Demon

The sound of the world crumpling bloodies your ears.

He woke up, drenched in sweat.

Another damn nightmare. Adrien sits there shuddering for a moment, remembering before it fades away. The world hanging in shattered pieces, liquefying in toxic fumes. People flash-frozen into living ash statues, looks of terror and pain on their faces, their screams causing their throat and face to chip away. They feel it all. He buries his head in his hands.

“I can’t save them. I can’t…” he whispered. Of course he can't. Like many of the modern day prophets, he had been deemed insane and sent to rot in a “safe room”. He wondered how they could do this. His arguments and visions were rational! The world would end, what was so hard to understand about this? Yet Adrien’s pleas for action were denied and his heralding dreams of the apocalypse were confined to a facility. His mind whirls at the overall unfairness of it all.

If he were blessed with such visions, he must be able to save them, somehow. These thoughts spin his head in a worn-down track. He has had them so many times before. So, so many times before. Was it even worth trying? Maybe it would be better to just give up and watch the world burn.

“Ah… what the hell… they’re so ignorant! I’m not insane, I just see better than them… they can’t handle it…but it’s my fault, I’m meant to save them!” God, that sounds pretentious.

“Hey, what are you talking to yourself about this time?”

He looks up, blinking. He didn’t hear the security guard come in. Thankfully, it’s the nice one, the one he feels like he can talk to. He’s known her for a bit now, and though she undoubtedly thinks he’s completely mad, she listens to his ramblings well enough.

“I grabbed you some food. Did you take your meds?” she asks, not unkindly, and sets the food down on a table. Adrien snaps out of his reverie.

“Yes.” he mutters. They don’t do anything. They don’t stifle his foresight. Just another reason the visions are true, as he has good faith in the power of medicine.

Suddenly, his eyesight flashes bright white, and then black. The guard’s voice fades and distorts into screaming from unholy tongues. The room twists sickeningly into unnamable shapes and colors. He sees something across the room, he doesn't know what it is. How could he? Everything is wreathed in a bloody-tasting red mist. The smell of ozone and metal is sickening. Suddenly, he feels something burning cold running down his face like tears. His eyes- is it from them? He runs over to the mirror, ignoring the heat coming from the floor, and behold-

“Oh my god, hold on…” Adrien feels the security guard pull him out of the future. “What was that about?” she says, checking him up and down. “You went all shaky and then you got up and tried to run over to the mirror-” She makes eye contact with him and freezes for a second. “Huh.”

“What is it?” he asks, horribly nervous. Were the premonitions coming true, right now? Here?

“Ah, nothing.” She smiles at him and points at the food she brought in. “Eat, alright? Get your mind off of things.” She pauses for a minute, contemplating her choice of words briefly, and quickly leaves. Adrien stares at the door for a long moment, then turns around as if possess

He wakes up. As he slowly comes to terms with his surroundings, something seems off. It takes him a minute of pushing the post-nap fog out of his mind to realize what happened and he is filled with elation. He runs over to the door and flings it open. The horrible premonitions that had plagued him for years! Every dream and rest he had taken was full of them. They were all gone! He must have done something he didn't know what but everyone was safe if they were gone and- Adrien’s thoughts run into happy nonsense as he sees the guard he knows and quickly walks over to her. She turns around as she hears his footsteps and her eyes widen. Probably confused to see him so happy. Then she falls back and puts her hands over her mouth. He halts, bewildered.

“What-” she stutters.

“What? What is it?” he says, tripping over the words. Isn’t it funny how your tongue doesn’t fit all the way into your mouth? Strange.

“Your eyes…” she whispers, and he reaches up and wipes them because he thought maybe he was crying from happiness but aren’t tears supposed to be clear, not black and cold? She starts calling for help but everyone’s already there. They crowd around. Adrien’s thoughts are clear, sharper than they’ve ever been. No more happy nonsense in his head. Someone behind him screams, a visceral noise that horror movies have never been able to touch. He looks over his shoulder, afraid, and there’s this god-awful tearing noise accompanied by SO MUCH PAIN. He doesn’t remember falling but now he’s kneeling, just barely, and the floor around him is slick with almost black blood, misting up in an ozone-y cloud like the dreams. The feeling off his shoulder blades is unbelievable, like red-hot knives. Now he knows why humans were never supposed to have wings. There are people around him, a brave few, and as he tries to ask them for help the words come out garbled by all the extra teeth in his mouth. He can see behind his head, which just seems wrong. He might also have extra arms now but he’s not so sure because there’s screaming all around him. It hurts his already bleeding head, which has horns coming out of it, so he attempts to shout for them to stop, that he’s OK... like they’d believe him. It feels like years have passed to get all the words out. Suddenly it hits him. They’re all… crumpled on the floor. Most are missing limbs. Some are missing heads. All are slowly turning into ash.

The sky is burning red. The screaming wasn’t from them, it was from the creatures in his dreams, which are now here, in real life. He shakily stands up and half-limps, half crawls over to the body of the security guard. She is staring with dusty eyes at where he was lying before, a look of terror frozen on her face. He picks her up with his seven or so arms, as she disintegrates a bit from his touch. This hits Adrien hard for some reason. She really was nice. He tilts his head back and flat-out screeches his frustrations to the crumbling ceiling, into the black rain-sodden clouds. The lightning flickers pink and a hot wind picks up, and he climbs not of his own volition to the roof of the facility with her.

He sets her down gently and gets a view of the world, one that he hasn't seen in ages. It seems bigger than he remembers, but that could be intimidation owing to the fact that most of it is on fire. He sits down, legs dangling off the edge of the roof, sighs, and stares off into the sky, watching eldritch beings thrash in the atmosphere. Some other distorted beings like himself are lying on the pavement several stories below, probably in shock. A sudden movement catches his attention as some sky abomination lunges for the earth, many many miles away. He sees the flash first, then the enormous soul-wracking explosion as the earth splinters into shards. A thick smothering wave of dust and metal and pretty much everything on the earth’s surface rolls towards the building inexorably. He considers flying, and for a second, he perches on the edge. However, a wind gust pulls his wings up and the resulting jolt of ouch kills any of that idea. He curses the useless wings and watches the cloud growing near him and her. Then it really comes home. He’d been so caught up in his new form and loss that he realizes this is his fault. He bends his head to his hands and shuts all his eyes, crying tarry blackness for the second time. Dust and paper hits his limbs as the wall grows closer. It’s his fault. He couldn’t save them. They didn’t listen. I guess he didn’t try hard enough.

The sound of the world crumpling bloodies your ears.

He wakes up, drenched in sweat.