Path of the Extra

When Celestina came to, the first thing to reach her was sound—distant, fear-filled screams tearing through the stillness like something fraying at the seams of the world.

”Uhm...”

Her eyelids were impossibly heavy, as though weighted with something more than sleep, and a terrible pain pulsed at her back—deep and rhythmic, like a second heartbeat she had never asked for. In truth, she felt utterly drained, hollowed to the marrow, and some dim, exhausted part of her only wished to remain there, suspended in that strange, cottony half-consciousness where her body seemed to float just above the ground.

Yet the moment she surrendered to that desire, the memories came—not gradually, but all at once, crashing through the fragile quiet like a wave breaking against stone.

Celestina’s eyes flew open.

The horror of what she had endured returned to her in vivid, merciless flashes, and she lay there a moment, chest heaving, before instinct moved her hand to her face. Almost without thinking, she dragged her fingers across her cheek, smearing away the grime and the dried drool that had crusted along her jaw and chin. With her other hand, she pressed her palm flat against the earth and tried to push herself upright—but her arms betrayed her utterly, trembling and collapsing beneath even the ghost of the effort. There was simply nothing left in them.

Her head swam the instant she moved. Each minuscule shift sent the world tilting on its axis, a nauseating dizziness coiling through her skull and behind her eyes, and she pressed her lips together against the rising sickness. Her gaze fell involuntarily to the ground beside her — and she saw it. Her own blood, dark and slow, still seeping from the wound at her back.

As though the sight of it gave the pain permission to wake alongside her, it surged—horrible and alive, crescendoing with every frightened beat of her heart.

”A-h... ahh...”

The sound that escaped her was barely a sound at all—a faint, fractured exhalation from a throat so parched and ravaged it could scarcely produce a whisper. And then, silently at first, the tears came. They spilled from the corners of her wide, terrified eyes and tracked down her filthy cheeks, because the pain was immense and relentless, and the memory of that creature—of how it had wrapped itself around her, of how it had held her as it tore into her—refused to leave her in peace.

Sniffling, Celestina forced her swimming gaze to search the surrounding air and undergrowth for the butterfly—the one that had tried to warn her, that had seemed to sense the creature’s malevolence long before she had. And yet, in that same breath, she could not help but recall that it had also been the butterfly that drew her here in the first place, that led her unwittingly toward the very thing that had nearly killed her. The contradiction sat uneasily in her chest even now, even amid all the anguish and bewilderment pressing down upon her. But it no longer mattered—for the ethereal, luminous butterfly was nowhere to be found. It had simply vanished, as though it had never been.

A pang moved through her, sharp and lonely, distinct from all the other suffering her small body carried.

Then the screams reached her again—louder now, or perhaps only more impossible to ignore—and Celestina turned her head, slowly and carefully, toward their source. They came from far away, beyond the treeline, from the direction of the estate.

”Gramps...” The word left her lips as little more than a rough, hoarse breath.

She did not know what had become of her grandmother. She did not know what had happened— to them, to any of it. She understood nothing.

”Mom... Dad...” Her voice broke between syllables, each word wrenched from her throat in a sob. ”...are not... home.”

She wept. For all the love she bore her grandparents—and she did love them, deeply and fiercely— the child whose body was cold and shattered and aching wanted nothing in this world so much as the warmth of something only her parents could give.

”Mom...”

*****

The thought of remaining in that forest terrified her. The creature, so unmistakably a void creature, could return at any moment, and that knowledge alone was enough to set her moving. Celestina had no choice. Despite the pain, despite the blood still seeping from her back, despite the utter absence of strength and the fear clamped around her throat, she forced herself to her feet, only to crumble back to the earth. She rose again. She fell again. And still she moved, dragging herself forward, out toward the estate, toward someone.

She lost count of how many times she fell.

There was no room for thought, only the cold and relentless terror that it was still watching from somewhere beyond the treeline, and the screams that grew louder and closer with every lurching step she took. Somewhere between one collapse and the next, without ever quite realizing it, Celestina found herself at the promised spot, the place she had told the maid she would wait.

She looked down.

The maid who was meant to bring her snacks lay in a pool of her own blood. Her eyeballs were gone, blood painted across every inch of her face, and her expression had been sealed there, locked forever into the final seconds of her life, revealing precisely how terrified she had been.

”Kristine...”

The name left her lips as a mournful plea, barely more than breath.

Celestina staggered backward, one faltering step at a time, until her legs surrendered entirely and she collapsed to the ground, her eyes hollow and stripped of all hope.

She could not hold it back any longer. The nausea, coiling and prickling within her all this while, finally crested, and everything remaining in her stomach rose in scorching acid as she vomited into the grass. She retched and wept, her tears running freely and mingling with the bitter fluid on her chin, while the maid who had stood beside her for as long as memory reached lay there, gone, and beyond all reaching.

The sound of her grief was swallowed whole as the estate erupted.

A white flash tore through the air, followed by a concussive crack that shook the very ground beneath her and sent the trees shuddering to their roots. Flowers trembled on their stems. Petals and leaves spiraled downward in the rolling vibration of the blast. Celestina’s face turned toward it without her willing it to, and her eyes carried a fear so visceral it seemed to reach into the marrow of her bones.

The blast had come from somewhere in the upper portion of the estate. A thick plume of smoke billowed from the gaping wound in the building while debris rained through it, both massive slabs and tiny shards alike crashing into the earth below with tremendous force, sending up fresh clouds of dust and rubble upon impact.

And yet, through all of that smoke and ruin, through the churning grey that should have obscured everything, a dark silhouette remained visible. It did not move. It simply stood there, its presence too dense, too absolute, to be concealed by something as incidental as smoke and falling stone.

Every hair on Celestina’s body rose. The goosebumps spread so fast and so forcefully they seemed to multiply by the dozens in a single instant.

Then the silhouette vanished. Not gradually. It simply ceased to be, between one heartbeat and the next, and though Celestina never once dared to blink, she had still somehow missed it.

The arms found her from behind.

They slithered around her the way they had before, unmistakable and inescapable, locking her into that blood-curdling embrace she had prayed with every remaining fragment of herself never to feel again.

”Hehehe... I killed all the bad people, Cele. Now no one will hurt you!”