"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up."
I did not move because I knew the next thing that came after that voice, the demonic words, would already be assembling at the back of my tongue and the demon that would be waiting for me when I opened my eyes.
I had already used my staff once to escape the waking, and the loop had given me back to the same moment with the same voice and the same horror still living behind my teeth.
And so I did not move because moving was the beginning of all of it again, at least, I was no longer screaming inside my head.
So I lay still and did not open my eyes and waited for the demon to come back, and it did not come back, so I waited longer and listened harder to find the demonic syllables at the back of my tongue and found them absent.
The screaming inside my head had stopped. The horror seemed like a memory and was no longer sitting in my chest the way it had been sitting in my chest a minute ago.
