Felis Leo

Chapter III: Take Me To Church

It began at the house in the woods.

It was the same house Ellie had been in every single night, though this time she was focused. It's only a dream, it's only a dream, it's only a dream. And the true advantage of her situation was that Leo had not yet realized that Ellie knew she was dreaming. With her focus overpowering her need for peace, she left Dean's side, left the comfort of the cottage walls, raced past soulless El, and into the woods. She closed her eyes as she tumbled down the mountain side, focusing on turning her old joints back into young ones, and from there, ran right at the source of energy she could now feel was causing her dream: Leo.

She passed into his mind so quickly that when she arrived in his head, he failed to notice her at first, only acknowledging that she was gone from the dream that he had set for her. Thus, she crept into his head, into his ideas, into his psyche - unnoticed.

Ellie found herself standing in a dirt driveway in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by grasslands. A starry night filled the sky, and no street lights illuminated the chillingly silent surroundings. At the end of the dirt road, appearing to glow against the dark backdrop, was a church. It was a simple, tall structure built from old materials, with layers of peeling white paint caking onto the outside of it. Four large, simple walls made up the outside, and the tin roof suggested that the building was a transformed barn. From the top of the building jutted a white steeple, like a compass needle pointing towards the heavens, and a single window filled with stained glass decorated the front of the building, just above the double front doors. In a series of red and green and yellow glass there was displayed the artwork of a perfect circle with a simple cross across the middle: the Roman symbol for Earth. Ellie only knew of its meaning from a highschool astronomy elective, but its familiarity made her tensions ease slightly.

She began to walk down the dirt road towards the white church, and an icy wind shredded through the trees, biting at her skin as she walked further. It was an unnatural wind, the kind that accompany foul beings, the kind tremendously out of place in such a summer month as this. A faint smell of rotting blood was carried to Ellie on it's crisp whirls, but she dismissed it as a likely nosebleed from the exertion of entering Leo's head. She continued forward.

As Ellie neared the windowless church doors, a violent chill trembled down her spine, reeking of warning, screaming to turn back now.

"Turn back now," a raven croaked in the treeline, echoing the very thoughts in her head. "Turn back now," it repeated with its gurgling caw. But Ellie pushed forward. As she raised a hand to turn the crystal door knob, she glanced up and saw a carving in the top piece of wood on the door frame, one that was too small to see from a distance.

"Ever beaming, still I hang,

Bright as when my birth I sang,

From chaotic night,

In the boundless, azure dome,

Where I've made my constant home,

Till thousand, thousand years have come,

To sweep Earth's things from sight!"

The words, though familiar to Ellie, came from a source that escaped her. Still, she grasped the crystal door knob in front of her, and turned open the door.

Inside were rows upon rows of wooden pews, which she didn't need to sit in to know they creaked. From a window upon the back wall, starlight flooded into the building, illuminating a wooden stage at the opposite end of the room. Initially, the most unusual thing about the room was that for a church, it was quite barren. There were no bibles in the backs of pews. There were no tissues at the end of the aisles. There was no platform on the stage to hold papers. There were no curtains on the windows. There were no colored cloths decorating the walls. The only personality to the building was the simple Roman symbol of Earth in the stained glass window, and now, the blood dripping through the ceiling.