I was following a man when I realized I was dreaming. He was a fuzzy figure and I couldn't recollect who he was, but I wanted to follow him to his destination. He was practically gliding past the grassy trail. I had to jog to keep up sometimes.
On the way, a little girl formed from his white glow. He made no remarks to his daughter, but the girl held onto her father's hand and tried to match his pace. When she turned back, although she had no face, I had a feeling she was smiling at me. I smiled back.
"Please come back." She said. I didn't understand why she said that, since I was still following them. But her voice gradually changed into a short, desperate voice.
I shot my eyes open to a mess of red hair. The boy immediately stepped back with a loose smile on his face. He was the same person I last saw underwater when the ink all disappeared from him. Except the fact that he had most of his clothes laid down on the rocks to dry.
So basically, he greeted me in his trousers.
"Thank you for saving me." He jutted out a hand. I reluctantly shook it. I noticed I was only in my black shorts also. Well this is a unique way to meet a person.
"My name is Roy. I don't think we've met before, so hello." He smiled.
I liked the way his blue eyes would twinkle when he made that very humanlike, genuine smile. The phantom's presence was no more. As I coughed, a warm drool of water dripped from my mouth. More water spewed from my mouth as if you tipped over a bottle of water. Roy patted my back.
"You were very brave, you know. I admire people who fight single-handedly."
"You remember fighting me?"
"No, um… but I remember glimpses of it. Like a scratched disc. And when I saw you through my eyes, my body was moving with the mind of another person."
A long sigh escaped from my mouth, "So you don't know what you did with my friends…"
I didn't expect Roy to remember how he made them disappear. But I wanted answers. Fighting one of the five black monsters Lucas talked about was the only connection we had with this cave, and now I was back in square one.
"Who were you with?" Roy asked. His voice was soft.
"Link, Marth, Ness, and Lucas. They've all disappeared with a flick of a switch. When the lights go off, they disappear. And you… well, your phantom, demonstrated to me that by a single snap. I don't know if they're in danger or if they are all separated… And I feel so powerless. I was holding onto them and they've slipped away from me…"
My head felt heavy. It felt like if I didn't support it with my hands, it was going to fall off of my neck. A long, brooding silence followed, but I sensed Roy staring at me for the entire time. His intense blue eyes made me somewhat nervous.
"Look on the bright side. You saved me, four more to go. Once we defeat all of those 'phantoms' there will be nothing to separate all of us, right? We're here for a reason. There has to be a reason why we're here. Otherwise we wouldn't be here and you wouldn't lose your name."
"How do you know so much?" I asked.
"You talk in your sleep." Roy grinned.
I think I blushed.
The two journal entries I collected were wet, but were still legible. As we waited for the papers and our clothes to dry, Roy told me everything he remembered.
"I remember a man running up to me. He was limping but he was able to run decently fast. When he got to me, he was hysterical about something coming after him. And I remember kneeling down to him and smelling this horrible burning smell and noticed this big burn on his neck like he was branded. He kept telling me something was coming for him, but hmm… I can't remember that part."
Roy stared at the ground. There was something else.
"And… he grabbed my shoulders. Very feeble at first, but he got a good grip of it. He probably said or did something to me; because that's the last thing I can remember before meeting you."
I bit my lip. I didn't think Roy was lying, but I wanted to make sure. "Were you dreaming this at all? Are you sure this happened?" I asked.
"Do you want to see some evidence?" He asked uneasily. I nodded.
As Roy twisted his torso around, the purple bruise on both of his shoulders appeared under the orange light of the candles. There were definite shapes of hands on each shoulder. When I dragged him down into the lake, I grabbed at his cape and wrapped my arms around his waist. It couldn't have been me.
I tried to recollect my thoughts. "So, this man asked you for help, but he gave you a curse that… paints you in this evil ink?"
"I guess so. Or maybe he didn't mean to curse me." Roy mused.
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't know that touching me was the process of cursing someone? But this is all assumption. What's true is that he touched me, gave me a curse, and I became a monster that kept all of us trapped here."
"And there's four more."
"If we follow what the paper and Lucas said, yes."
I held my head in confusion. I was grateful for Roy to share his reasoning with mine, but there were still so many questions unanswered. What does this mean to us? Why did it have to be us? What is the significance of me not remembering my own name?
"Hey hey, you're thinking too hard. Think about what we need to do now." Roy grabbed my arms and shook me lightly. I stared at him up and down.
"Wear some clothes?"
He burst out laughing. I never would've thought I'd laugh also in this situation.
We decided to sleep for a little while. Although we had no idea what time it was now, we were tired. Roy suggested that we slept sitting, just in case anything comes to attack us, we can get up faster. And the ground was colder than a bed so if we lay down, all of the body heat would be absorbed into the ground and we'd basically freeze to death. Those lazy afternoons watching informational television really paid off now.
Sleep came fast once the rockiness melted into me. This time, I didn't dream. But I heard somewhere that people dream every day, so maybe I dreamt of a pitch dark room. I didn't want to wake up.
Something rumbled far away, just like it has when I first woke up here and the time where we met the one lady who was fond of the crystals. I slowly blinked and tightened my eyes shut when I felt the prickling sensation when you don't get enough rest.
Roy was already awake and dressed. As he looked left and right, his purple cloak billowed gently. I wrapped the toga around myself and felt the two papers. They were soft, but not wet. I carefully placed them in my toga.
"What was that rumbling noise?" Roy asked without turning back at me.
"It happens sometimes. I don't know what triggers it though."
We listened for any other noise. But the room was so silent it made my ears buzz from the blood flowing in my head. I approached the lake just to listen to the trickle of water and make sure of myself that I didn't go deaf.
"We should go." I suggested.
We continued on around the lake and through multiple small lakes. Some were big, but most of them were the size of puddles. All of them were green and dark like portals into another dimension. We had to carefully pass through all of them as the room began to tighten up into a single exit.
Toothed dark walls that sandwiched us began to bind together from the ceiling. The small lakes were actually beginning to be as shallow as puddles, and when I stretched my arms to my sides, I felt the walls without fully extending them. Warm, flickering candlelight only outlined the jagged detail of the tunnel and it made me tense.
"It's getting narrow."
"I know." I whispered. My voice wouldn't come out.
I rubbed the sweat from under my nose. Half of it was probably the dew in the sticky air. I skipped over the last of the lake puddles. We had to be careful of our footing from the random dents on the ground. Some cold droplets fell on our head than their usual spots on their corresponding dents.
I was the first to notice a different sound. Roy made a tired sigh every once in a while and I got used to how that sounded like. I kept puffing breaths to calm myself down and those were quiet. The sound I heard was the rumble we heard this morning. But it was close. It reminded me of a car gently purring but that's probably not what I was hearing.
Roy was the first to smell it. He tugged on my toga to step back. A sweaty, insulting odor quickly reached my nose. I smelled myself just in case, but I wasn't that offensive. The stench wasn't as bad as the lifeless man I've found earlier, but the dankness added to the oppressive odor.
We came across a creature, a colossal reptilian hellhound that completely blocked our path.
Huge wasn't enough to explain the creature. The animal shifted from a lying position to a freefaller position. Exhales like a low grumble made my toga billow. An awfully wet stench covered me from head to toe that stank of maggots chewing on a bloated carcass. It had an ugly set of yellow knives that jutted out from its mouth. One tooth was the size of one of my swords.
Reddish-brown fluid bubbled at the corner of its mouth. Pus colored gunk oozed and tumbled to the ground in a viscous 'plop'. The gelatinous substance accumulated in a pile that shuddered with the heavy breathing.
I looked at Roy from the corner of my eye. He mouthed the words: "Step back."
Every muscle in my body was stiff. My right leg was as heavy as lead when I bent it and inched back. We calculated our steps with the creature's breathing but the slightest crack of gravel pierced my senses.
We were five steps back until my upper back brushed against something soft. Immediately, my mouth was covered with one hand and my arms were bound against my torso with another. I couldn't see who was holding me but he wasn't aggressive.
"Shh."
Author's Note: If you have any other gross words I can use, you can comment that also. Thanks!