Such a strange place!" Lilith exclaimed.
The ground beneath her feet was unlike anything she had felt before, cold and smooth, like stone that had never once seen sunlight.
The air was thick, heavy in a way that pressed against her skin and her lungs differently from normal air. It wasn't suffocating. Just dense.
Like the atmosphere itself was older than anything she had ever breathed.
There was no sky. Or if there was, it was swallowed entirely by darkness, a darkness that wasn't just the absence of light but felt like a presence of its own.
And the silence.
She had experienced quiet before , late nights, empty classrooms, her room after her parents finally stopped screaming. But this was different.
This silence had weight. It pressed against her eardrums like the world was holding its breath, and the only thing that cut through it was the distant sound she couldn't yet identify.
Something in chains.
Since she was a little child, every time she went to bed or fell asleep, it felt as though she was transported to another world.
Sometimes it was very dark and scary, sometimes ethereal. It got to a point where this condition of hers started affecting her mental health, and she told her stupid parents about it, Yes, her Stupid Parents.
They dismissed her and told her she was just seeking attention. Well, she wasn't expecting any suitable response from them, but she had just wanted to try. She was an unwanted child, born at a point when no one was expecting her, when her parents had lost all feeling for each other.
Lilith shook the thoughts that were beginning to form in her mind. A tear fell from her eyes.
"Gosh." Lilith slapped herself lightly.
"Why are you crying? You're a big girl now. Those kinds of things shouldn't bother you anymore."
She said it to herself, but the reality of life is that Trauma, especially from childhood, never truly leaves. And even if it does, not so easily.
A sound brought Lilith's mind back to where she was.
"Okay, so where did my dream bring me this time?"
She looked around. It was a very dark place, and really quiet, so quiet that even a drop of water could be heard. She heard that sound again. It sounded like something in chains.
The first instinct of every human would be to run from danger, and that was Lilith's first instinct too. But Every Single Time she felt like leaving her dream state, it was always impossible, and that infuriated her greatly.
Suddenly, Lilith felt a force dragging her toward where the sound was coming from. She kept resisting, but the force was too strong.
"What kind of bullshit is this?" she muttered under her breath.
The force pulled her toward a door, behind which the sound was growing louder. She opened the door, and the sight before her was, well, frightening.
There was a man, bound in chains. The only thing visible was his back, which bore a tattoo of a dragon, a dragon in chains.
Lilith, who had always been a lover of art, studied the design carefully. She could tell the artist who had created this was incredibly talented.
The dragon was enormous across his back, wings half spread, mouth open in a silent roar, every scale rendered with a precision that made it look less like ink and more like something that had grown there. But it was the chains that caught her attention most. They wrapped around the dragon the same way real chains wrapped around the man, tight, deliberate, designed not just to restrain but to punish.
The dragon's claws were outstretched like it had been reaching for something when the chains caught it. Like it had been so close to whatever it wanted and then, stopped. Frozen mid-reach for eternity.
She felt a strange ache looking at it. The kind of ache beautiful and sad things produced in her chest simultaneously.
"Beautiful." she said admiring the beauty of the dragon, though it was bound in chains.
That one word left her lips, and she regretted it instantly. The man in chains turned around. His eyes were unlike anything she had ever seen, one iris was blood-red, the other a bright emerald.
"Weird," Lilith muttered.
But that wasn't the most surprising part. The most surprising part was the moment their eyes met.
The Man's face twisted: angry, irritated, pained, a mix of negative emotions. Both irises turned to Blood-red. Fangs slid from his mouth. Veins became visible all along his body. His nails sharpened and lengthened, and he began to strain and thrash against the chains that bound him.
"Run, run, run, run, run."
Lilith kept chanting to herself. Everything happened so fast she didn't even know what to do. Her legs refused to obey the orders of her mind.
"Goddamn, move!" she screamed out loud.
And immediately she turned and ran at full speed, not looking back for even a second. She ran until her body refused to carry her any further, gasping for breath.
She looked around, she was in a thick forest surrounded by enormous trees.
She bent forward, hands on her knees, pulling air into her lungs in ragged gasps. Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her throat. It was only when the adrenaline began to thin, only when her body started processing something other than run, that she felt it.
The burning.
She straightened slowly and looked at her arm. The Rose garden she had sprinted through blindly had not been kind. The thorns had caught her everywhere, thin lines of red crossing her skin from wrist to elbow, some shallow, some deep enough to flow freely. She hadn't felt a single one while she was running.
Fear had been louder than pain. It always was.
She pressed her palm against the worst of it and hissed through her teeth.
"What was that?" she asked herself.
"Fangs. Sharp teeth. Sharp claws, Blood-red eyes...that's a — a — Vampire."
"Oh my God."
Lilith covered her mouth with both hands. She was a reader, and she loved the Fantasy genre deeply, so of course she knew what vampires were, including the fact that they had supernatural speed.
Her eyes widened as the realization hit her. She heard the flutter of wings and turned, a bat descended from above and transformed into the man she had seen. He slammed her against a great tree with terrible force, one hand closing around her neck, choking her.
"Witch."
That was the single word that came from his mouth.
The word hit differently from the grip on her throat.
She was losing air fast, she could feel her body beginning to prioritise, shutting down the unnecessary things, narrowing her vision at the edges. Her hands clawed uselessly at his. She knew it was useless. Some rational part of her brain that was still functioning noted the sheer size of his hand around her throat and understood that she was not getting out of this through strength alone.
But the word.
WITCH.
He had said it like an accusation.
Like a verdict.
Like he had looked at her and seen something she had never once seen in herself, and hated it on sight. She wanted to ask him what he meant. She wanted to demand an explanation. She had a hundred things she wanted to say and absolutely no air left to say them with.
Her vision was going white at the edges now.
I still have things to do, she thought wildly. I haven't finished my novel. I haven't figured out what's at the bottom of that cliff. I haven't—
"P-plea — please, let me go," she managed in a broken, tearful voice.
His grip tightened further, and he spoke in a voice low and furious:
"Why would I let you go? Your kind killed my family and took my heart. I swear I will kill every witch and wizard alive. If that is the last thing I do, then so be it."
"I'm not a witch. I'm human, please let go of me."
He scoffed. "I'm not surprised you're denying your heritage. Lying is in your blood."
He began positioning his hand, preparing to rip her heart out.
"No, no, no — I can't die like this. I still have to —"
She gathered every last bit of her strength and screamed.