"Ugh, why did I choose this route again?" Varian groaned as he trudged through the forest path, thorns ripping his blue overalls.
He heard something chirp and something howl. He hoped the latter was farther away. Of course that was the best time for his stomach to indignantly protest. Cookiesss, cupcakesss! It seemed to scream at him.
"Shut up," he muttered.
After a while he stumbled upon an odd house. It seemed to have been painted in a cartoonish way and absolutely abandoned. "Why do I get the feeling something major happened here?"
He bent down to inspect the ground and found a few oddly coloured feathers. He knocked on the door and when no one answered, he was relieved to find it unlocked. He crept in as silently as possible and tentatively looked around. It was a small house, with a colourful blue kitchen, a cozy-looking living room and a single bathroom. There were two bedrooms in the second floor but they were both locked. Varian wasn't too disappointed at this though, as the living room couch was still far more comfortable than his cot back in cell number 322.
"Huh, it is abandoned," he said as he swiped his finger on one of the kitchen counters, coming away with a layer of dust.
He ransacked the cabinets, hoping to find something to eat, and found a disturbing amount of birdseed. Eventually, he found a few dozen weird berries. He knew they might be poisonous but he was too weak and hungry to care. He popped one into his mouth, it tasted somehow both a bit too sugary and a bit too tart but he didn't seem to be experiencing anything odd so he gobbled the rest up. As he collapsed onto the soft, turquoise couch he sighed. "Good night, Rudiger. Good night, Cassie. Good night...dad," he said to the low hanging ceiling.
For the first time in many months, it didn't take more than an hour of tossing and turning for him to fall asleep. Of course, the world wouldn't be so kind to him as to let him escape suffering even in sleep. It couldn't give him a pleasant dream for once, or even no dream at all. It was the same dream as he usually dreamt. His father trapped in the crystal. The crystal erodes away and his grinning skull is all that's left. It asks him a question condescendingly, "Do you think you're worth being proud of?" This time, though, his subconscious guilt made a few adjustments, after the usual dream, it replayed but instead with Cassandra trapped, and her asking him as her hair and eyes turned blue, "The Cassandrite couldn't save me, but you couldn't either, could you?"
He woke up gasping for breath the next morning, bewildered at his surroundings, at first thinking that it was another nightmare before realising he was free, and realising this wasn't necessarily a good thing. He kept seeing her empty eye sockets, seeming to bore into his soul. He wanted to just stay like that forever, but he remembered he could still save her, and he recited this in his head like a mantra as he folded himself up and hugged his legs. He stayed like that for quite a while, just rocking back and forth, until he heard a strange noise.