Mox

First Encounter

Her first memory was of a dream. A nightmare, actually. Dahlia doesn’t know when it took place, but it was that first sleep on the day of her birth. A pitch black space with no orientation. She was disembodied, not that she’d really been cognizant of having any body by this point. A rushing sound all around, like too much blood in the head, a feeling of both intense disorientation and focus. A sound in the dark, faraway yet too close. The sound of loudest silence, like nothingness reverberating. Then a whisper, coming from nowhere and everywhere. It’s words were unintelligible, but terrifying all the same. The newborn woke up screaming; fairly normal behavior.[break][break]

Transference

Christened ‘Dallas’, Dahlia was plagued by vivid nightmares throughout her early years, since her inception, probably. They took many different shapes, sometimes falling, sometimes being harmed in various ways. Blown up by a cannon shot, choking on a toothpick, attacked by wolves, late to school. Terror of many kinds. The young child was constantly crying, often thought to be sick or of poor temperament. It wasn’t until she could string a couple of words together and learned to say “scawy” that it started to make sense. As a toddler she was indecisive and anxious, having trouble even just socializing with other kids. Getting to school age only seemed to make it worse. She spent the better part of pre-school trying to hide any way possible, and kindergarten and 1st grade were mostly spent crying. The birth of her sister Mira six years her junior had been particularly scary. [break][break]

Well, the crying never exactly stopped, it just became less of a constant and more of a “very often” kind of thing. It wasn’t until she was 9 that she wouldn’t run away from her birthday candles. The nightmares didn’t quite stop, either. Dahlia was constantly waking up screaming, sobbing, and in all sorts of distress. Her parents did their best, even shelling out for a child psych and a dream specialist, but nothing really helped. Through it all she kept seeing that face in her sleep, with mouth and eyes of every shape, formless. Not so much a recurring nightmare as it was a recurring theme. Walking in on her mother watching The Thing once hadn’t really helped.[break][break]

Still, she managed to make it through school, often tired from sleepless nights but successful enough in her studies. It was about her eleventh birthday she mustered up the courage to tell her parents she didn’t want to be Dallas anymore, and for their part they were supportive. Dahlia’s mother took in stride, saying she’d wanted more daughters anyway. Dad was clearly a little confused, but took to new name and pronouns as best he could. He got used to it eventually, though Carl still kept trying to get Dahlia out to the shooting range with little luck.[break][break]

Then mom got sick. An upper respiratory infection that didn’t seem to end, physical weakness, a blackout while driving that saw her license revoked. She was diagnosed with leukemia a few weeks later, and Dahlia was the most scared she’d ever been. It was around this time The Incident occurred, and Dahlia started spending a lot of time with her mother, mostly watching horror films and X-Files. Dahlia was terrified the whole time. About a year later Marissa Mox was gone, survived by her two daughters and husband.[break][break]

From there things sucked, to put it lightly, but Dahlia managed. Highschool was hard, she never really fit in, especially since her only hobby of things that scared her making it that much harder to sleep. The family managed thanks in part to Dahlia’s maternal grandmother. Eventually things kind of stabilized. Dahlia bade farewell and managed to get her scared self to college thanks to some scholarship help, aiming for a degree in Myth and Folklore Studies, and at some point in her second year while grading papers in her T.A. job, she realized she hadn’t had a nightmare in awhile. Life became sort of normal once she could reasonably sleep, and although Dahlia was still a nervous and generally terrified person, she found a bit of peace in there, too. She started a blog, joined an amateur ghost-hunting group, and worked odd jobs alongside tutoring and T.A. work.[break][break]

Fear Unending

Then the light hit. Rumors abounded, but most of society was content to just forget about it. Dahlia found it interesting and scary, but there were plenty of weird things in the world to be scared of. What really bothered her was that when it happened, the nightmare started back up again. The sleeplessness came back. She suffered years of dreams that were as bad as ever, finding herself tired enough as to have trouble telling where she was at times. Delusions took hold. She’d still tried to live her life, but holding down work became harder and harder. Dahlia still managed to get herself to a horror convention across the states before everything broke down. [break][break]

One night she woke up in a dark forest, almost pitch black underneath an eclipsed sun. The ground was indeterminate; Dahlia could feel the roots that she stumbled over, the dirt, but it had no texture she could see. No shape. She sunk into a shapeless abyss, the trees falling away above her until she floated in nothingness, suspended. The whispers may as well have not existed, not being a sound so much as a thing Dahlia heard in her head. But beneath her something moved in the inky darkness. At first limbs of some kind, the vague outline of faces too many in number along them. They moved around and past her, and though some faces seemed to be screaming or speaking, they weren’t the source of the whispers. The mouth beneath it all was. Gargantuan, with too many shapes, constantly changing. Eyes similar, too many of all shapes, never the same. The thing yawned beneath her, and it spoke of everything and nothing. Dahlia tried to cry out, but there was no sound here. Only her Fear, whispering. [break][break]

She awoke in her hotel room, gasping for air as though she’d just come back from the dead. Her face was wet with tears, and Dahlia’s throat felt raw like she had been screaming for hours. Then she blinked and she was somewhere else. Earth-chan had struck.