Cedric peered around the corner of the bunker he’d chosen to hide behind, quietly observing Dyllan’s Nightmare. The monster was only a platform away, and stood eerily still. It’s inhuman face gazed vacantly forward - not quite alive but not quite dead - and certainly anything but alert. It was reminiscent of when an old record player’s needle slipped a groove - the record still spinning, but no sound coming out.

It was infuriating, having so little information. Knowledge was strategy’s fuel, and tactics’ nursery - he couldn’t make informed decisions without information. He needed something to help him come up with a plan, but right now he only knew three things for certain:

He knew that Dyllan’s Nightmare was incredibly dangerous, which made him nervous. He also knew that Andie had an uncanny ability to take an impossible situation and pull out a happy ending, which gave him hope. But he also knew that Andie routinely overestimated her capabilities and dove into fights she had no chance of winning, which made him doubt his hope.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

In other words, Cedric knew that he knew nothing.

Any second now, everything could either go horribly wrong or perfectly right. And he had no way of knowing which was coming… if either one was coming at all. He couldn’t just blindly trust Andie, but he couldn’t just charge in and risk interrupting her plan. He needed to know more.

Cedric took a deep breath. Should he risk dropping the illusion that kept him hidden? Would the Nightmare respond to his presence if he suddenly appeared before it? Was it completely oblivious to its surroundings, or simply distracted?

A loud rumbling shook the stagnant air of the mindscape, knocking Cedric off his feet. Rarely a good sign.

Dyllan’s Nightmare violently spasmed back into motion as it began to tear like it was being unzipped along its spine, revealing a bright crimson light, and - hopefully - demonstrating the difference between “rarely” and “never.”

The Nightmare unleashed a twisted howl that shook the entire mindscape with a sort of elastic rhythm - like a guitar string that had just been plucked. The many platforms and bunkers began to creak and crack as they shook apart, breaking open to spill shadowy, gooey, oily, black hate.

Yeah. No. This was definitely bad.