The first of September. Uptown again. The dorm room, a bed of her own. The familiar stack of boxes, un-unpacked, still waiting to be opened for the first time. Somewhere within her box-cutter restored to its original position. The writing desk, the pristine, threadless corkboard above it. The muted sunlight peeking in through the blinds. Agony to her pounding head, all of it.

  Melody groaned and buried her face in her pillow, the disorder in her mind unfazed by the pathetic attempt to stifle it, not a single intelligible thought to be extracted from out of that impenetrable chaos, aside from—maybe—the vaguest sense of gratefulness for having been spared a mulchbrew hangover on top of everything else; coupled, perhaps, with an even vaguer (to the point of being subconscious) realization that, through its jarring absence, she had, at some point in the freshly invalidated month, in a city she’d never been to, grown accustomed to Somnhaven’s signature miasma.

  She then either slept, or she didn’t. She had no way of telling.

  By the time she could hear her own thoughts again—when her inner monologue was no longer being drowned out by the (mercifully, steadily; if not a tad too slowly for her liking) receding din of the rest of that echo chamber that had once functioned as a mind—the sun had long since set and she lay in the dark, alone, where she was monstrously free to not think about her brother, or the house on Petrichor, or the grad student who lived under that same roof, and not scrutinize over every second (of which there were at least, uh … ten) she could remember of her time in Somnhaven, agonizing over what she might have done differently, what she could do this time around to ensure a more favourable outcome, one that wouldn’t end in complete failure—which was just as well, because: (a) the Eighth Iteration hadn’t been a failure: it had been a confirmation, yes, a disillusionment, a finding-out of things she hoped were not so but were: but a failure? no way Jose; and (b) it really didn’t matter anyway because she was never going to visit Somnhaven again, in any capacity, under any kind of circumstance, because she was done, there was nothing left for her there, and there never would be again. If there ever even had been anything of the sort at all to begin with.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She closed her eyes again. At some point she fell—confirmably this time—asleep: unshowered, her door uncarved.