❝
Things change in the dreams that swirl around her.
Dreamlike faces and radiant smiles bleed together. Forms twist and twine together and first, swept up in rapture, Luka doesn't notice it. She takes another hand, accepts another dance. Blushes as a face turns to hers for a kiss. But the hand that grasps hers feels twisted and wrong. When Luka opens her eyes, she finds too many staring back at her.
She stumbles back with a quiet yelp. Something that had once been human lurches towards her, staggering forwards on too many legs. The faces and bodies of everyone she's come to care for are here, warped and corrupted into something monstrous.
Look what your love has done to us, they whisper.
You ruin everything you touch. Luka can only gape in horror as contorted faces fade into the mist that surrounds her, blinking eyes replacing them as spectators to her
NIGHTMARE.
Look what you've done to him, the broken voices whisper one more. No monsters appear, but silent dread only increases. The interdream zone grants her with only one last vision: a pine box, surrounded by lilies.
Luka collapses beside it while the mist closes in. Dry sobs wrack her chest, crystalline heart beating behind broken ribs. Tears fall onto the casket below her and sink into the wood, but after several minutes they only
plip, plip onto cold tile.
Vaguely she can hear the sound of commotion around her, muffled by the dream mist, but otherwise she's completely alone.
The visions have left her. And she's lost the real
jayden cross to the mist. No nightmares need to whisper into her ear now: she's alone, just like always, and it's a nightmare she's already used to living.
After a few minutes she staggers to her feet. Sniffs once and wipes at her eyes. It's almost scary, how good she is at pretending she hasn't been crying.
But sitting and sniveling like a baby won't help anyone. The quiet despair around her is getting harder to ignore, and it's clear that this dream mist isn't anything like her Musharna's. There's something
wrong with it.
Dreams aren't supposed to be like this. Luka dusts herself off, shimmering tulle flowing through her fingers. A pastel tribute to Cresselia, a patron of dreams— Luka glances through the mist, as though expecting the celestial creature to burst through and save her. It'd be the perfect plot of a fairy tale, but she's no princess.
Instead she starts to hurry through the mist, searching for someone,
anyone. Even though countless unnerving eyes surround her, she's completely alone. But how can that be? The ballroom was so crowded, certainly there must be
someone nearby.
"Jayden?" she calls out.
"D-derek? Mint? Andres?" There's no answer, of course. She hasn't even noticed it, but above her head an Unown hovers. It's a perfectly fitting question mark.
Her heels click against marble as she breaks into a brisk walk. Why isn't
anyone else here?
"Hello?" Luka shouts, voice tinged with desperation.
"A-anyone? Hello?"The
DIMENSION she's in is unstable. Darkness leeches into pastel pink, a dark stain spreading. Fear laps at her heels, tightens in her throat. She can almost feel five long fingers stretching around it, threating to squeeze.
Her Unown, though, meets with some of their fellows. Completing words with a question mark, rounding them up like a lasso. Luka frowns, puzzled, the first time she sees it.
CENTRIPICAL is not a word she knows well, but she's seen it somewhere before. While the cogs in her head slowly turn, she notices some of the corruption in the mist receding. It fades, like an old bruise, and takes some of the other Unown with it.
The question mark above her head chimes and wiggles around. Luka clears her throat, wants to thank them, but a flash of red interrupts her.
The scream that follows it snaps more into focus.
Even though she still can't see anyone else, she can
hear them. A cacophony of fear, shouting and cursing and thundering footsteps. Luka flinches as another beam of light zaps towards her, alerted only by the frantic chiming of her Unown that danger is near. She gasps and starts to run, holding her skirts in her hand and screaming out the names of anyone she can think of, praying that she might finally meet someone, or at least be able to
help in some way.
- luka's cute dream shifts into a nightmare
- it leaves her alone- utterly alone
- she believes the nightmare has left her, but her solitude is just another part of her bad dream
- she decides to try and fix things as best she can and help anyone she might come across in the mist
- post #17