Chapter 4 Nightmarishly Calm

She was back at her childhood home. Back in that state of not being in control.

She saw her friends and family beg her not to hurt them. Why weren't they fighting her? She realised they couldn't, because they cared about her.

That made everything so much worse.

She was now in the London Sanctuary. There were only two others with her in the dream, just like it had been back then. They were running to get to the mainframe.

Suddenly, the safety door behind her shut. This one wasn't remote controlled; someone had to physically put them down. She looked over to the button. Where there was a glaring lack of a person holding the button, yet the door was still going down.

She listened a little closer and suddenly she heard it: a fluttering heartbeat. Clara! She'd heard of the girl, but never met her. The invisible girl. Her dreamself found this particularly funny.

She started to laugh.

The heartbeat sped up.

She laughed louder.

She started to walk towards the button.

She could hear Clara try to suppress a sob.

She stopped laughing, in favour of grinning evilly.

She revelled in the feeling of knowing Clara's blood was running cold right now.

Clara was so scared that her concentration was slipping, parts of her were becoming visible.

Each part that got visible she wanted to hit, but not yet, this was way too much fun.

Finally she reached the button and completely ignored it.

Instead she studied the button.

Clara's hand on top of it was still invisible.

"Just make it quick"

She looked up, shocked that anyone who was associated with the Sanctuary would give up that quickly.

She was in fact so shocked, that she had snapped Clara's neck before she even knew it.

"Tut tut, that was absolutely no fun at all.." she said.

She had been living with Radagast for a long time now, she wasn't sure exactly how long. She hadn't aged at all, so she figured it was a few years at the most. It's funny how her perception of time had changed during this time; before every day would feel like a drag and never-ending, even though she had plenty of things to do and now she could be perfectly happy, relatively speaking, doing nothing all day.

He was away right now, there had been rumours about the old fortress and he decided to see if the dark magic came from there. This left her alone to tend to the wounded animals that had been streaming in lately. This also meant she could think for herself again for a while.

He never really gave her much time to think, always keeping her busy so she wouldn't get depressed again. At least, that was his reasoning. And it seemed to work. She was doing what she loved: taking care of the sick and wounded. She didn't really care whether it were human sick and wounded or not.

He had taught her many things about this world, how to light a fire without matches and so forth. In doing so, she'd found out a lot about the forest and the world it was in.

She was overjoyed by the fact that there were several humanoid species living mostly in peace next to each other. She wondered about the stories each race could tell her and for that sake alone, she decided to help Radagast; wizards were a race too, right? Wrong. She didn't quite understand, but from what he'd told her, she gathered that he was basically a demi-god. She didn't think he looked the part.

He hadn't told her much about the other races, only that there were dwarves, hobbits, elves, men, orcs and possibly ents around. She was very interested in all of them, but mostly in the men, she wanted to compare them with humanity as she knew it.

She had also learned to 'talk' to animals, as it were. She could somehow understand the mood they were in and what their attitude towards her and other creatures was. She'd had to find this out the scary way.

One day, Radagast asked her to go into a cave and simply wait there. He'd told her to sit down, close her eyes and relax. So she sat there for a while. It was unnerving, but she had learned to trust Radagast, so she stayed put. The sound of her breath was echoing off the walls of the cave and was getting louder and louder. It was also speeding up. Wait…why was the echo speeding up? She was still breathing evenly.

Suddenly, there was a warm fuzzy, living thing squirming in her lap. She opened her eyes in alarm and saw a bear cub happily playing with its sibling, which was lying at her feet. The mother warily entered and she could feel it didn't trust her; it wanted to keep her children away from her. Somehow, the animal seemed to understand that she wasn't going to hurt them and sat down, lazily lounging.

It was three hours later that the three of them finally left and Ashley walked back to Radagast's hut with shaking legs.

When she got back, he gave her some wine and simply smiled. That was his way of saying he was proud of her. He didn't talk much. Neither did she, she was still struggling inside with what had happened back home.

She was starting to find it harder to think of the place where all those bad things happened as home, but every time she thought about that, she felt guilty, because she grew up there and there were a lot of good memories as well.

But the nightmares got steadily worse.

Sometimes Radagast would give her some herbs before she fell asleep that would keep them away, but she didn't like them, because the nightmares were infinitely worse the night after.


I am terribly sorry it took this long to get a chapter this far below par out.

it just wouldn't work the way I wanted it to and I am very worried about graduating, I might not make it :(

So, please, tell me what you think and do yell my head off about being so tardy.