thanatophobia (n.) || an intense and irrational fear of death

was all a nightmare.

She couldn't escape the velvety clutches of terror that rendered her paralyzed, her heart thundering its own storm beneath her breastbone. She tossed feverishly from one side of her bed to the other, her body gleaming with a cold sweat.

She saw a forest. The expanse of trees fading with the mirth of darkness, their limbs bare to skeletal designs that reached for the sky with a silent scream. She was standing, eyes flicking through every shadow, and then she was fleeing as soon as she saw it.

Her lungs could barely supply her air. She could feel the lashes upon her face and arms from the limbs that sought to grab her. She could feel the soles of her bare-feet tearing from the unforgiving ground, jagged and brutal.

No matter how desperate she ran, how hard she punished her body, she could never escape. She could never outrun the beast behind her. Wherever she ran, it always laid chase, even consuming her mind as she tried to sleep. A tyrannical reality.

She couldn't stop. Tears tore jagged trails down her cheeks, followed by sobs that threatened to clog her only source of air intake. A bloodied, torn and battered teddy bear was crushed against her chest, her last source of comfort in the ashes. She would have begged for her life if it would have spared her any reward.

There was no mercy. She was plunged into a world that did not spare innocent lives. A world she didn't know existed with her own, yet how was she to know? In all eleven years of her life, no one had ever spoken of them.

A snarl consumed the forest, sinister and bone-chilling. She cried out, unable to understand why she was the prey. The shadows seemed to lurch around her as if a cloak to the beast, or maybe from the fright that plagued her own veins. Above her own erratic heartbeat, she could hear the calculated rhythm of her pursuers footsteps behind her.

She blindly changed direction as if it would spare her time and then again. Like a bunny, she scurried from one trail to another. She prayed that she would wake up, or pass out, but neither were her blessing. She was forever bound to meet the same fate.

The beast emerged. Its slim body unraveling from the shadows like wisps of black smoke skimming a steel surface, it truly was a creature of the dark. A creature of hell. Its eyes were fixated on her, sinister and impassive, its jaws unhinged as it snarled to reveal fangs sharpened and ready to tear into her appeasing flesh.

She knew that it was over and within another unsteady breath, she found herself consumed in agony as she skidded across the hardened ground from the impact of its body. The beast would have laughed if it could, taunting her in her weakness. Mocking the countless futile attempts she had tried to run.

Her body was given a mind of its own as she unwillingly locked eyes with death itself, immobile against the creatures advancing. It lurked closer with calculated, silent steps, as if enjoying the helplessness of her and priding itself with the impending kill. Only its vicious snarling conquered the silence that she longed to hear.

She always met the same fate.

She was frozen in fear as the beast came to a brief standstill before her, the frigid air locking around them like the ice that weighted her stomach. Tendrils of blood stretched from beast's jaw, splattering across her cheeks, soaking into the forest floor; the innocent blood of her family. Her chin wobbled uncontrollably, no one could save her. The little girl in the forest.

The beast always finished the chase and within a single blink she couldn't even scream before she met her end. Her blood rushed to escape her as pain exploded through her neck, white overtook her vision and then she woke up as it felt life had abandoned her.

She wished it was a nightmare.

But it was real.

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Chapter One: Expected to be published by 2019

(Not edited)