we are lost to one another. we are lost to the world. there is nothing left.
Who: Siren's Port
When: The night of Wednesday, October 19th into the morning of Thursday, October 20th.
Where: In the mind, in the dreams, in the unconscious of the sleepers.
Summary: --
Warnings: These dreams may be considered not safe for work, with violence, gore, death, underlying sexual themes and other mentions of graphic nature. Having them is completely voluntary. They will strike your character when they are asleep (and if they do not sleep, your character may be pulled into a trance-like state for an undetermined amount of time, at the mun's discretion).
Reactionary logging is encouraged, and feel free to use this post to do just that. Anyone hoping to do dream-walking and other psychic-related shenanigans should ask for permission first, though. And, of course, there will be one log per day of the dreams that happen at night for the entire event.
Myth is the Minotaur
Broken pieces of fabricated illusions dance on the winding, twisting walls of the labyrinth. In the darkness, there is no way to know where to go. The earth is soft beneath your feet, invisible in the blackness. A single light illuminates your tiny, curled prison. And you follow it out, running. You move as if in a dream - Who's to say you're not dreaming? - and your limbs seem to be too slow for your mind.
Move. Move.
The light bounces away from you, a tiny firefly in the night.
You start the dream in a very small, very dark room. It would be pitch black if not for the moonlight coming in from the tiny window near the top of the room. You're surrounded with the feeling of endless, all encompassing loneliness. In the pit of your stomach, there's also dread.
The absolutely silence is broken all of a sudden by sounds of footsteps from the other side of the wall. Even though the sound itself is mundane, you know it means something very bad is going to happen. Something bad always happens after the footsteps. The closer they get, the more afraid you become. You're in a panic, but there's nowhere to hide.
Suddenly, the door to the room bursts open. The light from the other side is so harsh and bright that it's painful. Hands are reaching out to grab every one of your limbs. They're everywhere, and you can't escape them. Even as you cry out to be left alone, your desperate fingers trying to find purchase in the floor below, they're pulling you into the light. You don't want to go. You know they're going to do bad things to you out there.
The walls brighten with color, painting them the thoughts and visions of others in their lives...people you've never seen before. (or have you?)
Boys, girls, men, and women with giant keys fight in the deserted wasteland of time long past. A prosecutor watches her father be dragged behind bars. A prince kills his best friend, a wizard. A dragon turns to ash and cloaks the entirety of Siren's Port in choking dust. A miner kills his entire hometown.
A man sacrifices himself for the world. He comes back as the new harbinger of death.
Your limbs feel strange, alien, stiff and ungainly like you’ve been sitting for too long and they’ve fallen asleep under you. You experimentally try to open your mouth, but you can’t.
Then you start to move and you don’t know how or why, but you do even though you’re not doing it. You know you’re not. And you don’t move like you. Your movements are stiff and jerky, like clockwork, like a doll.
A puppet.
But it’s okay, you tell yourself. Maybe it’s early. Perhaps you’re not awake yet.
“Do I… know you?”
His voice sounds strange, far away, confused and fuzzy and the words stab at you like knives. You’ve heard them before. They cut like glass shards then and the injury you once thought long healed is raw once again. The pain is still there, in your chest, the sadness of it all makes the breath catch in your throat.
“It’s funny… I feel like I’m forgetting something really important.”
No, no, you want to cry. No don’t, don’t forget me here! Not now, not when it’s all okay, not when we’re free and we have a chance to be who we never could be.
“Why would I want to waste my time with a copy?” The voice that speaks is lilting and taunting, so often barbed with sarcasm that like this now pricks and brings pain when before it brought nothing but laughter. “I don’t remember you, scram! I’ve got my real friend. You’re nothing but a puppet. Got it memorized?”
“Don’t waste your breath on it. It’s worthless. Useless.”
“Let me rearrange your face for you.”
“Like you? Why would I like you? You’re not even a real person. Girlfriend? I don’t remember you, go away.”
You gasp, and then you run, you run and run and then you fall and hit the ground and you break. You shatter into tiny little pieces that twinkle in the sunset.
You'd think they were beautiful... if you could.
The light guides you further into the labyrinth, into the heart of it, where the sounds and images continue. They only get worse, with children killing one another and reaping the souls of demons, of a man who's given himself into the night, and others too countless to name.
The faces begin to blur together into hideous amalgamations of people, whispering cruelties in your ear.
A dull roar begins to follow, coming from somewhere in the maze.
It's dark.
But that's not exactly new. Sleep with the lights off, spend most of your time in the dark, and you get used to waking up to it. But…
Pinpointing exactly what's wrong isn't easy, it might be that the air is a little too thin, it might be that weird sense you get when you know things are close by, it might be the fact that when you scream it reverberates off walls far too close.
Everything hurts, starting with your chest, and ending with pretty much every fucking thing else. That's why you screamed, not any sense of fear, but because you suddenly remembered pain the moment you opened your eyes again.
It should be much worse than it is, which…Well, it's pretty bad in the first place. Why you expect it to be worse, you don't know, but you know. It should be worse. Why should it be worse? Why are you expecting something this bad to be even worse than it is?
Your hands fly up, trying to feel for a wound you know should be there, hitting wood and cloth instead.
You reach out to touch it again, fingers sliding against something that's probably some kind of satin knockoff.
This isn't possible.
You hit the wall in front of you, (Lid. It's a lid. Holy shit it's a lid. You're-) hit it again and again, your own voice becoming white noise as you shout for someone else, anyone. You don't care who, as long as they come.
After what seems like forever, the lid is wrenched open, light pouring in and blinding you. While you try to adjust your eyes, you can barely make out a figure looming over you.
"Maybe if they knew you weren't going to stay that way they wouldn't insist on this" The figure says, voice both deep and unsettling, grinding against your mind.You think you know the voice from somewhere, and it becomes more important to remember than anything, over the fear, over the pain, over your own name. But the information just slips through your fingers, and somehow not knowing makes you panic.
"They really should know better." Says the voice. "What makes them think they could keep you, strange little thing you are."
The voice starts laughing, and it rings in your ears louder than anything you've ever known until it's gone, and the lid slams shut on you again, locking you inside.
The smell of formaldehyde overpowers you, and you feel sick.
The sound gets louder, soon encroaching on the small space you've found that has light. The sound grips your heart and squeezes until you choke, making you run into the dark.
The Minotaur. The Darkness. The monster.
You stumble; the dirt beneath your feet gives way to sand, tripping you. The visions on the wall turn horrific, of screams and death, people crying over lost loved ones and foes alike. The walls begin to cave in on you, the voices getting louder, the roar echoing behind you.
You keep running.
Sometimes you’re still shaken awake by a stomach-wrenching jolt: a temporary disconnect from your surroundings and why you’re not in your old room anymore-but not as often as you used to. It took a while, but the sounds and sights of the Port have gone from alien to familiar, from the water crawling in the pipes to the people blasting bad techno music downstairs.
Apparently logic has been flipped onto her head, so a familiar chuckle sounds alien in your new bubble. You just didn’t expect to hear his voice again-
“…Heh. Jesus Christ. You really fucked up, didn’t you?”
…But now it seems inevitable. He always shows up when you’re at your absolute worst.
You still jump like a cliché. And your brother smirks like a crooked jack o’ lantern when you shout at him: “What the hell are you doing in here?!”
“What I’m doing-” The sentence breaks with a snort. “Dude, what? I should be askin’ you that. You just disappear and don’t call, or fuckin’ whatever? What the fuck is that?”
There’s a glass bottle in his hand, and you watch as he cracks the cap off with a wet-sounding pop. He takes a sip, invites himself to sit down, and continues. “Hey. There’s nothing in your fuckin’ fridge. You should go out and umm, restock. Y’know, buy some better fuckin’ alcohol. Just because you’re broke now doesn’t mean you have to slum it.”
“It’s not like I’m here by fucking choice, dude. I was practically kidnapped. By a machine. Don’t you think I would’ve gone back if I could instead of hanging around this shit hole?”
You catch the roll of his eyes; then he waves it off with his hand like he was swatting a fly. “Okay whatever. You can’t hide here forever, y’know?”
You exhale a long, tolerating stream of oxygen through your nose. “…Fine. Just tell me why the hell you’re here.”
“Really? I came to pick you up. Bring you back home. So uhh, fuckin’ get your shit together and let’s go.”
It’s actually kind of astounding how little he hears over his own bullshit. “Go where?”
“Home. Where else?” He stares into space for a while, eyes green and impassive as the long-necked bottle he was nursing. “Oh. By the way, you’ve been replaced.”
You feel the air in the room shrink while something sharp crashes against the inside of your ribs. “Bullshit.”
His brows lift. “Would I lie to you?”
The sharp thing bursts into hot rage inside your lungs; it turns into sweat on your forehead. But you don’t actually think about anything before you’re scrambling over the coffee table to wring his neck.
Your brother shoots up and tries to find a safe distance, dodging your hands. After getting his ass handed to him twice, he’s gotten smarter about that, apparently. “What did you expect?! You were gone too long. That’s just what happens, y’know? That’s the fucking business!”
But you finally get a hold of him and shove him against the book shelf, hands fisted in his suit jacket. “Don’t lecture me about the business!”
“It’s not my fault you keep screwing up. What’s this? The third time one of your bands kicked you out?”
The adrenaline makes your muscles shake, and your breath seems to be ten miles ahead of you. So when he tries to shove you off, you actually move back.
With a withering look, your brother brushes imaginary dirt off the front of his clothes. “You made me spill my beer. …Anyway, you’re makin’ my life fuckin’ difficult, as usual. Just putting that out there. So uhh…yeah. How ‘bout you get over it, for once? And stop acting like a crying girl. How’s that?”
There’s another question that hangs loosely in the air-what the hell are you doing, here?--but you’re not even sure who said it: him or you.
The darkness swallows up every path you attempt to take, closing off any exit once open to you. The roar grows louder until it's deafening, driving you into utter madness.
It comes from everywhere.
The rabbit is coming. The rabbit is coming. You can hear the gong that sounds, vibrations making the ground tremble, like a god coming down to his knees. You put a hand on the shaking glass of the window in that apartment; it’s your apartment, and it’s his apartment, and it’s their apartment. You stumble back, a hand reaching out and cracking on the door, the same door you broke your arm on when you were only six. It’s a struggle to get away from the door, a ringing in your ears that you hadn’t heard since-
Turning a corner in the apartment leads to another door, one more receptive to being open. Slim fingers push open the door, and you look around the new room for a moment before letting the pile of clothes in the middle take your attention. Your foot nudges the clothes for a moment until you stumble back. The clothes aren’t just clothes, and the body parts strewn throughout it aren’t recognizable. But some parts are; the long blonde hair, the bloodied green eye.
“No, no, no, no, no, no…” That voice is yours, the movement is yours. The door slams open as you run through it, running smack into another pile of blood, hair, and clothes. There’s a symbol on this one, the symbol that you know as yourself. The symbol of what you should become, what you rejected becoming. His head is missing. You need to find his head, and when you look down to see the hand grasped around your ankle; you know that you’ll never leave. They won’t let you, even as you walk into the kitchen and you see your father there. Dark brown hair, the same colored eyes like you have. He’s there, alive and healthy, just like your family is for right now. You reach out to touch him when a sharp blast goes through the room, and what was left of your father is now gone. All gone.
The loss is immediate, as you fall to your knees. Your family is dying around you. Your family is leaving, one by one, and everyone will be gone. Blood is sliding down your hands. Everyone you’ve ever loved ends up dead. And as you get up and go to the bedroom, ignoring the bruised and battered body of your best friend on the bed, and the body of your sister slumped down in the corner, you realize that this is normal.
This is normal. All this death is not any less then you deserve.
And then it descends upon you, that rushing noise and the shadow that comes with it, pinning you down into the sand and choking you. You thrash beneath the impossible weight now against your shoulders. You can't breathe. The light bounces too far away now, leaving you incapable of seeing the monstrous creature that has you here.
Your vision sways and blurs.
The world winks out for just a moment.
The Monster.
Black wings, dead eyes
Always after you.
Trying to push you down into the river.
Trying to drown you.
He hates you. He hungers for you.
He wants to cut up your life and slice it to ribbons!
He preys upon you!
Run, hide, change your name
Change your face, so he'll never find you.
But he always does.
With great bat wings he pushes you down.
Cuts you up. You can't stay afloat.
You can never catch your breath.
It's almost funny.
The monster flaps away into his night.
You continue to sink. It hurts.
You're...
......Drowning....
Embalmed alive with your grin
To scoff at eternity.
Your heartbeat is all you hear in that darkness, in the silence that can bring madness. But even that slows to a crawl...until there's nothing...nothing left.
Emptiness. Nothing.
Red rose petals everywhere, floating in the air. You blink; everything's hazy. The details are hard to sort out. Red, everything's red, that's all you can make out, for now. Red. Because that's how you'd wanted it. That's how you'd planned it. Everything led up to this day.
As you blink again, the scene resolves. You can see your bouquet, its petals strewing the ground. Because you'd ripped it apart, just like you did to the officiant and most of the guests seated in the front rows. The rest had fled.
Now you're standing at the altar, in a bloodstained red dress, chainsaw in hand. Alone. Jilted.
He hadn't appeared.
And when the world comes back to you, you realize that you're staring into your own eyes, your own smile, and the bloody visage of your own body. You're killing yourself, tearing out your throat, clawing at your chest and your heart.
With your last effort, you scream.
You Hear...
The chamber is sterile, cool, circular, but a steady gurgle of amniotic fluids pump at a lazy pulse, backed by the constant white noise of machinery. Aside from that, there is only a long and lonely, isolating silence. Now and then there is a mild beep as the soft-lit panels wink on and off, with scrolling monitors recording newly updated growth charts. It's an admirably complex system, all smooth lines and closed shapes.
When you venture closer, faceless engorged bodies draped in tubes and sensors loom tall and voluminous in a ringed formation beyond the plexiglass panes. Their abdomens are open, egg-shaped cavities, and there is something living inside them, suspended in plasma, enveloped by soft walls of fleshy tissue which throb around them, moist and pink. These tiny, early embryonic forms sleep curled and barely recognizable as something that might be fetal and human.
These lifeless cradles, stand-in wombs...they offer no solace in the cold stillness. If you were to fade away, no longer exist? These might yet stand, fully operational, steadily churning out neonate bodies. The truth is disturbing, unsettling, a pervasive mingling of the organic and the artificial. A slow and sickening horror.
You place your palm to the glass, fingers spread- when you draw it away, the oils from your hands leave a smudged imprint on its gleaming surface, each tiny, perfect line of your fingerprints left behind. What are you doing, with no gloves on today? You wonder how long a stain like that would be permitted to remain. It's too guilty of an indulgent curiosity to entertain, so you rub it away with your sleeve. Clean. No signs of real life are permitted here. That includes you.
So you shuffle away against a firm warmth at your back, a pillar at the center of the room, a core of life, and its heat sinks into your grateful shoulder-blades. You close your eyes, you accept your fate. A painful sensation like prickling needles pierces along the right side of your neck, and spreads like burning ice, your body only twitches once. The support at your back goes cold, and still, lifeless. It's only when that endless machine-humming ends that you realize and understand the true silence of a flat-lined corpse.
Death folds in around you slowly, in a compression of metal and concrete and rubble. It dissolves into the numb of a severed spinal chord, and suddenly it's as if you are the one floating in plasma, blood choking warm and metallic in the shallow struggle of your lungs, at the back of your throat. Buried in your coffin-womb.
At last, and with a final struggling gasp which takes great effort, you catch the barest blinding glimpse of overhead sky.
Emptiness and nothing greet your eyes under a pale, moonless night. Outstretched, like a sacrifice on an altar, a martyr, you lay upon the rust-covered pavement and breathe once more.
And then you begin to laugh again, the sound echoing into the night and shattering the silence.
When: The night of Wednesday, October 19th into the morning of Thursday, October 20th.
Where: In the mind, in the dreams, in the unconscious of the sleepers.
Summary: --
Warnings: These dreams may be considered not safe for work, with violence, gore, death, underlying sexual themes and other mentions of graphic nature. Having them is completely voluntary. They will strike your character when they are asleep (and if they do not sleep, your character may be pulled into a trance-like state for an undetermined amount of time, at the mun's discretion).
Reactionary logging is encouraged, and feel free to use this post to do just that. Anyone hoping to do dream-walking and other psychic-related shenanigans should ask for permission first, though. And, of course, there will be one log per day of the dreams that happen at night for the entire event.
Myth is the Minotaur
Broken pieces of fabricated illusions dance on the winding, twisting walls of the labyrinth. In the darkness, there is no way to know where to go. The earth is soft beneath your feet, invisible in the blackness. A single light illuminates your tiny, curled prison. And you follow it out, running. You move as if in a dream - Who's to say you're not dreaming? - and your limbs seem to be too slow for your mind.
Move. Move.
The light bounces away from you, a tiny firefly in the night.
You start the dream in a very small, very dark room. It would be pitch black if not for the moonlight coming in from the tiny window near the top of the room. You're surrounded with the feeling of endless, all encompassing loneliness. In the pit of your stomach, there's also dread.
The absolutely silence is broken all of a sudden by sounds of footsteps from the other side of the wall. Even though the sound itself is mundane, you know it means something very bad is going to happen. Something bad always happens after the footsteps. The closer they get, the more afraid you become. You're in a panic, but there's nowhere to hide.
Suddenly, the door to the room bursts open. The light from the other side is so harsh and bright that it's painful. Hands are reaching out to grab every one of your limbs. They're everywhere, and you can't escape them. Even as you cry out to be left alone, your desperate fingers trying to find purchase in the floor below, they're pulling you into the light. You don't want to go. You know they're going to do bad things to you out there.
The walls brighten with color, painting them the thoughts and visions of others in their lives...people you've never seen before. (or have you?)
Boys, girls, men, and women with giant keys fight in the deserted wasteland of time long past. A prosecutor watches her father be dragged behind bars. A prince kills his best friend, a wizard. A dragon turns to ash and cloaks the entirety of Siren's Port in choking dust. A miner kills his entire hometown.
A man sacrifices himself for the world. He comes back as the new harbinger of death.
Your limbs feel strange, alien, stiff and ungainly like you’ve been sitting for too long and they’ve fallen asleep under you. You experimentally try to open your mouth, but you can’t.
Then you start to move and you don’t know how or why, but you do even though you’re not doing it. You know you’re not. And you don’t move like you. Your movements are stiff and jerky, like clockwork, like a doll.
A puppet.
But it’s okay, you tell yourself. Maybe it’s early. Perhaps you’re not awake yet.
“Do I… know you?”
His voice sounds strange, far away, confused and fuzzy and the words stab at you like knives. You’ve heard them before. They cut like glass shards then and the injury you once thought long healed is raw once again. The pain is still there, in your chest, the sadness of it all makes the breath catch in your throat.
“It’s funny… I feel like I’m forgetting something really important.”
No, no, you want to cry. No don’t, don’t forget me here! Not now, not when it’s all okay, not when we’re free and we have a chance to be who we never could be.
“Why would I want to waste my time with a copy?” The voice that speaks is lilting and taunting, so often barbed with sarcasm that like this now pricks and brings pain when before it brought nothing but laughter. “I don’t remember you, scram! I’ve got my real friend. You’re nothing but a puppet. Got it memorized?”
“Don’t waste your breath on it. It’s worthless. Useless.”
“Let me rearrange your face for you.”
“Like you? Why would I like you? You’re not even a real person. Girlfriend? I don’t remember you, go away.”
You gasp, and then you run, you run and run and then you fall and hit the ground and you break. You shatter into tiny little pieces that twinkle in the sunset.
You'd think they were beautiful... if you could.
The light guides you further into the labyrinth, into the heart of it, where the sounds and images continue. They only get worse, with children killing one another and reaping the souls of demons, of a man who's given himself into the night, and others too countless to name.
The faces begin to blur together into hideous amalgamations of people, whispering cruelties in your ear.
A dull roar begins to follow, coming from somewhere in the maze.
It's dark.
But that's not exactly new. Sleep with the lights off, spend most of your time in the dark, and you get used to waking up to it. But…
Pinpointing exactly what's wrong isn't easy, it might be that the air is a little too thin, it might be that weird sense you get when you know things are close by, it might be the fact that when you scream it reverberates off walls far too close.
Everything hurts, starting with your chest, and ending with pretty much every fucking thing else. That's why you screamed, not any sense of fear, but because you suddenly remembered pain the moment you opened your eyes again.
It should be much worse than it is, which…Well, it's pretty bad in the first place. Why you expect it to be worse, you don't know, but you know. It should be worse. Why should it be worse? Why are you expecting something this bad to be even worse than it is?
Your hands fly up, trying to feel for a wound you know should be there, hitting wood and cloth instead.
You reach out to touch it again, fingers sliding against something that's probably some kind of satin knockoff.
This isn't possible.
You hit the wall in front of you, (Lid. It's a lid. Holy shit it's a lid. You're-) hit it again and again, your own voice becoming white noise as you shout for someone else, anyone. You don't care who, as long as they come.
After what seems like forever, the lid is wrenched open, light pouring in and blinding you. While you try to adjust your eyes, you can barely make out a figure looming over you.
"Maybe if they knew you weren't going to stay that way they wouldn't insist on this" The figure says, voice both deep and unsettling, grinding against your mind.You think you know the voice from somewhere, and it becomes more important to remember than anything, over the fear, over the pain, over your own name. But the information just slips through your fingers, and somehow not knowing makes you panic.
"They really should know better." Says the voice. "What makes them think they could keep you, strange little thing you are."
The voice starts laughing, and it rings in your ears louder than anything you've ever known until it's gone, and the lid slams shut on you again, locking you inside.
The smell of formaldehyde overpowers you, and you feel sick.
The sound gets louder, soon encroaching on the small space you've found that has light. The sound grips your heart and squeezes until you choke, making you run into the dark.
The Minotaur. The Darkness. The monster.
You stumble; the dirt beneath your feet gives way to sand, tripping you. The visions on the wall turn horrific, of screams and death, people crying over lost loved ones and foes alike. The walls begin to cave in on you, the voices getting louder, the roar echoing behind you.
You keep running.
Sometimes you’re still shaken awake by a stomach-wrenching jolt: a temporary disconnect from your surroundings and why you’re not in your old room anymore-but not as often as you used to. It took a while, but the sounds and sights of the Port have gone from alien to familiar, from the water crawling in the pipes to the people blasting bad techno music downstairs.
Apparently logic has been flipped onto her head, so a familiar chuckle sounds alien in your new bubble. You just didn’t expect to hear his voice again-
“…Heh. Jesus Christ. You really fucked up, didn’t you?”
…But now it seems inevitable. He always shows up when you’re at your absolute worst.
You still jump like a cliché. And your brother smirks like a crooked jack o’ lantern when you shout at him: “What the hell are you doing in here?!”
“What I’m doing-” The sentence breaks with a snort. “Dude, what? I should be askin’ you that. You just disappear and don’t call, or fuckin’ whatever? What the fuck is that?”
There’s a glass bottle in his hand, and you watch as he cracks the cap off with a wet-sounding pop. He takes a sip, invites himself to sit down, and continues. “Hey. There’s nothing in your fuckin’ fridge. You should go out and umm, restock. Y’know, buy some better fuckin’ alcohol. Just because you’re broke now doesn’t mean you have to slum it.”
“It’s not like I’m here by fucking choice, dude. I was practically kidnapped. By a machine. Don’t you think I would’ve gone back if I could instead of hanging around this shit hole?”
You catch the roll of his eyes; then he waves it off with his hand like he was swatting a fly. “Okay whatever. You can’t hide here forever, y’know?”
You exhale a long, tolerating stream of oxygen through your nose. “…Fine. Just tell me why the hell you’re here.”
“Really? I came to pick you up. Bring you back home. So uhh, fuckin’ get your shit together and let’s go.”
It’s actually kind of astounding how little he hears over his own bullshit. “Go where?”
“Home. Where else?” He stares into space for a while, eyes green and impassive as the long-necked bottle he was nursing. “Oh. By the way, you’ve been replaced.”
You feel the air in the room shrink while something sharp crashes against the inside of your ribs. “Bullshit.”
His brows lift. “Would I lie to you?”
The sharp thing bursts into hot rage inside your lungs; it turns into sweat on your forehead. But you don’t actually think about anything before you’re scrambling over the coffee table to wring his neck.
Your brother shoots up and tries to find a safe distance, dodging your hands. After getting his ass handed to him twice, he’s gotten smarter about that, apparently. “What did you expect?! You were gone too long. That’s just what happens, y’know? That’s the fucking business!”
But you finally get a hold of him and shove him against the book shelf, hands fisted in his suit jacket. “Don’t lecture me about the business!”
“It’s not my fault you keep screwing up. What’s this? The third time one of your bands kicked you out?”
The adrenaline makes your muscles shake, and your breath seems to be ten miles ahead of you. So when he tries to shove you off, you actually move back.
With a withering look, your brother brushes imaginary dirt off the front of his clothes. “You made me spill my beer. …Anyway, you’re makin’ my life fuckin’ difficult, as usual. Just putting that out there. So uhh…yeah. How ‘bout you get over it, for once? And stop acting like a crying girl. How’s that?”
There’s another question that hangs loosely in the air-what the hell are you doing, here?--but you’re not even sure who said it: him or you.
The darkness swallows up every path you attempt to take, closing off any exit once open to you. The roar grows louder until it's deafening, driving you into utter madness.
It comes from everywhere.
The rabbit is coming. The rabbit is coming. You can hear the gong that sounds, vibrations making the ground tremble, like a god coming down to his knees. You put a hand on the shaking glass of the window in that apartment; it’s your apartment, and it’s his apartment, and it’s their apartment. You stumble back, a hand reaching out and cracking on the door, the same door you broke your arm on when you were only six. It’s a struggle to get away from the door, a ringing in your ears that you hadn’t heard since-
Turning a corner in the apartment leads to another door, one more receptive to being open. Slim fingers push open the door, and you look around the new room for a moment before letting the pile of clothes in the middle take your attention. Your foot nudges the clothes for a moment until you stumble back. The clothes aren’t just clothes, and the body parts strewn throughout it aren’t recognizable. But some parts are; the long blonde hair, the bloodied green eye.
“No, no, no, no, no, no…” That voice is yours, the movement is yours. The door slams open as you run through it, running smack into another pile of blood, hair, and clothes. There’s a symbol on this one, the symbol that you know as yourself. The symbol of what you should become, what you rejected becoming. His head is missing. You need to find his head, and when you look down to see the hand grasped around your ankle; you know that you’ll never leave. They won’t let you, even as you walk into the kitchen and you see your father there. Dark brown hair, the same colored eyes like you have. He’s there, alive and healthy, just like your family is for right now. You reach out to touch him when a sharp blast goes through the room, and what was left of your father is now gone. All gone.
The loss is immediate, as you fall to your knees. Your family is dying around you. Your family is leaving, one by one, and everyone will be gone. Blood is sliding down your hands. Everyone you’ve ever loved ends up dead. And as you get up and go to the bedroom, ignoring the bruised and battered body of your best friend on the bed, and the body of your sister slumped down in the corner, you realize that this is normal.
This is normal. All this death is not any less then you deserve.
And then it descends upon you, that rushing noise and the shadow that comes with it, pinning you down into the sand and choking you. You thrash beneath the impossible weight now against your shoulders. You can't breathe. The light bounces too far away now, leaving you incapable of seeing the monstrous creature that has you here.
Your vision sways and blurs.
The world winks out for just a moment.
The Monster.
Black wings, dead eyes
Always after you.
Trying to push you down into the river.
Trying to drown you.
He hates you. He hungers for you.
He wants to cut up your life and slice it to ribbons!
He preys upon you!
Run, hide, change your name
Change your face, so he'll never find you.
But he always does.
With great bat wings he pushes you down.
Cuts you up. You can't stay afloat.
You can never catch your breath.
It's almost funny.
The monster flaps away into his night.
You continue to sink. It hurts.
You're...
......Drowning....
Embalmed alive with your grin
To scoff at eternity.
Your heartbeat is all you hear in that darkness, in the silence that can bring madness. But even that slows to a crawl...until there's nothing...nothing left.
Emptiness. Nothing.
Red rose petals everywhere, floating in the air. You blink; everything's hazy. The details are hard to sort out. Red, everything's red, that's all you can make out, for now. Red. Because that's how you'd wanted it. That's how you'd planned it. Everything led up to this day.
As you blink again, the scene resolves. You can see your bouquet, its petals strewing the ground. Because you'd ripped it apart, just like you did to the officiant and most of the guests seated in the front rows. The rest had fled.
Now you're standing at the altar, in a bloodstained red dress, chainsaw in hand. Alone. Jilted.
He hadn't appeared.
And when the world comes back to you, you realize that you're staring into your own eyes, your own smile, and the bloody visage of your own body. You're killing yourself, tearing out your throat, clawing at your chest and your heart.
With your last effort, you scream.
You Hear...
The chamber is sterile, cool, circular, but a steady gurgle of amniotic fluids pump at a lazy pulse, backed by the constant white noise of machinery. Aside from that, there is only a long and lonely, isolating silence. Now and then there is a mild beep as the soft-lit panels wink on and off, with scrolling monitors recording newly updated growth charts. It's an admirably complex system, all smooth lines and closed shapes.
When you venture closer, faceless engorged bodies draped in tubes and sensors loom tall and voluminous in a ringed formation beyond the plexiglass panes. Their abdomens are open, egg-shaped cavities, and there is something living inside them, suspended in plasma, enveloped by soft walls of fleshy tissue which throb around them, moist and pink. These tiny, early embryonic forms sleep curled and barely recognizable as something that might be fetal and human.
These lifeless cradles, stand-in wombs...they offer no solace in the cold stillness. If you were to fade away, no longer exist? These might yet stand, fully operational, steadily churning out neonate bodies. The truth is disturbing, unsettling, a pervasive mingling of the organic and the artificial. A slow and sickening horror.
You place your palm to the glass, fingers spread- when you draw it away, the oils from your hands leave a smudged imprint on its gleaming surface, each tiny, perfect line of your fingerprints left behind. What are you doing, with no gloves on today? You wonder how long a stain like that would be permitted to remain. It's too guilty of an indulgent curiosity to entertain, so you rub it away with your sleeve. Clean. No signs of real life are permitted here. That includes you.
So you shuffle away against a firm warmth at your back, a pillar at the center of the room, a core of life, and its heat sinks into your grateful shoulder-blades. You close your eyes, you accept your fate. A painful sensation like prickling needles pierces along the right side of your neck, and spreads like burning ice, your body only twitches once. The support at your back goes cold, and still, lifeless. It's only when that endless machine-humming ends that you realize and understand the true silence of a flat-lined corpse.
Death folds in around you slowly, in a compression of metal and concrete and rubble. It dissolves into the numb of a severed spinal chord, and suddenly it's as if you are the one floating in plasma, blood choking warm and metallic in the shallow struggle of your lungs, at the back of your throat. Buried in your coffin-womb.
At last, and with a final struggling gasp which takes great effort, you catch the barest blinding glimpse of overhead sky.
Emptiness and nothing greet your eyes under a pale, moonless night. Outstretched, like a sacrifice on an altar, a martyr, you lay upon the rust-covered pavement and breathe once more.
And then you begin to laugh again, the sound echoing into the night and shattering the silence.