“Mother Maples! Something’s wrong! She’s… she’s screaming… she’s falling—oh, please, we have to help her!!”

“There is little we can do for her yet, child. It will take some time to reach her. However, what you can do is trust the dream to take her out of danger. Your trust can help her; it is all that will, now. There is magic in faith; it can cross the boundaries of worlds.”

“Trust the dream… oh! Yes, that’s right, she’s just having a dream, right? and you never land when you dream of falling, do you? So she’ll be okay. Thank you, Mother Maples!” Snowpepper breathed easier. Of course Sylvie would be all right. It was just a dream, and dreams weren’t dangerous, not the way reality could be.

******************

Sylvie closed her eyes tightly and curled into a ball. The wind buffeted her from all sides. She didn’t believe this. It was too crazy and weird to be true. She would make it change. “Something else happen,” she whispered. “Change into something else. Change… change…” Still, the wind buffeted her; daring to open her eyes a tiny slit, she sound the ground rushing toward her at dizzying speed.

“Change, dammit!!” she shouted.

The wind stopped suddenly. Everything was still, calm and quiet. She lay curled on her side. Gravity pressed her down onto a flat hard surface. The sensation was very strange after her previous experience in the air. For a moment, she considered not moving, not looking, just laying here with her eyes closed, never moving again. Catatonic. That way nothing could happen to her. She savored the idea for a long moment, then opened her eyes.

“Oh, nooo!” she moaned. This couldn’t be! She was back in the glassy room with the watery green light. She closed her eyes again and tried to stop up her ears. When the voice came, it seemed to speak directly into her brain, bypassing her ears entirely. She whimpered.

“Oh, Sylvie, what is the matter with you, girl?” the voice had a silky, confidential undertone that gave her the shudders. “Don’t you know you can’t escape your own self? You’ve been running forever, or trying to, but you haven’t moved a single inch beyond your own being. You still are who you are. Why don’t you just surrender to that?”

The words sounded reasonable. She almost agreed with them. But the silky intimacy of the voice felt unremittingly horrible to her, like rape. She felt an acute, horrifying sense of intrusion, violation of her most essential boundaries.

“Go away!” she shrieked. “Get out of my head!”

“Ah, but I have no place to go, silly girl. I live in your head. Don’t you know that? It’s not a very pleasant place to live, either. I’d leave if I could. But you won’t let me. You cling to me like glue while pretending I’m not here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Stop paying attention to it, she chided herself. You’re only enouraging it. Ignore it, maybe it’ll get bored and go bother somebody else. The trouble was, the voice was impossible to ignore. It spoke inside her bones. It reverberated like a bell inside her mind. It was maddening.

“What do you want from me?” she whispered, defeated. If I give the horrible thing what it wants, when it’s satisfied, maybe then it’ll go away, she thought. She felt little hope about it, though. It seemed that she had been locked up alone with this slimy mental intruder for eons. She doubted that it would voluntarily leave.

“Want? I want nothing. I want you to be a better person than you are, since I am doomed to spend eternity inside the confines of your brain. You are broken and pathetic and that impacts on the quality of my experience. If you would wise up and awaken to your true potential, my experience would become more pleasurable. That’s all.”

“What are you?” she asked, dazedly, feeling goosebumps prickling her skin. Was she possessed by some sort of demon? How weird was that?

But the voice was silent. As it faded away, so too did the watery light, and she found herself once more stranded in the darkness, this time too tired and dispirited to feel anything but relief that the voice had gone.

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