RELEASE DATE: 01 July 2022
Imprisoned in a back bedroom with darkness deeper than any lack of light for company, Ava bides her time. Fury boils inside her, keeping her going, and giving her purpose.
Soon—very soon—she can let her rage spill over… And her captors won’t know what hit them.
For everyone who ever dreamed of stripping back the darkness to expose every rotten secret—and make the ones responsible pay.
Far More Satisfying Than Hell
It was dark, and there was darkness, and the two were not synonymous. Outside, Ava could hear the chirp of crickets, the slow bleep-blip of tiny frogs, and behind it all, the soprano piping of some other kind of insect, the whole orchestral riot punctuated every now and then by a splash from a fish or a duck in the pond, fulfilling the role of percussion.
Inside, in the sparse room of her prison, she could hear nothing.
Usually, if she listened very hard, Ava could find her own heartbeat in any stillness, a comforting metronome in the background of her days, marking out time until the end—the end of what she wasn’t certain, but the end of something, for sure.
But it was dark, and there was darkness, and the darkness wasn’t the dark that gleamed outside in the moonlight, nor the dim shadows in the corners of her room.
Instead, the darkness was a cloud, noxious and smothering and smelling vaguely of plastic, draping over her and weighing her down, dampening her otherworldly senses.
Her cheek twitched as her concentration slipped momentarily from frogs.
Fury boiled inside—but the darkness responded, contracting, clenching, tightening, and she forced her attention once more to the chorus of frogs and insects somewhere out there in the night, and the smell of pond water curling in through the barely-open window.
The pond was not that large, a hundred paces across perhaps on a good day, so ‘somewhere out there’ wasn’t really a large area to contend with—unless of course you were a frog, knee-high to a towering blade of grass, that hundred-pace pond the entire summation of your world.
No wonder mortals had such limited perspective on things, living in a world that was barely bigger than a pond.
But that made her cheek twitch again, which made the darkness respond in kind, and so with a heavily exhalation, she closed her eyes cast her thoughts adrift till morning, concentrating on the taste of pondy water at the back of her throat, the smell of algae, and the singing chirpings of the frogs.