Nightmare || WIP

Dream .

The smell of fresh newspaper clouded my senses, dark ink stains coating the wooden floor of the printing factory. My fingertips held a thin sheet of the cheap sugarcane paper, my eyes scanning over the vividly dark ink. My breathing was slow, and I knew I appeared calm to the printer boy, but internally I was overcome with my anxieties. I inhaled deeply through my nose, gripping the charm around my neck as I exhaled the aforementioned breath. As my thumb glided over the smooth material of the necklace charm, my anxiety attempted to drift away. I rolled up the freshly printed material and threw it onto the table where the printer boy sat. He made a noise of disapproval, but at that moment I couldn't have cared less. The words I had just scanned off of that paper buzzed through my mind, drilling the information into my skull.

Another citizen reported missing from the northern Badland territories, friends say he vanished without a trace.

"That's the third one this month, Dream," the paperboy said to me.

I sat silently with my back against the cobblestone wall, thinking deeply. I knew my head was a dangerous place to be in, but there was nothing more for me to do than think.

"Dream?" I heard the boy say, but my name sounded like a foreign word to my ever so lost mind.

He sighed, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him reach over and grab my previously thrown copy of today's news. He unraveled it, an annoyed expression creeping onto his lips. He refolded the paper and tossed it in a trashcan that sat against the side of his desk, muttering something about "cheap ass ink."

"You should speak with King Eret, Dream. You may find it helpful," he suggested to me, a sickeningly fake sweet tone dripping from his voice.

I finally looked up at him, realizing that his eyes were locked on the window beside me. I knew what he was staring at. The great walls of King Eret's castle was a great view for a paperboy's shop and home.

"I haven't spoken to him since I dethroned George." I stared blankly, part of my mind still being far away from all of this.

His gaze fell upon me, blue eyes piercing my green. I shifted uncomfortably in my spot against the wall. Eye contact made me nervous when most of my focus was shifted.

A deep sigh escaped his lips. "Maybe now is the time to speak with him then," he replied.

He stood up calmly, the annoying sound of old wood scraping against even older wood filling the silence between us. He hastily gathered up the items that sat messily on his desk, shoving most of them into a leather shoulder bag, the rest into messy drawers. I grimaced slightly at the sight of his unkempt area until I compared it to life these days.

No one, not even the finest detectives could figure out what the hell was causing these disappearances. It was difficult to even catch a clue when everyone kept, quite literally, vanishing without a trace.

It made everyone in L'Manburg and the surrounding nations scared. Children would go missing from their beds at night, and the parents the next week. I knew the partner of the first citizen to go. She was so distraught, stating that everything had happened in a flash of orange and black.

"One minute she was asleep next to me, and the next I hear her screams from far away!"

I cringed at the memory, the hurt in the poor woman's voice piercing my heart with nerves. I can't imagine what she was going through, or the pain that she was feeling. Her wife suddenly disappearing in the middle of the night. It all felt unreal to me, but the terror it instilled in my heart was evident. Anxiety would surge through my gut every time George or Nick took too long to reply to my messages, or when they were late for breakfast at Niki's bakery on Tuesdays. Life as we had known it was now tainted with fear, fear that my best friends' names would be in tomorrow's paper.