I had a dream.
There was a vivid quality to it, the type to be broadcasted through teleprompters for the world to feel. Vibrant, indepth, a pulling sensation that overcame me so bad that there was no surrealism versus reality. It just was. The puzzles were all in the scene of it --
I recall only the beginning where I was before a small mirror, basking it's mercury reflection of me over a simple sink that was encrusted with glyphs made from sand. My fingers rolled over them, remembering them with out truely knowing what they meant. Familiar, but unknown. That is when my skin began to crawl, itch, even burn. It spread like a rash and had me reaching, feeling at my face.
I remember my skin feeling dough like, to soft. It hurt, so I scratched. When that did nothing but awaken my nerves to feel the rush of pain, I dug my fingers in. I began pulling strips of flesh away and I remember how it felt: Like wet clay. The pieces were dropped in the sink while my hands began to drip with blood from what I was doing. As I stripped my face there was something beneath -- a new face.
Splotched in red, but there were no wounds. Only another face. A familiar one, with puncuated veins pulsing black and blue and scruff across the jawline. Sad, sunken in eyes that were confused and rotten like old apple cores. His lips were pale, his skin even moreso. Transparent. I remembered this face -- Gabriel. He was trying to smile but his lips were cracking, peeling, chapped from the way he looked inebriated. Poisoned. Sick. I felt the burn, again.
Now my skin felt like paper mache, and I scrambled to tear at it to find another face -- any face. The next was a charade of sorts, malfunctioning like static on the television and blurring. Eyes of gold and green, intense and exotic. A pretty face that was now flawed by smears of blood. Dark hair, floating around as if she was captive beneath the waves, the anti-gravity of being under water. And that smile. It was tempting, to beautiful to reinact. Aisleigh.
I dug again, ripping away what I could. Slawing off the masquerade of a face that was not mine. I was scared, but I couldn't read my expression of terror because none of these, none of these images in the mirror, were mine.
The next was bloodied, wet with water, damp hair and shallow citrine eyes. Pale yellow that suddenly twisted and warned me in fresh red. The mutation of different pigments started to be cast -- to fast for me to read each pigment. His face was the haughty type of handsome that had soured due to fatigue, a tired syndrome of being buried under pressure. His lips were moving, though, but I heard nothing. Dead silence. I stared and stared and finally realized what his mouth was saying: Haylee, Haylee, Haylee. I knew it was Aden and sunk my fingers into my eyes, so anxious to get rid of it. I tore, and tore. It seemed like hours before it was gone, the chunks of flesh that wasn't mine piling up like slabs of warm meat in the sink.
I felt a ping of awareness, of comfort and security, when Hunters face stared at me now. But something was wrong, he wasn't smiling or looking at me -- looking thru me. I tried calling his name but my lips were stone cold and unmoving, and I watched this make-shift Hunter in the mirror slowly open his mouth, a rolling oil-fire slowly dripped out like orange and white hot bile. His skin bubbled, began to spread -- burning and sizzling. The smell made me sick: Roasted human flesh. The scream I tried to let out wasn't aloud, but in my head and it echoed back and forth.
There was no time to peel away this horrific portrait of my brother; the skin fell on it's own. Like the shedding of a snake it dragged away in large, puzzle pieced flakes to the sink. Suddenly it was a shaken camera angle of twisted flashes: Stefan the Nabou, devilish and handsome with black scales shimmering across his cheek and over his eyes. I wanted to kiss him, to tie my tongue around his, suck out his secrets and cure him. Before I could reach, to try and push my hands past the mirror, it was gone in a sudden black out -- lights flickering, strobes of light that suddenly showed a white-blue eyed carnivore smiling a sharks hungry grin. The snippets of what I caught were of red, red hair and milk white skin, a haunting image of a maniacle woman (they call her Rowan the Mad)-- her gaze something they made eerie ghost stories of, monsterous fables told about this cannibalic witch. Her fingers rose (or my fingers? Was it my body or was I just watching the mirror show me these things?) and were elegantly long, sharp nailed. They were brought to her lips where she hushed me. She could hear me crying.
I awoke just as another image was born: The Morose Sigils. They flickered in and out of view, but I knew what they were. They were his mark. Black omens, black cats, dark glyphs.
Hunter was over me, pinning my arms down and murmuring a longlost language down to me. A spellbinding mantra that brought me out of the limbo, away from the nightshade and the darkening matter that was threatening me. I felt warm wetness a long my face, something thick beneath my finger nails. My sheets were smothered in handprints of red. I asked to see a mirror (bizarre and ironic to ask for what had just made me sweat) and when he brought me one, I felt my lip tremble. My voice caught in my throat. I had clawed my own face to Hell and back. Deep gashes. Long streaks of where my nails tore into skin. A massacre of a mess that had me throwing my limbs from that tainted bed and flying into the garden, falling to my knees, digging my fingers into the earth. To feel Gaia's pulse, to rub the moist dirt across my arms and do nothing but chant.
I threw up, then and there, but not vomit or bile or hours of sitting food -- ocean water. The salt stung my throat, the feel of it being gritty on my teeth. Tethys trying to cleanse me, trying to purify my blood and stomach.
I'm sitting here now, quiet as the epitome of the Sleepers, and write while Hunter sleeps; pretending to close his eyes and not be scared. Not be worried. I can feel his ebbing aura trying to feel me out, coax me away from this all and rise to his question: Should we go to The Oracle?
I've told him I'll think about it, I'll wade in the shallows of our home and find sanctuary on the beach, but I won't emerge into the public eye. Not like this. Not with the evidence of my dreamstate disaster written across my face. But -- no. Then again -- no. I can't. I won't. She knew him and Rowan and I can't be near the --
Hunter is calling for me.
