Lauren was leaning against the bathroom wall, panting. Her mother had warned her for months, rambled on and on about burnout and Uncle Ern and his paranoid schizophrenia. And now it had happened. Lauren had gone mad. That was the only logical explanation for what she had just seen.

Despite the danger, she poked her head out of the door again and –

No. Still there. The giant, fiery-red dragon was still out there, smashing office furniture with its tree trunk legs and roaring at her colleagues. As she watched, it opened its mouth and belched out a jet of fire straight at Eva the Terrible. Lauren could feel the heat on her face.

She hurriedly shut the door. Hallucinations weren’t supposed to singe your eyebrows, were they? The dragon roared again, closer this time. Panicked, Lauren looked around for a way out. But the bathroom was in the middle of the building and had no windows. If it had, Lauren probably would have climbed out of one weeks ago.

Something caught her eye. A faint, golden light was flowing out from under the door to the last cubicle. The one with the big “Out of Order” sign that had been there for months. This would probably be mentioned in her next performance review but given the choice between death by dragon and a low score… she pushed the door gently. She gasped.

Not only had the door opened, but the room behind it looked nothing like what Lauren had expected. There was no toilet. There was no back wall either. Instead, a large, perfectly circular hole led into a tunnel that appeared… Lauren stepped closer. Yep. A tunnel with walls of solid gold.

She hesitated. Maybe this was a hallucination, after all. But a third roar that sounded like it had come from just outside the door made the decision for her. She hurried into the cubicle, locked the door behind her and stepped into the tunnel.

The floor was strangely warm. It also seemed to be humming. She took a few steps and noticed that despite the fading glare of the bathroom lights, the tunnel wasn’t growing dark. The golden walls were emitting a faint but consistent glow.

She squinted into the golden twilight. The walls stretched on as far as she could see. The floor seemed to slope down slightly, but that was the only thing she could say for sure. But what choice did she have? She hurried on.

When she had gone so far that the cubicle had shrunk to a tiny white speck behind her, she stopped and listened. Silence. No hint of a roar or thundering footsteps to be heard. With a sigh of relief, she leaned against the wall and slid to the floor.

She buried her face in her hands. Her memories of the events in the office felt unreal, like they had happened in a dream or a film. But there was no denying it, especially sitting as she was in a golden tunnel, miles from where the building should have ended: A grotesque monster had burned her boss to a crisp before her eyes. Seconds after Lauren had fantasised about murdering said boss in vivid detail.

Her mind flooded with icy cold. Could it really be a coincidence? She leaned her head back against the tunnel wall and closed her eyes. One thing was certain. She should never have listened to her mother.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It really works”, she had told Lauren when they finally met up on Tuesday. Lauren had been exhausted, her makeup all smudged from crying in the office bathroom, but her mum had insisted on going out for dinner anyway. And then proceeded to tell Lauren about the latest self-help trick that had supposedly transformed her life: Visualisations.

“You picture your perfect reality, right down to the teeniest detail”, she said, making a sweeping gesture with her fork. “Think about everything – the sights, the sounds, how it would smell and feel. Visualise it every morning when you wake up. I promise you, before you know it, it will come true.” She stabbed the fork into her steak. “The universe wants to help you. It just needs to know what you want.”

Lauren had told the universe what she wanted. And five seconds later, it had happened.

If only she’d known… She hadn’t wanted Eva to die. Not really. Lose her wallet and have to replace all her cards, sure. Get a really embarrassing and incurable disease, maybe. But death? No way. She opened her eyes and stared at the gleaming ceiling, tried to blink away the sting, tried to banish the images burned into her mind.

The ground trembled beneath her. Had she just imagined – no, there it was again. A second later, she could hear it, too. A roar. Dim but unmistakeable. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and her heart started thumping against her ribs. It was the dragon, and it was in the bathroom.

She jumped to her feet. Behind her, a loud clang echoed through the tunnel. The unmistakeable sound of a door being wrenched from its hinges. She started to run. Her one hope was that the tunnel was too narrow for the giant monster.

Another roar, closer this time. A gush of hot air whooshed past her. The walls around her peeled and cracked, and a trickle of sweat poured down her back. Her stomach twisted as she realised what it meant: The dragon was burning away the edges of the tunnel, enlarging it until it could force its way through.

She sped up, running faster than she had ever run in her life. Still, it was not enough. The next burst of fire made her cry out in pain as it seared the back of her dress.

I am going to be burned alive in this tunnel. The realisation crashed over her in time with the next blast. And then another thought, out of nowhere: If she had conjured the dragon through visualisation, maybe she could visualise her way out of this.

Without slowing down, she closed her eyes and pictured the tunnel in front of her slanting down at a sharp angle. She could see it on the back of her eyelids: The floor falling away, its edges bending up, the middle turning hollow and smooth. She imagined the wind in her hair, the sound it would make, the glint of the light as it reflected off the curves. Please let this work. Please.

She opened her eyes. The tunnel had turned into a steep chute.

She hurled herself onto it, crashing face first into its sloping floor, and then she was gliding, gliding so fast it felt more like falling. The rush of the wind in her ears drowned out the clamour behind her, and she was just starting to worry how long this would go on for, what would happen when –

Thud. She had hit a soft, springy something. She scrambled to her knees and tried to stop the world from swaying. Her head felt like a football that had just been kicked halfway across the pitch.

Another tremor. She looked around in terror for the dragon, but instead a group of people came running around the corner.

“Where is it?”, a man shouted at her. “Where is the dragon?”

She pointed wordlessly at the entrance to the chute. The man raised his fingers and the chute dropped back to the level of the floor and lower still, until it was tilting gently downwards. The man disappeared through the entrance, followed by the others.

Another man came trotting towards her. He was about her age, she guessed, tall and gangly with the most mismatched mix of clothes she had ever seen.

He held out his hand to her. She took it and let him pull her to her feet.

“Are you alright?”

She opened her mouth and vomited on his bright purple leather boots.