2125/2000 WORDS
Trinity
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
It was a cold night, but that wasn’t the reason that Trinity was shivering in her sleep. She had actually found a decent room to stay at in a small inn. It was more of a mom and pop type of place, bare bones and little more than a bed with a bathroom, but it was clean and that was all that mattered to her. She’d been finding lately that somehow, whenever she came to, there was a decent amount of money in her pockets. Honestly the girl didn’t know where she kept getting all this money from. She could only hope that she wasn’t hurting people to get it, a fear she often had when she often found herself waking up covered in blood and not knowing where she was.
She had lost Ehoron again, but this time she wasn’t worried. He was a kind man that seemed to share a similar tragedy as her, and when she got the chance to explain things to him she knew he understood her. He had promised that they would never be apart again, and that if they ever got separated he would find her. Trinity had never had a friend like him before, and she had full faith in his promise. Her friend would find her sooner or later. She just had to be patient and wait for him. So in the meantime she tried to do her best to stick to one area and not move around too much so that he wouldn’t have that long of a trail to follow, but when she often blacked out and couldn’t remember long periods of time it was difficult to keep track of herself.
Her nightmares had been steadily growing worse over the weeks. They were becoming so vivid that they felt real, to the point where sometimes she would wake up and not fully trust whether or not she was still sleeping. She was seeing faces of people she couldn’t recall meeting, but somehow in her heart she knew that she knew them. All of them were scared of her. They screamed and ran from her, or fought her, and every time it ended the same: she’d kill them, usually after torturing and doing unspeakable things to them.
There was a group of wizards in a woods at night, a church whose walls were dripping with blood, a man shrouded in twilight, a woman strung up in a spider’s web and shrieking in terror… but these were just some of the faces. Trinity often woke in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and gasping for air like she’d been running or fighting. She was terrified. She was scared because she didn’t know why she was having so many visions of being such a horrible person, just as she was scared because everytime she woke up the last thing she felt before reality set back in was… joy… excitement… thrill from the kills and the hunt.
She tossed and turned in the bed, her facial expressions shifting back and forth between fear and delight, sorrow and scorn, laugher and wailing. Even her hair seemed to change with her moods, changing between black, brown, and pink, from long to short. Her muscles twitched and shook like she was running, jumping, flinching, striking out…
And in her dream, she was running. All around her were walls that reached up toward the neverending sky, towering so far above her head that she knew flying would never help her escape, no matter how far up she went. The path twisted and turned in many directions, trapping her in a very real labyrinth that she didn’t know how to navigate. Was she trying to find a way out? Was she trying to reach the center? She didn’t even know where she was trying to go, she just knew she needed to run, to never stop running, or else it would catch her.
Tears streamed down her face as she ran, stumbling over twigs and overturned stones in the ground that seemed to be there only for the purpose of tripping her up. A scream sat at the base of her throat, but would not come to her lips. She was dirty and bleeding from several open scratches. Terror filled every fiber of her being. The walls and paths seemed to be constantly moving, with doors opening where there previously were none, and paths that she’d already gone down suddenly being cut off like they had never been there before. Trinity didn’t know what was chasing her, she only knew that it wanted to kill her, to tear her apart slowly and force her to suffer. So she ran and ran, and no matter how many times she fell she got back on her feet and kept running, because she knew if she stopped she would die.
In another part of the maze, Aeron stood carefully in an intersection. There were several different paths to choose from, but nothing to indicate which route, if any, would be the safest. They all looked exactly the same to her. Where should she go? What should she do? Was there even a point to all this? This labyrinth didn’t appear to have a beginning or an end, and while she hadn’t run into anyone else or seen evidence of others, she knew she wasn’t alone.
The woman jumped when she heard a noise coming from down one of the paths. “Thana?” she called out uncertainly. “Is that you?” When no one responded, Aeron bent down and picked up a large branch, holding it up in her hands like a club or a baseball bat. Whatever was there, she’d be ready for it.
Another sound from one of the other pathways caught her attention, but this was a low growl as if from some kind of animal. Aeron spun and faced that direction now, a chill running down her spine. “This isn’t funny, Thana!” she yelled, still not entirely sure whether or not the psychopathic woman was behind whatever sick game was going on here, though it wouldn’t surprise her if she was. “Whatever is there, come out and face me! Come on!!”
She pulled the branch back like she was winding it up for a harder hit, but nothing ever came from the path. Hesitantly, she started taking slow steps in that direction. Every instinct in her was telling her to run, but she was trapped. Aeron refused to be hunted down like prey, so as scared as she was she inched in the direction of the noise as silently as possible. Whatever it was, maybe it didn’t realize she was there. Maybe she could catch it by surprise. That wouldn’t help her escape this hell, but at the very least she’d be protecting herself. So she moved quietly forward, looking to peer around the corner unnoticed to see what was there…
Thana stalked quietly down the halls of the labyrinth. Her amber eyes were bright with passion and adrenaline, a crazed grin tugging at the corner of her lips. She was not afraid of this place. Though it had no end, no beginning, no goal, no reason, she embraced it. The ever changing pathways brought her excitement, the nefarious sounds that had no source brought her pleasure. The dark haired woman knew that she was not alone in this maze, but she had nothing to fear. She was the predator, here, not the prey.
Her nails scratched slowly and irritatingly along the rough walls of the maze as she walked through it, leaving little marks of her presence and contributing eerie sounds of her own to add to the already chilling cacophony. “I know you’re here…” she spoke in a low, singsong voice. Stooping to the ground, she ran the pads of her fingers along the ground where a smudge of dirt had been smeared by someone’s foot. “I know you’re close…” she taunted. “Why do you run from me? I just want to play with you a little while…”
The psychopath stood back up to her feet, giggling maliciously. She could smell her target’s fear, their panic. All Thana wanted to do was rend her prey from head to toe, carve them into tiny slivers of flesh and roll around in it like a pile of leaves in the fall. Nothing would satiate her except to hear the screams, smell the blood, give in to the ecstasy that came with divorcing a soul from the body, feeling as the life left them. This was a target she had been hunting for quite some time, but Thana was patient. Oh, yes. The longer the chase, the sweeter the reward, but she knew she was catching up quickly…
Trinity had reached a dead end. A whimper of panic escaped her lips and she turned to retreat the way she’d come but the path had already closed behind her. She was completely boxed in. Hopelessness threatened to cause her to collapse, she turned around again and some something peculiar that caught her attention. Sniffling, she wiped her eyes and focused. Two mirrors stood beside each other, placed at a forty five degree angle from one another. Curious but afraid, she approached them, but the reflections she saw were not her own.
In one there was a woman with short brown hair and bright blue eyes. She looked… angry. Confused. Suspicious. In the other mirror was another woman with long black hair and intense amber colored eyes. Her gaze nearly overwhelmed Trinity with terror again as the woman smiled at her like a wolf hungry for meat. Though Trinity had never seen or met either of these women in her life, she felt like she knew them. They moved in tandem with her in the mirror, their arms and heads shifting and adjusting as she did, despite the fact that their expressions and appearances were entirely different from her own.
Aeron, too, had stumbled across a pair of mirrors when she’d expected to find a creature of carnivorous nature. On one side was Thana, looking as blood thirsty and insane as she always did. Aeron sneered at the image with disgust, her hatred for the other woman palpable. In the other was a woman whose face she was unfamiliar with. She had long hair that was split down the middle, pink on one side and brown on the other. Likewise, the woman’s eyes each matched one color of her hair. She was dressed in rags, covered in dirt, and looks like she’d been crying. Aeron didn’t know why, but looking at this woman filled her with both a sense of rage, and of compassion and sorrow. The girl looked broken, scared, lost. A part of her wanted to help her, but another part just wanted to walk away and mind her own business, just take care of herself.
From her position in front of her own mirrors, Thana eyed each reflection of Trinity and Aeron with malicious glee. Aeron was a constant source of entertainment for her. Truth be told, she would kill the woman if she could, but Thana knew they were bonded in a way that the two of them could never fully be rid of the other. So instead, she dedicated her time to driving the brunette woman crazy and getting her into all sorts of scrapes that threatened Aeron’s safety and drove her levels of paranoia through the roof.
And then there was Trinity… Oh, how Thana longed to kill this weak wretch that she continued to hunt. The girl was little more than a joke to her, and Thana lived to make Trinity’s life an absolute misery. Everything Thana did -- the killing, the torture, the assaults -- everything was to complicate this precious, innocent young woman’s life. Thana licked her lips as she looked the girl over, hungry for the feast. One day… one day she would catch up to her.
As the three women stared at one another, a figure watched on from above, unseen and unnoticed by them. Tendrils of the figure’s power stretched out to connect with each woman slowly, seeping into their minds and bodies until each was fully overcome with fear, anger, hatred. The mirrors shattered, and the maze began a new, each aspect of the avatar returning to what they had been doing before. Soon, this child would deliver her into the realm she had been cast from, and on that day reality itself would bend and break under her devouring existence.
But not until the avatar had been fully broken by chaos.
She had lost Ehoron again, but this time she wasn’t worried. He was a kind man that seemed to share a similar tragedy as her, and when she got the chance to explain things to him she knew he understood her. He had promised that they would never be apart again, and that if they ever got separated he would find her. Trinity had never had a friend like him before, and she had full faith in his promise. Her friend would find her sooner or later. She just had to be patient and wait for him. So in the meantime she tried to do her best to stick to one area and not move around too much so that he wouldn’t have that long of a trail to follow, but when she often blacked out and couldn’t remember long periods of time it was difficult to keep track of herself.
Her nightmares had been steadily growing worse over the weeks. They were becoming so vivid that they felt real, to the point where sometimes she would wake up and not fully trust whether or not she was still sleeping. She was seeing faces of people she couldn’t recall meeting, but somehow in her heart she knew that she knew them. All of them were scared of her. They screamed and ran from her, or fought her, and every time it ended the same: she’d kill them, usually after torturing and doing unspeakable things to them.
There was a group of wizards in a woods at night, a church whose walls were dripping with blood, a man shrouded in twilight, a woman strung up in a spider’s web and shrieking in terror… but these were just some of the faces. Trinity often woke in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and gasping for air like she’d been running or fighting. She was terrified. She was scared because she didn’t know why she was having so many visions of being such a horrible person, just as she was scared because everytime she woke up the last thing she felt before reality set back in was… joy… excitement… thrill from the kills and the hunt.
She tossed and turned in the bed, her facial expressions shifting back and forth between fear and delight, sorrow and scorn, laugher and wailing. Even her hair seemed to change with her moods, changing between black, brown, and pink, from long to short. Her muscles twitched and shook like she was running, jumping, flinching, striking out…
And in her dream, she was running. All around her were walls that reached up toward the neverending sky, towering so far above her head that she knew flying would never help her escape, no matter how far up she went. The path twisted and turned in many directions, trapping her in a very real labyrinth that she didn’t know how to navigate. Was she trying to find a way out? Was she trying to reach the center? She didn’t even know where she was trying to go, she just knew she needed to run, to never stop running, or else it would catch her.
Tears streamed down her face as she ran, stumbling over twigs and overturned stones in the ground that seemed to be there only for the purpose of tripping her up. A scream sat at the base of her throat, but would not come to her lips. She was dirty and bleeding from several open scratches. Terror filled every fiber of her being. The walls and paths seemed to be constantly moving, with doors opening where there previously were none, and paths that she’d already gone down suddenly being cut off like they had never been there before. Trinity didn’t know what was chasing her, she only knew that it wanted to kill her, to tear her apart slowly and force her to suffer. So she ran and ran, and no matter how many times she fell she got back on her feet and kept running, because she knew if she stopped she would die.
In another part of the maze, Aeron stood carefully in an intersection. There were several different paths to choose from, but nothing to indicate which route, if any, would be the safest. They all looked exactly the same to her. Where should she go? What should she do? Was there even a point to all this? This labyrinth didn’t appear to have a beginning or an end, and while she hadn’t run into anyone else or seen evidence of others, she knew she wasn’t alone.
The woman jumped when she heard a noise coming from down one of the paths. “Thana?” she called out uncertainly. “Is that you?” When no one responded, Aeron bent down and picked up a large branch, holding it up in her hands like a club or a baseball bat. Whatever was there, she’d be ready for it.
Another sound from one of the other pathways caught her attention, but this was a low growl as if from some kind of animal. Aeron spun and faced that direction now, a chill running down her spine. “This isn’t funny, Thana!” she yelled, still not entirely sure whether or not the psychopathic woman was behind whatever sick game was going on here, though it wouldn’t surprise her if she was. “Whatever is there, come out and face me! Come on!!”
She pulled the branch back like she was winding it up for a harder hit, but nothing ever came from the path. Hesitantly, she started taking slow steps in that direction. Every instinct in her was telling her to run, but she was trapped. Aeron refused to be hunted down like prey, so as scared as she was she inched in the direction of the noise as silently as possible. Whatever it was, maybe it didn’t realize she was there. Maybe she could catch it by surprise. That wouldn’t help her escape this hell, but at the very least she’d be protecting herself. So she moved quietly forward, looking to peer around the corner unnoticed to see what was there…
Thana stalked quietly down the halls of the labyrinth. Her amber eyes were bright with passion and adrenaline, a crazed grin tugging at the corner of her lips. She was not afraid of this place. Though it had no end, no beginning, no goal, no reason, she embraced it. The ever changing pathways brought her excitement, the nefarious sounds that had no source brought her pleasure. The dark haired woman knew that she was not alone in this maze, but she had nothing to fear. She was the predator, here, not the prey.
Her nails scratched slowly and irritatingly along the rough walls of the maze as she walked through it, leaving little marks of her presence and contributing eerie sounds of her own to add to the already chilling cacophony. “I know you’re here…” she spoke in a low, singsong voice. Stooping to the ground, she ran the pads of her fingers along the ground where a smudge of dirt had been smeared by someone’s foot. “I know you’re close…” she taunted. “Why do you run from me? I just want to play with you a little while…”
The psychopath stood back up to her feet, giggling maliciously. She could smell her target’s fear, their panic. All Thana wanted to do was rend her prey from head to toe, carve them into tiny slivers of flesh and roll around in it like a pile of leaves in the fall. Nothing would satiate her except to hear the screams, smell the blood, give in to the ecstasy that came with divorcing a soul from the body, feeling as the life left them. This was a target she had been hunting for quite some time, but Thana was patient. Oh, yes. The longer the chase, the sweeter the reward, but she knew she was catching up quickly…
Trinity had reached a dead end. A whimper of panic escaped her lips and she turned to retreat the way she’d come but the path had already closed behind her. She was completely boxed in. Hopelessness threatened to cause her to collapse, she turned around again and some something peculiar that caught her attention. Sniffling, she wiped her eyes and focused. Two mirrors stood beside each other, placed at a forty five degree angle from one another. Curious but afraid, she approached them, but the reflections she saw were not her own.
In one there was a woman with short brown hair and bright blue eyes. She looked… angry. Confused. Suspicious. In the other mirror was another woman with long black hair and intense amber colored eyes. Her gaze nearly overwhelmed Trinity with terror again as the woman smiled at her like a wolf hungry for meat. Though Trinity had never seen or met either of these women in her life, she felt like she knew them. They moved in tandem with her in the mirror, their arms and heads shifting and adjusting as she did, despite the fact that their expressions and appearances were entirely different from her own.
Aeron, too, had stumbled across a pair of mirrors when she’d expected to find a creature of carnivorous nature. On one side was Thana, looking as blood thirsty and insane as she always did. Aeron sneered at the image with disgust, her hatred for the other woman palpable. In the other was a woman whose face she was unfamiliar with. She had long hair that was split down the middle, pink on one side and brown on the other. Likewise, the woman’s eyes each matched one color of her hair. She was dressed in rags, covered in dirt, and looks like she’d been crying. Aeron didn’t know why, but looking at this woman filled her with both a sense of rage, and of compassion and sorrow. The girl looked broken, scared, lost. A part of her wanted to help her, but another part just wanted to walk away and mind her own business, just take care of herself.
From her position in front of her own mirrors, Thana eyed each reflection of Trinity and Aeron with malicious glee. Aeron was a constant source of entertainment for her. Truth be told, she would kill the woman if she could, but Thana knew they were bonded in a way that the two of them could never fully be rid of the other. So instead, she dedicated her time to driving the brunette woman crazy and getting her into all sorts of scrapes that threatened Aeron’s safety and drove her levels of paranoia through the roof.
And then there was Trinity… Oh, how Thana longed to kill this weak wretch that she continued to hunt. The girl was little more than a joke to her, and Thana lived to make Trinity’s life an absolute misery. Everything Thana did -- the killing, the torture, the assaults -- everything was to complicate this precious, innocent young woman’s life. Thana licked her lips as she looked the girl over, hungry for the feast. One day… one day she would catch up to her.
As the three women stared at one another, a figure watched on from above, unseen and unnoticed by them. Tendrils of the figure’s power stretched out to connect with each woman slowly, seeping into their minds and bodies until each was fully overcome with fear, anger, hatred. The mirrors shattered, and the maze began a new, each aspect of the avatar returning to what they had been doing before. Soon, this child would deliver her into the realm she had been cast from, and on that day reality itself would bend and break under her devouring existence.
But not until the avatar had been fully broken by chaos.
Please forgive me if I don’t talk much at times. It’s loud enough in my head.
IVYLEAF33
