Breaking The Balance

Breaking The Balance - Nightmares and Demons

Jordan's POV

I was walking through a wasteland. Surrounding me were the bodies of creatures that seemed to be filled with darkness, twisting and writhing in the throes of death as their pitch black blood oozed out and into the ground. All that filled my ears was the sound of screams, people shouting names with fear and pain filling their voices – people who I had never heard of up until now but yet they seemed so familiar to me. A demonic laugh echoed around the wasteland and the cries grew louder, drawing me to them subconsciously, my feet moving of their own accord. The stench of blood and death was so strong it brought bile to my throat as I passed each of the corpses. As I grew closer to the sounds the world seemed to focus, the rocks on the ground were becoming clearer and a small hill appearing just in front of me – not the eerie mist that was surrounding me before.

I climbed the hill and stood next to a huge boulder, seemingly invisible to the two figures that were battling just across from me. One of the fighters was a man, quite obviously deranged as if he had once been a good man but taken over but another. His robes were tattered, stained with the disgusting black blood and the pure crimson blood of a dying human. His eyes blazed vicious amber, a bit like a wolf going in for the kill on a sickly deer, arms waving in intricate patterns and causing shadows to leap from his fists towards his opponent – grinning maliciously with each drop of blood spilt. The opponent was worse for wear, a young girl whose eyes kept flickering between a beautiful shade of blue and a terrifying soulless black. The girl's clothes were also tattered but her own blood leaked out of them and the worrying paleness of her skin made me wonder whether she was going to win this fight.

They were fighting on top of a pile of bodies, faces that brought pain to me yet I couldn't name. Laying at the very top were three faces I did know, it was my friends. Tucker's body had been shredded by some unknown force, his face the only thing that allowed me to distinguish him from another pile of blood and limbs. His face was twisted in agony and his empty eyes stared at me as if accusing me of causing this. Sonja lay next to him; her neck sliced and dried blood clinging to her neck as if it could avert my eyes from the gaping wound that revealed the bones and muscles underneath. Her hand was reaching towards Tucker in death but she never reached him, dying alone and in pain. Tom was lying slightly further off, a shadow dagger in his chest and a look of fear that reminded me of something I couldn't remember, a memory that was on the edge of my mind and flitted away whenever I tried to grasp onto it.

Suddenly the fight ended, with a shadow blade being shoved through the girl's throat and I had to stand there and watch as she choked on her own blood, agony and regret in her eyes as she collapsed at my feet. The manic laugh of the survivor brought me out of my trance and I moved myself to be standing in front of him, wanting this all to end, for something to make sense and for my mind to stop acting against me. His voice was gravelly and cold, filled only with malice and cruelty.

"Nothing seems to make sense does it Jordan? You've been here for months, yet you are still an outcast. You don't belong with the others, but then again you never have. Before you jumped into that void you betrayed them over and over again yet none of you even remember it! You withheld knowledge and held their lives in your hands yet you chose wrong time and time again. People have died because of you, what you see here is what should have happened yet your ending just caused more suffering in the long run. They were all meant to die that day, you broke the prophecy, and you ruined everything! You lost your family, your friends, your love and now your sanity. Yet you remember none of this. You chose the cowards way out; maybe you should do it again? Seems all you are good at is being a coward, why not finish it off?"

With that, he disappeared into shadows and I fell through the world, the blocks around me collapsing into the void that sucked in everything around me – the blackness almost suffocating me as it curled around my falling form. The shadow creatures fell too, I could hear them flying next to me – constantly whispering dark thoughts and cruel ideas into my frail mind that just wouldn't silence as they bounced around my already empty void of a mind. The light underneath me grew closer and closer and I just prayed for this to end, that I would remember none of this when it was over, that the screams from a familiar woman and the bellows from my closest friends would never happen and that I would never have to face my own demons ever again.