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You gaze into the abyss. And the abyss gazes back.
The Nightmare before you elegantly removes her mask in one swift motion, the void beneath seeping out immediately, covering every inch of the abyss around you with a black darker than darkness itself, the very opposite to light and an insult to light itself. An antithesis to light, like the antichrist to son of god. You can feel eyes watching you from every corner, every surface, every micron. You stare deep into her eyes as the darkness seeps evermore, a single tear shedding from her beautiful eyes, akin to large pearls of sadness, cracked and broken with a glimmer of hope inside. You don't get a chance to speak before your body quivers and trembles, lighting and static fill the air as the corpses of you and the Princess appear around you, filling the void you are in with the stench of decay and birth, scratching at your skin, your existence nigh-unwound from the very impact of this new sight...
But you refuse. You steel your heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves. Every blood vessel in your body runs cold and then warm again. It is agony, but you push. Your legs feel wedged in an unending swamp, the corpses around you seeming to grasp and try to pull you down to them, their empty eyes staring up at you, completely devoid of any emotion, sentience or soul. You continue walking, the scene before you shifting and changing or distorting all at once with every movement. You stop, a wall of void seeming to appear in front of you. You feel a single hand tugging at your leg, and you gently stoop down. Different. Emotion. Pain. Envy. Agony. Sad. Happy. Angry. The hand that grabbed you, covered by a silken glove, twists and quivers as you gently lay your own upon it, detaching it from you and gently holding its palm in your own. You can feel it, it wants to be free, to be out, to be alive in a world without the stagnation and repeating patterns it has experienced. You gently place it back down, uttering wordless solace and apologies to it as you step forwards once more.... She needs solace...
The scene shifts. You come across the Princess in an empty cabin, her face buried in her palms, unmoving. The air seems to stop, her body frigid. But not just hers. Yours as well. You cannot move, cannot blink, cannot utter a single shout or prayer. You try your best to move-
And then the Princess moves. Just out of the corner of your eye, you see her slowly beginning to shift, the hands covering her face moving downwards at a microscopic pace. Your body is in agony again. It won't go away. You need to move. To stop it. It hurts. Stop it-
The pain lessens, your body moving at the same pace as the Princess'. Minutes, hours, days, years seem to pass. You have only taken 5 steps forwards. The room is different now, and so is the Princess. Her face full of terror she is looking around, the room giving birth to junk, furniture and other such items, like the guts of an animal spilling out in slow motion, you have seen them slowly materialize from the void around you, the room slowly becoming cluttered. You've gotten used to the constant pain by now, but it still hurts so much. With every step you take it seems to increase twofold. But you refuse to break.
Another... decade passes? The room is almost full now. You have almost reached the Princess, her face pale and distraught. Can she even see you? Sense you? She's looked at you so many times and every time she does her face never changes, as if she's seeing through you. Halfway now. Maybe if you grab the hand covered in the same silken glove as the one decades before you can escape this hell, this world of molasses and sandpaper, the very air you breathe in taking days to fill your lungs, the floor beneath you rough, a splinter stuck in your foot, agonizing you for decades, adding on to the pain, almost like the straw that broke the camels back... and eventually yours... But not now. You steel your soul. Moving again.
You reach out and grab her hand just as the room fills with junk and clutter, and-
-the scene shifts. You come across the Princess in an empty Cabin, her face buried in her palms- No. Did it just... loop? It's all the same. You know it but you fear it, you don't want it to be true. You thought you had rid yourself of the boredom, the rock wedged into your skull over all those years, the eagle eating your liver just like Prometheus, but no. The eagle is back for seconds. Before you walked. Now you run. A decade passes, and you've made it halfway to her. She is different now, though slightly. She looks around just as she did before, but tears shed from her now hopesick eyes, glancing around the room, yearning for something, a way to escape from the prison she is trapped in, the prison you are trapped in with her.
Another decade passes. A year after you made it halfway, you noticed something about the junk and clutter this time... Somethings burrowed inside them all. Worms. So many worms. Wriggling about the room, the furniture, everything. You became jealous and horrified of them the moment you saw them. The reason being? They could move. Not like you and the Princess, with bodies of lead and molasses running through your veins, but move as the world should be moving. As YOU should be moving. As SHE should be moving. A year passed, and they noticed you. The moment the first one touched you... you thought the pain was bad. They were worse. Much worse. Like the all the pain you had been feeling over all this time was simply a grain in sand, and a single one of those worm's touch felt like a desert. You almost died when it touched you. You could feel your body boiling, burning, drowning, sinking, melting, disintegrating all at once. But you refused to give up. You steeled your heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves. The very muscles in your body, all at once, again and again and again, EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND.
TO AVOID THAT DEATH. YOU PERSERVERED. Now, to the current moment. Your will is steeled but rusty. The worms have found their orifice. They have burrowed into you like the very earth itself.
Through your ears.
Nose.
Mouth.
Eyes.
You refuse them. You refuse the pain. You are weak, but you still refuse. Your hope is strained. You are finally almost through, you hope. hope. hope. You grab the Princess' gloved hand, the silk making you homesick, reminding you of a life you once lived outside of this hell fit for a snail or slug. And, as soon as a finger touches the glove, you cry. The Princess looks at you, the world returns to a normal speed, and you understand something new about the Nightmare that has flung you into this fate yet again, just like the gloved hand before, in the wasteland of corpses you ran from into a hell unlike any other.
The hell is ending, but the worms and their deserts still pierce into you. You cry out as-
-the scene shifts. You collapse to the floor, vomiting anything and everything inside your stomach out. And when it's empty you heave. Heave and heave until you feel like you're going to vomit your very stomach up itself. The worms have left their orifices, but have left you scarred, their wriggling leaving grooves of trauma across your psyche. Gone as soon as you left that HELL. You feel empty. So, so empty. But you must continue.
Quivering, your body welcomes the familiar pain, the shower of grains of sand much more inviting and beautiful then the worlds of sand you experienced just moments and decades ago. Your body is so weak now. You have to take a breather. You have to rest. But you can't. You have a morbid feeling that if you do, the worms will come back, back to reclaim their home from your grasp, dooming you to almost drown in millions of oceans of sand once more. You look up, slowly and gently, as to not snuff out the embers of energy you have left and are growing back into a grand flame once more. The Princess stands before you. Staring down at you, her eyes seeing and not seeing you before her, her mouth turned upwards in a happy grin. You have little time to register the scene before you before you can feel solid shadows emerge from the void around you, standing perfectly still like statues but simultaneously dancing like ballerinas, all in the corners of your eyes. The scene starts to play, and your body shakes. Something new. Something different. Something not you is piercing into you-
It's the Princess. You can feel her emotions, her thoughts, everything. More shadows gather around, her smile becoming larger, tighter, more forced as tears begin to stream down her face like a waterfall. You can feel her want for companionship, family, friends, recognition, progress, a good life. Her smile gets so wide as the crowd of mocking shadows dances and stands and watches her intently, the void seeming to shrink and shrink, the air becoming heavier and heavier with each new member of this silent, judging choir. You can't even stand, the air is so heavy. Like a mountain pressed upon your back, like Sisyphus and his boulder, forced to carry it up his hill forever and ever... But just like Sisyphus, you will not break so easily. Your will is rusty, worn, almost broken, a crack forming in it. Hold it together. If even one more fracture appears you will shatter.
The ground shifts and squirms, like a worm, before you find yourself looking down into a grave, the Princess laying below, arms crossed, still as a corpse, her expression one of sorrow and emptiness. Flowers adorn the graves edge, no tombstone, but a single dark mirror to replace it. Your gaze is drawn quickly from it back to the grave, worms falling and rushing out of the walls of it to encase and cover the Princess. No. No she doesn't deserve this. You leap in, desperate to save her from the fate you once had. As soon as you touch her, seeing her vacant eyes become bright once again for just a moment-
-the scene shifts again. Standing before you in a void with everything from the scenes before mixed together is the Princess. She is crying out, tears running down her cheeks, red bruises streak down her face like burn marks. How long as she been weeping? You can see her lips, cracked and torn, old blood caking the wounds. How long has she been crying out? But before you can ask her, she looks down and begins to melt. And so do you. You feel your body breaking down, turning to mush and mud. First your toes, then your legs. Then your waist then your chest and arms. Just as your eyes are fully melted, the void begins anew; You stand before the Princess now- No, the Nightmare. She looks at you blankly, silent fury and sadness and rage behind her eyes. You understand her better than anyone now, better than yourself, and that terrifies you more than anything you've encountered in this void before. She turns around and begins to walk away, deadpan still. You can feel the void below you taking hold, your heartbeat the only noise you hear. You feel like you could give in. You've been through a lot. Just let go. Let his hell end...
No. No. You've been through too much to let go. Steel your heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves. Ears. Mouth. Eyes. Nose. Everything.
And you claw your way out, the muddy void seeming to turn into stone at your very touch. You climb and climb and climb, until you see a crack ahead. Something not of this void. A glimmer of hope. You rush forwards and break through and come face to face with the Nightmare again.
Her mask on again, she stares at you in disbelief that you made it out of something... something she couldn't. You walk forwards. Your body feels numb all over, it whines and begs for you to stop, but you do not. Push. Onwards. Do not stop. Not God nor the Devil or anything beyond that can stop you from what you're about to do. You raise your hands forwards towards her, steady at the level of her neck and-
you grab her firmly by the shoulders, shocking her, surprising her. She thought she had broken you, smashed your glass self to fragments and scattered them in the wind, but she was wrong. The world seems to vanish around you as you gently and slowly move your hands up her onyx-skinned shoulders, weary with pain and sadness and broken, past her fair neck, which she wishes to strangle to escape it all, and to her beautiful, tender visage held back by a porcelain mask of serene beauty.
You've pushed and ran and clawed and grabbed and pulled and forced your way through the horrors, the hell before, bearing witness to their grotesque and disturbing beauty every second. And you accepted them. Then, when the single crack in your will was just about to break, you made it out of the torrent of madness and reached Her, the Nightmare, the one person you now understand more so than anything in the entire world, even yourself, your very soul, your being. You understand the intricacies of her moreso than you could ever hope to imagine.
You gently clasp your hands around the edges of it, and feel your body quivering as a force unknown to you tries to stop you in your tracks. You refuse. You will not give in. You feel a sense of Deja vu at this feeling, of never surrendering to forces beyond you... You ignore it.
You swiftly pluck the mask off of her with grace like a swan diving into a lake to catch its prey and whisk it away. She stares at you, her beauty now fully behold to you once more, and, as soon as she would speak, you gently cup her cheeks and embrace her visage, yours and her body quivering at the tender touch between them, your lips locked in shock and awe to the void around you, your body quivering as static fills your ears...
But you stop before the static can envelop you, consume you in it's nulling grasp, and wrap your arms over her shoulder, locking your hands together behind her back, soft like a coat of taught silk, weary by time but still holding together.
Embracing her once more, head resting on her shoulder and arms locked around her waist, you feel her hug you back, wrapping her arms around you just as you did to her, both of you now interlocked with each other in silence.
The silence is only broken by a quiet sob, your shoulder becoming wet and warm with newfound tears raining and pressing down upon it. You say two words, which cause her to hug you tighter as if you're the last thing from keeping her falling into the abyss yet again; "I'm sorry."
You close your eyes. You understand her pain and are stronger for it. Not just for her but for yourself as well.