I took a bite of the roll that the well-built man gave to me. It was pretty good actually. The savory butter and fluffiness of the roll was a stark contrast to my current situation. It is laughable really. One minute I am getting confessed to the cutest girl in class, and the next I’m (partially) forced to eat delicious rolls against my will by some lunatic. As I eat the last bit of the roll, I notice something happening to me.

Everything seems clearer somehow, like as if I was looking through a dirty lens my entire life, and now it has fallen away with that delicious roll. The man has already left the room, but I can make out his footprints on the ground somehow. I can see my own heartbeat ripple across my skin and muscles. I look around the room and those lines seem to make a little bit of sense.

Instead of randomly going across the room like I thought they were, I noticed that they intersect at specific points across the room. After a bit of deduction and logic reasoning, each point that is intersected by the lines has some sort of mathematical value and variable to it. Kinda like grid coordinates mixed with a set variable to get a different outcome for each instance and...wait…what was I thinking about? Something about numbers…

Any way I look over at everyone else to see how they are handling things. They look completely terrified yet serene somehow. I should be terrified too…especially since I got a perfect front-row seat to that execution the looney asshole well-built man so graciously showed us. I look up at the altar and let my eyes drift to the right of it. There is a very clear HD display of a neck cross-section with blood oozing out and some clear fluid and small strands coming out of the severed spine. I immediately look away and dry heave a couple times, trying to not lose the only bit of food I have had today.

I listen to some people talking in a corner of the room. I can’t see their faces since they are behind a pillar but I can still hear them whispering.

“This is fucking insane…what does he want with us?”

“I don’t know, probably a ransom or something…”

“THEY DON’T KILL OFF PEOPLE LIKE THAT IF THEY WANT A RANSOM YOU-”

“” SHHH!””

“Don’t be so loud! He might come back and kill someone else.”

“Sorry…”

The conversation goes on, starting with bad scenarios and going to complete doom’s day theories.

“e…” a…j…ke…” I turn my head to the left to see what made that noise. Nothing…probably my imagination.

“…ake…jake…” I look right quickly and something seems off….

“No one is moving…” I say to myself as if to confirm that this isn’t a dream. I look around the room again, only to confirm the reality. I look at the altar and a single drop of blood hangs just before the ground in midair, another drop is above it as if it just fell from the edge before time itself stopped.

“Jake…” I close my eyes to focus on the voice.

“There you are~.” I open my eyes to see a woman wearing a formal dress of silver with black highlights, accentuating her well-developed chest. Silver thin gauntlets going up to her elbows with a regal air to them. An ever-changing crown of obsidian and maroon with thorns adorns her head of black hair. Pure silver eyes that feel as if they can see through reality itself stare at me. She walks towards me with a grin plastered on her face.

I stay silent since my unusual clarity and instincts tell me to avoid this woman with every fiber of my being. Screaming at me to look away and run for my life. I tear my gaze from her eyes and look somewhere, anywhere but where she is.

“Come on now, don’t be like that…Jake.” At the mention of my name, my head involuntarily jerks up to look at her. Her eyes are now a dulled silver. All of the excessive silver colored clothing has turned into a deep maroon. Her crown on closer inspection is now a ring of tiny faces laughing. Her gauntlets a pitch black as space itself.

“I know what you really are Jake. And I can even help you out…for a favor of course.” She giggles.

“What do you want…” I ask cautiously. I’ve already had to deal with one lunatic, so I’m not really looking forward to owing a favor to a possible second one.

“Simple. I want you to hold something for me.”

“Hold something?”

“Yes, simply hold something for me. It will even help you out of this little…predicament hahahaha. However, I will warn you only once. Once you agree to hold this, you will never be able to let it go. It will be one with you for the rest of your life for better or worse, and how you handle that…well...”

“Well what?”

“How you handle it will determine if it is a blessing or a curse I suppose.”

“Who are you?” I ask apprehensively.

“*giggles* No need to fear, dear child. Know that I am always with you. Forever been a part of you as I always will be. For I am the madness that sleeps within you that waits for its freedom…”

She opens her hand, and a white sphere of light appears. It moves erratically as if confused or frightened. The lady grabs the sphere and lightly tosses it towards me.

“Good luck~” She says.

As the ball of light hits me, I feel an immense soul-wrenching pain. As if my mind is being torn asunder to make room for the ball of light. My thoughts become slurred as the world warps around me. I see the lady laughing at me and the people chained to the pillars are smiling. Their existence starts to flicker in and out one at a time randomly.

“AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH DAAAAMMMIIIIITTTT!” I scream at the lady in front of me. The pain just keeps going. I feel like I am losing myself and my mind is becoming that of someone else.

“GAAAAHHHHhhh…” I slump against the pillar as the overbearing pain slowly subsides. My body twitches with aftershocks from the mental assault.

“I look forward to how you handle it.”

The lady raises her hand and snaps her fingers *snap*. She fades away with a soft giggle and that same annoying grin on her face.

People are moving again. I can feel myself instantly start sweating and chills crawl on my skin all the way up to my scalp. After about seems like an hour, the pain finally goes down from soul-wrenching to a very bad headache.

“I will NEVER do that again.” I vow to myself. I once again look at the people around me, only to notice they are now in a delirious state. Almost high on drugs even…drugs…

“He put something in the rolls.” I finally realized. But I was also curious why I wasn’t in the same state as them. I ate the same thing that they did so why…

*Crrreeeaaak* The only metallic door into the room slowly opens to reveal the large well-built man holding an orb or some kind of glass object and a basket of more rolls. God my…head hurts….

I force myself to keep my eyes on the man as he slowly walks into the room of delirious people. Some are laughing while others are crying. Others still are very silent and don’t even move.

The man brings the orb up to the altar behind me.

“Probudite O duhovi ludila. Skupi na ovaj dan za festival. Rally oko centra, tako da može biti slobodan.” The man says with increasing passion. His eyes are glazed over as the orb starts to float in the air.

“Dođite duhove. Dođite na ovu stranu.” He said. It’s as if he was pleading for something. The orb then started to turn red as if a dye was put into a glass of water. More and more red filled the orb until it went from red, to a dark crimson, then to a bright red like blood.

“BUDI SLOBODAN!!!” When the man said this, a large “bang” resounded in the room. The orb had a small crack on its surface that slowly widened with more branching off from the main one. Like the sound of glass shattering, the orb finally shattered and lots of red orbs shot out of it. They flew around the room phasing through the pillars and going every which way until they hit a person. One…two…five…ten…

More and more people got hit with those red orbs, and when they did, they instantly started convulsing and screaming. Soon the room was filled with screams of terror. Different voices echoed in the room. Some had two different octaves coming out of the same person.

One of them flew towards me but before it touched me, it instantly evaporated. More and more tried to hit me with the same result but to no avail. Soon the entire room was filled with screaming and the man’s insane laughter. The red orbs that didn’t hit a person eventually became still and vanished into nothingness.

With the man’s job seemingly complete, he once again left the room while distributing more of those rolls. Too mentally shocked and physically exhausted from the earlier pain and current headache, I put my unfinished roll aside and let my exhaustion overtake me.

***