It's one of those dreams. You know the ones.
You're inside your body, but you aren't really controlling it.
Every move feels foreign—you are both stranger and passenger.
Omi feels the way her lungs burn as her legs carry her swiftly through an unfamiliar land. Her surroundings are black shadow, the sky is a burning crimson galaxy. The trees are bare and outlined in white—the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of the blackness.
She doesn't know what is chasing her, but she can hear it crashing through the foliage behind her. It bellows a deep roar that shakes her very bones and vibrates the ground beneath her. It throws her off balance, she feels hair whipping against her cheeks as she plunges to the ground at the edge of a pool of black water.
It's the first glance at herself she gets.
Her face is her own, scratched and muddied though it is—but her hair is a shock of fine white, silky and straight and nothing like her normal brown cloud of curls."C'mon...get up!" She mutters to herself without really meaning to, fingers digging into the soil as she pushes upward.
There's a mirror in front of her, and in that moment she knows it is what she's been searching for.
"Just...a little further!"
Only one step she takes before the monster is on her again—bursting through the trees behind her. It roars again and she dives out of the way as it slashes at her with one massive clawed hand.
She rolls to her back as it howls again in anger, and she feels herself throwing her hand out as if to ward it off.
The searing white energy that shines and shoots from her fingertips is a surprise, and the bright light engulfs the monster and all she can see before she can feel herself slipping away.
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And then she's hurtling out of bed in a tangle of sheets, choking on a strangled scream and scrambling across the floor as if the monster had followed her to the waking world. She's drenched in sweat, chest heaving in her panicked frenzy.
It takes her a minute to scan her familiar dorm room, finding no sign of her assailant.
She is safe. She always had been.
"Shit..." She mutters, slumping back onto her palms. Her breath starts to even out. "It felt so real."
It's only then that she notices the buzzing. Her phone bounces around on the nightstand, held at bay by the charger cord it is hooked up to. She stands and checks it, finding that the time reads 10 AM. The alarm has been going off for nearly two hours by now.
"Shit!" She repeats, less breathlessly and with more feeling.
The next 20 minutes find Omi scrambling around her room after the quickest shower of her life, toothbrush sticking out of her foaming mouth and hair pick tangled in her curls as she tugs on the cleanest clothes she can find. She figures she still looks a bit disheveled by the end of it—but she's already running late for her meeting with her advisor and she can't really afford to do anything about it at the moment.
It's a lucky thing the campus is so small. The university didn't waste resources on space it didn't need—the buildings are few enough that they can all circle the center of the campus while the dormitories lie on the outskirts. By the time she makes it to her advisor's door she is out of breath from running but only a minute later than she had been after getting dressed.
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attuned • magic untold
Fanfiction" i've seen enough of what we can do to know he won't stand a chance against the both of us " The Elementalists OC centric