LadyIndigo Habitica 01-08-2021

Written by: LadyIndigo

Finish the Story - ''At the mall, you walk by a mannequin that looks just like you. Something odd is happening...''

...Your skin is crawling with a wrongness that clings to it like an oily film, but your eyes flitting about the empty mall can find no obvious threat. Well, except for the fact that your face is everywhere. From television screens, mannequins, even magazine covers your own eyes are looking back at you. Tracking you. Flat and empty and hungry, their attention pulls at your movements like tar, tries to make you stop, be still. Their sneering mouths curl at you in a bloodthirsty parody of a smile. It is instinct that keeps you slogging onward, past window after window, past shop after abandoned shop. There is nowhere to go but forward. Storefronts are stretching out in front of you in an endless corridor, with only your own face as company.

Your thoughts move languid as molasses, slow and dull as you trudge ahead. Don’t stop, keep walking, keep walking. It echoes in the mist clouding your mind. There is a whisper of an idea underneath, a memory teasing just outside your reach, if you could just… It slips away again. Almost, you stop moving with the wave of frustration crashing over you. Instinctual fear claws at you at that, to keep moving. The terrified snarl almost does not sound like yourself, even inside your own head.

Oh.

You blink. A slow grin splits your face, and you know you have nothing in common with those facsimiles of you then. Reaching down, your hands wrap around the reassuringly solid handles of your daggers materializing with a thought, clear now. They drip with the power of the Dreamscape. All around you, your replicas awkwardly pull themselves free from screens and pages. Their façade quivers and falls in places to reveal the grey, sooty mist that the Nightmares are made of as they are coming towards you. They are an army. You are one person. But you have a power they will always be hopeless against. They realize what you are going to do and rush forward as they are able, reaching, grasping. Just before the wisps of their claws touch your skin, you bury the dagger in your right hand in your chest. Still delightedly laughing, body thrumming with adrenaline, you gasp awake.