Nightmare

Beatrice woke up panting, with tears flowing like a non-stop shower from her eyes. Her hair was disheveled and twisted but she could barely feel a thing. The room was drowning in silence except for the muffled sound of her tears dripping onto the bedsheet in a continuous pitter-patter.

Her pupils were stretched wide in shock and her whole body trembled as if suffering from uncontrollable epileptic fits that shook her very innards. The only way her condition could be described was absolute terror; the kind that reached deep into the bones and eroded the very soul.

Her heavily contoured body that was capable of bringing down gods and demons alike, was reduced to nothing more than a bag of bones. With her beauty and charm eclipsed behind her terror, she looked like some psychotic household shrew who had lost even that tiniest bit of hope that she had been hiding deep within her heart.

The nightmares that had been hounding her nights began to change gradually a while ago. The recurring horrors began to grow more proficient in the amount of misery and terror they caused her.

But one thing that stayed the same throughout this time was the ending which was almost always the scene of her death. The nature of these deaths were different. Some were quiet but most of those deaths were gruesome enough to cause the most ruthless demons to vomit at the sight of such a scene.

Beatrice felt afraid but not for her life. Her fear was rooted in her worry towards the child that was still in her belly.

In all the nightmares she saw, the demons always succeeded in killing her in the end but her child always managed to survive. This was the only hope that kept Beatrice going despite suffering such torture on the daily basis.

The recurrence of these nightmares was so consistent and they seemed so real to her that they felt more like prophecies rather than just simple scares or the side-effects of some rare kind of hormonal imbalance.

But what Beatrice saw today turned out to be a little different from what she was used to. It was the last stroke that broke her barely stable mental state into a thousand pieces. the axis of her entire world and hopes had been ruthlessly mangled.

The last semblance of her hope that she had been desperately holding on to was taken away from her in the cruelest manner possible. As she lay wounded with her broken spine which was the routine in her nightmares, a cruel looking demonic being stood over her almost lifeless body. It used one of its claws to cut a deep gash into her belly but not to torture her or to mutilate her body. It did it to take out her child whom she had been nurturing inside her for so long; the child who had already become an inseparable part of her. Her child was cut out of her belly ruthlessly as the demon gave a gurgling laugh.

As he held her child in its hand, the child started to glow with a reddish light. The pitch of the demon's laughter increased in amplitude with the increase in the intensity of the light being emitted from the weak looking body of the child.

The child cried in pain caused by the reddish glow as if it was searing the insides of the newborn. His mother writhed on the ground in pure agony as she tried to gather up her corpse-like body which had been mutilated beyond the point of salvation in an attempt to hurl herself at the demon to save her precious child.

The intensity of light grew so high that it became hard for Beatrice to keep track of what was happening.

She kept her eyes open forcefully despite the glare of the demonic light trying to blind her. She helplessly watched as her child; her beautiful, precious and powerful child disintegrated after a flash of light at the hands of the terrifying demon.

There was nothing in the hand of the demon where just a moment ago her child had been crying. Her child was gone; eternally.

Beatrice's soul left her body in shock and despair but no sound came out of her mouth. She wanted to scream, shout and roar her grievances to the world about the atrocities she had suffered. But something seemed to be holding her by the throat. Another flash of light later; her whole world turned dark as well...and she woke up.

As she lay awake in the darkness the thought of breaking apart the world went through her mind several times. If she could will some meteor from outer space to plunge down from the heavens, she would have already done it so the unknowing populace around her could know what it felt like when your world came crashing down on you.

But strangely she could not bring herself to move even a little bit; not even her eyebrows.

She stayed lifeless and unmoving in the darkness for a long time before life returned to her eyes. As soon as she found her body to be capable of responding to simple movements, she climbed down from her bed and started walking aimlessly with no direction or destination in mind as countless thoughts...dark thoughts ran through her mind.

The reason she couldn't stay still was the fear that kept urging her to do something even though she felt like dying at the fate that awaited her and her child towards the end of her long journey.

Beatrice had invested her blood and soul to get what she had. This was supposed to be the time when she should have been basking in glory and the jealousy of others but instead she was running around barefooted in the street like a shrew with a loose screw.

She was furious with how things had turned out. She couldn't lose her child who was the embodiment of all her trials and efforts during her lifetime; at least the time that she had spent chasing after Sparda and his sealed powers. Adamant on fighting till her last breath, she vowed to carve out a future for herself and her child even if the heavens had ordained their destruction.

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