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Description
The shadows close in on the girl as she trembles in her small cube of light. The light surrounds her. It protects her; it soothes her anguished cries. The light has always been there for her, and though the shadows writhe and swirl against it, it has never wavered. Golden warmth encircles her and holds her close as the outside rages on, its gentle touch never impacted by its constant fierce struggle with the darkness.

A slow decrease in the screeching all about her alerts the girl that day has come again. Her only sense of time is the knowledge that her demons are louder at night and quiet at day. She doesn't know where the words she attaches to these concepts have come from. They have simply always been there, as everything else in her small little world has been. The girl yawns and stretches, careful not to let her fingertips brush the edge of the cube and break the seal. The shadows have subsided. She can rest now, rocked softly to sleep by shimmering, somehow corporeal light.

Sensing a change in her rigidly consistent world, the girl opens her eyes just a crack. Dim golden light floods in, veined with black. Her eyes fly open and she gasps, her throat rasping painfully from disuse. There in the wall of her protective cube were spidery cracks, the same night-black as the shadows beyond. A thin stream of golden dust tumbles endlessly down below her as the walls of her fortress slowly, infinitesimally crumble.

The girl begins to panic. She screams and scream, but the shadows only advance further than they ever have before. As her cube of light, her world, her home dissolves around her, the light begins to shift. It seeps from the fractured barriers around her to the shadows like raindrops falling up from the ground, dimming the eternal glow around the girl and lending more and more detail to the demons that have always haunted her.

They're not so different from her, really. They have the same hands, the same feet, the same limbs that she sees when she looks down at herself. But there is just something so very wrong about them, the girl decides. The shadows are all so eerily similar in their pressed white coats and green hair nets.

One of the shadows that is no longer a shadow reaches for her; tries to elicit a response. The girl wants the light back. But now everything about the world that was so clearly hers--imperfect, terrifying, but her own familiar life--is fading away around her.

Now all that exists are the shadows. Her light is gone, replaced by a harsh glaring thing above her that is light but not her light. Its sterile white glow is terrifying, not comforting. The shadows all about her are hugging her, touching her hair, making noises that she can't understand. She wants the light back.

She is trapped in the outside world.

Description
The shadows close in on the girl as she trembles in her small cube of light. The light surrounds her. It protects her; it soothes her anguished cries. The light has always been there for her, and though the shadows writhe and swirl against it, it has never wavered. Golden warmth encircles her and holds her close as the outside rages on, its gentle touch never impacted by its constant fierce struggle with the darkness.

A slow decrease in the screeching all about her alerts the girl that day has come again. Her only sense of time is the knowledge that her demons are louder at night and quiet at day. She doesn't know where the words she attaches to these concepts have come from. They have simply always been there, as everything else in her small little world has been. The girl yawns and stretches, careful not to let her fingertips brush the edge of the cube and break the seal. The shadows have subsided. She can rest now, rocked softly to sleep by shimmering, somehow corporeal light.

Sensing a change in her rigidly consistent world, the girl opens her eyes just a crack. Dim golden light floods in, veined with black. Her eyes fly open and she gasps, her throat rasping painfully from disuse. There in the wall of her protective cube were spidery cracks, the same night-black as the shadows beyond. A thin stream of golden dust tumbles endlessly down below her as the walls of her fortress slowly, infinitesimally crumble.

The girl begins to panic. She screams and scream, but the shadows only advance further than they ever have before. As her cube of light, her world, her home dissolves around her, the light begins to shift. It seeps from the fractured barriers around her to the shadows like raindrops falling up from the ground, dimming the eternal glow around the girl and lending more and more detail to the demons that have always haunted her.

They're not so different from her, really. They have the same hands, the same feet, the same limbs that she sees when she looks down at herself. But there is just something so very wrong about them, the girl decides. The shadows are all so eerily similar in their pressed white coats and green hair nets.

One of the shadows that is no longer a shadow reaches for her; tries to elicit a response. The girl wants the light back. But now everything about the world that was so clearly hers--imperfect, terrifying, but her own familiar life--is fading away around her.

Now all that exists are the shadows. Her light is gone, replaced by a harsh glaring thing above her that is light but not her light. Its sterile white glow is terrifying, not comforting. The shadows all about her are hugging her, touching her hair, making noises that she can't understand. She wants the light back.

She is trapped in the outside world.