Pin It Down

Artwork by Vadim Kalabukh

A cackle echoes across the dreamscape, chains rattling in the howling wind. No Dreamer visits this night, for he is at war with his own brother, and tonight that brother has won. Whatever dream was cultivated is lost, eaten liken a sweet delicacy.
The Black Owl grants us a nightmare instead.
We see Pin, locked in a room full of mirrors, with no escape in sight. She shuffles from reflection to reflection, glaring at it for a time, and then moving on to the next. Her eyes are hollow -- not plucked with empty sockets -- but empty of spirit, empty of intelligence, empty of self.
Pin: "Empty."
Pin looks at herself, and speaks the only name she knows.
Pin: "Empty."
Time moves forward at alarming speed, and the shuffling never ceases. Pin grows sickly, the weight vanishing off of her, hair falling out in clumps, while other, graying strands grow down to her waist.
Pin: "Empty."
Fingernails turn into claws, clothes rot away, skin beings to wrinkle and tear. Filthy hair curls into clumps.
Pin: "Empty."
An old crone stands in Pin's place, her ritual neverending, its purpose long forgotten -- if it ever had a purpose at all. One by one, teeth begin to fall from the crone's mouth, which give a sickly crunch as she grinds them under heel.
Crone: "Emp-y."
The woman trips as her legs give out, and she crashes into one of the mirrors. It shatters around her hands, slicing open her fingers, and the broken shards show a dozen crones at once, each with a different face.
Crone: "Emp-y!"
The crone smashes the other mirrors with her fists, her dance now wild and violent, crying out as each one shatters.
Crone: "Emp-y!"
The broken shards slice open her feet as she turns one final time, and then she falls, staring up into the unknown above her.
The ceiling is a mirror.
The crone screams until her voice gives out, pounding her monstrous hands on the ground, sending cracks along the floor. Eventually, something gives, and then she falls into the darkness below. A crawlspace, with wood barriers on either side, and a dirt floor. She's too afraid to look up, so she crawls instead, madness fully taking her.
And she crawls, and crawls, and crawls. For an age unknown in a place where time doesn't matter. All that matters is moving forward. Away from that terrible mirror, and that terrible reflection. And she is alone, peacefully alone, until the day that she isn't.
A light blinds her darkness eyes, and a gasp fills the crawlspace. Someone like her -- a dreamer, desperate to flee from the spaces between. But now they were both stuck...
No. Not her. Never her.
Stuck meant staying, or going back. And there was only forward.
A voice crept out of the crone's ancient throat, nothing like its original, spoken from the soul instead of the lungs.
Crone: "Don't worry. I can still get through."
The crone twists what she is, as she has always done, and adapts. Anything to keep moving forward. Her fellow dreamer frightens, its little light scrambling back, but she was already moving now, jaw unhinged, certain of what was behind her, and where she needed to go. The crone moans with pleasure as her muscles twist into a new shape, and she crawls forward, ignoring the screams that now came from inside her.
And she kept crawling, forward and forever.
Never reaching an end.