“Chaos?” His voice came out strained, and he cursed himself for not finding composure.
“Are you okay?”
Chaos.
The same word was written in blood on his chest after confronting his own darkness.
Embrace your chaos.
“Well… Aren’t you all tied up in a pretty bow?” A familiar alto voice slithered along the room.
Familiar, and yet something was off about it.
Somethingunhinged.
Brookscranedhisheadtoward the voice to find Lytta standing by the entrance of his padded prison.
“Lytta? I thought they killed you! Where did you go?”
The smile that crossed her face was off kilter, her fingers twitched and her eyes bulged. With every slow step Lytta took toward him, the lights flickered in the room.
“It’s easy to manipulate this reality, Brooks. I’m afraid they’ve stripped me of my disguise, however.”
The way she spat his name sounded like a taunt. He closed his eyes hoping that when he opened them, she washisLytta.
“That’s not going to work,” she crooned. “This is very, very real. Look at me, Brooks.”
He refused, his eyes squeezing harder as the footsteps grew closer.
“Look at me,” she said, her syllables exaggerated in a sing-song tone.
He focused on his breaths, keeping them deep and steady.
In a rush of movement, Lytta straddled his prone form and grasped his face, her nails digging into flesh and breaking the skin.
“Look at me!“ she shrieked, her voice a shrill scream.
Brooks’ eyes flew open and he flinched. They were nose to nose, so close he could see the dirt filled pores on her cheeks and the dark circles under her eyes. Her brown hair fell in limp, greasy strands and the cuts on her face, once white and healed, were puffy and freshly opened.
Her breaths came as quickly as his own, the smell of rot suffocating him, but what was most concerning were the sockets where her eyes should be. Rather than the soft espresso irises he’d grown so accustomed to, black rosebuds replaced the orbs and rooted into her flesh, spreading beneath the skin in inky spirals.
“Now,” she smiled. “Now you seeme.”
“Lytta,” he gagged, the decay forcing its way down his throat. “What happened to you?” Brooks tried to turn his face from hers but the straps held steadfast.
She laughed, the throaty sound crazed.
“The better question is what hasnothappened to me. Let’s play a game, shall we?“ Lytta released her grip from Brooks’ face but continued to straddle him. “Nightmare for a nightmare, Brooks. But don’t worry, I’ll start this time.”
Fear lanced through his heart.
“These.” She raises her sleeves and points to the festering twin gashes up each arm. “Are when I used wooden stakes to slit my wrists. I woke up the next day, knit together.”
Horror.
“And this.” She raised her shirt and brushed her fingers over an enormous rip in her abdomen from hip to breast. “I taunted a horned beast so that it would tear me to ribbons. I woke up disemboweled with birds pecking my bones clean. Took memonthsto heal from that one. Which was sad, really. I’d hoped that would be the one.”
“The one?” he scoffed, overwhelmed with fear and disbelief. “The one to what?”
