The answering call wasn’t what she was expecting, but it was everything she’d needed. Their soft cries mingled, the only sound traveling down their tenuous connection. She was the first to stop and listen.
“Hello?”
Xia’s eyes scanned the bathroom. She tried and failed to lift her body to see around the door. Her heart raced. Could he be lurking outside? Was he feeding her illusions, or thrusting her into another nightmare?
A sob escaped her lips as she silently begged the great God of Chaos for safety. She didn’t have anything left to give the Lord of Nightmares. If this was his dreamscape, he would kill her.
“H-Hello?” A masculine voice filled her mind, but it wasn’t one she recognized. It wasn’t the Devil’s, and it didn’t come from her memories. So who was it?
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“Just fucking great,” he groaned. “I wake up from a massive blackout and I’ve got a new voice floating around in there. You’re a sick bastard, God. Really sick.”
“How are you in my head? Who are you?” She was really starting to freak the hell out.
“The irony is not lost on me here,” he sighed more so to himself. “Hello, lady voice. I’m Brooks, and you’re just a figment of my broken psyche, so this introduction thing is weird. But here we are.”
What was he talking about?
“I don’t understand,” she said slowly, wearily. Xia raised to a sitting position and leaned against the wall, the heels of her palms pressing to her aching head.
“If schizophrenia was understood, you and I wouldn’t be in this position. My voice would be the only one in my head.”
“Schizophrenia?” What did that even mean?
“I’m not doing this with you. Or, rather, myself. Fuck!”
She flinched as he yelled, cowering back into the wall.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s happening, but I can’t.. I can’t do it. Just leave me alone, okay?”
When she’d asked the Father of Chaos for a lifeline, this wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind. It made her hands tremble and scrambled her thoughts.
A deep laugh rumbled through her mind as he said, “That’s a new one. Usually, I’m the one telling the voices to shut up.”
She didn’t respond, only covered her ears and closed her eyes against the intrusion.
After a few moments of silence, he muttered, “Today sucked.”
She pressed harder on her ears, but it only made his voice louder.
“I woke up from a coma a few days ago. I’m not sure how long I was there. The fucking psycho doctor loaded me with insulin until I couldn’t wake up. She said it would make my voices go away. That’s why I said the irony isn’t lost on me. I lose months of my life trying to stop the flood of them through my head and when I wake up there’s always more rather than less.”
Xia lowered her hands slowly, her mind whirling as her body sat frozen. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an illusion or a nightmare. The Devil never had the patience to hold off on theatrics this long.
“What’s insulin?” she asked hesitantly.
“It’s a drug used as a sort of therapy here. They overload your system with it to try and reboot your brain through a coma. Heavy sleep that you don’t wake from until they stop dosing you.”
Her mind whirred with the horror of his situation but, even worse, the familiarity. In large doses, her song could cause something similar among gods. In small doses, it was exotic and liberating, an aphrodisiac of the highest sort. If she were to use too much? To overdose? She could force them into an endless illusion if she so chose, or exsanguinate them completely.
She forced her mind from the thought and brought her attention back to the voice invading her mind. “Someone does that to you?”
“Someone does a lot of things to me here. I live in an asylum for the mentally unwell. They can do whatever they want to me as long as it’s in the name of medicine.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Oh, one hundred percent. My head still feels like it’s not fully connected to my shoulders. Which would explain why I’m talking to you rather than trying to ignore you.”
