Chapter 01 - Memory

I still have nightmares. Standing at the top of an endless staircase with only darkness below. I get shoved from behind and start falling, but I never find out who did it - by the time I turn around, I've fallen too far to make out their figure.

Rather than tumbling down, I stay in freefall just a few inches above the stairs, my feet never hitting the ground. The void swallows me, air rushing through my hair, gut twisting with the unpleasure of falling one thousand stories.

Once you fall one thousand stories enough times, your gut stops twisting. You stop waking up mid-fall. Perhaps it's complacency? Once you fall two thousand stories, paintings start appearing on the narrow walls of the staircase. They're very strange paintings. Strange, but familiar. Most of Guertena's works are familiar to me, really. They blur past, melting into each other as I keep falling, yet time seemed to slow.

At the bottom of ten thousand stories lies a painting, the last one Guertena ever worked on. A young girl with a green dress, blonde hair, and blue eyes standing atop an assortment of golden roses. I can't stop falling and you can only catch a glimpse before waking with a start, but I've fallen enough times to know what it is. Who it is.

I hardly even wake with a start anymore. I'd just roll over and fall back asleep, waiting for morning to come. I suppose that means I'm not even allowed to call them nightmares anymore.

Once more, I stood atop the all-too-familiar staircase, gazing down into the void, trying to draw me down again. This time I heard footsteps, the sound of bare feet slapping against a cold marble floor. Knowing what was to come next, I quickly turned around before I could be shoved into the abyss - but there was no one.

The room was white. Rather, the museum was shite. Everything was white. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, even the stairs were white. Like someone had filled this place to the brim with paint before hanging anything up on the walls. Everything seemed so clean, so polished, yet the walls seemed to drip. The white seemed to melt.

The walls thirsted for color.

There was a deafening silence, interrupted only by the careful taps of my own heels. The barefoot steps were gone. All along the walls was the same girl at the bottom of the staircase in different poses. All of them closely watching me.

In the atrium was a large rose that seemed to be made of glass and glazed. It looked so fragile, it would break at the gentlest touch and yet, I couldn't stop myself from reaching out to it. It started vibrating violently, echoing throughout the museum as I got closer -

- and it shattered into a million pieces. The shards melted into the floor. And then it came. The girl jumped out of the paintings - all of the paintings - brandishing a knife. Giggling. Swaying back and forth as she - no, they - approached. I tried reaching for my own knife, my ring, something to protect myself, but my body refused to respond. Muscles dead. Limbs frozen. Stuck, slumped on the floor. They jumped. I couldn't even scream.

...

I was used to nightmares. I sat up in my bed, clutching my head. I couldn't get her image out of my mind. I knew who she was, but I just wish I could stop dreaming about her all the time. Or nightmaring about her. She was dead, anyways.