Bit of inspiration from the Episode 14 of Gou, but not much.

June 5th, 2021

Rika's mind was an interesting place. It was a shadowy labyrinth, full of glimmering specks and fragments that could, at any moment, explode into red, bloody, tragic gore. It was a dull, dead, hopeless place, a grey twilight for wandering in, a maze of fuzzy thoughts and endless marching.

If Rika's mind was made physical, it would be the setting of a horror movie. This, she had decided long ago. Whether it was a place of twisting, doubled-up corridors, or a haunting fog of ghostly impulses, or the unfathomable apathy of the walking dead, it was not a good, welcoming place to be.

Her mind stretched on, far past that which any child, any human had a right to live. Her memories covered events that humans were not meant to endure or notice, and oh, she saw them all too often. She was not made for being a soldier, and though Rika had never seen a place of whizzing bullets and shouts and explosions, she had seen blood and battlefields all too often. She had seen mundane peace abruptly and viscerally torn open by death, had witnessed in her own person massacres that no child should ever see.

Over, and over, and over again.

Ceaselessly, mercilessly, the maze tangled around Rika twisted and drew in on her wandering consciousness, closing off perceived avenues of escape, creating new dead ends. It dulled her spirit and deadened her empathy, so that she could tear open her own throat to escape torture and watch unblinking as tragedies were committed right in front of her. She wished she could forget, but forgetfulness, of course, came from those things that didn't stick properly in her mind, not from the memories that sent her jerking awake in the middle of the night and, as often as not, making a beeline for the wine cupboard.

Rika knew that a person was made of self –a distinct consciousness that identified them– and memories, but memories and the self affected one another incestuously, and as Rika's memories changed, her self did too. She was no longer the doe-eyed child that frantically sought an escape: now she was weary, tired, worn-down, exhausted by countless repetitions in a world that never let her grow beyond the age of ten despite her decades, nay, centuries of memory.

Rika had forgotten was it was like to have a child's fascination with the world around her.

Rika had forgotten if she had ever had a pleasant relationship with her parents, rather than seeing them as inhibiting burdens that she would be deprived of within a set number of years.

Rika had forgotten how she felt when she first met Satoko, when she truly first met Satoko.

Rika had forgotten where the roads outside Hinamizawa went, if she had ever known.

Rika could feel those fragments slipping through her fingers, dehumanizing her, reminding her with every lost shard of herself that she was becoming an existence bound by higher and less understandable laws of physics and reality. Those ghostly, half-forgotten fragments marked the road to obscure memories, and oh, she hated how all her memories were slowly being rewired into this desperate struggle to escape from the maze of fate surrounding her.

She shouldn't have to look at her friends when she first met them and wonder who they would kill this time, if they would be murderer or victim this cycle around. She shouldn't have the element of whimsy being slowly, steadily eroded from her life, as she lost all sense of being surprised by the repetitions of the events around her. She shouldn't have her worldview being condensed slowly inward, focusing on this narrow corner of Japan, reluctantly dismissing everything else as a fairytale land she would never get to visit.

Rika's afterlife was a sea of fragments, but she sometimes had to wonder if she herself was the fragment.

If she was, she was shattering.

12.17 PM, USA Central Time