(Hey folks, small disclaimer. This piece contains themes of sleep paralysis and night terrors. If you aren't familiar with those things, I recommend you DON'T look them up on Google Images, freaky stuff. That being said, this is a horror piece. You've been warned.)
Zaiss blinks his only working, sunken eye open long after dusk. Outside of the room, the night air sings to him through an open window, disrupted only by what originally might be mistaken by water moving over stone. The gurgling turns into a growl, and without even a moment to think and fully awaken, he is forced to look again as a glint of canine eyes observes him, and darts with a flash of bared teeth from the bush towards the lower floor of the house. It was large, large as a horse or maybe larger, and it was heading to the lower windows, and front door…
Logic only barely reaches him as he ponders how he is the first to have seen such a threat enter the haven. He hobbles towards the dresser for his sword, whispering in alarm to his sleeping wife, “Ily! Ily, there’s a f’-” he steadies his breath and tries further as his blood begins to pump, “There’s a warg out there.”
No response. He limps to her side and feels the breath come out of her parted lips on the back of his fingers, before grabbing her shoulders and shaking urgently, “Ilcariel wake up! There’s a warg outside!”
His sleeping beauty does not wake, and he is running out of time to make it her problem. The beast could already be creeping through the window downstairs in the darkness, aiming to rob him of her, his home, and everything he might love. He unsheathes the blade and tosses the scabbard on the bed foot, two more fruitless attempts to stunt her to the world of the awoken. Without another hesitation he opens the bedroom door and starts to traverse through the darkness. As he keeps his eye focused ahead of him and listening for movement, but hears and sees nothing. He calls out, things looking more dire by the moment as he wanders the large, empty stairway and the hall beyond, “Dramgoth..? Estelain? Orchallon!”
He cries out into the deep for his comrades, until he reaches the foyer in which a woman sits by a slowly dying fire, asleep in her chair. It is Filigilmë, resting her head on her knuckles gently, joined by the growing screech owl, Bronn on his perch by the chair and the fire. She jolts awake as he closes in and speaks at first with some caution at his frantic appearance and evident terror on his face, his sword drawn, “Zaiss? Whatever is the ma-”
Zaiss all but cups his hand over her mouth as he silences her with a hush. Loud thumps on the grass of the Haven sound from outside the window to their right, and round the circular building towards the front door. Quivering, Zaiss informs her, “It’s a warg…”
Filigilmë looks towards the window and whispers back to him, “What? How?”
Zaiss takes the sword in both hands and quietly steps towards the door, “I don’t know…take Bronn and go upstairs…Stay with Celebreneth and bar the doors behind you.”
She protests, “I cannot bar them behind you, what if you need sanctuary?”
Zaiss shakes his head, “There’s no time to argue…and the others…they are too far.” His hands shake on the sword hilt, but he remains steadfast as the adrenaline keeps him on his feet.
There is nothing left to say. Filigilmë presumably takes the owl upstairs to protect the lady asleep in her chamber. Sweat rolls down Zaiss’s brow as one of his hands, his less damaged one, reaches up to unlock the door falteringly. His heart drums loudly in his ears, but with a deep breath of courage, the sword in his hand is lifted aloft as he bursts through the front doors to meet the night. There, just ahead of him, the large wolf-like shadow stalks along the path. What luck that the beast turned away. He may be slower than he once was, but this mongrel is dead to rights, and with a warcry that surely will wake his dozing wife, he brings the sword down on the warg heavily…
Only for his blade to sink into the grass. He looks up past the silvered streak in his hair, then turns his attention left and right. Where did it go? How did it move so fast? Was he seeing things and seeing things only? How embarrassing to be so disabled by his trauma.
Then it hits him. Hard and from behind the claws sink into the layers of his clothes and pierce into his back for a cruel mauling as the elusive creature tackles him. He grunts as he falls over, and within less than a second, he can feel the teeth clamp around his flesh, then begin to rip and tear at him. On his stomach, unable to do anything, he screams so loud his voice gives out. Or it appears that way as his eyes slam open and he remains bewildered.
In his room, next to the bed, slumped against a nearby wall. He tries to scream but he can’t, as if the nightmare had actually happened and he could not anymore. It is clear his thrashing and struggling within the sleeping world had led him to the floor, but somehow quietly, as the sound of his wife’s breathing hits his ears. Just a bad dream. It was all just a bad dream, and it is time to go back to bed…
He can’t move his leg. No, he can’t move at all. He can’t move a muscle. He can breathe, or can he? Can he breathe? He tries to grunt, to call out. He’s stuck. Something’s holding his chest down, and he tries to see it, but his neck won’t move. The walls begin to get smaller around him. The pressure on his chest grows and before he can come down from the terror that plagued him through sleep, his heart roars thunder through his body. Panic sets in and his strained breathing doesn’t go anywhere to catch up. Paralyzed, helpless to do anything but watch as the shadows of the room begin to bend. Desperately, his eyes catch a slithering movement by the closed and locked door…as a deeper darkness slips under the crack and looms tall and large in the room. For a moment it just stands there, by the door, long dangling arms nearly dragging their taloned fingers on the ground. Matted and wet looking hair covers all of its humanoid face, except two large white, glowing orbs, and an eerily ever growing crooked smile from one side to the next, toothy, uneven, jagged.
Then in the blink of an eye, if he could blink, it is upon him, hissing a forked tongue from its teeth. The light from its circular, deranged eyes bounces off his face to illuminate a noseless horror of sagging, greenish skin, deeply sunken eye sockets and a horrendous maw that could bite his head off like a guillotine. The creature's cold arms perch on his shoulders, and its long, tendril black wisp of an end at its waistline attaches to his chest, and he can feel the fear and the darkness seep under his skin. It itches, it burns, it freezes, it corrupts every inch of who he is left. The thing then just smiles at him, watching, waiting until every bit of hope within him has died. It does not take long, so confusion mixes with panic when Zaiss resigns to his fate, this nightmare of a thing would eat him, maybe even his wife, and it’s because of him. He’s done trying to fight, he’s given up, he’s entrenched in horror and sorrow, he’s ripe. Why is it just tormenting him still?
It does not move on him. It hovers over his chest, grinning and hissing, the smile still growing but never getting any bigger. Maddening, unending torment of confusion, pain, helplessness and fear. He can’t give any more. He’s tried and tried again. Anything to make it stop. It doesn’t. Not until the sun peeks through the open window and breaks the shadows entirely in the dawn.
Tensed for hours and now sore, he takes a deep inhale. He had been crying, and only just now notices as the streaks come down his face. So many things did not make sense in the nightmare. How was he walking without a crutch? What was his friend Filigilmë doing there? Where were the others? Why didn’t his wife awaken? It made sense now, but what came after the nightmare had done real damage. It did seep into him. It was a part of him now. For the coming hours this new day, that tormenting, crooked monster follows him. It is there when he closes his eyes, there when he has them open. Whatever it means, for however long, he doubts the possibility of sleep. Even so, in this moment, he crawls into bed once his strength returns, curls his arms around Ilcariel, and weeps.
