Quoted By:
"I never knew you. You know this. You are taunting me. I am not him, and nothing will make me him, not—"
"Who are you, then?"
In that moment, in the dream, you found no answer. Of course you knew. You had a name that was given to you, and you had taken it for yours. But you searched and searched and could find nothing.
"I thought so," Henry said. He extended the knife, blade toward the floor, and offered its mottled brown handle. "Take this. You'll need it."
You took it. You didn't thank him.
-
Then you had gone down stairs and secret corridors, and in the third scene you were there with the knife in an underground chamber. It was furnished sparsely and in traditional fashion, with braziers and a tattered red drape and a lonely altar, and a groove was cut in the floor for the blood. The place smelled of metal.
You heard footsteps on the stair and grimaced, but it was too late already: she pushed the door open. Why hadn't you locked it? She wore a grim dead expression and held nothing.
"Hello, Charlie," you said slowly.
She appraised you and grew a grim dead smirk. She shut the door behind her and advanced.
"You shouldn't be here, primrose. I shouldn't be here. This is a... a wicked place. An evil place. I'm glad you came to remind me. Should we go back upstairs? Was there something you needed?"
"Something like that," she said, and extended her hand.
You looked and you felt the tide and the track and above all else you felt the great spiral of things. The WYRM eats its own tail. You handed her the knife.
"Thank you," she said. Your eyes locked. Then she ushered you over to the altar, so you were leaning against it, and she bade you to stay. You stayed.
She raised the knife, and your eyes locked again. You smiled wanly, to encourage her. "It's okay."
She smiled wanly back and stabbed you in the stomach. Your vision went white. You buckled. "I love you," you managed to say.
She stabbed again.
"I forgive you."
She stabbed again.
"It's not your fault, Charlie."
She stabbed again.
"It's okay," you said, through the agony, and that was all you could say. You saw her glistening eyes and slumped forward. She caught you with one hand and held you up and stabbed you again, again, again, again, to carve it into the deepest tracks of your memory, and you died. And you woke up.
>END IX
>END NIGHTMARES
And that's it for this vignette! I'll have all the NIGHTMARES compiled together in a doc when the thread ends, for easy reference, and I might add one more just so it ends on a nice X rather than IX. Hope you enjoyed these interstitials, even if they meant I wasn't writing the main quest... which is almost done! I expect two or at max three more updates in this thread. Tomorrow for sure.
