The Spirits of Past Pains

No crickets chirped, no familiar nocturnal bird calls echoed through Madeleinea's conscious. Instead, strange clicks and croaks crept along the forest floor and up her spine, making the hair on the back of her neck stand right up. Her eyes felt numb and dead, and she half wondered if she had gone blind. Suddenly, she heard a strange sound: singing. Now, Madeleinea loved music, and usually it would make her as happy as a bird with a worm. But this music was completely different, like dark eulogies being thrown from the lungs of a person in deep emotional pain. She covered her ears as it crept into her very soul and shook the ropes of security loose. She felt every wound and every bit of hatred creep from her past and begin to eat her sanity. She screamed, squeezing her eyes shut, not even aware she was still in the forest and trying to keep unknown to the monstrosities that could be slinking under the cloak of the nightmarish dark. This horror, this torrent of long buried hatred and fear, where had it come from? Who had dug it all up? She opened her closed eyes, seeing no difference between the black behind her eyelids and the night threatening to swallow her up. Then, her tortured consciousness picked up on specks of eerie blue lights, coming ever closer. The singing grew louder, the pain greater, and the lights gained the shapes of human figures. Just when she felt her head would explode, the creatures were upon her and the singing they emitted stopped. Now, the whole forest was horribly quiet, as if every creature knew the beings were not something one wished to make their presence known to. It was then that Madeleinea knew she had made a mistake. She realized the creatures were spirits, but nightmarish ones. Skeletons, hung in tattered clothes with gaping, smiling jaws and endless holes for eyes. Now she was screaming for help, though she doubted it would come. Pinpricks began to poke inside her head as one spirit reached down and placed a palm on her forehead. The pinpricks became spears, and the spears became boulders. She felt as if she were sinking into nothing. As she sunk into the open, welcoming arms of the unknown black she fell into, she heard galloping hooves and screaming, but she was just to tired to wonder what was going on. All she wanted to do was sleep, sleep, sleep...