I lay in the darkness, sandwiched between a purring serval and an equally purring Wendigo, my brain trying to process everything that had just happened.

  "So," I said into the darkness. "That was... nice."

  Nexxali's whiskers tickled my neck as she shifted. "Nice? I demand a proper rating!"

  "A rating?" I laughed. "What is this, Yelp for threesomes?"

  "Absolutely," the serval declared. "I need to know if my fantasy-honed skills translated to reality. Come on. Dis my first real sex-time, one I didn't force myself to imagine with my magical mental-songs. Rate it. Out of ten."

  "Do I want to know what scale we're using?" Shady chortled into my other side.

  "Standard human satisfaction metrics," I said solemnly. "Considering I went from 'awkwardly undressed by Nexy... to 'reality literally fractured when we finished,' I'm gonna say... solid thirty outta ten."

  "Thirty?" Nexxali's tail swished smugly. "Ha! See, Shades? The edging technique works!"

  "You and your devious speech-torture methods," Shady grumbled. "I still can't believe my claws actually softened. And my teeth! Do you know how long I've wanted to bite Ashy without accidentally ripping chunks out?"

  "Your whole life?" I guessed.

  "My whole life," she confirmed, biting my shoulder. "Every relationship before this was just... mutual murder with extra steps. Damned Deathseeker knobs."

  "How the heck did you even start dating Deathseekers?" Nexxali asked. "Was that, like, an arranged thing or did you sniff juicy death-terror on them?"

  "My dad did try to arrange me blind dates with some pompous Omnithornian Prima knobs, but I nicely told them to go fuck themselves," Shady huffed. "And by nicely, I mean I murdered them on the first date."

  "Really brings the point across," Nexy giggled.

  "Uh-huh. The three 'relationships' I had in Omnithornia were indeed due to how they smelled. The..." Shady paused, making a thoughtful noise. "It wasn't their fear or death that I smelled. It was the clinging shroud of terror from their kobolds. Each one had this... signature scent of organized dread."

  "You dated people based on how scared their minions were?" I asked.

  "Yes. The Quetzalcoatl's kobolds were Aztec humans that lived in his family's giant pyramid. They smelled like... how do I explain this... like thunderstorms mixed with the moment right before you fall off something tall. Sharp. Electric. Worried anticipation of being sacrificed for the greater good of giving their Master more power. Excitement of watching him die and get resurrected."

  "Oddly specific," Nexxali commented.

  "His entire retinue reeked of it," Shady continued. "Everywhere he went, this cloud of 'oh-god-we're-gonna-die-again' just followed him. It was intoxicating at first. Made my Wendigo side absolutely giddy. They didn't just murder each other for him. They found or hired random humans too as 'death sacrifices', then resurrected them and paid an Aztec gold coin each for the... inconvenience."

  "Damn," I said.

  "The Thunderbird had human and bird prad bolds similar to Kawathra. They smelled like burnt ozone and regret. Like when you stick a fork in an electrical socket, except the fork is sentient and knows exactly what's about to happen but does it anyway. Her whole warship that her parents bought her had this pervasive scent of 'why-are-we-building-another-death-machine' anticipation taste."

  "That's hilarious and also deeply fucked." Nexxali yawned.

  "Yah. It gets worse," Shady said. "The Skinwalker's Knights and kobolds... They smelled like... you know when you open a really old book in a library that nobody's touched in centuries?"

  "Musty?" I suggested.

  "Musty and existentially terrified," she corrected. "Like that book knows it's decaying and there's nothing it can do about it. His entire retinue reeked of entropy and desperate, clinging fear of the void. They knew they were being marched through a dimensional gate into dead dimensions where reality peels sanity and linearity away, and they just... accepted it. Resigned cosmic dread! Here we go dungeon delving again! A five minute adventure that turns into everyone dying horribly over twenty hours of being chased by horrific alien monsters!"

  "So you were basically attracted to the ambient terror of their kobold swarms?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Shady yawned. "My Wendigo Fractal Engine heart found it... very appetizing. Thrilling. It made hunting them feel right."

  "Mrrwrll," Nexxali made a feline noise. "What do we smell like?"

  "Like home," Shady said. "You're my... home. Not terror. Not death. Just... warmth. Safety. Nexy smells like sunshine on fur and pure, ocean-like-contentment. You smell like..." She paused, nuzzling closer. "Like every good memory I've ever had. Like the summers Ashy and I spent together before everything went wrong and I lost him for thirteen years. Like belonging."

  "Wholesome," Nexxali mumbled half-asleep through bubbling purrs.

  "I can be wholesome," Shady huffed. "Sometimes."

  "You're both wholesome critters," I smiled.

  Nexxali curled into a cat-ball, purr slowly fading away. She was already asleep.

  "Ashy?" Shady whispered.

  "Yeah?"

  "Thank you for... For this. For accepting me into your heart."

  "Where else would I go?" I asked, feeling my eyelids getting heavy. "You're my best friend. Always have been. Always will be..."

  "Yeah," Shady mumbled blearily. "Always. Nothing but good times ahead. Definitely no... murders."

  I wasn’t a big fan of my dreams, especially after the anti-psychotic meds twisted them into awful, nightmarish reflections of reality deprived of any sensible direction and logic.

  Dreams of high school are the worst. They feature endless, liminal hallways, the urge to go somewhere, the nagging feeling that you're late and cannot find your classroom.

  This one started like all the others—gray fluorescent lights humming the song of their people above me, the smell of industrial floor cleaner and teenage desperation thick in the air. Everything was painted in shades of gray, like someone had pulled all the joy and color out of the universe and left only the sense of dread and anxiety behind.

  I clutched my backpack straps tighter, moving through the maze of identical hallways.

  I was late. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was late for. Maybe a test. Maybe having my photo taken for the year book. Maybe some other stupid reason.

  My dream-addled mind didn’t provide me the wiggle room to think clearly. I simply knew, on some level, that I had to find a particular classroom for some particular dread-inducing reason which pushed me one step ahead at a time.

  Room 11811 didn't exist. It never did in these dreams. But I kept looking for it anyway, because that's what you do in high school nightmares—you search for a place that doesn’t make sense and cannot possibly be found.

  The lockers stretched endlessly on both sides, their combination locks watching me like dead eyes. At times, my footsteps echoed wrong, each one arriving a half-second too late, as if the sound had to travel through water to reach my ears.

  Then I saw them blocking my path.

  Other students.

  Memories, vague manifestations of people who usually made fun of me, pushed my teenage self around. This time, however, two girls at the front of the crowd were suspiciously well defined.

  A very tall girl stood by the lockers, jet-black hair cascading down her back like spilled ink. Even in the monochrome dreamscape, she seemed to absorb what little light existed, creating her own gravity well of social dominance. Her entourage flanked her—the usual bothersome suspects whose faces I could never quite remember upon waking.

  Another girl lounged against the lockers, a vibrant, ginger mane inexplicably standing out against the rest of gray, smudged reality. Her gold eyes tracked my movements, and freckles dotted her face like constellations. She smiled, showing teeth that seemed just a bit too sharp.

  The girls spelled out major trouble, a dreadful impediment to my dream-quest.

  I tried to duck into the nearest classroom, to avoid the crowd, but the door was painted on. Just a flat surface pretending to be an escape. My shoes squeaked against the linoleum as I attempted to reverse course.

  "Like, look who we have here, girls." The brunette declared. She flipped her hair with a malicious grin. "It's the dweeb."

  The jibe hit me physically, making me trip over my own feet. Words don't have weight. Except when the bullies said them in a dream, they always did.

  "Trying to sneak past us, Clifford?" She pushed off from the lockers. "That's, like, super rude. We're just trying to be friendly."

  The other grayscale bullies giggled. Their faces were difficult to focus on, my mind slipped off them. This was normal. Their leader however, felt far too real.

  The ginger girl stayed silent, tilting her head as she observed me with unsettling gold eyes like a cat waiting to pounce.

  "I'm just trying to get to class," I muttered.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "Class?" The brunette stepped closer, looming over me. "What class?"

  “Uhhhh… the class,” I outputted. “Sorry, gotta go.”

  I graduated years ago. This was a dream. I knew it was a dream. But my dream-bound mind insisted I play along, insisted I feel the familiar twist of teenage fear in my gut, the inescapable insistence that I was late.

  So very, very late.

  "I..."

  Her pure-white smile widened, showing way too many teeth. Were there that many teeth there before? The fluorescent light above her flickered ominously.

  "You know what I do with confused little bunnies, don't you?" She reached out, her fingers longer than they should be, sharp nails painted jet black. "I help them remember their… place."

  She grabbed my shirt and spun me around. The world tilted, gravity forgetting which way was down for a moment. Then she slammed me against the lockers.

  The metal didn't behave like metal should. It rippled like mercury, spreading silver waves from the point of impact. The entire wall of lockers wobbled and warped, undulating.

  She leaned in close, leering at me with silver-gray eyes.

  "I... I need to get to class," I repeated.

  “So small and adorkable.” The ginger giggled. “Hrmmmm. You’re looking pretty swank too, darling,” she admired the brunette. “Mmmmm… human legs. This calls for fitting human names!”

  What? My mind wobbled sideways at her commentary.

  “Sup, cutie,” the ginger offered a hand. “I’m… uhhh… Nessa! And this is Annie!” She grinned cheekily, elbowing her lanky friend.

  Annie? Nessa?

  The names clicked into place. Since when did people have names in my nightmares?

  Annie grabbed my backpack strap and yanked, sending me stumbling sideways. "What’s even in this thing? …Peanut butter sandwiches and tiny hammers? Why does your backpack have so many hammers in it?”

  "Heh, this is about what I expected," Nessa tapped her chin. "Kinda neat though. Very... traditional."

  "Traditional?" Annie turned her head to Nessa. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Nothing, babe," Nessa shrugged. "Do your dream-thing. I wanna see where this is going."

  As my tormentors became distracted, I twisted free, my backpack straps slipping from the girl’s fingers. The momentum sent me careening down the hallway.

  "Oi! Get back here, Clifford!" Annie snarled.

  I ran.

  The hallway stretched onward, doors blurring past on both sides. Each classroom I passed featured smudged interiors: a view of empty desks, a teacher writing nonsensical equations on the blackboard, slightly smudged students looking sternly at me, judging me.

  The clock hanging overhead ticked loudly. Focusing on what time it was, was a struggle.

  This was normal dastardly dream logic.

  Annie's black, laced boots thundered behind me.

  "Running just makes it worse!" she called out, galloping after me. "You know how this ends, dweeb!"

  “How does it end?” I yelped.

  “You die,” she growled. “Obviously!”

  I turned a corner and found myself in another identical hallway. More lockers, more slightly fake-looking doors, more flickering fluorescent lights. The exit sign at the end glowed green, promising escape, but as I ran toward it, it receded, not allowing me to reach it.

  I swore and burst into one of the classrooms, slamming the door shut and clicking the locks closed.

  "Pretty impressive cardio there, babe," Nessa's voice came from beside me.

  I jerked in surprise. The ginger girl was sitting on a desk, legs crossed. “Sup?”

  “How’d you get here?” I demanded.

  “Dreamwalking,” she answered. “I’m pretty good at this stuff. On the account of you-know-what.”

  "What do you want?” I panted, not sure what Nessa meant.

  “Just figurrrring stuff out, I suppose,” she purred. “For now, I’m observing stuff. Understanding.”

  “Understanding what?” I demanded.

  “Your dream, duh,” she chewed on a gum and popped it. “Oh hey. Gum. Neat.”

  The classroom door wobbled, the handle turning slowly. I retreated.

  The handle twisted fully, lock clicking open even though I had clearly locked it from my side. The door swung inward with deliberate slowness, revealing Annie's silhouette against the flickering hallway fluorescents.

  "Sup, dweeb," she said, stepping inside. Her black boots clicked against the linoleum with each measured step.

  I backed toward the windows, but they were painted on too—just flat gray suggestions of escape.

  Nessa watched from her perch on the desk, blowing another bubble. "This is getting spicy."

  Annie grabbed my collar and yanked me forward. "You think you can just run from me?" She growled.

  "Please, I just need to get to—"

  "To what?" Annie shook me, my teeth rattling. "You don't even know what class you're looking for. You're just wandering around… all lost and… delicious."

  “Give him a lick!” Nessa encouraged. She received a bothered glare from Annie.

  The tall brunette shoved me backward into a desk. The edge caught my hip, sending a sharp ache up my side.

  "That's what you've always been, isn't it? Lost. Confused. Weak." She spoke with voices that didn’t belong to her. "No wonder you needed those pills. Couldn't handle reality without chemical help."

  "How do you know about—"

  "I know everything about you." Annie's silver-gray eyes flared. "Every embarrassing moment. Every failure. Every time you cried yourself to sleep because you couldn't figure out how to be normal."

  “Wow, harsh,” Nessa frowned. “I expected some making out… Where’s the making out?”

  "You want to know a secret?" Annie ignored the ginger girl, leaned close, her breath cold against my ear, her voice a reverberating whisper composed of my own doubts, my own voice chiding me. "This never ends. You graduate, you grow up, you think you've escaped—but you're always going to be that scared little boy running through hallways, looking for a room that doesn't exist. Looking for a girl that never existed. An imaginary best friend.”

  Nessa blinked. “You’re hooking his fears to torment him with his own doubts?”

  I shoved past Annie, desperation overriding fear. She laughed as I stumbled toward the door.

  "Run, rabbit, run!" she called after me.

  I burst into the hallway. Behind me, Annie's footsteps resumed their steady pursuit. Not running—she didn't need to run.

  The hallway forked ahead. Left or right? Both looked identical, but the left felt... darker somehow. I went right.

  Wrong choice.

  The corridor dead-ended at a stairwell, metal railings gleaming dully under the stuttering lights. I grabbed the railing and started up, taking the steps two at a time. My breath came in ragged gasps, the backpack bouncing heavily against my spine.

  "Going up?" Annie's voice echoed from below. "Not going to circle the same floor forever? There’s nothing above nor below. No escape."

  I reached the second landing and kept climbing. Third floor. Fourth. The numbers on the doors stopped making sense—Room 98247, Room Triangle, Room Why.

  My foot caught on the next step. Time dilated as I pitched forward, hands grasping for the railing but finding only air. The backpack's weight pulled me backward, momentum carrying me into a sickening tumble.

  I bounced off the landing—shoulder, hip, head cracking against concrete. The world spun in gray kaleidoscope patterns. Another impact, this one driving all breath from my lungs. My arm bent wrong, snapping with a sound like breaking pencils.

  The final landing rushed up to meet me. My skull met the floor with a wet crack that I felt more than heard. Warmth spread beneath my head, darker gray pooling against lighter gray.

  Annie's boots appeared in my fading vision. She crouched down, tilting her head.

  "Oops," she said. "That looked like it hurt."

  Nessa materialized beside her, whistling low. "Damn. That was more dramatic than expected. Death by gravity."

  The gray faded to black. Complete. Empty. Silent.

  Then—

  Fluorescent lights hummed above me. The smell of floor cleaner. My hands clutched backpack straps.

  I stood in the hallway again, the crowd of students ahead. Annie leaned against the lockers, black hair spilling over her shoulders. Nessa lounged beside her, gold eyes already tracking my movement.

  "Like, look who we have here, girls," Annie said, the exact same malicious grin spreading across her face. "It's the dweeb."

  I didn’t even bother to interact with them. I bolted away from my tormentors down the hallway.

  "You can't outrun me forever!" Annie's voice carried down the corridor, but she wasn't running. The monsters never needed to run in these dreams.

  I skidded around a corner, nearly colliding with a water fountain that jutted from the wall like a metallic tumor. The hallway ahead stretched on, doors multiplying on either side. Room 404, Room 505, Room LATE, Room YOU'RE-SO-LATE.

  Behind me Annie's footsteps remained steady, unhurried.

  Click. Click. Click.

  I yanked on a door handle—locked. Another—painted shut. A third opened into a brick wall with "NO ESCAPE" scrawled in what looked like pencil that gleamed wetly.

  "This is getting repetitive," Nessa's voice came from above. I glanced up to see her walking on the ceiling, ginger hair hanging upward—or downward?—defying gravity. "Maybe try something different?"

  "Different how?" I gasped.

  "I dunno. Stop running? Face her? Kiss her?" She shrugged. "This is your dream, no?”

  "My dream?" I wheezed.

  "Yeah. Whose dream is it then?" Nessa called down from the ceiling. “It’s certainly ain’t my dream. If it was, we'd already be making out on the beach. Is this fun? Are you enjoying this?”

  I didn't have an answer. The hallway curved ahead, a gradual bend that shouldn't exist in a school's architecture. My legs burned, lungs screaming for air.

  Annie's footsteps remained constant behind me.

  I risked a glance back and immediately wished I hadn't. Annie was closer than she sounded. Taller too, shadow stretching across the floor.

  A door appeared on my right—Room 11811. The room I'd been looking for. My hand grabbed the handle, twisted, pushed—

  It opened into another hallway. Identical to this one, except Annie was already there, leaning against the lockers ahead of me.

  "Surprise," she said flatly.

  I backpedaled, stumbling over my own feet. The Annie behind me was still approaching. Two of them now. Dream logic bullshit.

  "That's cheating," Nessa commented, now sitting cross-legged on a drinking fountain. "Very creative though. Which one’s the real Shady? Hrm. Are these even Shadies?"

  I ducked into a bathroom. The mirror reflections were wrong, just gray blurs instead of my face. The stalls had no doors, offering no hiding spots. Water eerily dripped from a faucet, each drop sounding like a deep, unnerving pulse.

  Annie pushed through the door. Definitely taller now, having to duck slightly under the frame. Her black hair blossomed, spreading out into feather-like patterns.

  "You know what your problem is?" she asked, advancing slowly. "You think too much. Always analyzing, always worrying, never just... existing."

  "That's fucking rich coming from a nightmare," I shot back.

  She smiled with shark-like, pure white teeth.

  Then, she lunged. I tried to dodge, but the bathroom was too small. Her hand caught my shoulder, spun me around, and shoved.

  My back hit the mirror, which shattered into a thousand gray fragments.

  Each shard reflected a different moment—me at ten, crying about an imaginary friend nobody else could see. Me at thirteen, swallowing pills that made the world feel wrapped in cotton. Me at eighteen, staring at university acceptance letters and feeling nothing but uncertainty about my future.

  The second Annie entered the bathroom, just as tall and dark as the first, eyes glowing silver in the gloom.

  One of the Annies grabbed me, holding me. The other picked up a jagged mirror shard, advancing towards me with ill intentions.