Eliana - Winner of Ark Writing Competition
A huge congratulations to Eliana in Year 9. Her short story has been selected as the overall winner of the Prose category in this year’s Ark Writing Competition.
The standard of entries this year was exceptionally high, but Eliana’s story left judges wanting to read more.
Guest judge, Dr Sharon Maxwell Magnus, shared the following comments: “This story was such an achievement: An exciting Sci-Fi plot, contemporary concerns and challenges (the pandemic, the deadening of critical thinking through social media), great writing, and a beginning middle and end.”
Eliana has also won Bolingbroke the opportunity to receive a student and/or teacher workshop led by the Creative Writing Department at the University of Hertfordshire. All shortlisted entries will be published in a student anthology, which is coming soon!
This is a fantastic achievement and a real testament to Eliana’s talent as a young writer.
Eliana's winning story:
The first symptom was silence. Not the absence of sound but the absence of an echo.
Dr. Marily Ilyen noticed it on a Tuesday morning when she dropped the metal tray in Ward D. The clang struck the walls of St. Adriel’s Lab and then simply died. Swallowed whole. No lingering. Just a flat, suffocated end.
By then, it already had a name.
Aschrephius Claxitus.
No one knew who was behind it. The words first appeared on an anonymous research Upload 03:17 UTC. No author, no lead. Just a run-down graph and a title. Within hours, labs across the world were whispering its name.
Aschrephius Claxitus.
The APC, as people began calling it, did not kill instantly. It did something way more inconceivable. It erased resonance.
Patients of the APC first report the dulling of sound. Music became thin. Voices flattened. And laughter felt artificial and staged. Then came the visual decay. Colours losing saturation and shadows sharpening into hard lines. As though the world were being redrawn in cheap ink. However, the true horror manifested internally.
Neural scans revealed that emotional feedback failed to ‘echo’ through the mind when responding to natural things such as music and sound. Joy registered but did not bloom. Fear sparked but did not spread. Love flickered but didn’t come alight. Humans were becoming chambers without acoustic.
The disease’s structure itself was haunting. Made up of microscopic hooks that latch onto your blood cells, your organs, until, slowly, everything you has been consumed. That’s when the physical symptoms start to come in. Complete and total numbness takes over your body. You don’t feel pain but agonising discomfort as the hooks pinch themselves up to your brain and take complete control over your body.
APC infects people through any form of physical touch. It acts quietly and seems harmless at first but it’s quite the opposite.
Within 3 months, entire cities felt muffled. Birds still sang, but their songs had no depth. Wind moved trees, yet the rustling sounded prerecorded. Even thunder sounded like someone was cracking their knuckles in the room next door.
And people changed.
Without emotional consciousness, consequences lost weight. A man could weep at his mothers funeral but the grief wouldn’t ripple into memory. A child could scream in terror, but the fear wouldn’t etch caution into her mind.
Wars did not erupt.
They simply happened.
Governments collapsed. Not from rage, but from apathy. Markets froze because ambition requires anticipation, and anticipation needs emotional momentum. Birth rates plummeted. Why bring life into a world that felt fake?
Dr. Ilyen stayed in the lab long after funding evaporated. She studied the silence.
She began to suspect the disease was not spreading though touch or breath, but through synchronisation. Medical readings showed something terrifying. Proximity to infected individuals transferred over to uncontaminated ones. The virus was hopping person to person at the speed of light.
Humanity had become contagious to itself.
One evening, as dusk bled weakly across the sky, Marily found a child of about 8 years, sitting alone in the dark corridor of the lab. The child was humming softly, yet with purpose. Not a song Marily recognised. Just a wavering tone.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Marily uttered, her voice sounding like paper tearing. The girl looked up, her eyes were bright. Too bright, however, in this stage of the pandemic.
“Do you hear it?” the child asked.
“Hear what?”
“The bounce,” she replied.
Marily frowned. The girls clapped her hands once. The sound struck the walls.
And returned.
Faint. Delicate. But undeniably there.
An echo.
Marily staggered back. The girl clapped again. And once more, there was an echo.
“See?” she exclaimed, smiling.
“How long have you been humming?” Marily whispered.
“Since it started getting quiet,” the girl replied. “If I keep singing, the silence stays away.”
Marily rushed back to her lab and wired the child to the last functioning monitor. Her brain readings were chaotic, in the best possible way. Her neural activities were wild, the sensory equivalent of an orchestral crescendo.
The humming wasn’t random. It was shifting her brainwaves, forcing variety, preventing the flattening effect of Aschrephius Claxitus. She wasn’t immune, she was objecting.
Marily tried it herself later that night. Her voice cracked with disuse. Yet she carried on. She sang an old lullaby her mother had taught her when she was young. At first, nothing changed. The air remained thick and dull. But as she pushed her voice louder, past embarrassment, past fatigue, she felt something stir in her chest. A vibration not confined to her throat. It spread, trembling through hr bones and blood.
The overhead light flickered.
From somewhere down the hall came another voice. Then another. This at first, then layering.
Harmony.
The lab walls began to answer.
Outside, across the city, windows rattled faintly. The few people left paused mid-step. Some felt a shiver through their spine. A feedback loop reigniting.
Aschrephius Claxitus had silenced humanity by dampening its resonance. But resonance, once remembered, multiplies.
The next morning, the city was still broken. The sky still pale. The disease still present in every bloodstream. Yet in alleyways and rooftops, in ruined train stations and abandoned schools, people were making noise.
Not screaming.
Not protesting.
But singing.
And for the first time in a year, when Dr. Ilyen dropped a metal tray is ward D, the clang rang bright and full.
And came back to her.
…
Or is that what she wants you to believe?
By Eliana Cavini