A DARKNESS NOW IN PURSUIT OF ME
In the stillness of midnight, my sleep was ruptured by a dream—a vision that transcended the familiar landscape of my nightly musings. It began innocuously enough. Rising from my bed, I drifted toward the hallway, fingers brushing against the light switch as I had done a thousand times before. But as the soft glow spread through the corridor, a strange weight hung in the air, a presence that did not belong in the sanctuary of my home.
Looking at the clock on my dresser, I saw it ticking, steady and certain—a tether to the world I knew. But in that instant, a sense of displacement took hold, and the door, as if possessed by an unseen hand, swung shut with slow, deliberate menace. I reached out, pressing my palms against its surface, feeling a resistance that grew with unnatural strength. The wood groaned, buckling as if alive, as though it were held fast by a force beyond my strength to control.
My heartbeat quickened. A primal dread, ancient and consuming, crept into my soul, seizing my mind with a terror that felt foreign as if borrowed from a long-forgotten fear buried in the marrow of my bones. Shadows gathered at the periphery of my vision, shifting and growing. They writhed and coalesced, forming grotesque shapes with faces that leered and grinned in distorted mockery. The air turned dense, weighted with something malevolent, each breath feeling like an act of defiance against an entity intent on swallowing the very life from me.
Then, they began to whisper—not in a language known to humankind, but in a cadence that crawled across the skin, leaving a chill in its wake. Their voices, thick with malice, spoke of things I could not understand yet felt deeply—a threat that transcended words, a promise of suffering and subjugation. These shadows, I realized, were more than phantasms; they were beings of ancient malice, entities born of darkness, older than any fear I had ever known.
Driven by instinct alone, I pushed back against the door with all my might, summoning a single, resonant “NO,” a word that somehow held a force beyond my mortal strength. It reverberated through the space, a sound that pierced the heavy air and shattered the hold of the unseen force pressing upon me. Slowly, reluctantly, the oppressive weight receded, the shadows dissolving into the depths from which they had emerged, leaving behind a palpable void, a lingering sense of something unfinished, something that might yet return.
Shaken, I retreated to my bed, feeling the weight of the encounter lift only as I slipped back into the refuge of unconsciousness. By morning, the stark clarity of the dream remained, settling in my mind like the fading scent of smoke after a fire. This was no mere nightmare, no tangled knot of subconscious worries. It had been an intrusion, a brush with something unfathomable that bore the chill of another realm entirely.
As the morning sun rose, warming the shadows in my room, an unsettling realization took form. The Asuras—those ancient, shadowed beings of myth, known in ancient lore as opponents of the divine—had breached the walls of my mind. I questioned if my recent novel, The Asuras: A Dream World Odyssey, had somehow acted as a bridge to their dark world, its words stirring these entities from their hidden depths. Could my work of fiction have invited them into my life, their ancient enmity awakening in response to the world I had dared to imagine?
I felt a shiver as I considered the possibility. My novel, it seemed, was no longer a story confined to the page. It had become a portal, a channeled invocation that had breached the boundary between reality and the unseen realms. I felt both exhilaration and trepidation as I moved through the day, my mundane tasks shadowed by the awareness that I had glimpsed something ancient and dark, and perhaps, it had glimpsed me in return.
That night, I found myself compelled to search my room, drawn toward the manuscript I had discovered and nearly forgotten in the initial stages of writing my novel. I retrieved it from its resting place beside my desk—a worn and weathered book with words now seeming to pulse with significance. Its pages held prophecies and invocations of the Asuras and their realm, a world where dark forces schemed against the celestial order. I wondered if I had unwittingly invoked a path, a journey not yet complete, stretching from the pages of my novel into the fabric of my life.
And now, dear reader, I leave you with this tale, with the question that lingers still. The Asuras, formidable and patient, have stirred. My words may have roused them, but the journey is far from over. Will you dare to venture into the world I have unwittingly opened? Will you seek the pages of The Asuras: A Dream World Odyssey and step into the darkened realm that called to me in the dead of night? Be warned—the Asuras are not merely specters of myth. They are watching, waiting, and the door to their world is slightly ajar.
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