SOUL DORM

19

Celebrate good times, come on.

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CHAPTER 19:

GUARDIAN

I've never been afraid of swimming. Whether it's a pool, the sea, or the ocean... No matter the size, water has always been my closest companion since I was a little kid. But today... it was suffocating me, pulling me down to the depths, wanting to annihilate me. I struggled. Resistance was futile. Unshed screams lodged in my throat. Aside from the pressure weighing me down, there were dozens of arms in the darkness that had trapped me. They slithered, struck, seared wherever they passed.

I had died once before. I shouldn't be able to die again. Yet, I felt life being ripped from my body. The chains that bound my soul to this realm were breaking one by one. I had failed. Both at dying and at returning. I was a foolish soul, who couldn't even grasp onto purgatory. I was leaving. Into nothingness... Into the void... Into endless oblivion...

I gave up struggling. I had no strength left anyway. At that moment, light enveloped the darkness, swallowing all the shades of white and black. Perhaps this was how the end looked like. When you reached the finish line, there would be nothing left to see. The pressure was gone, the pain vanished, the torture ended. My brain stopped thinking. My body ceased feeling. Slowly, I disintegrated, crumbled, dissolved, merged with the light, expanded, grew.

But there was a mistake. Amidst all this tranquility, a new sensation emerged after a while. It was warm. Wet. And... sticky. An unsettling impulse spread within the void, like a coffee stain dripping onto a pristine white carpet. So much so that the dimensionless light now had boundaries again. Awareness was returning. I wasn't infinite. I wasn't nothing. Senses, emotions, thoughts filled the shell of my being. And then, as if someone had spat me out of a womb, my eyes suddenly opened to colors.

The first thing I saw was a pink nose, a pink tongue, and long whiskers. That tongue licked my cheek and left behind warm, wet, sticky saliva. When it withdrew, its eyes, resembling purple beads, entered the picture. Pink ears, white fur, a big butt were added to the scene. It was a cat, and I knew that cat.

"Meow."

Memories flooded back to me with painful intensity. I straightened up as if surfacing from underwater. But I wasn't in the water; I was in a bed. My movement startled the cat, causing it to jump to the corner. It toppled onto its rear and happily licked its paw. In stark contrast to its comfort, I scanned my surroundings in horror. I was in a large hall. Rows of beds, more than I could count, were arranged side by side and facing each other. Bright sunlight streamed in through the windows, revealing a lilac sky beyond.

It wasn't night anymore. I wasn't by the lake anymore. I wasn't wearing Ursa's tailored clothes anymore. How did this happen? How did I escape that monster, how did I manage to emerge from the water? I examined my arms. Not a scratch. I tossed aside the cover and pulled up the nightgown. My wrist, which I was sure had been burnt, was intact. My skin looked even healthier than before.

How?

"Don't worry, everything's fine."

I sprang up on my knees, completely disoriented. The cat beside me had puffed up and hunched over. Somehow, I had managed to grasp the pillow like a shield between my hands, and it was against my chest. I needed to learn not to trust my reflexes, which thought that a pillow filled with goose feathers could block my enemy's attack. But then again, the enemy wasn't really an enemy. There was a mischievous grin on angel Ria's face when my eyes adjusted to the light and saw her coming towards me.