Are you the monster or am I?
The streetlights flickered overhead, buzzing like dying insects. My shoes were completely soaked from the downpour, and my muscles ached with a deep, bone-weary fatigue from playing outside all day. The biting night breeze only made it worse, shivering straight through my clothes.
Then, a sound cut through the dark. A scream echoed from an alleyway—sharp, frantic, and entirely devoid of joy. Driven by pure, reckless curiosity, my body moved before my mind could protest, racing toward the sound despite my heavy, waterlogged shoes.
That was when I saw it.
A human-like creature stood in the shadows, its jaw warped by bizarre, star-shaped metal braces stretched across its mouth. It was strangling a young boy, a wretched, twisted expression of pure happiness carved into its face. Tears hot against the cold rain began to stream down my cheeks. With the last burst of adrenaline left in my lungs, I turned and bolted.
The sudden movement caused the creature’s neck to snap violently in my direction. I thought I had escaped. I thought I was safe—until I hit a dead end.
Terror paralyzed me. I shook like a leaf in the wind as it cornered me, closing the distance without uttering a single word. Up close, the horror amplified. The creature was completely bald. Its body was entirely human in shape, but its skin was blanketed in intricate, non-human tattoos—symbols of a language that looked entirely alien. In the pitch black, its eyes were solid pools of void, and those jagged, star-shaped braces glinted in the dark.
My vision went black, and I fainted.
I awoke with a violent gasp. The soft, golden hue of the morning sun filtered through the mahogany-painted bedroom, instantly shattering the illusion. It was just the dream. The same recurring nightmare that had haunted me ever since I got lost as a child during a family holiday at my grandmother’s house. I had vanished for an entire week, eventually found wandering with absolutely no memory of where I had been. Years of hospital visits, specialists, and failed therapy sessions had yielded no answers, forcing me to finally stop going altogether.
Suddenly, a sharp, blinding headache spiked behind my eyes. Groggily, I pushed myself out of bed, gripping the wall as I stumbled toward the bathroom to find some pain relief medicine. I chugged a pill down my throat, desperately hoping the agonizing pressure would just go away.
After the pain calmed a little bit, I took my bath and headed for work. My life felt like a repetitive, endless cycle no matter what I did. I went to work, visited my favorite restaurant for lunch, and ordered takeout at home. It felt like I was a robot. Whenever I tried to break the rhythm, I would have that horrific dream again and again, waking up gasping for air. With no means to break the cycle, I simply lived life the exact same way. It reached a point where I had even tried killing myself, hoping to shatter the loop, but it never worked.
As I drove my car to work, humming my favorite lullaby, blinding headlights suddenly flashed in my eyes. Everything shifted into slow motion as the vehicles jammed together in a brutal collision. Blood dripped from my head, and broken glass showered everywhere. My vision blurred, but a serene, desperate smile crept up on my face as I finally fainted.
Then, I woke up.
There was no mahogany room. No apartment. Instead, the sterile hum of a machine echoed nearby. Blearily, I tried to clear my eyes, my brain frantically trying to figure out what was going on. But when I looked down at my hands, my heart stopped. They were small—tiny and fragile, just like the child in my dream.
A scream tried to escape my throat, but nothing came out. I was completely incapacitated, locked inside a pitch-black room. Suddenly, a glint of reflective light caught my eye. It was the same jagged, star-shaped brace.
A wave of icy dread washed over my body. I was trapped. I tried to gasp for air, but something cold and heavy clamped onto my face, forcibly tilting my head upward into its view. I stared directly into those bottomless, pitch-black voids.
My inner voice was screaming at the top of its lungs now, shattering against the walls of my own mind. I felt like I was being torn apart with every silent shriek. The pain was absolute. With the very last ounce of strength my inner voice had left, it begged to disappear. I was completely falling apart. As my inner voice shattered, begging to fall apart, the creature didn’t strike me. It didn’t tighten its grip to hurt me. Instead, its hands began to tremble with absolute, genuine fear.
The creature pressed a glowing, tattooed hand against my chest, and a sudden surge of ancient memory flooded my tiny child brain. The pain vanished, replaced by an icy, terrifying clarity.
I looked at the star-shaped braces glinting in the dark. They weren’t a torture device meant to warp my jaw. They were a lock. A muzzle. A cosmic seal designed to keep my mouth shut.
I wasn’t a normal human child kidnapped by a monster. I was the monster. I was an ancient, consuming entity that had taken the form of a human child, and these bald, tattooed guardians had spent a week capturing me, sacrificing everything to chain me down. The “wretched happiness” I saw on the creature’s face in my dream wasn’t malice—it was the pure, breathless relief of a jailor who had finally managed to lock away a god.
My adult life, the repetitive cycle, the mundane job—it was all a massive, artificial simulation they had pumped into my brain to keep my mind calm, docile, and asleep so I wouldn’t destroy everything around me. The car crash hadn’t killed me; the sudden trauma had simply cracked the simulation and shaken me awake.
In the dark room, the braces on my small jaw began to groan under a sudden, immense pressure from within. A pitch-black fluid, identical to the creature’s eyes, began to leak from my gums. My inner voice stopped begging. It started to laugh.
The bald guardian scrambled backward in sheer terror, his hands clawing at the floor as the star-shaped seal on my face began to crack.
The heavy metal of the braces shattered with a deafening snap, shards of sharp iron embedding themselves into the dark walls. The creature let out a desperate, strangled cry, but it was far too late. The artificial calm of my fake human life was entirely gone, replaced by a raw, ancient hunger that had been starved for years. My small, child-like hands began to stretch, the skin splitting as a terrifying, true form began to tear through the fragile human shell. I didn’t feel pain anymore. I only felt power. As the guardian cowered in the shadows, waiting for the end, I opened my mouth and let out a sound that shook the very foundations of the room—a sound I had spent a lifetime dreaming about.
