There is no hope for one who fears her own mind.

Marcheline snarls, this is getting tiring. Extremely so. In the back of her mind, she knows caution and vigilance. In the truth that she knows, your mind is the one place where you shouldn’t bow down to anything.

The edges of her sight goes dim, but she wills herself to be outside, away from this… this… thing! It feels like a violation, a filth. Anger comes easily. In her anger, she is clean.

That fucking creaking of wood! She sees her own tent from the outside. Shifting away the flap this time, she hears a dissonant screech of nails on a board, like the edges of the flaps are held down by claws digging on hollow wood.

There’s an unpleasant tingling on her scalp, heat on her neck. A cold fury overcomes her in this spiraling nightmare.

Marcheline expresses irritation like a normal person. But anger, true anger, cloaks her in layers of calm. She doesn’t even flinch as she meets the eyes of the thing that’s wearing her face.

She, no it, is barely clothed. Lying on the cot, white sheets are haphazardly draped all over the too-young female form. It’s white breasts are pressed against each other, a mimicry (and it must be a mimicry) of breathing swells them to the point that the tips peek out.

The line of its right arm goes straight down, moving sensuously. Delicate fingers moving on an inner thigh and slips between its legs.

Marcheline feels that sense of violation again, as a foreign arousal is insistently lapping at the edges of her consciousness. It’s not mine. Not this feeling. She goes nearer the thing, and its influence barely even registers in her cloak of anger.

She stretches out a hand, neither fast nor slow, and wraps it around the thing’s neck. There’s no change of expression, that flush on its cheeks remain, truly as if it’s only a mask.

In dreams, there’s a certain distance to whatever’s happening. Here, somehow, there’s no fear.

In her waking hours, Marcheline would never think of murdering anyone, she wants to be a decent person, a good person. She tightens her grip.

There’s still that disgusting look of lust on the impostor’s face, but she feels like she could sense its confusion. Then panic.

It finally starts to struggle, so she presses down on it with her ‘body’, imagining her own presence surrounding it, preventing its escape.

She doesn’t know human anatomy well enough, how do you really snap a person’s neck? But Marcheline raises her hands to its head and twists this way and that, paying no mind to the weak scrambling of faux arms against her. She twists again and again, stronger and more insistently. Then the neck snaps, and it dies. She thinks.

—-

There’s a scent of roasted leaves, someone should be preparing their village’s version of black tea. The sound of chores fill the air.

Marcheline grins, feeling unbelievably great. Her spirits are high, and she attributes it to playing the triumphant hero from last night’s dreams.

She’s always so fearless during sleep. It’s not a particularly unique ability. From her knowledge about sleep, there’s a stage where the body releases some hallucinogenic neurochemicals (she only watched the lecture once, she can’t remember the name).

What’s remarkable about that process is that it sometimes makes you dream of scary stuff, but inhibits any fear response in your brain. It makes you examine the nightmares clinically, and hopefully help you get over them.

It’s the reason why natural sleep is so important to patients with PTSD. Back at that lecture, they were only discovering that some sleeping pills take up the receptors meant for those neurochemicals. Thus, lack of sleep or certain pills delay trauma recovery.

Marcheline has always kept that in mind, and she almost looks forward to nightmares. It’s almost a superpower— that a braver, calmer, overall better version of her is in charge. So cool.

She bounces out of her cot, and the motion is too exaggerated, she almost trips. Marcheline snickers, she feels almost too light.

Out of habit, she opens her status.

[Marcheline: lvl15/???]

 Thirteen…!