After walking for what felt like hours through the endless dark, I finally noticed a faint glimmer ahead, pale, steady, and almost reluctant to exist.
At first I thought it was the skin-stealers tricking my eyes, but as I kept walking, the glow sharpened, outlining something solid against the black.
A door, in the middle of nowhere, its position was so disturbing that it felt akin to watching an optical illusion back in my previous world.
Its frame forged from some kind of dull silver metal that shimmered faintly like wet stone.
Strange markings, neither runes nor words, had been carved along its edges, winding in looping patterns that kept changing.
Despite the eerie silence, I could feel it humming, like a deep vibration pressing against my bones.
Overall, it didn't look ancient but carried the weight of something that shouldn't be existing.
Even before I could convince myself otherwise, I knew what it was.
The alternate entrance.
The threshold to Dreamlands.
I approached with cautious steps, though the rush of dopamine surged through me like a river of static, flooding every nerve with a strange, electric anticipation.
But as the distance shortened, my excitement dulled into unease of sort.
A few Skin-Stealers lurked near the door, some creeping along the edges of the light, their limbs twitching in uneven spasms, while others seemed half-melded into the darkness itself, their pale, waxy forms barely distinguishable from shadow.
And yet, none of them dared to cross the boundary of the light.
They lingered there instead, circling but never advancing, their heads twitching occasionally toward the door as if drawn by instinct yet chained by something stronger.
It wasn't reverence, nor was it fear.
And I knew very well what it was.
Obedience, that too, without sentience.
They weren't protecting themselves from the door, but guarding it from the invaders, and everything else that shouldn't cross it.
There wasn't much left to do.
All I had to do now was slip past those Skin-Stealers, cautiously, once that was done, the path ahead would be easy.
Though, saying it like that made it sound simple.
It wasn't.
Those things didn't look like they were planning to let me go that easily.
Whatever, I decided not to let those bull-headed freaks crawl into my mind and pressed on.
I dropped to my knees, intending to follow through with a plan I'd thought up, but abandoned it the next moment.
Instead, I walked forward, low and silent, almost dragging myself across the ground.
All I had to do was reach the boundary of that pale light. Once I crossed it, they wouldn't be able to touch me, not anymore.
The pale light spilling out from its cracks didn't seem that far now.
Those skin-stealers still loitered around it, some twitching, some half-sunk into the dark, their limbs bent like wet sticks.
It was almost funny, watching them crawl and flinch every time the glow brushed too close.
One of them moved.
Their usual favourite habit.
As I kept moving, a strange feeling began to bubble up inside me, it was so irritating, like a raw itch beneath the ribs, that I felt like screaming.
I pressed on anyway.
Step.
Breath.
Stop.
Repeat.
That was the strategy I followed along the short journey, until I got past them.
Though sometimes the sound of my breath raised suspicion among them, it didn't do much overall.
They twitched, stilled, and went back to whatever grotesque rhythm they followed.
I let the air out slow as the light grew brighter now, along with the door, which was at most a few meters apart from me in the real sense.
But even after crossing the nightmare, and getting a sense of accomplishment, the strange feeling continued to boil inside me to the point of saturation, its weight pressing against my ribs.
But I didn't give up, because I couldn't.
I knew the consequences of stopping here. Or at least, that's what I would've liked to tell myself.
"Why do I have to fucking crawl? It's disgusting. Fuck this place."
The words slipped out before I realized it, bursting through the tightness in my chest.
My voice echoed through the stillness, raw and distorted, bouncing back at me like the voice of a stranger.
My hands clawed at my hair, half in frustration, half in anger, or maybe just trying to tear apart that damned, boiling irritation that wouldn't leave me alone.
The few Skin-Stealers that had been lingering near the door suddenly turned, their heads twisting with an eerie slowness before jerking upright all at once.
Their limbs shuddered, bending like thin paper in a storm, as if something inside them had been snapped awake.
Then, without a single sound, they began rushing toward me.
The irritation that had been bubbling inside me boiled over, mixing with something colder. Something that kinda told me this was it.
And before I could even think, they were almost upon me.
However, some part of me still believed I could make it if I just took one more step, and so I did.
But, the dark reached faster.
Their limbs swarmed over me in a flurry of paper-thin flesh, wrapping me whole, snuffing out the pale light until all that remained was the sound of my own breath, which was fading beneath their hollow forms.
Darkness pressed in, and then, after a while, even that was gone.
---
•••
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I floated.
There was nothing around me, no sound, no light, no direction.
Just darkness.
It wasn't empty though, not like I could open my eyes to see it.
I couldn't tell if I was breathing.
I couldn't even tell if I still had a body.
Yet I could feel the void, thick, cold, almost alive, clinging to me like a second skin, pulsing faintly with something that wasn't my heartbeat.
I didn't know why, but the thought crossed my mind.
If I had a say in it, I wasn't uncomfortable at all from the fleeting void.
In fact, I felt a strange kind of pleasure, as if it was whispering to me, inviting me to dissolve into it completely.
But I might as well be lying to myself.
It would've been better if there was at least some light.
And the moment the thought settled...everything changed.