EDENSPHERE ★ d r e a m

[cache_oeil]

Your feet are small, and they slide uneasily against the rope, toes curling uncomfortably against the hemp.

For some reason, you feel too small for your skin, different somehow, like you don't quite fit in the right places and your limbs aren't sure where they should be positioned. Your fingers are curved tightly around this bar, and it's supposed to help keep your balance, shifted weights and some other big phrases that you didn't quite understand. You were too small, when you started, when you first stepped and put one foot under the other. That was back when there was a net, when there were hands and helpful smiles encouraging you along. Aides. You felt happy, and you felt like you could accomplish anything.

What happened to them? Did they go? Did they leave you? They weren't supposed to. They were supposed to be there, and you miss the smiles, you miss the happy crows from beneath you, not speaking in words but you knew the sounds liked you enough, even if they didn't form English that you could understand. You take another step, your foot sliding hesitantly against the rope. You feel colder with every move forward. Why?

It's dark now, shadows seeping through the room and clutching you tight, darkening the air like steeped tea, like inky darkness delineating each of the particles surrounding you, and the faster you move to try to escape it, the more wary you feel, the darker it gets, the tighter and tighter your hands grip the bar and you're scared and your knuckles are white and your teeth are clenched and the smiles and the sounds have started to slip into something more ugly, more desperate, the room is freezing, your shoulders pull taut as the sounds grow louder, angrier, horrified, bleeding into actual words that you can understand, like run, like you shouldn't be here, and oh, God, and oh, GOD and you miss the other sounds, unfamiliar as they were, they didn't hurt and ache like these ones.

Your teeth chatter, your chest seizes tightly as you take more hurried steps, wobbling, weeping openly, your cheeks painted with sticky wetness. You drop the bar, you clutch the rope. You're going to fall. You're almost to the other side and you're going to fall here, and now, and the words start to boil.

It's hotter and everything's jeering and angry and uncomfortable. Straight ahead is the platform, and there's a looming shadow, dark and ominous and nothing but an elegant black swirl that slowly stretches itself into something limbed, into bright, bright eyes and a cruel, slow smile that should be more worrying but it's welcoming, it's almost helpful. You're almost there and you creep towards the shadow, your hand outstretched. The black reaches. You smile, desperately.

Behind you, cackling laughs transfigure into more haunting shapes, like people with sharp teeth, like scissored limbs that suddenly and abruptly snap the taut line behind you, their voices stained with high shrieks and laughs. You lose your grip. You lose your smile.

You fall.

The shadow leaps after you.