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Something black approaches me, familiar yet all the same frightening. A shadow of the past? Perhaps a changeling that wishes to mock me, or perhaps god has had enough of my mockery. Whatever the case, I am compelled to fear it. Hair black as night, skin pale as snow, lips red as blood. The eyes have long vanished and the skin around them cracking and dry as the empty black pits where they should have rested stared with an unnatural hatred. IT speaks to me, a tongue I cannot decipher whether I have yet to speak it myself or it has been long since I have. I understand it still, the core of the message, while the voice slithers through my mind its sharp tone only translates to one thing, KILL. It wants me dead so I run, I run faster through the twisted overgrowth of the Nightmare Vale that I have ever run before. I trip, I fall, it catches me, she catches me and my gaze is locked in the maelstrom of rage present in the darkness of her empty eye sockets. I mutter the only names I can think of Raven, no, Rosemary, no, Anastasia, no... I ask "Who are you" and my final answer is my awakening in a cold sweat, my eyes shifting frantically as I bury my head fearing she had followed me from my dreams. I take refuge in the small bathroom and sit in the shower watching the curtain instead of the wall, watching my paranoid mind create shadows that don't exist there. I remember the mirror oh what I fool I am to forget the mirror, a portal of trickery that yearns to backstab unwary victims. I calm my mind and my frayed nerves, and proceed into the day normally, hoping and praying it all a dream. Simply a dream, and nothing more.



The next night, I fear sleep yet as the night draws on into morning I succumb and drift off again into the Nightmare Vale alone. All is well and I awake in the morning but my short slumber leaves me weary and I fall asleep again, this time being hunted by things that should not be there. I wander through an echo of my memories, a home that I care for dearly, a time when I ran through the grass carefree with family. From there something screams, a loud and terrible sound fills the air and I beg and plead for confirmation that I'm not the only one who hears the cry. The other phantoms of this memory play it off as background noise, perhaps they cannot hear it? The second and third thunder across the sky and a massive cloud blocks out the sun. No, they CAN hear it, their denial only a reflex of fear for they know all too well what the sound is. The cloud flips over in the air, revealing the scaled hide of the monster it was hiding. It circles the scene letting out a cry of both rage and hunger as it swoops in to devour the memory and those inside of it. Before it takes me I awake again, saved by the physical world, or perhaps I yet died again, escaping through the only means that keep me alive through these damned accursed lives. But what was such a beast doing there? The Cloud Whale, as it is called by some, is a beast that roams the lands of our own dreams, keeping out intruders and protecting us from the Nightmare Vale's influence, why would there be one inside of the Vale itself, even more why would it attack?



Nothing more until I fall to sleep again, perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow, I cannot say but I wish it stays far in the future.