's Shadow Forest, she did not have any reaction. Did she care for anyone besides… her?

The answer was horrifyingly— yet thrilling— clear. It was a resounding no.

The world— and everything around her was twisting beyond her imagination. And what made things worse was that she was getting used to it. This ride, a stomach-churning ejection into the heavens, was probably the only break she would get to herself. Madoka had to close her eyes, but the sensation of falling and getting launched at the same time had subsided to just background noise.

She needed time to think, and in this strange place between gentleness and life, Abyss and Pnaumen, she had more than enough to wrestle her tangled thoughts. There was not much she could do here anyways. A small smile tugged at her lips as she sank into a long sleep, and a calm confidence she could not recognize sprouted inside of her.

See you on the other side, Audrey.

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