I was on the mountain again. My bare feet were cold, really cold, like stepping on freezer ice packs. The wind was loud but also quiet at the same time, hard to explain, whooshing in my ears while everything else felt stuffed with cotton.
The angel was there, white hair flying everywhere like spiderwebs, and when she turned around, it was Krivya's face.
My stomach flipped in a bad way, the kind you get when you miss a step on the stairs.
"You're getting closer, snail boy," she said. Her voice was wrong somehow, sounding like the peacock from the zoo and also like my mom calling me for dinner from another room.
"Why do I keep dreaming of you?" I asked. My voice sounded small, like a little kid's. "Are you a memory, a ghost, or a part of me?"
My toes were so cold they hurt. I wiggled them against the gray rock beneath my feet, noticing the little sparkly bits in it, like glitter spilled on a sidewalk.
"What's the difference?" she said, tilting her head too far, owl-like and wrong. "A memory is a ghost of a moment. A part of you is a ghost of a possibility."
I didn't really understand. My brain felt fuzzy, like TV static.
"I am both and neither," she said, her mouth not moving right as the words came out anyway. "I am the question you're too afraid to form."
The wind picked up, smelling like wet dirt and the kind of medicine my grandma used to take. I hugged myself, my pajama shirt too thin to stop the cold, goosebumps rising on my arms.
"Did I kill you?" The words jumped out before I could stop them.
She laughed, and it wasn't a nice sound. It was like glass breaking, or ice cream truck music heard from far away and twisted.
"You give yourself too much credit," she said, stepping closer. Her feet never touched the ground, hovering an inch above the sparkly rock. "You can't kill a shadow. You can only fail to see it."
"Then who did?" My teeth chattered, and not just from the cold.
"The same one who is trying to bury you." Her eyes were too big and too dark, like holes punched in paper. "The one who fears what we represent."
"What do we represent?" I whispered.
A black beetle crawled over a rock near my foot, moving slowly. I focused on it because I didn't want to look at her face anymore.
"The space between worlds," she said as her body began to fade, the mountain behind her turning wavy like heat on a road. "The crack where the light gets in… and the darkness leaks out."
She was disappearing fast.
"Be careful, Eryx." Her voice came from everywhere now, from the sky and from inside my head. "When you stare into the abyss, it's not empty."
The beetle stopped moving, becoming just a dark dot.
"It's full of all the versions of you that you've ever abandoned."
A sharp pain hit my palm. I looked down and saw my nails digging into my skin, leaving little half-moon marks.
"And one of them," the voice hissed, right next to my ear, icy cold, "is very, very angry."
I woke up.
My whole body jerked like you do when you're falling in a dream. I was in my bed, sheets twisted around my legs and damp with sweat, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I couldn't breathe properly. My chest felt tight, like someone was sitting on it. I didn't know if it was asthma or the dream.
I fumbled for my inhaler on the nightstand, knocking over a glass of water that shattered on the floor. Water spread everywhere, but I didn't care. I found the inhaler, shook it, pressed it to my mouth, and took a deep, shaky puff. The medicine tasted awful, chemical and minty.
I waited. My lungs felt sticky, like they were full of glue, so I took another puff. Slowly, the air started to come easier, my heart calming a little, but the feeling from the dream stayed. It sat in the room with me, heavier than the dark.
It felt more real than my bedroom, more real than the broken glass on the floor.
This wasn't like a normal dream. Normal dreams are strange and then gone by breakfast. This felt like a message, not a text but something carved into my brain with a hot knife.
I got out of bed on wobbly legs and stepped on a shard of glass. "Ow," I hissed, seeing a tiny cut bloom on my heel, a perfect red dot. I hobbled to the light switch.
The light was too bright, stabbing my eyes. My room looked wrong, like a stage set. My nebula poster, my desk, my school bag on the floor all felt fake, cardboard thin.
Krivya's face. Her owl-tilted head. Her voice.
The space between worlds. The crack.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my foot. The blood smeared when I pressed it. It was real. I was awake.
But what did awake even mean?
If the dream felt more real than this, then which one was the lie?
My head throbbed behind my left eye. I went to the kitchen for a paper towel, the clock reading 3:17 AM. The world was asleep, except me and the memory of the dream.
I cleaned the cut, swept up the glass, and dumped it in the trash, the sound too loud in the silence. The tap water tasted like metal as I drank it. The fridge hummed. A car passed outside, headlights sliding across the ceiling.
I felt deeply alone, not normal alone but ..alone, what kind of alone this is? maybe it just is.