[SFW VERSION]
🌹 There's something wonderful in those who stare death in the face. Even in a world wracked by relentless calamity, flowers blossom between a sea of corpses, the shapeless crimson rivers marched over by mechanical instruments of mass...
[It's always the pink haired women in anime who are the most messed up...]
[cough cough happy sugar life] [don't watch that shit]
A million.
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A million strands. Not a lick of movement. A million strands, and none falter. A thousand breaths fill the air. A hundred heartbeats whittle away at one's chest. Muscle and bone turn to liquid under that venomous gaze, and blood ceases to exist. Tendrils of light lap at the darkness spread beyond a veil of sickly red, something rotten and putrid turning cold air hot and musty.
You try to move. You try and try, but there is no movement. Your limbs become weighted, breaths labored and sticking to every fold in your throat. Every huff of air within you scorches your lungs, as though they are held against an inferno waging war on your very consciousness.
Desperate, you pry open your lips.
And the silence persists.
Not a scream, not a whisper, not a whimper — a plea. Nothing escapes your throat, yet there are a hundred things you want to say. Your first instinct is to call for your squad. Rapi, Anis, Neon. But you cannot.
You desperately want to scream at the top of your lungs. But you cannot.
A hundred things you want to say. A thousand reasons why you cannot. A million strands. A million, binding your arms and legs to the endless black boundaries in your sight. Walls that have faded into obscurity. A floor that is nonexistent. Like you were contained in a small black box, there is nothing here but the sound of your own helplessness, the dead stench in the air, the walls that are not truly walls at all.
And a million strands.
A fly, small and alone, caught in the guts of its worst nightmare. A million strands, a million webs, too many to count, all tethering your useless limbs to the edges of the world.
You shut your eyes tight.
No, it's just a dream. I'm having another nightmare.
Those nightmares have learned to spiral out of control, showing you grotesque imagery from every angle — the sight of corrupted Nikkes, dead bodies littering a ruined ground, the feeling that, one day, you will stand alone on the surface and face death in silence. Many a time you have dreamt of being pierced through the heart by a Rapture's gunfire. Backstabbed by a trusted Nikke. Crushed by debris.
Compared to those dreams, this one is tame. As restricting as it is in nature, you're certainly not dead. If you were to die again, you've no doubt it would be horrifying. This nightmare is more vivid than the rest. You can feel, you can taste, you can see clearly. Although there's not much to see, you can't help the rising feeling you're being watched.
Monitored by a familiar energy.
Your eyes peel open and dart down to the ocean of black beneath your bound body. A heavy breath catches in your throat.
It rises from the liquid, deliberate and crawling, the way a plume of smoke might slowly erect from a city of ashes. Beneath it, ripples of water oozing from around its form, now blackened completely to appear instead as ink.
The shape of a hand.
And then a wrist, and then an arm, until its fingers are close enough to grasp the skin at your throat.
You watch, completely helpless, unable to struggle as the lone limb juts out of the sea of ink and tickles along your flesh. An uncomfortable whimper fills your mouth, yet there is still no sound that escapes you. Against your will you're forced to let it handle your skin, its frail fingers spreading across every line in your neck, caressing the shape of bloated veins and the stony Adam's apple resting in the center.
It traces a fingernail along your jugular, prodding gently at the blood vessel. And then, the hand as a whole comes to wrap tightly around your throat, holding you in a vice-grip and denying you every breath.
It hasn't even been two seconds and you feel you're going to die.
You try to cough. You cannot. You try to suck in a deep breath. You cannot. You try to claw at the hand beneath you—
A million strands.
A million strands, and none will allow you to move.
Not here in this gargantuan web. Caught in the middle, a helpless fly. Close to indulging in its dinner, the widow itself.
"A million," says a voice you've heard before. "A million reasons why I despise you. I have them."
You watch, your vision faltering, as the body connected to the lone limb surfaces from beneath the ocean of pitch-black liquid.
First, there is a head of hair. Pink, lush, smells as sweet as a freshly blossomed rose.
Then, there is the face.
Her singular eyeball burns out of the darkness. A purple iris, bleeding through the inky black veil. Droplets of that colorless fluid spill from the figure's eye socket, gushing down dirtied caucasian skin like a rotted, melting syrup.
You know her.
"A million," Dorothy echoes herself. "A million reasons why I should keep you all to myself. I have them. I have every reason."
More of her face lifts from the sea.
A wild smile splits across her lips, the contours of her jaw appearing uncanny and destroyed in a realm of nightmares. Now, all that remains is a broken face, tainted by black tears, the raging burn of her violet eyes, and a mouth that has spread into a grin so impossibly wide that her face is torn.
"A million. A million reasons why I despise you. A million reasons I will keep you, all to myself." Dorothy leans in, breathing into your face — rotten, putrid breath that rivals the smell of dead bodies littering ruined ground. "You will belong to me, Your Grace."
. . .
You open your eyes to the sun glaring down at you. Heat spreads across your face. Look no further and you see the sky, clear and vivid and blue.
As you expected, it was just another one of your bad dreams. You know, the ones where you die brutally or get chased down by something or...
No, no, that's not right. That one was different. You were paralyzed.
You sit up, patting the ground around you, coming back to your senses. A field of grass stretches beyond you. Doesn't take long for you to remember — this is Eden. The towering structure at the edge of the field should have been clear proof of that.
"Ugh..." You rub your eyes. "I need to fix this sleep schedule. I don't know how many more nightmares I can take."
"Ah, you're awake."
The voice startles you out of your thoughts. It occurs to you that you're not alone.
And perhaps you never were to begin with.
Looking ahead, you see her. Dorothy, pinned in all her perfect, glorious attire, the whites of her dress shimmering beneath the onslaught of sunlight. She stands there in the middle of the field, not far away, her eyes trained on the sky until she feels the need to turn and face you instead.
When you see that subtle glow in her irises once more, there's a gnawing feeling in your chest. A sixth sense, if you will. Behind those eyes, there is something else. A shape, a bunch of white lines converging into a pattern that looks all too similar to some sort of web—
You stop.
"How was your nap?" A soft smile breaks across her face, her eyes sparkling.
