“Oh dearie.. we’ve met before. You’ve seen me. You are what made me realise I can thrive.”
The voice cooed through static, like haphazard notes mimicking human voices. Like those AIs that sound so realistic but too monotonous. Like synthetic voices that sound realistic but you know deep down they’re fake.
He’s fake. His words are all but lies… right?
There’s something about those words and his physical form’s eyes that tug at Xander’s memories. Memories of a bright summer’s day and a stray boy wandering the woods. Entering into a domain he has no right to be in. A great beast of some form from those lands looking directly into his soul, rearing it’s head as though ready for attack, only to collapse onto the ground.
He had ran away screaming, back to his family. His father gently calmed him down and got him to try and describe what it was he had seen. Hysterical fear clouded over his mind and the being was blurry in his mind. But he remembered the beast’s breathy call, it’s lack of fear, it collapsing under itself. It seemed wrong in some way, but he couldn’t describe it, eventually settling on “a deer of some kind”. Later that day, his father rang wildlife services warning that there was something wrong with an animal his son had seen but couldn’t quite describe.
The wildlife services had reported back to look for a cervidae suffering from something akin to chronic wasting disease. They never found one.
But Xander remembered those eyes. And how they stared back at him, not full of fear but something else. Not bravery, not calmness but power. Power to unlock the hidden nightmares that made you stay away from the woods at night, the fear that had slowly encroached upon the town in the past few years, the paranoia that had struck him that day.
No deers were slowly dying nearby. It was all just a fear god who realised he could cling to the power he had thought he lost years ago.
And Xander had realised too late what had happened that day.
He was indirectly responsible for everything.
And here he stood, looking the gift deer in the mouth in defiance for those years of nightmares.
