Post by Tiifu on Sept 20, 2019 21:42:16 GMT
((January 17th, night in the Great Forest. Closed to @kiara .))
Peace, it seemed, reigned in the Great Forest that night. It wasn't fully quiet, by any means; the scuffling of small nocturnal animals could be heard as they went about their own business, many of them oblivious to the details of war on their horizon. Shadows shifted as a few clouds skidded in front of the moon; the silhouette of a hunting owl, even, could be seen briefly against the night's sky. But these were the normal sights and movements of the forest; the blue and grey cast of the trees and their surroundings was peaceful. Nothing was unusual, nothing disturbed them.
Except...
For the soft sound of scared whimpering that carried on the wind.
She was... back in the Pride Lands?
Deep within her own mind, the little cub blinked a little. She knew exactly where she was; Pride Rock towered just ahead of her, a familiar sight that ought to have been comforting. All around her stretched the familiar grass plains of the savannah; wide open, unmarred, exactly as they ought to have been... and it was that, more than anything, that troubled Tiifu. This was the Pride Lands as she remembered them... but not as they stood now.
Maybe, though... maybe her dreams would be kind to her. Maybe she was just going to dream about the best days of her childhood, when everything had been safe, and there had been nothing more to fear in the world than nameless creatures that couldn't cross the border into the Pride Lands. Maybe she was just going to dream about frolicking and romping with her best friends; even a zany nonsensical dream adventure would be embraced. Just as long as it wasn't...
The first crack sound put paid to that thought. In the dream, Tiifu leapt half a metre into the air, whirling around. Behind her, the ground had split apart; a thorny vine had burst forth out of the crack. Now, it flailed forward, barbs about as thick as her foreleg sprouting from it and growing sharper by the second. The young cub gulped, cried out, backed away.
No... please no... any dream but this... ANYTHING but this...
The thorny vine seemed to drain the colour out of the world; soon, the land appeared leached of all hue at all. Where, moments ago, blue sky had been overhead, it swiftly faded into darkness; not the darkness of night, but a horrible, suffocating, inky blackness. Tiifu let out a screech of fear, backpedalled, was sure she felt something press into her shoulder-blades that hadn't been there a moment before. She whipped around again.
More thorns had come spilling seemingly out of nowhere. These didn't even grow; they just spiked forward from the very ground itself, spearing towards her throat and face and eyes. An unearthly howl escaped the terrified girl, who turned again, intending to run, only to find...
That single vine, too, had multiplied faster than she could have possibly imagine. Thorns and spikes impaled the land for as far as the eye could see; the ground itself cracked and writhed, almost bucking her off her feet, and horrible visions of being speared alive tumbled through the cub's confused mind. The thorns were spreading faster than any plant she'd ever seen, far too fast to be natural...
As if on cue, a horrible, demonic laugh ripped through the land. Centuries old baobab trees splintered before it, and Tiifu swore she could see the horned shadow of the horrible empress from beyond the Outlands towering over her. She quailed, feeling cold fingers reaching for her, trying to grip her tight... she had to, she had to get away!
The only way still open was toward Pride Rock, and Tiifu fled down it. Even as she ran, she could feel the thorns constricting around her, forcing her path narrower and narrower, and the cub knew with a horrible certainly that she wasn't going to make it. Some nights, she did; but even on those nights, Pride Rock offered her no sanctuary, only a precipice where she huddled, crying in terror, as the thorns grew and grew and grew up around her...
This night she wasn't even going to get that far, but Tiifu could draw no comfort from that knowledge; she was going to be impaled alive, the black thorns reaching their cruel gasp for her, blocking her in on every side, whispering death, whispering her name, stretching towards her eyeballs until she was certain, she was certain they were only millimetres away, and all she could do as squeeze her eyes shut and cry and hope that someone, SOMEONE, would hear her and save her at the last moment...
And in the forest, where she lay asleep, the poor cub twisted and flailed and whimpered pitifully as the dreamed torment embraced her. The nightmares didn't come every night; but when they did, they were all the more terrible for being a blend of reality as well as fiction. The Pride Lands really had been overrun with thorns, and Tiifu really had been part of the desperate escape that had let them to this forest. Even at the time, terror had squeezed her heart; and in the intervening weeks and months, her subconscious mind had built the fear far beyond what had actually happened, to the point where the child was no longer sure where reality ended and the nightmares begun.
All she knew was the terrible, gripping fear.
And if someone else were to hear her whimpers, to try and wake her up? They would be doing the little cub a great mercy indeed.
