Winter always comes with surprises. Sometimes it brings you the joy in the form of solitude, other times it comes with a snowstorm that buries your old cabin in a thick snow mountain that has you trapped until Springtime. You had believed that you w...
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The dream seems to be getting even more aggressive when it returns to you in your sleep tonight.
All the faces, the voices, the cries coming from the faceless figures and the shadows — or perhaps your own cries? — fill your dreams, sending you to another restless sleep.
An intense sob jolts you awake, but only darkness welcomes you when you briefly open your eyes. You could feel the tears running down your face, your heart pacing in a rapid beat. Your eyes are heavy, both with the tears and the exhaustion weighing you down. There are many ways that you could do to recover, one of them by pushing yourself up and probably washing your face to give you a few moments of reprieve, chant a calming spell or just simply leave the bedroom and pace around a little to calm your mind.
But the emotional tug inside your chest, along with the fear and the pain, are still mixing into one. All you want to do is curl into a ball, to protect yourself from the world and from all the terrible memories that keep haunting you as you hide beneath the covers. And you feel too exhausted to do anything. Your body keeps insisting to return to sleep, denying the way your brain is telling you that the terrible dreams would come back to you the moment you give in and close your eyes.
The fight in you weakens as your eyes continue to grow heavier by the passing second you keep lying on your bed. You could no longer put an effort to force yourself to wake up, knowing that it would seem to be useless to even try when you keep on getting pulled back into the depth of slumber.
Through the haze that is slowly engulfing you, you can hear a shuffling sound happening around your bed. A part of your mind is telling you that something is happening, while another is screaming with a warning, telling you that the dreams have begun. But you are too tired to open your eyes to figure out what it is. Too tired to care.
The shuffling stops briefly and you can sense a tall figure standing by the bed, stopping there for a while. Just as you are slowly drifting away from consciousness, you feel the bed dips right behind you. Before your mind could even process it, warmth engulfs you, enveloping you in a tight embrace that makes you feel comfortable and safe.
Safe enough that your nightmares never bother to return as you fall back into your slumber.
✽✽✽
The warmth is what wakes you up the next morning.
The familiar warm from the streaming sunlight coming from the nearby window tickles your face first, but the warmth around your middle is the one that you are completely unfamiliar with. Stretching your limbs, you can feel a steady weight around your stomach, covering you protectively without pressing you too much that you could still move but still lets you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
