The little mouse can only watch as the sky tears itself apart. He and his co-workers are stranded in a distant hillside near that famous Cheyenne Bridgehead. The terrible emptiness of the space between safety and the impending storm fills the air, and since he doesn't know how to work on a truck's engine, he leaves the driver to sort it out. His boss makes smalltalk nervously as he sucks down another cigarette, his third since the skies turned blood red and black.
It's as-if the sky itself has been split along a fault-line, gouts of red-white lightning strike over and over again, forking into the same three spaces around home.
Around where he buried his Husband's memory.
There was no body to recover.
The worst part about dying is that you're helpless to stop it once it's clear you're going to die. Sure I'm Undead now, but the part where you reanimate / reconstitute / etc isn't all that pleasant either, and the day to day cold nothingness that comprises your entire being and vessel isn't any better. Un-dead, as in quite literally a take-backsies on mortality. But your type of Undeath might vary, and it's in this wrinkle we find the problem.
I am the Cold Empty, a golem animate by psychic pain and arcane energy forced into fusion by ancient ritual that binds me to the Great Knowthing, an empty void of black skies and red abyss, scattered islands of asphalt and concrete, steel, crumbling streets and abandoned burned out structures whose skeletal frames vainly dot what little terrain hangs above the swirling aether. My flesh is amalgamation of guesswork by entities who Know Nothing of themselves, and Everything of me. Of my psyche, so projects and reflects the Great Knowthing, a twisted wreck of fear, of regrets, of shame, of sadness, of mourning.
Considerable is what icons remain of my world, the high school, the capitol building, my mother and father's sizable manor in the woods, my husband's cramped little apartment. The winding halls of the rehab I once thrived within under employ, the twisted business offices I traversed past daily which drip with mutual disgust. The tattered, distant shreds of an ever disintegrating banner of rainbows, the battle flag of our miserable Confederacy triumphant and absolute, dominating the spires of every church, courthouse, and trailer window. The empty halls of a strip mall turned hospital, cracked pavement and bust pipes leaking black into the red swirling abyss below.
I am isolated, but not alone. The Egos occasionally grace me with their cruel parody of self, a conglomerate of countless Billions refined into a core aspect of a civilization long passed, made eternal and godly in exchange for their loss of self. I am recreated as golem within their image, bound to this form for their agenda, and empowered through my will at their peril. The Great Knowthing also is populated by Demons, little psychic miseries made animate. Black bodied vagaries parroting my many mortal torments, a hell of my own creation but not of my own infliction. Each lined with eyes that stare with cruel empty judgement regardless of where you are relative to the creature. The eyes lock with mine even if the creature is unaware of me, as-if the displeasure of eye contact with such beings is an extra and omnipresent punishment.
I am agonized by my twisted form, itself a parody of my fucked up genetics and a mockery of my once-living self. The Egos twisted me into their shape, and inversely, my shape twisted their handiwork towards a cruel compromise of Saurian and Mammalian features. I am neither one, nor the other, as is my sex neither one nor the other. A husk of clay and blood textured vainly to resemble plumage, and to my displeasure it is a grand trickery that works on me when I can find the shattered mirrors mixed into the skeletons. My own reflection is freakish, an ever disintegrating creature rotting not due to a natural process, but due to my own psychic wounds that persist despite death.
I am Cold. There is no heat in my breath, no warmth in my smile, and like a still-flowing river in winter, I suck the life from those around me, soaking them in misery and causing ice to form where it can vainly make purchase.
I am Empty. The space within me is a mockery of the cruel biology I once was accustomed to, now a tormented labyrinth of dead ends and uncanny, pulsating passways that ripple with black and tarry blood. I weep ichor, I spit blood. My body is pock-marked in open wounds which reveal fetid and rotting muscle from which the glowing hot black pain radiates, as if I am on fire all over, yet beneath is mere clay and blood.
"It is all in my head", I protested against this place at first.
Now, this void is what was in my head. There was only the Great Knowthing, and that having since escaped the prison of my skull now entraps me within its walls. I am in Hell, and I am its twisted interpretation of Queen, and emanating within my approximation of a womb lives a swirling hole of hatred and resentment. I am furious, but a frozen rage such as mine is one which takes the heat of action to break. I won't squander this chance.
Here comes the Queen, and Hell will follow after.