Nightmare

Note: IT IS VERY HEAVILY RECOMMENDED TO READ THIS CHAPTER ON AO3. RR TECHINCAL LIMITATION DOES NOT ALLOW ME TO PERFORM BATSHIT INSANE THINGS SO FOR THIS ONCE, PLEASE READ ON AO3. YOU CAN FIND THE CHAPTER LINK IN COMMENT.

I Must Die. I Must Die. I Must Die. I Must Die. I Must Die. I Must Die. I Must Die. I Must Die.

The ground was a scab. It wept grey pus with every step. The horizon—stitched with screams and black lines—threads too thin. One foot. Then the other. Walking and Walking and Walking and Walking.

There. The precipice. The lip of the abscess.

It stood. The vibration in the jelly of the eye translated the impossible. The sky was a corpse mid-rot, draped by countless Suns—not a sphere of plasma, but bleeding ulcers in the firmament, dripping. Each one, they hummed a different frequency of despair. What their darkness had cast was no mere shadow; it was a weight possessing texture. Like the wet fur of a dead animal pressing down against the Earth, struggling to breathe.

The stream weaved through the cracks of reality—worldless, as it said—a silver-black slipstream of anti-memory, erasing the rocks it touched.

The sound. A symphony to decay.

Strings: snapping tendons of dead plate tectonics.

Percussion: melting granite, drip by drip.

Brass: caves collapsing into their own buttomless throats.

Twilight swirled like a filthy bandage unpeeling from infected meat.

I Must Shatter.

I Stepped and Fell.

Wind Howled against my ear; it licked my skin, through a tounge made of glass and silk, tasting and savouring my very being, shattering the very flesh that is me, and then…

I stopped.

Femurs cracked and burst. Wet explosions contained in thigh meat. Jagged bone-spikes forcing through leather sacks of flesh. The sound: green branches snapping in a frozen forest.

Pelvis cracked with a sound akin to a metal plate dropped in an empty cathedral. A shard of of the iliac crest punched upward, kissing cold, dead air—a kiss of calcium and shock.

Spine. The cord became a bruised fruit. The signals screamed. Gurgled. Died in puddles of their own static.

The flesh is but a gown of rot,

Worn tight against the dancing bone.

The breath a debt that's soon forgot,

The heart a drum of borrowed stone.

Ribs now inward. Embraced the screaming lung. A laceration. The lung wheezed aerosolized hemoglobin. The body lay mangled. A marionette with cut strings and burned wood.

But the eyes. The cruel joke; windows unbroken as the house collapsed.

And there.

A flower.

Red. One so deep it rivaled the hazy crimson draping the sky. It bloomed from a crack in the scab. Where roots touched weeping pus which recoiled. Dirt returned. Decay, un-decayed. Rot reversed. The bloom revived the grave.

A frayed nerve fired.

The body dragged. The left radius and ulna ground like chalk mortar. Right humerus hung from gristle-threads like wet cement. The shattered pelvis left a trail of ichor, not just blood.

From dirt. From sky-cracks. From twilight folds. Bruise-colored. Too many joints. Fingernails on palms. Hands reached out.

They found the trailing, useless left leg.

They pulled.

A long, slow, tearing sound. The skin of the calf unzipped. The tendon snapped with an indescribable sound. Flesh came away in cold, fibrous strips. They were unraveling it. A hunk of gluteal meat. The body being dismantled by an unseen, impatient butcher. A harvest of the broken. A piece here. A piece there. The wet, sucking soundsuck of a hip joint being pried from its broken cup.

And yet.

The right hand clawed forward. The left, or what remained of the forearm, trailed.

And the eyes.

The eyes remained on the Red. The RED flower. The negative of the void. The period at the end of the sentence of annihilation.

The hands, They tore away the lower jaw. The scream that tried to escape was just a warm, wet gurgle of air over the exposed root of a tongue. They tore the ears. Sound became a muffled, underwater drown. They tore everything but the reaching arm and the staring eyes.

The fingers closed around the stem. Warm like the breath of a sleeping child.

The hand brought the flower to the ruin of a face. Lips gone. Cheeks tattered. But the black hole where a jaw had been, remained.

Placed it inside. Bit down with remaining teeth.

Light exposed the skin. The nectar drained in me—like the sound of the first bird that had ever sung, compressed into a drop of liquid silence.

Swallow.

Red traveled up. Into spine. Into skull. The optic nerve regaining life. Eyes that had seen corpse suns now filled with Red. Blood Shot.

The invisble hands tearing the body apart stopped. They recoiled. Not in fear. In confusion. The rotting, putrefying soil began to hum.

The mangled tar of flesh hummed along.

And in the crater of the crushed body, a new sound was born.

And from the stem dissolving into blood:

I Must Live.

I Must Live.

I Must Live.

I Must Live. I Must Live. I Must Live.

…

He opened his eyes.

The World laid silent at his wake. What? The usual chirp of birds were missing, muted colours of rays escaped from curtained windows. Klein breathed hard, his chest rising and falling with sheets covering his naked body. He turned, a visible spot missing on his bed—her warmth still remains.

A bead of sweat dripped from his forehead. He stood up from his—no, their bed. Maggaots crawled out from the pores of his flesh, forming an underwear followed by simple pajamas to cover parts of his shame. He drifted out of their room, nose twitching, steps following her intoxicating scent.

It didn't took him too long. She stood in their balcony, looking over the land and sky. Her naked visage covered by his black longcoat, a covered back turned against him but failing to hide the slight twitch between her legs. Klein walked over, now standing just besides her.

Amanises beautiful face, lovely Klein might add, was now veiled by solemn phase. Her dark eyes roamed over a withered patch of flowers in the distance, and the dark clouds looming over the sky. It seemed like the world was frozen solid, the usual bustle from the lively lands conspicuously absent.

Before Klein could vocalize his thought, Amanises spoke. "I have a bad Premonition."

That can't be good… Indeed he could do nothing but lampoon. He pondered his option between cracking a joke or reply seriously. Ultimately, the gravitas of a Knight of Misfortune sensing a dangerous misfortune killed any mood for toomfoolery. He sighed and followed her gaze. "Well I had a nightmare too."

"Of what kind?" She now focused on him, intrigued. He rested his body on the railing. "I dreamed of a crimson world, the sky was shattered and illuminated by countless stars and a cracked gigantic moon. I saw myself at its centre and you." He turned facing her.

"We looked down and saw death. The entire land was decayed, cold and littered with corpses of different races—elves, pheonixes, devils, giants and even humans." He paused only for a moment, eyes stooping low to wood. "Some of whom… I know, or at least have seen once."

Silence permeated between them for moments. "Then there was this bright light, brighter than the stars and even the sun, it was like the glow of a nuclear detonation. In it, we could peer into the heaven of the Astral World and the decaying abyss, the space between them looked like it was was merging. I then found myself in the cushion of darkness… I mean, both literally and figuratively. I could hear someone talking but couldn't decipher the words nor the voice's details."

Amanises knitted her brows, her mind already churning to decipher the weird dream of this top-tier Seer. "What kind of dream is that?" Klein laughed, "It is certainly is one of the wilder ones I ever had." He clapped his hands, straightening. "Anyways, let's start from the buttom:

"The Stars must represent "Them". Its how "Their" bodies appear from within the safe haven of the astral barrier. The Moon is self explanatory but it being cracked is an interesting piece." Immediately, as soon as Klein mentioned the moon, the sky and ground turned pitch black, an aura of serenity and a veil of concealment now covered these great existences.

"If we assume the Moon represents depravity, then I currently I have no clear assumptions. Instead, if it represents Omebella and or Lilith, then then it is a token of bad omen for either of them, or both." His eyes turned hazy for a moment. Amanises ears were permeated by the sound of running Mercury water, calm and thoughtful. She felt a shift in faith, in fortune.

"Hmmm… Nope. There is a thick haze over this part of Destiny."

"Uncertain fate."

"Correct. The scene below looks to be that of a battlefield. It could also be a massacre of some kind but why would so many different entities included?" Amanises rested her head in her hands. "Maybe a clash similar to the night of thrice falls?"

Klein remained silent for a moment. "But why would normal masses be involved in this altercation…" she had no convincing reason. Indeed it didn't make sense. "Whenever I delve into my mind, more specifically, the part of the seal which separates me from The Celestial Worthy of Heaven and Earth, I feel the same feeling of darkness and lack of any mass and buyouncy as I did in the dream. This leads me to believe that part of it references "Him"."

He tapped his chin, deep in thought. "I feel like I am missing something… , ." Klein pondered deeply. "There is something I am forgetting orthough it could be a false alarm."

"I could attempt to recreate the dream."

"It will be of no use or be outright dangerous for you. My mind is conditioned to block peeping Toms, both due to past experiences and the Visionary we often hang around with. And no, I can't simply remove or alter it so casually—would kind of efeat the safeguarding mechanism purpose. Essentially, you'd have to traverse the mental wall and then the labyrinth of that is my mental castle to piece together the broken fragments one by one. Besides if I of all people can't recall something, then dream reenactment simply won't work. It might mean mean the fragments are buried too deep, or something else entirely."

Amanises was both dumbfounded and amazed. What's with all that! Is this not to make the plot complex? She slowly nodded in resignation as Klein got rid of her concealment. "In any case, I'll keep thinking about it and hopefully remember one way or the other. Right now we should be focusing on your bad premonition instead." He stopped and gave a cheeky smile.

"I hope its not because you found last night unimpressive." Amanises serious expression broke into a smile, then a snicker. "On the contrary, I dreamed about it all night long."

She took sideways, edging closer to his chest. Her breath rendered softly against his neck. "Maybe I should have pulled you instead to save this conversation."

Klein's heartbeat rose in an instant. He gulped and then shot back with the same seductiveness. "Nothing's stopping you right now. In fact, I'd prefer that than to worry about something in the far future."

They both flashed a wide grin to each other, bringing their face closer with intent.

It was going to be a quiet and tiresome day.

…

Thump Thump Thump

God looked up in the sky.

"His" radiance missing. "His" light did not illuminate today. The clouds unmade of "His" hands. The wind did not howl with "His" grace. The waves of water did not rise with "His" intent.

A bad premonition, "His" mind suffered from. The shadow under his feet pooled deep, extending into deep depths of the Shadow World. "He" wished to discuss but not intrude upon the two "sinners" plagued with Lust in their heart.

Even a Devil spoke cleaner than two hopeless lovers.

"He" sighed. "His" lips parting, a simple question "He" asked.

"What did the Tyrant Tell?"