[open quest] trick or treat? round 2

[rosemary]

It's quiet.

In the blink of an eye, Rosemary is transported back to the grassy knoll overlooking the black sand cove of her home. Pale moonlight wavers over the ocean, splashing the world in an eerie enough glow that Rose doesn't notice the lack of color around her. Silver and black: the beach she's grown to love and the moon that keeps her company.

All she notices is the silence. It's overwhelming, so unearthly quiet that she can hear her heartbeat in her ears. She blinks, first looking to her left to notice the harsh bend of wind-swept grass; then to her right, where the ocean crashes more violently with each wave, frothing and foaming like a rabid dog. It's then that she sees how the shadows turn the white curls of the ocean to gray, and her head whips around to stare dumbfounded back at the bending grass. Around her, the wind whips and lashes, tying her hair in what feels like supernatural knots. What strands pass across her eyes are muted and pale, vastly different from the usual vibrant glow she wears so freely.

One attempted step forward drains Rosemary's energy down to her marrow. She sighs, rapidly blinking drooping eyelids. Delayed, sluggish panic alights in her brain like the violent wash of the stormy sea before her, but it doesn't quite fire off enough neurons to get her running. She feels stuck here, drowning in the realization that this world is hers but not quite, not really -

Where am I? she thinks, and takes another daring (daring in her fight against the weight of how this world wants to change her, to keep her) step forth. One more step is the the slope of the knoll and she thinks if she can just . . . get . . . close enough . . .

She stumbles fast like the rush of an avalanche, faster faster faster -

On the rocky, pebbled shore she lands, knees first.

Ow, Rose thinks she says, but the world around her is too much, and her tongue doesn't have the strength to make the exclamation. Weepy, exhausted eyes drift to the moon, but Rose watches in dismay as a large, black cloud slowly drifts over its light. The moon, her only friend in this trickster's world, disappearing behind more shadows can only mean something more foreboding is to come. She fears being stuck here, glued to the earth by how it wants her to be shadow and smoke - monotonous, tired, and unfeeling.

With the last swallowing of light comes a cacophony of . . . Rose slowly switches her ears. She can't tell if the noise is sirensong or demons cackling. Her eyes drift downward, toward the sound of the ocean. Where there was once dark gray swishing water is only darkness. Hundreds upon hundreds of yellow eyes blink from within its depths. They cries (of joy? rage?) grow louder.

The creatures beckon, beautiful light winking as softly as Rosemary's childhood nest. She stumbles forth, tired legs so unsteady that each hoof forward is accompanied by desperate, muscle-aching trembling. To them she must go, this she knows - they'll relieve her of this wretched exhaustion, this meaningless existence, this world without life.

"I'm coming," she murmurs, delirious, as she steps hoof after hoof into the water. Soon, the creatures' eyes surround her; and soon, so do their claws and their teeth, their joy and their fury.

It's only when her cries are silenced by the drowning water that she finds relief.

---

Rosemary awakes, waterlogged and exhausted, to peer up at the shadowy creature that had sent her to die.

"Why?"