1st Saun 717
Zipper had two kinds of dreams: the ones where she did it right, and the ones where it went so, so wrong.
The latter category was where grim speculation met the fantastical and the macabre, where the most chilling of what if's were given life.
Sometimes the what if took the shape of an old house with creaky stairs and windows so unwashed no light could even hope to pass through the brown. Zipper takes a cloth. She can't, can't, can't help herself even if she knows she shouldn't, but she takes the cloth and she attends to the windows in the single, unlocked room above the stairs with the care of a mother, gentle stroke after gentle stroke giving back the view. There it is again, that cold, creeping shiver that whispers that there is no sin but the sin of curiosity, for what lies outside sight only comes when it is called.
She climbed the stairs, every creak an ode to better judgement.
She gave the window back its life and purpose, for which it will never be grateful.
She called. She never once opened her mouth, but she called.
From the window, she could see the garden below. It was old and decrepit and oddly colourless, yet weedless, as if someone had found time to trim but not to beautify. She looked away, the whispers warning again, but she looked away. She let the cloth find dirt, and then she looked away. She looked away, she looked away, she looked away.
And every time she looked back, there was a brand new child in the garden below, looking up at her. Well, not quite at her. They were fixated at some point above the roof, maybe the sky - but every time she looked away, she had this chill that started in her arms and her chest and spread like the frost, that told her they had collectively shifted their gaze to her - only to return to the sky when she looked back.
That was alright. She hated children, she depised children, she wished that childhood lasted a second. But that was alright.
It was only when the children started moving from their spots where it truly edged into the pitch-black panic that was survival's screams. She looked back, she looked back, she looked back, and they moved without transition or sound. Their faces shifting ever slightly to face her with every unseen step. There were boys, there were girls, there were children that couldn't be either, but she couldn't tell one from any other.
The door to the house disappeared as the children came within 10 steps of the house. Then the children started disappearing, and Zipper has this curious urge to turn around and check whether there was still a door behind her, but something held her tight, made her look and look and look down at the garden until there were no children left.
Then it made her look behind.
The dream usually ended there, but sometimes it didn't. Oh, sometimes it didn't.
There were other what if's: a recurring nightmare where daylight hunted her with the intent of a caterpillar wasp, seeking to lay an heir inside her spine, one that would make the parasitic womb horrors of the Rhakros jungle look like a flea bite in its hatching. But the real torture, when it happened, was the long wait after getting caught, to feel something grow wrong inside you, to hear it chirp like a baby bird and to feel yourself come to inexplicably care for it, to root for it, to want it to be birthed into the world at your fatal expense. To see your face mirrored in its features as it explodes out into the world and curls gently around your neck, feeling your last breaths.
There was no blood. That was the worst part. It was clean in a way that could only be unnatural. It was clean because the world was messy and rotten and a thing of shrivelled rot, and the creature was beyond that ugliness; it transcended mud to takes its place on a throne of pure, spotless naught.
A saint over all that was wrong.
And it was crying its thousand eye-mouths out.
The sound is aged and mournful, like an old man lamenting the loss of his recently departed wife. You're the only mom it will never know, and it killed you because it was you or it and it was never given a choice. It killed you through the sheer birth of its being and now it's alone and there's nothing be said or done about it.
It loves you and, in a way, you love it back. You want to swaddle it to your breast and tell it that it's okay, that you understand, that tears are just tears, and you need to go now.
You want to reach out to comfort it. You have the will, but your dead body lacks the means. And so it fuckin' goes: a child that isn't crying while its mum that ain't watches impotently.
There was one nightmare where the ocean lost the light of the lighthouses, and U'frek was physically bambozzled by a giant, swelled cock-
But these were abstractions that could never be, ultimately. These were nightmares rooted in metaphor, in bloated fears and insecurities and annoyances from Idalos. When she opened her eyes in the morning, it was done; finished.
And in her own way, she didn't want them to finish. There was a viscerality to that kind of experience, a sense of something sorely lacking in the waking world. Ironic that the fanatastic would feel ever more real than the mundane.
It was the first type of dream that truly haunted her.
Because the former category -the one where things went right- was where almost all the truly horrifying nightmares came from.
Zipper had two kinds of dreams: the ones where she did it right, and the ones where it went so, so wrong.
The latter category was where grim speculation met the fantastical and the macabre, where the most chilling of what if's were given life.
Sometimes the what if took the shape of an old house with creaky stairs and windows so unwashed no light could even hope to pass through the brown. Zipper takes a cloth. She can't, can't, can't help herself even if she knows she shouldn't, but she takes the cloth and she attends to the windows in the single, unlocked room above the stairs with the care of a mother, gentle stroke after gentle stroke giving back the view. There it is again, that cold, creeping shiver that whispers that there is no sin but the sin of curiosity, for what lies outside sight only comes when it is called.
She climbed the stairs, every creak an ode to better judgement.
She gave the window back its life and purpose, for which it will never be grateful.
She called. She never once opened her mouth, but she called.
From the window, she could see the garden below. It was old and decrepit and oddly colourless, yet weedless, as if someone had found time to trim but not to beautify. She looked away, the whispers warning again, but she looked away. She let the cloth find dirt, and then she looked away. She looked away, she looked away, she looked away.
And every time she looked back, there was a brand new child in the garden below, looking up at her. Well, not quite at her. They were fixated at some point above the roof, maybe the sky - but every time she looked away, she had this chill that started in her arms and her chest and spread like the frost, that told her they had collectively shifted their gaze to her - only to return to the sky when she looked back.
That was alright. She hated children, she depised children, she wished that childhood lasted a second. But that was alright.
It was only when the children started moving from their spots where it truly edged into the pitch-black panic that was survival's screams. She looked back, she looked back, she looked back, and they moved without transition or sound. Their faces shifting ever slightly to face her with every unseen step. There were boys, there were girls, there were children that couldn't be either, but she couldn't tell one from any other.
The door to the house disappeared as the children came within 10 steps of the house. Then the children started disappearing, and Zipper has this curious urge to turn around and check whether there was still a door behind her, but something held her tight, made her look and look and look down at the garden until there were no children left.
Then it made her look behind.
The dream usually ended there, but sometimes it didn't. Oh, sometimes it didn't.
There were other what if's: a recurring nightmare where daylight hunted her with the intent of a caterpillar wasp, seeking to lay an heir inside her spine, one that would make the parasitic womb horrors of the Rhakros jungle look like a flea bite in its hatching. But the real torture, when it happened, was the long wait after getting caught, to feel something grow wrong inside you, to hear it chirp like a baby bird and to feel yourself come to inexplicably care for it, to root for it, to want it to be birthed into the world at your fatal expense. To see your face mirrored in its features as it explodes out into the world and curls gently around your neck, feeling your last breaths.
There was no blood. That was the worst part. It was clean in a way that could only be unnatural. It was clean because the world was messy and rotten and a thing of shrivelled rot, and the creature was beyond that ugliness; it transcended mud to takes its place on a throne of pure, spotless naught.
A saint over all that was wrong.
And it was crying its thousand eye-mouths out.
The sound is aged and mournful, like an old man lamenting the loss of his recently departed wife. You're the only mom it will never know, and it killed you because it was you or it and it was never given a choice. It killed you through the sheer birth of its being and now it's alone and there's nothing be said or done about it.
It loves you and, in a way, you love it back. You want to swaddle it to your breast and tell it that it's okay, that you understand, that tears are just tears, and you need to go now.
You want to reach out to comfort it. You have the will, but your dead body lacks the means. And so it fuckin' goes: a child that isn't crying while its mum that ain't watches impotently.
There was one nightmare where the ocean lost the light of the lighthouses, and U'frek was physically bambozzled by a giant, swelled cock-
But these were abstractions that could never be, ultimately. These were nightmares rooted in metaphor, in bloated fears and insecurities and annoyances from Idalos. When she opened her eyes in the morning, it was done; finished.
And in her own way, she didn't want them to finish. There was a viscerality to that kind of experience, a sense of something sorely lacking in the waking world. Ironic that the fanatastic would feel ever more real than the mundane.
It was the first type of dream that truly haunted her.
Because the former category -the one where things went right- was where almost all the truly horrifying nightmares came from.
