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Frankly exhausted and pushed past her limit, Demi stepped out of her work clothes and into her nightgown for the first time in nearly a week. She couldn’t keep it up anymore— she was driving herself mad by virtue of keeping herself awake for so long. Fluffing up the pillows on her bed with the movements of a madwoman, she fell onto her bed with her face in her hands.
Nobody could explain why she was having these dreams , not even the psychologist who she’d begrudgingly paid a visit to. Every spiritualist had left her at a dead end; Andrew had nothing to offer but the promise of a prayer, Eli had turned his face away in refusal to speak on it, and Fiona had leant on her hands, grinning and asking if Demi had summoned the dream witch. Who would do something so stupid, let alone her? By that point she had driven herself so highly strung from exhaustion that she found her way in Dr. Mesmer’s office, talking about her childhood, the way she was raised, and her brother. Ada had sent her away with nothing— she was a mentally sound woman, and it was completely unclear where these dreams were coming from.
But they weren’t just dreams.
Awaking in a cold sweat with the taste of blood in your mouth from where you’d been forced to eat your own innards was not normal, and she could not be convinced otherwise. The vivid surreality of those dreams is what had forced her to remain sleepless for night after night, to pace around the empty manor and run into those who only showed their face at night, those who would offer prayers and suggest she see a doctor for her ailments. What a joke.
They were the work of the Dream Witch herself, and nothing else.
It was Demi’s own fault, really, that she’d gotten herself into such a situation. She must’ve upset the witch a couple weeks back by bumping into her during a match— and probably by the flirtatious words she’d used in her following apology. From that moment on, she’d been left with a looming feeling of unease and nightmares so graphic she was keeping herself awake just to avoid them. It was pure madness.
Her bed was soft and her sheets were clean, a cruel reminder of what she had missed, but she could not find it in her to rest yet. She stared up at her ceiling until her eyes watered as if blinking might cause her to fall asleep in that instant. After days of refusal, she couldn’t imagine tonight’s dream being anything other than horrific and she wanted to brace herself for as long as possible. But she was only human, in the end, and her eyelids were so heavy that she condemned herself to “rest her eyes,” knowing fully well she would not open them again for the rest of the night.
Demi soon found herself face down in a wriggling pile of something — and she opened her eyes hesitantly to find herself surrounded by hundreds of thousands of larvae. Squirming over each other, those hungry things quickly took note of her and made quick work of inching their way across each expanse of her body, digging into her skin as if it would open for them. Horrified, she opened her mouth to scream, like that’d do her any good, and the new space for them to crawl into was quickly taken advantage of. She tried desperately to spit them out, forcing her arms to find the floor beneath her, to find her standing and free herself.
But there was no end, just miles and miles of maggots squirming and popping under the pressure of her hands. The larvae squirming across her tongue, breeding in her mouth and worming their way into her stomach, did not seem to mind when her hands returned slick with the blood of their comrades, reaching into her mouth to pull them free. Coughing up the wriggling bugs did nothing to help her, as more and more of those bugs fell into her open mouth. They were everywhere, every expanse of her skin slick with their grime, tangling themselves in her hair. Even the insides of her ears were not safe, as they gnawed on her ears drums. They wanted in .
Finally, they gave up on her mouth and continued further up her face, crawling over her eyes and uncaring of her uncomfortable screams as they wormed their way under her eyelids. She thrashed for a moment before falling still, the maggots easily sliding into her skull and chewing straight through her brain. Gagging, she vomited up more maggots into the pile, tears streaming down her face as she sobbed, her head hitting something hard and the world going black around her.
When Demi awoke— though she was not really awake— she found herself not in her room, not anywhere she should have been. Hell, not anywhere she could have been. She stood in her nightgown, in the absence of space, surrounded by nothing but white. Whirling around to take in more of the atmosphere she was met with the figure of a woman, lanky and thin, smiling at her pleasantly, lovingly , adoringly.
Her hair fell in jet black curls down to her waist, not at all like the defined frizz of Demi’s hair, but loose and styled coils that looked intentional and forced. Her lips were painted a deep, glossy black and her skin tone was unlike any human color, a nearly indescribable purple that complimented the many markings, ranging from black to white, that covered her body. Most of her body was exposed, from her curved waist to the majority of her large chest. Her long legs were spindly and oddly out of place on her form, and in an instant, Demi knew why.
This woman was beautiful, undeniably, but her beauty was all wrong. Her lips were too pointed and cruel, her skin the wrong color, her legs— she could not begin to describe just what was wrong with them, but Demi couldn’t believe she could even support herself on them. That woman, that creature , could not even be called a woman— she was a God, and she was exposing herself to Demi in a way that made the barmaid deeply uneasy.
The silence hung heavy and oppressive in that nothingness, as the two stared at each other, the Goddess' empty eyes staring right past what could be seen on the outside. She was more than any lover— any human could see.
“What do ya’ want from me,” when she finally spoke, her voice hoarse and weaker than she’d ever sounded.
The woman smiled, her sharp lips curling upwards in such an unnatural, uncanny way that Demi wanted to turn and flee, but there was nowhere to run to. There was nothing but Yidhra. Yidhra and the vastness of space surrounding them.
“What do you think I want, Ms. Bourbon?” Her voice was smooth and as attractive as her face, but her pointed lips did not move.
She took a shaky inhale through her nose, standing back a little bit. “You want me to become your little follower.”
When the woman laughed, her back arched backwards, fluid without a structure of bones, and she kept on laughing until crocodile tears sprung into her coal-like eyes. “No, not at all, for I could never wish such a fate on a woman like you.”
“No, my little rosebud,” she purred, her expression turning back to her blank grin as she gazed down at the shaking woman beneath her. “I’m in love with you, Demi Bourbon.”
“What?” She stumbled backwards. That had absolutely not been her first guess, not her second or third.
“Isn’t that what you say when you love someone? That was my understanding.” Now it was Yidhra’s turn to step forward, catching Demi in her claws before she could fall. Her long nails dug into her waist, but there was no warmth in her touch. She was less than a shell, a vessel for the goddess to speak through.
Those pretty black lips turned down in something that could’ve been a pout, “Do you not like the form I’ve taken?”
In the blink of an eye, she changed, her hair shortening and straightening at her shoulders before it lightened to an auburn brown. Then, her purple skin turned pale and human, her lips shifting to a light pink. “You like the perfumer, yes?”
“Maybe the priestess?” Her skin tanned and her hair fell into a long braid, flipping through each survivor's skin and their hair, even as her face remained the same. “I’ve seen everything, my dear. I can be everything.”
“In love with me?” She stared into the current face of Emily Dyer, her eyes watering.
“Yes, in love with you.” Her voice was low, surrounding Demi from every angle, inside of her. “Don’t you love me back?”
It felt unwise to respond in any clear way, “Ya’ve tormented me for weeks— you don’t love me.”
When she smiled it exposed rows of sharp teeth, and she raised her eyebrows incredulously. “Torment? My dear, you don’t know of torment.”
“I’ve made humans suffer in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. Your dreams don’t even scratch the surface.” She whispered, pulling the barmaid into what could’ve been a hug if it wasn’t so tight and cruel. “I have seen and will see everything that’s ever happened, every cruelty of the human mind ever enacted, and in return, I’ve matched them all by far. You should consider yourself blessed that I’m so interested in you.”
She melted back into her original form, but this time her glassy eyes were covered by a thick blindfold and her legs had disappeared, curling into a thick, scaly tail that wrapped itself around Demi’s shaking legs. “Don’t you want to know what happened to your brother? Isn’t that why you put yourself in this very situation?”
“My brother?” She rasped, her hands clutching Yidhra’s sides as she struggled to hold on.
“I can show you what happened to him if you let me in.” Her tail tightened around the barmaid further, pulling them as close as she could. “Close your eyes, Demi Bourbon. Succumb to your desires, let yourself be mine and mine alone.”