The Goat.

[wooz 341]

This is a dream, so like, don't act like you know this if you see her lel.

 

Spoiler

It would be months since Aleksiya lost her eyesight to a degenerative eye disease. It came suddenly, what was a slow, agonizing affliction of sight loss over years. Was now a world of nothing. One she did not welcome or want to be a part of.

 Months that have been too hard on her. She snaps at people, pushing them away. She cries in her sleep every night for a world she can hardly see anymore. But, when she sleeps, she can see again. 

She has one recurring dream. She’s in the north, trapped in a blizzard. Sight limited to nothing but white and the occasional shadow of a ruined structure. To her it feels like nothing but a cosmic joke. 

She walks, hoping to reach an end. But every dream, she reaches a point where she hears nothing but whispers, sees eyes in the blowing, howling snow. She is watched over by a goat looking being of immense size. She wakes up in cold sweats. 

Until in one of her dreams, she makes it farther, closer to the goat. The closer she gets, the more it whispers in her mind. Simple directions of where to go, how far, directions, guiding her. She reaches a cathedral, inside there sits a goat. A simple looking goat of normal size, in a pen eating grain.

The whispers in her head get louder. She is offered a choice, a simple one. “Kill the goat, receive what you seek. Walk away and lose the only path forward.” Before she can make her decision aloud, the weight of metal in her palm is suddenly apparent. 

 

With a sweater and hands covered in blood and flecks of stray hair, the whispering turns into harsh, guttural laughing. The world is then made into a plane of darkness, she is surrounded by the staring cold, dead eyes of her sacrificial goat. She awakes to terror and darkness. She can still hear the laughing, feeling the stare of the goat, the weight of the knife, the warmth of the blood and the tickling of the hairs. 

Every dream she has from now on is filled with a starry sky made of the stares of the goat. Every waking moment is filled with the feeling of being stared at and whispers of laughs.