Rise of Tempest Merlin

Chapter 9

Volga’s Mission

The door was the grey of unburnished silver, dull and spotted with years of water damage. Where there should have been some fancy matching handle was only a square shaft of dark cold metal. Volga closed her fingers around it to twist but they simply slipped over the coarse edges and came away blackened...

What kind of nonsense was this? Volga was one of the royal families of Russia who had the power of death dancing in her veins and she hoped that she had gotten the same thing in her game avatar as well. She liked this Avatar which she had been assigned. It looked beautiful in a haunting kind of way. Her hair was white, like an albino and it was long and wavy. Her skin was paler than normal hue and she knew that this Avatar was actually an Albino. She wished that she was wearing a tight leather pants and also beautiful boots to match along with them and a beautiful leather jacket and a tank top. She would be the most comfortable in that.

But instead she was stuck with a white dress which had frayed ends and it billowed in and out making her look like a ghost herself. Not that she cared. Human beings were far more dangerous creatures than ghosts, which was the reason she loved going on adventure mission games like this. But this one was surpassing everything that she had played till now.

 So the black goo that touched her hand kind of looked gross and she smelled it. It reeked with the stench of death.

How was she able to ascertain that she had no clue but Volga figured that once she was able to move forward in the game then she would definitely come to know what were the pros and the cons of this Avatar. Except the fact, the door in front of her was weak on its foundation so she did not wait and kicked the door in the middle and it broke into half right through the middle.

Well, she could not say that it was not a pleasure to kick doors. Who did not like to do that?

When she entered through that broken door way she was welcomed with an eerie sight. It seemed like she had suddenly been transported in a ghost town. And that too not in the metaphorical sense, in the literal way.

The ghost town was out of place in the rolling hills of yellowing grass. The old road was barely discernible through the flora that had colonized it and so the dilapidated buildings that once fashioned a high-street had the feel of a movie set. But this was no million dollar venture, these were tear-downs that no-one had any incentive to demolish. They were inhabited by the birds and sometimes sheltered wild dogs. The occasional window was still in possession of its glass but most had broken so long ago that there was no trace of the shards on the rotting plank floors. In most homes the roofs had partially caved in or at the very least they sagged like a disappointing soufflé. The only welcome was the howl of the wind and the only future of the town was to be slowly beaten by the weather and eventually succumb to gravity without even a witness or person to mourn its passing.

Why on earth would any one even create something like this in a game Volga was clueless about that but she guessed that may be it was the luck of the draw. And she had drawn the short straw. When her mother used to teach her about ghosts in her childhood in the form of stories she always told her that it was a wrong thing to think that the bigger the size of the monster the scarier it would be. That was not the case, it was the isolated feeling and the lack of any stimulus altogether which caused the greatest amount of fear in human mind and today as she was standing in this abandoned and dilapidated place, Volga felt that her mother had spoken rightly.

There was sign board of wood which had broken down in half from the rod where it had been fixed and Volga picked up the piece from the ground.

“Golden Hopes”

The sign board read. A town named like that it was supposed to have a history. So Volga decided that she would take a walk through the streets and she was certain that she would find a non-playing character somewhere out here. If not then at least a ghost would be there whom she could ask the questions about. She could not determine what was the mission that she was supposed to accomplish here!!

Between the decaying dwellings that have lost more paint than they have kept, the wind is channelled to a low howl. The style of the buildings suggests that the town dates back over a century and likely fallen out of living memory, relegated to a small black dot on an old archived map.

Volga started walking ahead and it spooked her like anything. She dropped the wooden plank on the street and the noise that it made caused a flutter of birds to fly out of the nearest chimney and she shrieked.

“This is a goddamned nightmare!” muttered Volga as she started walking as fast as she could. There was no one. No one absolutely. How was this even possible? How was she supposed to do anything if she could not even communicate when she suddenly came across a tall building. She could hear the waves crashing nearby, and a light was glowing on the top. That should be the lighthouse.

In the darkness the only sign of the lighthouse was the brilliant white light -and even that almost failed in the thick air. Between black cloud and black ocean it gave illumination to the waves, sculptured by the wind, dancing, powerful. The hour was growing wary and it was becoming darker. Nothing made any sense in this place and Volga was still unaware of how she was supposed to cross this mission since she had no idea of what that might be.

But the lighthouse was the only thing that made some sense or gave her some semblance of hope in this bleak and desolate place. She could hear the roaring of the ocean waves as she made her way in the direction of the lighthouse. What kind of place had a light house and was in a deserted town? Whoever had designed this place was crazy and about that Volga had no doubt at all.

She smelled the brine in the air as she went closer to the lighthouse. The lighthouse was bathed in rainwater and brine, the pure and the salty, season in and season out. Around it were the rocks both proud of the waves and submerged. It had been a long time since there were real steps to the door, ones that could be traversed with ease, but she could not wait for the tides to recede so that the waves would move away and allow the rocks to breathe freely.

Volga felt that she might slip down the rocks but she stepped gingerly on the rocks and clumped grass here and there and started wading and climbing on them. There were clumps of grass, and sea w**d growing on the rocks. A slimy layer covered the lower edge of the rocks….algae which caused her to slip more than once and Volga was extremely aware that she was slipping more than it was necessary and someone had made it a lot more difficult than this was supposed to be.

But after a lot of scrapes and cuts she could reach the door of the light house. It was an iron door which had been obviously reinforced so that it would not be damaged within a short time because of the continuous brine water.

And the door was open and Volga pushed it with all her might and the door swung inward with such a definite and violent creak that she jumped back in surprise. This was the creepiest scene or a place in a game that she had ever visited.

Inside the lighthouse the stairs twisted upward, damp from the moisture laden air that poured in through the n***d windows. Each footfall let out a metallic clang that echoed and all the while the wind whipped around in a howling scream. This was nothing less eerie than the entire town. She could see that the sky was now dark and the only light in the whole region was now the light which was getting reflected from the top of the light house.

The semidarkness was making things difficult for her to even see. But she knew that she had to reach the top of the lighthouse. And when she did, the broken wooden door was lashing loudly and banging on the wall while there was a bright lamp in the middle of the room which was within a glass encasing. Even though it was haunting, Volga decided that it was a terrifying kind of beautiful.

And that thought remained in her mind only for a short period of time.

Before a loud shriek and a slam made her fly in the direction of the wall which had surely broken her back and she groaned as a voice screamed in the air,” get out of my house!!!”