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✨🌙🔮🌙✨
Juniper Tanaka abruptly awakens at midnight, mouth agape, soaked in sweat. Her throat is clogged with metal chains, pulling, grinding her pharynx. Close your eyes. Breathe. She follows her own instructions, her cold palms fisted the bedspreads, eyebrows scrunching in struggles to breathe. Deep breaths. Slow and steady.
When her lungs are filled with air again, she exhales- letting out all the pain and fear from her chest. Only one of them works out. June can't let go of the fear. Not when it paves its own way into her mind playing and replaying the same dreams over and over, for three nights straight. For three nights she tells herself that she can handle it, that's it's only a dream. But every following night, the dreams only became more terrifying. Every following night, the dream was a fleeting step away from reality. The nightmare was one flying second away from her life.
She can't go back to bed. Instead, she adds the night into her list of sleepless nights, now increasing in the recent times. Something has changed, but what? Secrets began to evolve everywhere around her, reality- at least the reality that she knew of seemed to dwindle away slowly and painfully. Like myths and legends were becoming real.
She shifts to her study chair, pulling her dark her into a ponytail. On her desk in front of her, the empty pages of her journal stared back at her, waiting to be written in. The book had been left unfolded for the past two nights when June told herself she would jot down the dream. The dream that enacted to be a prophecy rather than what it would usually suggest.
But today, she would. She would let go of her fears, she would share her secrets to the journal perched in front of her. It had only gotten worse each night. She was afraid she would combust.
One more breath later, she grabs her blue ink pen, uncaps it and the moment the nib touches the blank page, her hand flows in her penmanship. She tries recalling every detail.
Unmistakably in the night, the trees flutter in the cold breeze, the chills reach down her spine. Her fair skin is paler under the silver light, serendipity dwindling in the darkness. Soaked in sapphire moonlight, she stands alone in the middle of the woods, heart thumping in her ears, cold sweat drizzling down her palms. She is encapsulated in fear- freezing and impending. Her dark chocolate hair stick to her neck, her sweatshirt is drenched in sweat. The eerie atmosphere hisses at her like a large snake, preying on her before the attack.
Something cries farther down, deafening her. She presses the heels of her palm to her ears, squinting her eyes to take sight of its source.
The howl comes again, but June is ready enough this time to adjust to the sound. She squints into the night, trying to switch on her eyesight when suddenly a figure leaps in front of her. The figure is a human male, kneeling in front of her, his face is ducked out of her sight. Curiously, she walks towards it against her loud heartbeats that tell her to run.
