Page 6 of Bound By the Beast Man
DIANA
I float in a deep, dreamlike fog. It is not a true void, but a muffled, timeless state where my consciousness drifts, untethered from a body I can no longer feel.
For the most part, it is a place of profound silence, a quiet hum of the magic that holds me, a constant, unchanging note.
But sometimes, the hum changes pitch, and the fog thins, allowing the outside world to leak through in fractured, terrifying ways.
In these moments of flawed stasis, I am assaulted by sounds I cannot understand. There is the soft, sibilant hissing of the Purna, their voices like venomous secrets being shared just beyond the veil.
“The specimen remains stable,” one voice whispered.
“For now,” another whispered back. “But the power within her is… volatile.”
I hear the sharp, grating scrape of what might be glass against stone, a reminder of the prison that contains me.
These sounds are not constant; they are brief, distorted intrusions that pierce the monotony of my existence, reminding me that a world I am no longer a part of still exists, and it is a place of horror.
These moments are a torment, a hint of a reality I cannot reach, but they are also my only connection to anything at all.
I am a mind, a flickering awareness, held in a state between life and death.
The memories are all that keep me tethered to the girl I once was, the girl who tended a garden and laughed with her sister on a sun-drenched porch.
The memories are all I have left, and they are also my greatest torture.
They prove I was once alive, and in doing so, they remind me that I no longer am.
The fog is not always empty. It is a canvas onto which my mind projects the worst day of my life, over and over again.
The memory is always the same, a cruel loop of a perfect morning.
I am nineteen years old, and the world is beautiful.
My sister, Ingrid, is fifteen, her whole life a bright and shining promise ahead of her.
We are on the porch, and she is chattering excitedly about the upcoming harvest festival, her blue eyes sparkling with dreams of music and dancing.
My heart aches with a love for her so fierce, even here in this placeless state.
The memory is a gift and a curse. I can see my mother’s smile, hear my father’s laugh, feel the warmth of the sun on my skin.
It is all so real that a part of my sleeping mind always believes, for a fleeting moment, that it is true.
But the scream always comes, and the beautiful memory shatters into a nightmare.
I am forced to watch the Purna glide through my village, their impossible beauty a terrible mockery.
I see them drag Ingrid away, her face a mask of terrified disbelief.
I see my parents fall, and the sight breaks me anew every single time.
But my own trauma is not the only horror that lives in this fog.
During the moments when the veil of my stasis thins, I have heard things.
The terrified screams of others, dragged into the clearing, their pain a sharp, jagged echo that pierces my dream-state before fading back into the hum.
I do not know who they were, but their agony has become a part of my own endless nightmare.
The Purna’s experiments were not limited to me.
They have been at their monstrous work this entire time.
The world outside my prison has its own rhythm, and even in here, I can feel the faintest echo of it.
The magic that holds me is not entirely unchanging.
It breathes with the seasons of the world.
Four times, I have felt a deep, pervasive cold seep into the very nature of my stasis, a metaphysical chill that lasts for months before giving way to a different, warmer energy.
It is not a feeling of temperature on my skin, but a shift in the magical hum itself. Four winters have passed.
This subconscious tracking is the source of the cold certainty that has grown in the core of my soul.
I have relived my nineteenth birthday thousands of times.
But the four cycles of cold tell me the undeniable truth.
Four years have been stolen from me while I have been floating in this darkness.
The thought is not a vague instinct; it is a calculation made from the only input my prison has allowed me.
I have not truly lived since the day my village died.
My only escapes are my dreams—fleeting moments of running free through fields that no longer exist, or terrifying nightmares of drowning in the oppressive presence of the shadow that walked among the Purna.
The thought of those four stolen years is the most profound horror of all, a loss so immense that it threatens to finally extinguish the last, flickering ember of my spirit.