A/N: This is a weird fic. It's inspired by the Immortals Quartet and by Sonnet Lacewing's brilliant companion pieces (Two Weeks in Carthak, etc.), but has a modern setting. Here's the prologue. Tell me what you think.
Disclaimer: I didn't invent any of these people, but I do weird things to them for the purposes of this story. Don't sue, please.
Prologue
In the dream he is there again, there in the biochemistry lab at Cairo University with Ozorne and Tristan—fellow students whom, until this moment, he has considered his friends. Ozorne has summoned Tristan and Arram to witness some unusually impressive experiment, but hasn't told them what's in store.
Had Arram known, he would have done nearly anything to evade the summons.
Along a lab bench at the back of the room are arrayed a variety of small animals—white mice, gerbils, a rabbit, white rats, a guinea pig—not caged but, to Arram's great surprise, frozen in place, noses quivering, tails twitching, but otherwise immobile.
"Fantastic! What's holding them there?" Tristan asks.
Ozorne smiles widely. Not for the first time, Arram detects something deeply unpleasant in that smile. "Fear," he says.
It is at this point that the nineteen-year-old Arram Draper, Cairo University's youngest ever PhD candidate, seriously considers fleeing the room and calling the university police. The much older and wiser Numair Salmalín, whom he also is at this moment, has regretted not doing so ever since.
Arram–Numair has looked away for a moment, and when he turns back Ozorne's way, the worst horror of the nightmare has begun: the lab bench has grown much larger, and on it, neatly aligned with the frightened animals and dwarfing them both in size and in fear, is Daine.
His Daine.
He knows what is coming—he has dreamed the same dream dozens of times—but, as always, is powerless to stop it.
"This is just the beginning," Ozorne is saying happily. "It's easy to hold them there, but I can do so much more …"
The rabbit's head is the first to explode. Arram–Numair shouts an inarticulate protest, and the invisibly prisoned dream-Daine shrieks in agony.
He closes his eyes. It is useless; the scene continues to play itself out on the inside of his eyelids.
"Fear is just another chemical. Don't you see? If you could mass-produce it, you'd never need any other weapon …"
The animals obey commands; they run improvised mazes unimaginably fast; they all, ultimately, die of their manufactured fear.
Only Daine is left.
Finally Arram–Numair succeeds in taking some action beyond hoarsely shouted protest; he steps (his feet heavy as concrete blocks) toward Ozorne, raises a hand (it is like pulling against invisible chains), and strikes him.
This, too, is useless.
She is already dead.
