Descriptive Snippet

[icarus_chained]

From a writing exercise entitled 'Set the Scene'. Nothing else, no further hints. Between 100 and 500 words, you had to write an opening description to tempt someone into a story.

I tend to hate that part. Anyway.

Title:  Night Rave
Wordcount:  319
Fandom:  Whatever you think it fits, if anything.

Night Rave

 

The Streets were alive with a strange, electric wailing, an ululating cry accented by the staggered ecstatic roar of intersecting crowds, driven by the subliminal pounding of a drumbeat so deep it set manhole covers vibrating in their settings. Rhythm of the night, pulsing and singing, the inescapable heartbeat of the Streets. Sharp moments of clarity flared up here and there, screams clearly delineated from the musical roaring, bright arcs of blood against the neon. Slivers of violence in the darkness, fountaining and subsiding, highlights of death in the maddened whirl of life, greeted with delighted screams. Cars flew through the night, announced by the flare of the headlamps and the green werelight of the undertubes, detectable streets away as the purr of their engines built into the surrounding rhythm, flared into angry, powerful crescendo as they passed, and faded, swallowed by the roar of the Streets.

If you stood perfectly still, absolutely calm, and made yourself a center for its madness, you could feel the movement of the Streets around you. You could feel the ebbs and flows of the people, the crowds that whirled in dizzy interlocking spirals around each other, blinded and enslaved to the echoing music. You could touch the ribbons of light and rage that ran through them, feel the shallow vibration of the tarmac beneath the wheels, feel it sink into the deeper beat of the Streets themselves. If you stood still, you could feel it all, the great whirl of life and noise and brief, flaring lights in the darkness.

It was the Night Rave. The bloodmusic of the Streets. It was the ecstatic arc of life into death, a Festival of Violence, and utterly entrancing in its hard and brutal power. Beneath the neon glare of its lights, humanity had never looked so alien, so beautiful, so utterly, utterly mad. It was the heartbeat of life on the Streets.

It was home.