Cassie
For the first time in memory, I did not wake in the forest. Instead, I opened my eyes and saw the candlelit wooden roof of the barn. I stood from my bed of straw, knowing what I had to do.
I left the barn. From the field outside, I saw the candle in the window. Slowly backing into the fog, I confirmed my suspicions—its light penetrated the forest. No matter my position, I could find my way to the barn now I’d correctly placed the candle. I would not be lost again.
Turning to face the dense white fog that had clouded my vision and been the instrument of my enemy for four years, I entered that chosen battleground. I knew this would be the last of the nightmares, one way or the other. I was afraid, perhaps more than I’d ever been, but I had made a choice.
What I found in that forest I
I’m sorry, I can’t do this right now. Telling you everything that’s happened has been really good for me. Putting it all down in writing… having someone to ‘talk’ to helps a lot.
But this, what happened in the forest that night, I’m not ready to talk specifics. For its final attack, the one supposed to break me once and for all, the demon used everything—past torments, present struggles, and fears of possible futures all jumbled together in an endless nightmare panorama I’m not sure I could ever rationally describe.
I think I’ll skip it for now and move on to what happened next—
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Cassandra entered the forest with trepidation. Something felt wrong. ‘Déjà vu,’ she tasted the familiar words. She had done this before. This had all happened before.
She was already in the Nightmare.
The leaves behind her rustled, and she spun to see tentacles of black hair gripping the nearby tree trunks. She heard a liquid falling on leaves, thicker than water, dribbling like drool. She heard blood.
> Run
Cassie fled deeper into the fog and maze of trees, anything to escape the sight of what Kenta had become. The forest constricted on her, and thorns drew red lines on her skin. The leaves all around her hissed in evidence of movement just beyond sight.
Two tall figures loomed ahead in the fog. After her initial shock, Cassie recognized those shapes, “Mom? Dad?” She approached with eager steps.
The fog parted, and Cassie found a pair of giant bat statues. Their fierce animal faces were forever frozen in their last act of protection. Tears streamed down her face. She rushed forward to embrace the cold stone.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of green. Cassie ducked around the statues to hide as a wave of venomous light crashed against rock. Having barely evaded the first blast, she bolted for the trees as something vast slithered nearer.
She rounded the closest tree for cover and turned to see a lashing tail the size of a train crush the two statues to dust.
“No!”
The snake heard her and hissed its sadistic delight.
> Run
Tears stung her eyes. “It’s not real,” Cassie told herself.
She fled, blind, tripping on roots and slamming into trunks over and over as she sought to escape the vision. Cassie’s heart ached with fear and sorrow, pushing her forward and pulling her back until it felt ready to tear. Battered and bruised, she wiped her eyes and caught her breath between sobs. A loud crack of claws on wood made her spin.
Cassie saw the blue devil draw nigh as sharp talons left five gouged trails on each tree trunk in her path.
“You were my friend!” Wendigo cried, eyes molten red with hate. Whatever had happened to the real Wendigo, this one was in no mood for forgiveness.
> Run
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” She dodged through the trees and ducked low-hanging branches. Twigs and thorns clawed and tugged at Cassie’s hair in painful jolts, and flies swarmed around her. No, not flies, those black orbs were caramboles.
Lea strode from behind a tree with the eyes of a cruel yet beautiful tyrant.
> Run
Cassie plugged her ears and ran the other way before Lea uttered that damning word, but the gravity of those swollen black orbs almost overwhelmed her. She sprinted for all she was worth and put a tree trunk between herself and Lea to break the caramboles’ line of effect. On a branch hanging from the tree opposite her, eyelids of bark opened to reveal a glowering naked eyeball.
It was so alien compared to all her experiences to this point. She had no framework to comprehend what it meant. She screamed and fell as she scrambled away. Terrified, she ignored her skinned knee and ran deeper into the woods.
Thick cobwebs beaded with dew like row after row of pearl necklaces hung all over the thorn bushes and between the trees.
A huge slamming noise grabbed her attention. At first, she saw nothing strange through the mist except one out-of-place black trunk. As she slowed to examine it, a second black trunk descended from above to land next to the first with the same terrible noise.
Those weren’t trees. Those were legs. Cassie heard someone chuckling as a tremendous head obscured by fog bent to meet her. It had eight glowing red eyes.
“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly.
> Run
She turned to flee, but the ground in front of her vanished in a puff of dust.
“Why did you do it?” Daniel shouted, his eyes wet with tears and red with rage. “Why’d you hurt Rana?”
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> Run
She turned again to a third direction and ducked behind a tree in the nick of time as an unseen hand vaporized the trunk.
Hundreds of eyes followed her as she panted through the woods, opening on trunks and on the ground below and branches above and even empty space. She bashed herself against bark every time she about-faced in her haste to escape them.
“CASSIE! WHERE ARE YOU? PLEASE, ANSWER ME!” came Rana’s forlorn howl from far behind as more trees fell and crashed.
> Run
Thousands of vines sprang from the ground around her, forming a dark tunnel with one way out. Heart pounding, lungs aching, she rushed headlong into the embrace of a twelve-foot-tall amalgam of glass and metal. It had hundreds of arms of all sizes with lenses of every conceivable design and array. One arm had a metal gauntlet that caught her before she could escape and lifted her into the air.
“Paul?” The faceless head of radiant glass turned to look at her. “What are you doing?” she asked, voice quavering.
In response, red light burst from the glass in a hot wave that enveloped her. An ‘awareness’ within the light stripped her defenses, leaving her naked before a malicious consciousness.
> Run
“You have such pretty hair,” the woman said.
“What?” Cassie asked, disoriented. She sat in a comfortable black leather barber’s chair with a white gown tied around her neck. She saw herself and the hairdresser behind her holding a comb and scissors in the mirror on the wall.
“I mean, it’s a shame to see a beautiful young woman let her bangs cover her eyes. It’s not like you have anything to hide—what are you afraid of?” the hairdresser said as she snipped a few strands.
Idly, Cassie tried to shift slightly on the chair and found she couldn’t. “Hold still, my sweet,” the woman said.
She looked down.
The gown was not cloth but thousands of sticky white threads. She struggled, but freeing herself was impossible. She looked up. “What are you afraid of?” said the spider to the fly, and Cassie saw eight red eyes in the mirror.
> Run
She screamed as she tore the cobwebs from her skin, scratching herself in the process, and stumbled through a gap between trees. Running full tilt, the gaps narrowed as she went until the trunks merged and became wooden paneling, and she was running through a corridor.
White masks littered the walls, their enchanting beauty catching her attention. Yet, the unearthly charm of the expertly crafted porcelain and their perfect symmetry disturbed Cassie. Each mask had slight variations on the same essential face.
Then the eyes of the masks burst into a volcanic red as they all spoke in turn with the same voice, “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?” dozens stepping on each other’s words until the result became nonsensical, “You who are? Are you who? Who who are? You are you? Are youyou who are whoou yoyou who whare you?”
> Run
As she fled, porcelain arms broke through the wooden boards and grasped at anything that moved. Dozens of hands latched onto her as she tried to force her way through, but they were tenacious. She cried in pain as one pulled her hair. Three caught her right arm, and two hung onto her left as she struggled away. One yanked on her ankle and tripped her. Cassie fell prone on the hardwood floor.
“Whyoar uoyeraoh reyoho wharyo?” More hands grabbed at her. Rather than tear her limb from limb, the hands felt her body like curious blind children. She found the strangeness of it even more terrifying. One hand found her face, and the fingers invaded her mouth and nose. Cassie clawed and dragged herself out from under the hands. She manually pried off the most persistent ones, and, in her frightened rush, she scraped her skin on their nails.
Cassie scrambled to her feet and started running. Whole mannequin bodies tore their way into the hall behind her, and dozens of them gave chase. In their hurry to catch her, they tripped each other, stampeding over the fallen as their shouted questions merged into complete incoherence, “Aryoywh yoarwhe wryhuaou ahwuroywahryu oahwuurw hyyyaoawrr ohwwhao?”
A white wave of tumbling dolls came hot on her heels as she saw a door ahead. She sprinted the last feet and slammed into the locked door. Desperate, she struggled with the handle until she heard a click.
Cassie flung herself through the portal, banged the door shut, and locked it.
She breathed a sigh of relief too soon; the mannequins pounded on the door and cracked the wood. Cassie fled into an enormous ballroom, elegant and empty. As she entered the center of the room, the floor split and moved.
> Run
She ran, but her feet were too slow.
Cassie fell and landed in something white and slimy. Her body was covered in goo, and her hair soaked. She stabilized herself with a hand to find the surface beneath the goo soft and organic. Looking more closely at the white substance revealed little red veins all around.
The pupil of the gigantic eye rolled beneath her and stared up at Cassie, watching. She stared into that vast black pool of awareness and thought she saw something. She did see something, a distant battlefield growing larger by the second. A familiar battle, viewed from high above, consumed the whole of her vision.
She fell.
She fell thousands of feet to the ground below. Her stomach flipped in a way she’d once found exciting but now thought horrible as she had no control. She cried as the wind, once her supporting friend, betrayed her. If only I had wings! she thought and closed her eyes.
“RETREAT! Take who you can and run!” Calephor shouted.
Cassie opened her eyes as she stood on the ground. The battle raging around her had been familiar for a reason. She’d lived it. But, she thought, I wasn’t here, on the ground, I was—
Cassie found herself in panicked flight above the battle, though she clearly stood on the ground. She had entered her own memory but was not herself as she was then. She seemed to be in two places at once, the Cassie in the memory and the Cassie in the dream.
> Let’s play a game of ‘Who’s Who?’
That voice. She knew it intimately. Moloch’s voice.
> You try to run, and I will catch you
He wasn’t talking to the dream Cassie, though she could hear him. He was talking to the Cassie in the memory.
> I know you’re blind
Forms arose all around her, alabaster white, lesser demons in the shapes of her friends and family.
> You can’t see their eyes
“Help! Help!” a Lea called, its eyes sticky black tar.
> You have no way to know who is a friend
Half a dozen Nyctea’s patrolled the skies where waving tentacles menaced each of them, keeping her from guessing which one was real. Cassie relived the anguish of diving away from her beloved guardian, not knowing if it was a lesser demon in disguise—
> And who is me
—Only for her to discover the truth an instant later as Moloch’s talons raked across the owl’s wing and knocked her out of the sky.
> You couldn’t even tell me apart from the person you love most in the world
Except, this time, the Cassie in the memory changed course. She dove at the Cassie in the dream.
> Run
Cassie turned and ran as her doppelganger inevitably gained on her.
> Run like you always do
She had been running for ages. It felt like forever. It felt like her whole life. Her feet ached. Painful stitches lined her abdomen. Overwork strained her lungs tight. Her heart was stressed from so much fear, adrenaline, and running that it seemed about to explode.
Bruises covered her body. Blood dribbled from cuts, scrapes, and scratches accumulated in her fear-maddened rush through the woods.
> You could have saved them if you hadn’t spent your nights smothering your ears in Silence
The demonic Cassie plunged her way.
Sweat dripped into her eyes and stung them. She wiped her face with one hand as she ran. Then, in the distance, she caught a glimmer of light from the candle in the window—and stopped to think.
And once she began to think, everything unraveled.
She’d injured and weakened herself like an animal in a trap gnawing at its leg. Sleep deprivation. Hiding her blood-drinking from the others. Distancing herself from her friends because of nightmare futures. Secrets, lies, and isolation.
Everything she’d done to escape her problems made them worse. Every injury she’d suffered in the nightmare was self-inflicted. Once she understood that, but one course of action remained.
Cassie stopped running and turned to face herself.
“Why run when I can fly?”
Two Cassandras clashed, claws ripping through flesh.
She landed in the open field outside the barn. Cassie flexed her claws and stretched her wings. She Heard the demon in human-Cassie shape behind her facing the opposite direction. As It turned, her ultrasonography sensed deep claw marks on the demon’s chest.
“The Will of Moloch endures as long as even one shadow remains,” It said in her voice. Then the demon disintegrated to ash scattered by the wind.