All that is not silent

The vivid dim light gleamed throughout the chasm. Deathly stalactites hung looming above the abyss, threatening to fall on the heads of dying and impoverished people. Silence crept throughout the empty space. It was occasionally broken by distant echoes and the dripping of cold water. Some people fall asleep here, never to wake up again. Some get taken away by those people in masks. There's no escape here. There's no space in the endless void.

They sometimes stand at the precipice of the chasm, welcoming the end of their lives. It wasn't common here. We all worship death more than we lived.

But some of us still strived to survive. If it was in vain, I could not tell you.

We all stayed silent, waiting for something to happen - for an opening in the darkness.

My damp, ruffled clothes weighed me down. It was cold, but I knew I'd need it to survive longer. I grabbed onto my bag and huddled against it for warmth. This bag contained my life. Life from the surface, a relic of the past.

Many people huddled together in groups. Under steep rocks, and rugged tents made of sticks and fabric. They would all sleep and stay together, like statues.

And then the silence was broken. Among the crowds of people huddled together to arouse the gleam of the purple whisper of death. They wandered across the separations within the crowd, their armour clanking, echoing across the abyss. They covered their faces with the harsh metal plates, and although you could not see their eyes, they still stared at and pierced the soul.

They appeared every so often, wandered around, and left.

and every time, a soul is lost. They took it.

We were all waiting for our end here. The darkness is all that remains.

Emptiness shrouded the cold stony walls. The shadows had started to creep. Ruffling inside my bag, I pulled out a damaged and old radio receiver. The speakers were wrapped in damp and miscoloured bandages, covered all again in a thick blanket. Even when the volume was turned down and muffled, a great amount of luck was required for it just to work at just the right sound.

Holding the receiver in my bag, I turned the volume knob ever so slightly. Static filled the air for a split second, before settling down to a low ringing. Rising to my knees, a peered around in the dark. Nobody had noticed yet.

"Chronos-B"

A voice could barely be made out of the muffled sounds. With the new coordinates, I muted the receiver and prepared to leave. Taking one more glance around at the people, all scattered around the ground, lifeless. Maybe they had all died already. You couldn't really tell.

<[]>

At the precipice of the chasm lay dormant a fallen tower. Half the body hung across the edge of the abyss, the other held on the surface by boulders and strings. The head of the tower pointed into the abyss, all its faces showing the face of a giant clock. The pointed roof cracked open, a giant golden bell isolated near the face of oblivion.

Gravel cracked in the tunnel where I emerged. Several strings attached themselves to the walls of a plateau close to the edge of the abyss. The rope held up the tilted clocktower, holding it in place so it doesn't tip into the void.

The top of my hands ran down the string as I approached the clock tower. Each string was knotted haphazardly to a metal rod embedded into the stone. Several of them had snapped, broken, or slacked to the point where they were useless already. The rope I touched gave out a low groaning, before detaching itself from the stone wall with a deafening sound of snapping metal.

The leather gloves I wore grazed the metal end of the string as it was launched down the plateau.

Down below, through the head of the glass-plated clocktower shone a dim light. It flashed once... twice...

Reaching for my flashlight, I flashed back the same sequence.

The quiet was broken once again as the rope finally hit the bottom of the plateau.

<[]>

A group of people in shaggy cloaks stood by a gaping hole by the entrance of the clock tower. A woman, Alice, approached me.

"Report?"

"They took another child. the forty-second support also snapped not too long ago."

"I can see that. It almost smashed into our weapon storage."

We were the last humans that could think for ourselves. They don't know that we're here, yet all we can do is hide and wait for an opportunity.

It won't be soon. Either we come up with a way to escape this hell, or we tumble into the abyss along with this clock tower.