The Cursed Kingdom

THIRTY-NINE

~ THE DEMON ~

I woke up with a loud ringing in my ears and the feeling of my brain pounding against my skull, the feverish beat making me groan and roll onto my back so I could press my shaking palms against my eyelids in an attempt to relieve some of the pain. But it was futile. My whole head felt like it was consumed in fire and its invisible flames were burning me from the inside out, slowly turning my senses and conscience into mere ashes until all I could focus on was the agony it inflicted.

Darting my tongue out to lick my painfully chapped lips, I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion when I noticed that the torture didn't just end at my neck but also spread down my spine, which was lying flat an something hard and cold—the complete opposite of Henrik's plush mattress. I forced my eyes open, ignoring how my pulsing brain protested, and sat up when blackness met them as if my eyelids had never parted at all, my body stiffening when my palms registered the feeling of smooth stone underneath my body.

"Oh no..." I muttered, springing onto my feet, and immediately almost toppled over, a familiar sensation of lightheadedness amongst the pain feeding my dread with each passing second. Spinning in circles, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness to where I could at least see shadows and figures and then widened when I saw where I was, which confirmed exactly what I'd feared since the moment I woke up—I was stuck in yet another nightmare.

All around me was grey stone—under my feet, beside me, above me—everywhere until it disappeared behind the curtains of blackness on either side where the cylinder-shaped cave went too far for my eyes to see. The whole space felt like it was vibrating with energy, my bare feet tingling from the strange sensation, and it smelled unusually like something was burning, although there was no smoke or fire in sight.

Pulling my eyes down from the stalactite-infested ceiling, my eyebrows scrunched in confusion when I took note of the yellow-tinted vines along the cave's walls. I traced them with my eyes, seeing how they all sprouted from the ground and wove together to form a large and oddly formed cocoon-like mass only a foot above the ground that had a gaping hole in its center.

I cringed, taking a tentative step closer to try to get a better look at it, grime and rocks as big as my fingernails sticking to the bottom of my feet. My stomach churned in horror and disgust when I made the observation that it looked like something had crawled out of it, dried pieces of the strange vegetation scattered below the cocoon that was well over five feet tall. Squinting to look inside, I could faintly see the outline of where a head used to be but the rest of the vines were all too damaged and ripped up to make out what kind of creature could've come from it. So I took a step back and averted my gaze to the darkness, not wanting to think about it anymore since my thoughts would only make me more nervous.

It's just a dream, I repeatedly told myself. Nothing can hurt you.

"Hello?" I exclaimed helplessly, my voice reverberating off the walls and into the ears of unfeeling darkness. Dream or not, my heart gave a leap at just how endless the cave sounded, the echoes of my voice and heavy breathing almost seeming to go on forever, and prayed that whatever creature had emerged from the cocoon didn't care for the taste of Human flesh or was at least too far away to hear my voice. "Mom!"

"It's amusing how many creatures scream for their mothers when they're afraid."

A shriek of fear escaped me, shrill and loud enough to have something within the darkness scatter away, and I whipped around in the direction of the voice, my blood becoming as frozen as ice.

Sitting at a small square table that wasn't there a second ago was a man whose brown hair was slicked back into perfection and blue eyes were trained on me expectantly and equivalent to if I was a speck of dirt under his black shoes. In the dim lighting that was provided by his unusual blue-flame lantern on the table, I stared at his fingertips that had clumps of dirt trapped underneath them as they languidly moved up and down and back down and up in an impatient pattern against the metal piece of furniture. The man couldn't have been older than thirty and I would've considered him handsome if it weren't for his sickly pale skin that suggested he hadn't seen sunlight in a concerning amount of time and his eyes that lacked any warmth of a soul.