[attr="class","main"]
Their song is finished, and the beast emerges.[break][break]
For a moment, Luka has half a mind to use her portals to force the children out of the archive. But she makes the mistake of looking up first.[break][break]
Her voice freezes in her glowing throat, and her tongue feels heavy and thick.[break][break]
The eyes that stare above them lidless and clouded, veins spiderwebbed across sclera the color of sour milk. Luka is drawn into their gaze, searching desperately for some kind of clues, an answer. Albedo, purification, banishment...what is it that they're meant to
do, really?[break][break]
There are no easy solutions. Luka continues to stare.[break][break]
One pair of eyes is different. They are
her eyes, but not quite. They are verdant irises and a tired kindness. Wrinkles at the corners, the same that are etched into the corners of a smiling mouth. Sometimes, while pouring over casework at night, they're obscured by a pair of reading glasses.[break][break]
Luka lurches forwards unconsciously, drawn towards the impossible figure. She recognizes more eyes as well: soft and kind, friends and family and a multitude of fleeting loves. The rest dissolve into starlight, the same that shines within sweet dreams and paints the sky in sprawling constellations.[break][break]
She knows that this isn't real, and that perhaps is cruelest of all. And yet she stumbles forwards regardless, grasping onto hands that feel ice cold and stiff with death. White lilies gather around her feet, and for a moment all is still. Her nightmare starts so quietly, based on memory alone. There is nothing more horrific than the truth.[break][break]
"I tried," Luka chokes out. Grief eats at her until there's nothing but bones left.
"Please, you have to know that I tried—"[break][break]
She addresses them all, every silent watcher. Their teeth flash back in mouths that still smile at her sweetly. They gleam a little too brightly under the lantern light.
"Look what your love has done to us," they whisper, words she's heard before under the thrall of painful sleep. Corrupting, twisting, ruining- those she loves shifting, contorting, melting into each other. Too many limbs, reaching, clawing. Too many eyes, always staring.[break][break]
The thing that had never been her father laughs cruelly as the lilies around her feet wilt, filling the air with the sweet scent of rotting petals.
"You were never enough," it hisses.
"You let your love rot inside you. And when you fail here, you'll take all of them with you."[break][break]
Luka takes a shuddering breath and stumbles blindly backwards. Her foot hooks around one of the lanterns, glowing with an otherworldly flame— it burns but does not go out, and the pain is no match for her terror. It rings like a bell in the steeple of her heart.[break][break]
The burning at her heels is familiar, however. It matches the burning in her throat. As Luka's visions lunge at her, multitudinous hands reaching and clawing, they never go for the throat. If only she could think long enough to understand the implications, if only she could just put everything together and not be struck useless by the fear that threatens to devour her—[break][break]
Her Hatterene rushes to her defense first, a clawed appendage readying a
brutal swing. But the moment she makes contact, the fairy's body ripples, and shrinks as she devolves into a
Hatenna.[break][break]
But Luka's Musharna takes a less direct approach. Hovering above her trainer's head, she settles upon it and employs the same practice she's used to protect Luka's dreams for years. [break][break]
Pink mist swirls around the quartet, tendrils undulating towards the nightmares and illusions that plague them. Plum's dream mist is not as powerful as that of the
interdream zone, but it's just as hungry. The drowsing Pokemon's
dream eater attempts a feast, using her psychic abilities to devour each nightmare and level the playing field.[break][break]
The mist that pours from her head begins to turn dark at the edges.
[break][break]
1dERNnDB + ???
[break]
- Luka is drawn towards the monster[break]
- The beast reminds her of someone she loves[break]
- Has visions of her father[break]
- Is burned by a lantern[break]
- Hatterene charges the beast and devolves[break]
- Luka's Musharna uses dream eater to consume the nightmares
[break][break]
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