To live again

Chapter 6 - The poison inside me

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Nightmare opens his eyes, but he doesn't see the white walls of his hospital room… He looks around. He is outside, but the sky is bloody red, the grass looks almost dead and there is an extremely uncomfortable negative aura in the air. Way too negative.

Where am I? Nightmare asks himself, a bit concerned. He hears voices a bit further away from him. He can tell that they are angry, very angry. This only makes the fear in his soul grow. He slowly takes a few steps back. His legs are shaking. But when he takes one more step, he bumps into something. He jumps up from how startled he felt. He quickly turns around. Then he finally realizes where he is. Oh… he's home.

He is facing the tree of feelings. His mother. But… it is not like the beautiful tree he remembers. No… Almost all the leaves are gone, the apples are only black with no gold in seight. The tree looks dead. What happened?!

Nightmare's panic is rising. His breath gets faster as he hears the voices get louder and closer. He turns his head around and sees a crowd coming towards the tree. There are many familiar faces he wished he would never see again. The villagers.

He started to panic even more than he already was. Why is this happening?! Where is Dream? Why is he here? He starts to tear up. Nightmare wants to just curl up on the ground and cry. The villagers were surrounding him, yelling insults and threats. He doesn't know what to do. He cannot run anywhere and there is no way of defending himself against the whole village. He is terrified and his whole body seems to be shaking out of fear. The only reason why he is still able to stand is because of the tree of feeling’s he is leaning on. They are getting closer.

Then a familiar cold feeling runs through him. Suddenly he hears a deep voice. But… it doesn't belong to anyone around him. It's like someone was talking within his head…what?

“You need to get stronger.” the unknown person whispears to him. What does that mean? Nightmare is confused. Then he notices it. He is holding something. He looks at his shaky hand and realizes that he has a black apple in his hand.

“Eat it.”  Night hears the voice say. What? No! “You need to eat the apple. It will make you stronger.” B-but… “Do you want to die?” He freezes at that question. He looks up from the apple and finds the angry mob so much closer. They are holding axes, knives, pitchforks and pretty much anything that could be used as a weapon. Nightmare feels absolute terror. He doesn't want to die.

“Eat the apple. If you don't, then they will kill you mercilessly. There is no one to save. You need to get stronger.” The voice is even more insistent this time. Nightmare once again looks down at the apple in his hand. It feels wrong. It feels very wrong. But… does he even have a choice. Tears are running down his face. He doesn't want to do it. But he doesn't want to die either.

“Eat it.” And he does. He takes a bite out of the dark apple. The taste is weird at first, but then a surge of energy goes through him. It… it feels nice. He then finishes the whole apple. The feeling of his magic being stronger is somehow comforting.

“That's not enough. You need to have more or you won't survive. You need to be stronger.” He can only agree with the voice. He is not strong enough yet. He picks up another apple. Though he stops for a second. Something deep inside him is telling him this is extremely wrong and he should stop…But the fear of getting slashed and beaten until he is just a pile of dust is stronger. He takes a bite out of the forbidden fruit. From that moment on his fate was sealed.

He ended up in a vicious cycle. He kept eating more apples. The feeling of his magic made him feel wonderful and powerful inside. He couldn't get enough. He still needed more. He started to drown out everything around him and only listened to the encouragement of the deep voice. He already ate so many, the juice is dripping down his chin, his tears were replaced with dark liquid. Cores of black apples are liening all around him. But still he couldn't stop. He needs more.
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