FALLEN FROM GRACE ⍋ Regulus & Sirius Black

- Chapter 10 -

I DREAM OF DEER,
the first nightmare,
———

It was so dark. Not the kind of dark that invaded your bedroom at midnight, only to be disrupted by the moonlight seeping through your curtains but the kind of dark that robbed you of your vision completely. Not even moonlight dared to dance it's way through the trees.

That's all I could see, the trees, but only if they were right in front of me. Then it was just darkness.

A black space that wasn't empty. I knew it was writhing with life that could clearly see me, though I couldn't see them. It was as if I could feel their eyes latching onto me as confirmation. It was lively in the dead of darkness.

I could hear them.

The rustling of the leaves. The crunching on the ground...the short spurts of exhaled breath.

I could hear them.

"Hello?" I called out in front of me, into the darkness. My voice sounded distorted, as if I was listening to it underwater.

"Hello?" A voice said back.

I spun around, almost falling to my feet. The mud slippy underneath them. My toes squelched in the mulch. Freezing cold but too numb to feel the pain of the sticks that threatened to slice at my bare soles.

The voice was distant. Deep. Belonging to a man.

I could hear more movement. A scuttling.

"I-I'm lost." I could only say in a hushed voice. The beating of my heart blocking my throat.

Although I was seeking for someone and calling for help, the voice startled me and I started slowly backing away. I hadn't expected anyone to reply.

There wasn't the sound of safety echoed in his tone. An unfamiliarity with his voice that triggered an ancestral, built-in, bodily response. A feeling I knew I had never felt before now felt overwhelmingly familiar; like a long forgotten toy clasped, unloved between the very hands that misplaced it. His deep and distant words dug up the very roots of the ground I was standing on and suddenly I felt it, I understood; I was the toy between his fingers.

I pictured a faceless man loitering out of sight. Eager to find me. It felt as if the trees that suffocated each path would only open to him. As I moved, I couldn't disprove that their branches also moved to block my escape. Like they had a life of their own, desperate and consuming, almost as if they didn't want me to leave them behind.

My eyes flickered like the wings on a hummingbird. I couldn't look in all directions, at once. The gaps in the trees...in front of me, behind me, to each and every side of me. There was no safe space for the parts of me that had no eyes.

I let out a shaken breath, the temperature difference between it and the air around me creating a fog.

I kept on backing up, frantically looking around for any escape within the trees that didn't give me a deep feeling of fear or the ground covered in stinging nettles.

"Get out." The voice boomed and I swore I could hear the branches around me move, feel the roots beneath my feet attempt to trip me.

With the warning I started running. But not fast enough, always an obstacle to overcome. It felt as if I were running in slow motion. My feet growing heavier and heavier.

My knees buckled beneath me as I caught my foot under the overgrown root of a plant that seemed to appear out of nowhere and I plummeted to the ground on all fours.

"Get. OUT!" The deep voice shouted. Closer now.

My head lulled at the impact and my hand instinctively reached to my throbbing ankle that now couldn't bear to withhold my weight.

"Fuck." I started sobbing, picking myself up and limping as fast as I could. Fingernails scraping against the trees for support.
"Fuck."

I could hear them.

The breathing. The running. The growling.

My chest started to feel as if my ribcage was being sewn together like the binding of a corset, laces being pulled tighter and tighter together.

My throat felt thick with the freezing air around me.

My ears started to feel full of flu. The sound of being underwater returning.

The pain of my ankles and feet starting to shoot through my once numb body.

That's when I noticed the blood. Berry red, so fresh and quickly flowing that you could paint with it.

I collapsed onto the floor, tears clouding my already limited vision as I backed myself up against a freezing to the touch, damp moss covered boulder.

I hitched my breath.

They were getting closer.

I covered my mouth tightly with my mud covered hands, in attempt to quieten my unsteady breathing even further.

I tried to squeeze my eyes shut but I couldn't seem to. They stayed wide open wild with fear.

The rustling.

It was beyond the trees in front of me.

I tried to conceal a scream as ... stags. Many of them. So many deer. All with their glowing eyes staring at me, as if I shone like car headlights.

Only deer.

I could feel my body relax and I started to pull myself up with the boulder behind me. Clinging onto the grooves in the rock to help support my weight against my twisted ankle.

"Oh thank god." I let out a shaky breath. Gulping on the air that I had tried to survive without.

I smiled at the group of deer, although they started seeming like a figment of my imagination. Each stag looked like a replica of the other. Exactly the same antlers. Exactly the same glowing eyes. Exactly the same movements but in different places.

I wiped my own teary ones and the stags all merged into one.

Just as my eyes readjusted to the trickery around me. The darkness behind the stag started to grow somehow blacker...taller...

The growling rattled the leaves behind the stag and as if it were possessed- it charged at me and knocked me over. Hooves trampling over my body, as the spooked animal turned to face the looming darkness behind it and in front of me.

Those eyes.

I felt my tongue drop to my stomach. My ability to scream being stolen from me.

Death lived in the darkness and he had found me.

It was too late to escape.