Dreamtale: Origins

Chapter 6: Just a Nightmare

Made based off of future pages.

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Edited

:):

He woke up.

Nightmare sat up. He couldn't see much. Just a lot of darkness. He felt like... he had been here before. But how? He had never seen this place in his entire life.

At the same time, he could feel something. Nightmare reached behind him to feel something sticky. Quickly he retracted his hand in disgust. But something caused him to reach back. He actually could feel whatever it was slithering up his arm. But he noticed something. The substance wasn't warm.

It was cold. Ice cold.

He knew it shouldn't be cold. Nightmare had enough experience with this type of stuff to know that slithery slimy stuff  should not be cold. At least lukewarm. Nightmare jerked his hand away.

Trying to take his mind off of the... substance... Nightmare looked around. Where ever he was, it was extremely dark and dreary, with barely any light seeping through the sky. Was there a sky? He didn't know.

What he did know was that there was a small light on the other side of the 'room.' Nightmares slowly and quietly made his way through the goop towards it, trying to ignore the sick silence that hung in the air. There could be many things hiding in the shadows, waiting to strike...

It was only until he was three fourths of the way there that he realized the quiet was not quiet. There were whispers mixed in with the strange white noise that seemed to dominate the 'room.' One of the most noticeable of the whispers was unclear, but Nightmare could make out one thing:

"...Th...You...Fa...D..."

Nightmare tried to get the warped cry out of his head as he stepped through the light—

—and almost instantly wanted to step back into the dark. Nightmare sucked in a sharp breath.

The world around him was a wasteland: dead, cold, and barren. Bloody. Emptied. Building fragments and what was left of their original structures were scattered around, smoke rising out of most of them. Nightmare wished so, so badly that he could look away. But he couldn't.

Nightmare couldn't even move, now that he thought about it. He was trapped, forced to look at the bloody scene in front of him. There were bodies strewn everywhere, some of them had been severed in half. Several were severed, actually.

That wasn't even that most terrifying part to Nightmare, however. The most petrifying thing here was right in front of him.

A tree. What was left of one, at least.

The poor trunk was deprived of any sort of beauty it had held before. It was severed and withered. Nightmare wished he could scream. But he couldn't.

Then he heard a tiny scream from behind him. It was a small scream, quickly cut off. Who was screaming? Why did they scream? Nightmare was just about to find out.

He whirled around. Nightmare caught a glimpse of something black and only before it moved out of sight. What in the stars, he thought before looking slight down to make eye contact with the person he had least expected to see.

Aubrey. Aubrey, the rabbit girl he had met what seemed like forever ago. Aubrey, the girl that longed for his brother's apples. Aubrey, the girl in front of him that was covered in cuts that were soaking her sweet canary yellow dress in blood.

Aubrey, the girl that was now cowering in fear.

"W-Why..?" Aubrey asked shakily, coughing up a tiny bit of blood. Nightmare would have flinched if he was in complete control. He hated seeing people like this. Hated seeing people get hurt. At least, that's what he thought. What he believed.

"Why would you—" Aubrey cut off to cough onto the ground. Blood splattered like paint in a twisted picture. "Why w-would you do this? I-I thought..."

Aubrey went pale as Nightmare heard someone— or something— started laughing. Who the hell would be laughing at something like this?? It was terrifying to hear that laugh: double, even triple toned, semi-deep, full of malice and hatred. But something else seemed to petrify him as something hit him hard.

It was him. He was the one laughing. He was the reason why Aubrey was cowering in fear. Nightmare felt sick. He could feel the laughter coming out of him, right out of his soul. Then he started talking.

"Oh, Aubrey," Nightmare felt himself say in that strange, sick tone, "Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey. Do you know nothing? I wouldn't be surprised if you really didn't." Nightmare-But-not-Nightmare reached down and grabbed Aubrey's chin, tilting it up to face him. Aubrey's amber eyes bore into his, full of terror and sadness. Then they suddenly hardened.

"I will never forgive you."

Then Nightmare— the one that was trapped inside of his own mind— saw suddenly that his hand was covered in that same sickly cold substance as the 'room.'

Nightmare also watched as Aubrey was impaled with a long tentacle of darkness. He screamed for it to stop inside of his head as Aubrey collapsed, insides now spilling down onto the dirt. She was gone in a matter of seconds, the light going out if her eyes.

"Tch, always knew you were a weak one. So easily disposed of. Just like the others." Nightmare could only watch as the tentacle receded back, covered in many shades of blood. Nightmare could only scream as he realized that the tentacle was connected to him, and that there were more.

The whispers intensified as he turned slowly to see something else at the base of the trunk. The whispers suddenly became pristinely clear as he made eye contact with one last thing worth noting.

A statue that was the exact size as and looked like Dream. Nightmare's eyes and mouth started running— bleeding, even, and before he could pass out, he heard one thing ringing in his head:

"This is YOUR FAULT. THEY'RE ALL DEAD AND IT'S YOUR FAULT."

:):

Nightmare shot up. His hand went directly to his mouth, seeing if there was anything leaking from it. His hands then went to his eyes, and finally his crown just to make sure.

He had honestly thought that he would have been prepared. He thought he would have known what he would be dreaming about. He thought it would have been that bad.

But it was bad. It got worse every time he dreamed. Especially the fact that Aubrey was in his dream set him over the edge. He had just met her yesterday.

No one heard Nightmare as he silently cried among the dark apples, their glow eerie and almost sinister in the pale moonlight. No one cared. Nightmare wiped his tears away with his silky royal violet sleeves and curled up on the branches.

Nightmare decided he wouldn't go to sleep that night. The night for him was spent thinking over his nightmare.

I would never do any of that, he thought to himself. He couldn't find any reason in him that would push him so far to hurt a person, let alone kill them. So why was he so put off?

After all, it was just a dream. Nothing more.

Right?