Parrow's Nightmare Realm

They'd cast her away. Whoever had exiled the monstrosities to that place of endless writhing darkness she now suffered in had ousted her there too. She knew not why, but the fact that they had provided a hard cover guide for her stay: the Nex Opus, made her think they must have had good reason to send her there... either that or they were meticulously cruel.

 

Thus Parrow wandered through the bamboo forest, with the blue moon hanging in the eternally black sky illuminating her way. It was a good omen, as the lunar cycles went: blue set a calm on things that red and yellow did not. She would be safe from the terrors, at least for a time. Never the less, her fractured mind did not need the presence of real demons in order to be frightened any more, she was too far gone for that. The reflection of her own image in a puddle sent her leaping back with a scream, and looking to the blue moon for comfort as tears rolled from her eyes.

'It's blue, it's fine. Everything's okay. It's blue. Nothing can get me, the moon is blue. It's all right, it's blue.'

 

After several attempts at getting up from the ground, Parrow finally got her legs to work and walked slowly over to the puddle where her mirror image lay. She was little the same mousy little creature she remembered, with skin so pale the veins could be seen at the surface, pin point azure eyes given a permanent red hue around the iris by having been bloodshot for so long, and her once blond hair that had been turned shock white by all the traumas she had experienced. Looking down, she noted with fervent melancholy how dirty her black laced ultramarine dress had gotten.

'This was a gift from my mummy.' she blubbered to herself, a moment before her reflection winked at her, sending her once more scurrying back. The creatures of the realm may have been rendered powerless in a blue moonlight, but that didn't been they weren’t still there.

 

Wearily she made her way through the wood, pushing aside any foliage with her sturdy old Nex Opus. After what seemed like an age of tired walking, her blurred vision caught something that set itself apart from the endless bamboo. She ducked down into the grass out of habit and once more initiated the ritual of convincing herself that the moon was blue. After a few minutes, she gained the courage to peak her head above the blades, and noted with an ever present fear that there were three tents ahead of her. Slowly, she placed her hard cover in front of her, and scanned the pages for anything concerning tents. Eventually she found a sketched picture of some people setting up that sort of encampment in the midst of a forest, and with nothing else matching the her enquiry, she looked into the paragraphs beside the drawing.

 

'The rural Vo, lived by the law that they should never partake of the consumption or use of nature's bounties, as it would be an affront to their gods which resided in the wild trees.' Parrow read in her mind, quickly darting her head from side to side to check if the tree gods were present. Seeing that they were not, she carried on. 'So it was that they ate only the meat of animals, never fruit or vegetable, and resided in the caves or other inclines of their lands, never building structures from wood or leaves. However, if a such a place could not be found, they could partake in the use of animal furs and bones as a base for making tents.' The white haired girl peered up and squinted her sleep deprived eyes at the tents, but it was too dark to make our their covering component. The last thing she wanted was to run into a shelter made up of a collection of violently killed beasts. Descending with suspicion, she read on.

 

'This Vo style of life remained dominant in the land for centuries, until the sudden arrival of the Jaya, a race that arrived on the island in great boats of metal. The Jaya did not know of the Vo's laws, and so ate the fruit of the gods in the wild trees, and used the forest itself to make their camps. This angered the Vo greatly, and soon a bloody war ensued, with the Jaya eventually leaving the island on their boat for fear of the wrath of its inhabitants. The Vo had killed most they battled with, but some were kept alive, and held as...' she gulped. 'trophies.'

 

'In the wake of their victory, the Vo chieftain asked the gods that lived in the wild trees what they should do with the prisoners. To this the gods responded: "Since they invaders have sought to eat of our fruit and make their homes out of our carcasses. You shall do the same to... them."' Suddenly Parrow felt very uneasy about being there, and started to crawl away. She had not made it twenty meters from the spot when, to her shaking dismay, the light shining on the ground below started to turn from blue to red. The white haired girl snapped her head up and started to hyperventilate.

'No no, it can't have been twenty four hours yet, I haven't found a place to hide.' she begged quietly, but it was no use. Before long the red moon had appeared out from the blue, and her ears picked up rustling ahead of her.

 

Pressing herself down on the grass, she noted with alarm that the tents were no longer where her eyes lad left them.'Please, please no!' she pleaded in her mind as the rustles continued in different places.

'I sense a pilgrim...' a voice that sounded like cracking bones whispered from somewhere close.

'What should we do with the lost little lamb?' another sounded, as a figure three times the size of her moved just out of her line of sight.

'Maybe we should consume them, I haven't had any new flesh in so long.' the last replied, the smell of decay filling Parrow's nostrils.

Through all this, the white haired girl lay statue still. Her resolve being if they couldn't find her, they couldn't hurt her. For a few more pain staking minutes she endured their ghastly talk and the shifting of their unnatural bodies, until at last: the voices and the rustling stopped, the demons obviously having gone to look for her elsewhere. Parrow gave it another minute, and then lifted her head from its side... only to see that one of the tents had positioned itself right at the crown of her head.

 

Human skin, stretched across a pyramid of old bones, the puss filled face of the man they had used still present at the top: with his lower jaw broken down the middle and sewn to the teeth lined flaps of the tent entrance below. His eyes, his organs, his limbs and his blood turned about itself inside the shelter, acting as the mutilated being's new tongue.

Parrow was too scared to scream, and that fear increased tenfold when she realised the other two tents were also present.

'Sweet creature, a wingless angel sent forth from the bosom of the maker himself. Wont you join us?' the monster in front of her asked as it dragged itself forwards with the others.

'No... I, I can't... it's...' Parrow mumbled as she cried.

'Come now, it will be fun.' the one behind her encouraged as breath foul as excrement wafted her way.

'Don't you want to be our friend?' the demon to her side questioned, it's guts lulling from in-between its jaws.

'NO!' Parrow shouted, leaping in between two of them to escape. However, her pursuer's gruesome tongue wrapped its way around her ankle mid flight, causing her to trip, and before long she was being dragged into the mouth of the ghoul, where the blood and organs invaded every crevice of her body. The white haired girl wailed as the mouth shut in on her, and before long was engulfed by the tent's oozing red muck.

 

The next time she regained consciousness Parrow found herself bloody and aching in the middle of a field of long grass, the blue moon hanging in the sky, and the tents no where to be found. Her very being violated, Parrow cried out as loud as she could to the night's sky, but only her echo answered back. After several hours of trying to bash her head to bits against a rock in the ground, the seemingly invincible girl got up in a fit of tears, the Nex Opus in her hand, and collapsed back down again into a series of panic attacks.

'Why? Why does... I don't want to... anymore. I hate it... let me out. Please let me out, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, whatever I did I'm sorry!'