Felicity had never seen darkness before. She lived in Up, where the air was always perfumed with light, and every smile gleamed perpetually. Felicity lived among dancers who never stopped, among laughter that never cracked. Where no one ever spoke of sorrow. But curiosity is its own kind of sin, and one night, she wandered too far from the music. The ground split. She stumbled and fell.
Down smelled of ash. Felicity landed hard, her hands scraping stone slick with something wet. Around her, faces lifted. Not smiling. Not singing. Hollowed, weeping, gnashing with silent mouths that stretched far too wide. She froze as desperate hands bony, desperate reached for her dress, clutching at her light as if they could steal it away. She might have screamed, but the sound snagged in her throat, strangled by the weight of this place.
Then she saw her. A girl in black, younger but older all at once, standing amid the misery like a pillar of grief. Her cornrows swung like chains when she turned. Her eyes, sharp as broken glass, cut through the hollow faces and landed on the stranger in white. She did not smile. She did not weep. She only whispered, voice cracked but steady: “You don’t belong here.”
FELICITY staggered back, trembling. “Where am I?” she asked, her voice breaking as the miserable ones wailed louder, their bodies writhing like waves on stone. The girl in black stepped closer, sorrow folded around her like a cloak. “You fell,” she said. “I saw you. You came from Up.” And then, softer, as though choking on the truth: “It's real.”
Felicity stared at the miserable faces around them, shadows swirling as they moaned in desperation, "Who are you and what are they? What is this place?"
The girl in black held out her hand, "I'm Mallory. They can't hurt you. But you shouldn't be here. You're from Up. This place, this is Down."