Delirium (Creepypasta x reader)

•46•

The next chapters contain a variety of similar mature themes and triggering content. Thus, the warnings for all of it will be listed here. It cannot be avoided, so please keep yourself safe and read responsibly. I consider this final arc and all its content a dead dove.

Content warning: moderate to heavy violence, moderate gore, panic attacks, dissociation, graphic depictions of murder, character death

--

The first few seconds of silence after the voice finished speaking were ones of stillness. The sky was dark beyond the reach of the scraggly treetops, pinpricks of stars overtaken by the saturation of the full moon. Silver light bled into the woods, creating swathes of detailed visual stimuli contrasted with hard cuts of shadows. They were made deeper than ever by this illumination, patches of void that carried an irrational fear - to trip and fall out of reality from one step into its murk.

Within your head the seconds stretched on like days. Anxious thoughts sped along at such a rate that they threatened to throw your brain right out of the carriage like a horse gone wild, the reins torn from its coachman. They bore no weight, no concrete subjects other than pure panic and a wish to be anywhere but here.

Here, lying in a forest filled with people instructed to kill one another.

You were one of these people, tossed together like vegetables in a salad bowl; dogs in a ring. Forced into an arena of endless length with a fatalistic task to carry out. Time spent in this place meant you knew that escape was impossible. The forest didn't conform to the rules of reality. If you walked in one direction you'd walk forever, finding the same dilapidated structures that dotted the area. They never changed, never aged - the silo never bowed under its unmanaged weight, the truck never moved or rusted further.

The quests you had undertaken only emphasized that point - seeking out items, tracking animals, avoiding the Hooded man and his swift corrections. You had traveled hundred of kilometers here, and never gotten out of it or seen the end. Only found more spindly pines, more bare birch trees. No escape.

It was the perfect coliseum for this contest.

Time was probably passing faster than you noticed. It seemed slow, but you could also see the soft tilting of trees in the wind. Moving at a normal pace.

You couldn't feel this wind. Couldn't feel much, really. A lot of things seemed far away as you contemplated the situation - your hands, your arms and legs, your heartbeat. Reception was fuzzy, like a bad cell signal. You had a body, you were sure. But it wasn't really important right now.

This situation brought a lot of hard, uncomfortable concepts to the forefront. You thought about the crow slain on your doorstep. You thought about the obscure drawing dropped on campus. You thought about standing in the dark, assaulted by three shadowy figures and clean, sterile hospital walls.

You thought about the smattering of dreams over the months, whatever you could glean from otherwise empty sleep. Running from an enemy who was always one step behind, hidden eyes always watching your every move, blood. Blood and tears and rage - killing crows by snapping their necks, being a crow strangled to death. Being chased, being the chaser. Turning and fighting for your life, killing for the pleasure of it. Blood drawn from your body and theirs that mingled together, coagulated. Indiscernible from one another.

But all of that was fake. It came from the realm of dreams where thoughts, hopes, and fears randomly sorted themselves. You had never snuffed the life from any living thing, not on purpose. Not for fun or from another's direction.

And now you were told to kill people. Forced to kill someone, if they crossed your path. Be the attacker or the attacked. Either way it was a lose-lose...