Your heart races as you run down the streets. Once again, countless dark purple crystals pierce through from beneath the ground and tear through the city all around you. You leap and dodge out of the way as broken glass and chunks of concrete fall all around you like rain. Time seems to slow down when they hit the asphalt, where they shatter and break into even smaller pieces.

Behind you is the shadow creature, slowly but steadily coming after you. Its translucent purple blade hovers along obediently at its side.

And gripping your hand fiercely in front of you is Kaja. The wind rushes around the both of you as sweat drips down your brows. You’re both panting heavily, tired from constantly running.

Your chest heaves as you take in as much air as you can - your body feels tight everywhere, and your muscles are burning. You want to stop. No, you’ve wanted to stop a while ago. But you can’t.

The only way is forward, because to slow or to stop or to stay is death.

Despite your fear, despite your anxiety, despite your pain, you smile. And you can’t help it - you’re deep in your recurring dream. You hated it the first dozen times it happened. Being a part of the dream truly gnawed on you. Then you grew to eventually accept that it simply wouldn’t stop, despite the ache in your heart.

At some point, you began to cherish it.

Sure, it always results in death and loss, over and over. Watching Kaja die and leave you… it wrenches a part of your soul every single time. But the dreams also allow you more time with Kaja. You get to spend hours with her, again and again and again. Those are the moments you cherish greatly.

They might have been the worst two days of your life, but they’ve also been the absolute best. Nothing you’ve ever experienced has even come close.

It’s a shame you had to ruin things. Maybe if you didn’t try to end things with her, she wouldn’t have been so eager to… disappear. If you instead fought for her to be by your side, she might still be around. And you wouldn’t have to go on this trip.

Now you’ve come to a point where your dream is tiring. Yes, you love what time you can spend with her, yes you hate the heartache at the end. But most of all, you know it’s all futile.

Kaja’s dead, and these dreams only anchor your mind to the past. It’s time to end them, somehow. Whatever it takes.

You shake the thoughts away, afraid to go any further. You instead return to your dream. Time in your dream has slowed to a crawl, or perhaps your perception has sped up. Either way, you’ve learned to float about in your own memories, through your dreams.

In this way, you can better appreciate the small, beautiful moments, or lament your most terrible ones.

A massive bolt of lightning breaks through your reverie and slams into the four-way intersection in front of you. Your ears ring from the deafening blast it creates, and you raise your arms up defensively out of pure instinct.

Chunks of asphalt are torn out the road as the lightning punches deep into it. A shock wave rushes out from the point of impact, which throws you to the ground with ease. Detritus and debris fly past, even as abandoned cars and such are pushed a meter or so.

Though the shock wave sweeps through you, its electrical energies seem to remain in you. It’s not enough to harm you, but enough to jolt your entire system out of complacency.

The lightning bolt itself hasn’t ended - it continues to smash into the ground, as though it’s a never ending strike. Your eyes go wide at the sight. Nothing like this happened to your dreams, ever, and you’re certain that this is the first time it has ever been interrupted.

The very sight of it leaves you in awe.

Kaja stands up as fast as she can, then beckons for you to keep running. She glances behind the both of you frantically, presumably towards the shadow creature, then grabs you by the shoulder and tugs you back onto your feet.

All the while, you’re still enraptured by the lightning, unable to pull your full attention away from it. The bolt itself seems to pull you in hypnotically, as though it wants you to walk into it. A part of you shivers at the prospect.

A booming feline voice echoes all around you, as though it comes from the skies above. But you also hear it reverberate in your own head, as though it’s bouncing around a vast, empty shell.

“Wake up, you idiot!” says the voice. “Wake the hell up right now!!”

You feel a sting on your cheek, which immediately breaks you out of your reverie. When your eyes refocus, Kaja is in front of you with both hands on your shoulders.

“Snap out of it!” she tells you. “Come on, run. Run!”

Kaja then grabs you by the hand and tugs you hard, causing you to somewhat reluctantly put one foot in front of the other. You stop after a second to hold your ground, which causes Kaja’s face to get filled with surprise and fear and .

“What’re you doing?” she says, frantically. “It’s coming to get us! We need to go!”

“No, wait, Noir’s in trouble,” you reply, half in a haze. “Gotta stop this.”

“Noir? What the hell are you talking about? Come on already! Let’s get outta here!”

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“I just need a second to think, alright…”

It pains you to tune out Kaja, but some part of you knows you have to. This is just the dream, and you can always come back to it any time. For now, you’ve gotta wake up. The problem is simply that you don’t know how to.

All this time, not only has your dream ever stopped or been interrupted, but you haven’t done anything to stop or interrupt it on purpose, either. Of course there’ve been times when you’ve wanted it to end prematurely, but found that you couldn’t. Something else inside of you always holds you back.

A greater part of you never wants the dream to end. That part of you would rather give everything else up just for another moment with Kaja, no matter how unreal it is. After all, this dream is all you’ve got left of her now.

Strange how you wanted to end things, only to deeply regret it as much as you do now.

And of course, the dream itself has become more than tiresome. You feel it making you insane, every time it happens. You know it has to end. You know you’ve got to get rid of it. It’s the only way forward.

To stay is to meet death, in more ways than one.

But how? No matter how fast your heart beats or how far it falls, the dream keeps on going, always. Your dream always runs uninterrupted all the way to the end, when you pass out from psionic exhaustion, when it turns into a nightmare, when Kaja dies.

Always.

Time slows down to a crawl again as you take hold of your innermost thoughts. You’ve got to figure out how to get out of this. You suppose you could let the dream end by itself, but then who knows what would happen in the meantime? Noir could get killed! And so could you.

Wake up already! Noir’s voice reverberates around your head.

“I’m trying, alright!” you shout out. But you aren’t sure if anyone hears you. Noir doesn’t respond, not exactly

A cat-like wailing echoes all around, followed by a loud hissing. Then comes a yelp, and the lightning vanishes in a flash of light, just as suddenly as it had come. Whatever damage it had done to the landscape of your memory also disappears in its wake.

You tremble, not knowing exactly what happened, if Noir has been killed. And now that the lightning is gone, you can’t use it to wake yourself. If you could even use it to wake yourself.

A soft curse escapes your lips, frustration at your inability to get out of here on your own fills you. But instead of lamenting and burying yourself like the past, you push the feeling aside. You’ve spent more than enough time feeling helpless and pathetic and useless. It’s time to end that.

If you can’t be with Kaja any longer, then you may as well be more like her. That’s the only real way she can still be a part of your life.

Though you understand that this is the path you need to take, the Kaja in your dream tugs at your arm, even in stillness. Your resolve weakens the more you look at her, the more you indulge in the memory and the dream…

No! You have to get out of here!

You shake yourself free of her frozen grip and pull your hand away. Then you strike yourself as hard as you can, palm to cheek. But you feel nothing. Even when you try over and over, nothing changes and you feel little. Which makes sense - your actual, physical body is just laying there on the garage floor.

Dream Kaja reaches out in alarm, attempting to stop you from striking yourself. She pleads with you to stop, to go with her.

Because of that, a part of you starts to wander back towards Kaja, and you have to consciously pry yourself away. You force your thoughts to focus on the task at hand, and wake from your dream. This becomes harder and harder as the moments pass, and you feel your heart and mind getting torn in two.

Almost like parts of you want to splinter off to indulge in a past long since gone.

You put one foot in front of the other and break out into a run. If you can get away from here, then maybe you could shake yourself awake. Maybe you can become free of all of this. But even as you push your legs to go as fast as they can, the world crawls past, as though you’re running in a river of mud.

Frustration wells up inside you as you look up into the buildings around you. You want to get up there, to jump off the roofs, to wake before you hit the ground. But you can barely move now, even though you were running just earlier.

Worse, when you finally get to a door you find that you can’t even open it. It’s shut tight and practically impassable. You try to force it open with all your might, but it doesn’t even budge. When you try to get through a shattered window to get inside, find that you can’t pass that either.

Of course it’d be an invisible wall - this is just a dream, just a memory. You never went into any of these buildings - you ran down the streets. You’ve no idea and no knowledge of what’s in any of them. Makes sense you can’t now do that. You can’t veer too far from your own memories, no matter how much psionic energy you use up, or how imaginative you think you are.

A part of you looks back behind you, wanting to know how far you’ve gotten away from the memory of Kaja. It feels like you’ve gone down half a street, and fully expect her to be running towards you. But when you turn she’s right next to you.

Frustration wells inside you at the contradictory emotions that flood you. You want to be right here, always. But you want to leave, too. And hopefully never come back. You’re tired of feeling all these things whenever you get into this dream, this nightmare. You hate that it all tumbles down around you, suffocating you with all these conflicting thoughts and emotions.

All the happiness and the loss and the frustration and the disappointment, all of which turns into a bittersweet loneliness on waking. Your heart and mind can’t take much more.

This all has to stop, one way or another.

You look ahead of you, past the four-way intersection, and into the street beyond that. There, the shadow of numerous crumbling buildings meld together to make one large one on the asphalt. Up above, they’re suspended in the air in mid-fall, stalled by your will. And an idea takes hold.

You allow time to flow normally again, and allow your dream to come back to life. The world shakes as it ends, and Kaja grabs your hand yet again. She tugs at you one more time, worry plastered on her face.

You run with her this go around. But instead of letting her lead, you run ahead of her, and pull her with you. And instead of turning left at the intersection in front of you, you keep going forward.

“Wait!” Kaja objects, but you tune her out as much as you can.

Instead, you keep running down the street, towards the ever-growing shadows. You run as fast as you can, this time seemingly unhindered. Your heart beats madly in your chest as you glance up at the sky above you.

There, the detritus of countless buildings fall closer and closer.

You barely feel it when Kaja stops in her tracks. She attempts to hold a tight grip on your hand, but your fingers slip away from each other.

A second later, the falling chunk of building crashes all around you, crushing you completely. You feel shards of stone and metal smash down on your body, but only just. There’s a sliver of a moment when you feel a terrible weight on your body.

Your heart beats one more time, heavily and loudly and deeply. It comes with an all-encompassing darkness that mutes out everything else around you.

Then, you wake.