The key slipped into its hole like a hot knife through butter. As she turned it, however, she felt a certain resistance which was anything but physical. It was like trying to put two magnets with the same pole together, only as she turned the key this force intensified greatly. At one point, she even had to use both hands just to keep turning the key clockwise. After she had turned the key about sixty degrees, which was by no means an easy feat, she was startled out of her wits when the resistance suddenly let off completely, as if she had snapped a rubber band, and the key rammed itself into a ninety degree angle. An audible boom could be heard when this happened; whether this was because of some lock within the door or the dissipation of the force which had tried to reject her remained a mystery. Valkyrie was mostly surprised but also somewhat relieved to find that she would not have to go through the laborious task of pulling the huge door open – it opened all on its own to welcome the curios creature who dared to unlock it.
At first, all that could be seen behind the door was purest darkness. As Valkyrie’s eyes adjusted, she could make out what looked to be the mouth of a cave, with stalagmites and stalactites of varying sizes. Further adjustment of the eyes resulted in a shocking discovery. The entirety of the cave, from what she could see, was covered in some kind of liquid substance – viscous as magma and pure black. Pure black, that is, until Valkyrie’s eyes were able to make out various disturbances of red, green, and purple in the most eerie shades of the color. They appeared and dissipated much in the pattern of bubbles do in boiling water. To worsen it, the substance clearly did not behave like lava. It had a mind of its own; able, somehow, to climb uphill and launch pieces of itself upward to cling onto nearby stalactites.
The whole sight was simply disturbing on a level beyond the ability of language to communicate. The whole incoherence of the blob, perverted with its possession of a single and apparently intelligent Mind, gave the appearance of what a theologian might describe as Hell. How this blob communicated such evil to the beholder added to the mystery, but anyone observing it would swear by the following description. What Valkyrie now viewed looked like a collection of souls, swallowed up and stripped of their self-determination by a single Malevolence who now bathed in an ocean of his depraved prizes. Valkyrie could swear that she saw the eyes of this Malevolence – two white holes, side by side on a single mound of the Darkness, seemed to peer out into the new and ripe world which had been opened to them.
Valkyrie’s previous ambition to fight whatever evil she might encounter evaporated in an instant. The absurd ignorance upon which the ambition was founded in the first place came to her on such a wave of self-critique that, following the shock of the sight, she felt exceeding embarrassment at the fact that she could not muster the bravery even to try and engage the Nightmare Matter which stood before her. For a moment she tried, but to no avail. The notion of fighting it was idiotic – surely even one experienced in wielding the Royal Scepter would be unable to fight this vast and seemingly infinite ocean of malice! She simply stood for a moment and stared, dumbfounded by the guilt of what she had done.
“We have to close it!” Valkyrie exclaimed upon returning to her senses, expecting Flip to agree and help her with the task of pushing the huge door closed. She ran to the door and began pushing it closed helplessly, budging it by mere centimeters. “Flip?!” The considerable difficulty of her task caused her to realize that Flip was not even helping her, and she began looking around for him frantically. A cold shiver ran down her spine following the discovery that Flip was standing not far off, his back facing the Nightmare Matter as it squirmed and writhed. Was he oblivious even to this? In spite of the twisted picture that Valkyrie currently perceived, there was no time for hesitation, and she immediately ran up to him to tap him on the shoulder and get his attention. “Flip!” she said once again.
YOU ARE READING
Nightmares
Fantasy“C’mon,” Flip said to Valkyrie somewhat mischievously (a mood which was wholly inappropriate for the situation at hand), “Let’s open it.” He was referring, of course, to the imposing wooden door which stood before them, some three times Valkyrie’s...
