Snippet #1456065

Nighttime. It carried sounds - subtle, yet wonderful - that were privy to those who knew how to listen for them. The song of shelter offered to those who hated the waking world, a promise of fantasy, of a world without rules to those who were sick of them, where one could finally be alone, or with loved ones, even if they were no longer alive; the answering note, pulsing with life, of those souls who sought its blinding embrace, the desperate plea sung by the oppressed, the weak, and the exhausted. This was joined by the epitaph of midnight, the lurking shadows that could only exist in the absolute void of light, where darkness played in earnest and things that wished to remain hidden could travel almost freely; intoned within were the umbras of horror, not quite human or anything but, sending unseen smiles of daggers that thrived in the nothing of night. It all played quite the wonderful symphony, if you knew how to listen. There was one person - if you could still call him that - who enjoyed nighttime very much for this reason. Every night, the melody changed or the song varied, but it was always lovely. Staccato screams that pierced through the sound were like masterful crescendos, erupting in splendour.

Something disrupted the song, tonight. There was a pull, like the moon on the tide, that dragged him from his rest and drew him towards something he had not expected. A human seemed to be creating her own space - no, not one, but three, together in harmony. This was highly unusual. These girls must be something quite special. He floated in the nothingness, watching the slow smiles come to them as they discovered their little playground. Unusual indeed, though actually quite boring. He preferred squeezing screams out of th-- But wait. What was this? He had almost passed over her entirely, but here was a girl who stood at the edge of the water. She was a single, vibrant note hanging above the peasant drumming below her. She guarded her soul well, but her defenses were no match for his experience - he saw right through her, and her fear was absolutely delicious. His smile was uncanny.

As the sun set and darkness fell over the ocean, the beauty of the water lit only by the stars was immeasurable. The waves themselves seemed to shimmer with light, as though they had soaked up the sun's rays during the day and were now echoing them with a quiet, aquatic sonata. There was so little noise out here, but for the waves gently lapping at the shore, and at Heaven's feet, burbling around her toes with happy contentedness. The near-silence was soon sundered by splashes off to Heaven's right. There seemed to be a line of tiny, localized disruptions in the water that were leading ahead of Heaven and past her, as if someone small were running along the coast, but there was clearly no one there. As they grew closer, it would become obvious that there was a second line, as small as the first, seemingly chasing after the first one. Once they had almost reached her, there was a giggle which quite clearly rang through the air, a child's laughter that bubbled out of nothing and reverberated in an unearthly cadence, in a way that was clearly inhuman. Soon after, there seemed to be images coalescing above the splashes. The light emanating from the waves seemed to be bouncing off figures which were apparently leaving the splashes, but it was wrong and distorted, as if their skin was not quite whole, and made of glass. They were children, a boy chasing a girl, both looking straight ahead. The girl threw her head back and laughed once more, and the boy let out a playful little shriek as he gained on her, which also echoed in Heaven's ears, hollow and unliving. Just as they passed Heaven, the boy caught up to the girl, and he reached out as if to grab her. As his fingers touched the back of the flowing dress made from reflected light, they froze mid-stride, and the boy's head was suddenly turned directly at Heaven - he had not turned it to face her, it was simply staring right at her, now. The reflected light was quite clear in that one split second, and it was very obvious that half of his entire face and neck and possibly extending further down, she could not see - the half that had been facing the open ocean - was nothing but bone and sinew. There was no skin to cover it. That frozen tableau lasted only the briefest of moments before the apparitions vanished, sound, splashes, and all.

A few moments later, a soft light shimmered into existence off to her right. It was about 30 feet away, and soon it was quite clearly a woman, sitting at something dark. She was wearing a white, flowing dress and had long, lovely brown hair that seemed for some reason to be longer on her left side than her right. The woman exuded the very essence of comfort, and calm, and Heaven would know, in the purity of dream knowledge, that anyone around her would be safe. She lifted her hands, and music started to drift over the beach. The dark thing she was sitting at was a piano, and she was playing.