[memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing it. Warning, this memory contains: nightmares.
You jerk awake. It's possible for a moment to believe it is the wind outside that woke you, if not for the feeling of something being deeply terribly wrong that penetrates every aspect of your body.
Outside the wind howls through the trees as if it's something alive and it feels vengeful enough that you wonder if perhaps it is.
Because that's the thing that woke you, a sense of darkness impending, something that's going to come - maybe something that you're a part of? It's not the first time you've dreamed it, and tonight you just hope that it didn't wake him too.
The last time the darkness woke him, and there was fury and quiet, and the quiet was worse than the fury.
With this thought, you pull in all of your thoughts small, knotting them tightly into the darkness as you clasp your hand together and focus small. The wind continues but the sense of whirlwind and darkness seems to be blown away with it. You don't want to risk waking him to check if he's sleeping. But he isn't here. So maybe he is.
The longer that he isn't here, the more likely it seems that he is asleep.
Tentatively you open your eyes and stare into the night. You are somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a cabin that likely belonged to a woodcutter a century ago. It's cold: the fire must have gone out or there are more cracks in the walls than you found earlier.
The wind howls yet, and your own emotions feel smaller, small enough to breathe out, and try to seeā¦
It isn't fury, or rage, or whirlwind that greets you.
This is malice, like a tentacled thing from the woods, trying to reach between the cracks, but not those in the wall, those in your mind.
It is malice, but a promise. Power, absolute certainty, the ability to control all circumstances. It dangles, maybe too attractive for what it is. A heartbeat extends beyond any sense of normal time. The wind itself fading away into stillness, and you realize that you need to keep breathing. The stillness is attractive, the control even more so.
Whispered between dry lips, barely audible in the room: "no."
The wind is back, rushing at full volume, the promise lost. You're not certain it even happened. It might have been a dream, if perchance this dream offends.
You shift to your side and close your eyes, the storm outside weirdly soothing after the unnatural silence of what likely wasn't a dream.
It's nothing more than your own fears. Nothing beyond that. But it lingers.