Life of the Strange

Those are Visions

After the day had started to melt into night, it was time Siren thought she would actually try to sleep again.

Siren's room was near the front of the castle and, like most of the residential rooms, on the spire-half. The light in the room felt artificial and sparse.

No one slept in a room with a window or porthole, just in case a small monster or something of that caliber won't get in if the glass ever gave way. So one got used to lamp and electronic light as their prime source of sight (unless you were Tenor, who was the blind member of the castle and as such didn't need light at all).

The walls were a salmon color that Siren never really paid mind to, and the bed was a four banister build with a neatly carved headboard. She had stripped the bannisters of its willowy curtains long ago, she didn't like how it made her feel caged in whenever she tried to sleep.

A fine sheen of dust was skimmed across her wooden dresser, and there was a small bathroom out to the side of the room.

The room, despite the decorative carpet and nicely sized bed, was kept sparse.
Siren slipped under the covers of her bed and listened to the wilds that rang outside the castle. Bird and bug songs mixed with something else. She tried not to listen to the something else.

Fatigue had finally gotten her in its clutches, and she felt her eyelids heavily droop shut. She couldn't quarrel with sleep anymore. Whatever dreams or nightmares in the back of her brain waiting to creep out was just a fact she had to deal with.

In the darkness, she calmly drifted away from consciousness.

It was the light that shows up first in her dreams. A warning light. She knew its intentions were sinister. It invaded her sight like a beacon, calling to her. Inviting her in. Exposing the ugliness of the world around her.

Siren was standing in the middle of a forest. She recognized the flora and fauna, shadowy in the night, to be something she's seen before. She was outside the castle. Green, brown, and other faint colors swam before her eyes in the dark.

The hum of the animals and the swaying of the plants, one big living organism breathing and speaking to each other. The trees tight-knit, leaves and branches gently skimming her clothes. Patches and patterns of dim moonlight dotting her skin.

All very calm and mysterious.

Siren couldn't shake feeling something was waiting for her. (every cracked-up dream of hers had to keep it ominous.)

And there was the light, deep into the trees. It flickered just so. Maybe a fire or a flashlight, but Siren couldn't deduce its origin.
An inhuman noise broke her from the gentle scenery, something in between a wail and a roar. A monster.

Siren let the branches scratch her skin and grab at her hair as she broke into a run.
She crashed through the undergrowth and broke crisp limbs off of trees, puffing toward the gleaming light– even though everything about it set the hairs on the back of her neck straight up, it was better than the hungry monster about to chomp on her bones. The light that called to her, always the sinister beacon.

Thud thud thud thud thud...

Her heartbeat mingled with the sound of footsteps–hers and the lumbering monster's. Alarms went off in the back of her head, telling her to escape and to run run run faster faster faster.

Which she gladly obliged like a scared animal.
The faint light that seemed so far away just a minute ago was coming up quickly with every frantic step she took. Just right over there, through the wood. Maybe not hope but it was at least something.