Dreamscape

She sees endless water flowing down in sheets about her head. She feels fear. She had never really liked water very much after almost drowning when she was six. She was chained to a four poster bed beneath scarlet satin sheets and watching her worst nightmare fall in torrents around her. She can't escape, the manacles around her wrists and ankles are soldered shut. How did she get here? She can't remember a single thing before she woke up in this vast room, empty of everything except the large bed she struggled to free herself from. The chains were only long enough for her to sit up and touch her knees, not much else. Underneath the sheets someone had changed her clothes into a gauzy white, sleeveless creation with a wide black ribbon tied around her waist and gossamer skirts that draped all the way down the sides of the bed. Like a wedding dress. Or perhaps a shroud. The water falling from the ceiling had not stopped while she was thinking. Her mind whirred, formulating plan after useless plan. She gave the chains one last frantic tug, yanking so hard till she felt like her joints would tear from their sockets. The chains snapped. And the dream ended. Only to begin a new one.
She found herself falling into an endless black hole. Around her roots were sticking out of the walls. Walls of earth, she discovered as she grabbed blindly to stop her descent. They crumbled beneath her fingertips, staining the immaculate white dress she still wore from the previous dream. The dress billowed around her in a cloud, black ribbon tossed about wildly as she fell. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Beneath her, lights glowed and bobbed like maniacal fireflies doing a macabre dance while she was falling to her death. A bubble of hysterical laughter escaped her lips. And the world burst into a flare of light so bright that it burned her eyes even when she shut them.
The wind from the momentum of her descent had stopped. She opened her eyes, blinking to clear the afterimages of the unnatural flare of light. The landscape had changed drastically within the space of a heartbeat. She sat on a throne, her fingertips still grimy with earth and her dress still stained with dirt. She sat on a raised dais surrounded by gigantic ivory pillars that stretched up to an impossibly high ceiling. A red velvet carpet stretched all the way from beneath her bare feet to huge double doors that were opening slowly on silent hinges. A troop of ladies, their faces covered in ethereal floating veils of grey gauze entered the room, walking slowly across the tiled floor that resembled a giant chessboard. Their dresses were identical to hers in almost every way except that theirs was a dark grey that coordinated with their veils and their sleeves extended to their wrists and their hands were covered with dove grey gloves. As they neared her, she realized with a start that none of them had faces. They were simply blank masks with indentations where their eyes and mouth should have been. And they were whispering. A dry, sibilant whisper that ran through their groups like the sound of dead leaves rustling through a graveyard. She made a mad dash for the door but stopped short when the group fanned out, cutting off her escape. Whirling around she noticed a stained glass window depicting a sunset right behind her throne. She ran for it and smashed through the glass with a sound like a hundred tiny bells ringing. And she was flying. Slivers of glass arched in the air next to her, glinting in the golden light, twisting till they grew wings, a head and long slender bodies of swans. They carried her away.

~Rei Shiori