“I keep having this dream. Maybe it’s a nightmare. I’ve had the same one probably a dozen times already - I don’t know for sure, I never thought it would turn into enough of a problem to keep track. Anyways, it happened again last night, so I’ve finally decided to write it all down, or at least, the pieces I can remember. Maybe it will make more sense after I do. Maybe the dreams will stop. It’s a long dream, but only the end is clear in my mind. Too vivid to keep ignoring.
I’m in the darkest part of the forest. It’s nighttime, not that you would ever be able to tell the difference when you’re there, but somehow I just know it is. I feel as though I’d been running for miles before I stopped there in the clearing. Even as I’m kneeling there, in the dew-burdened grass, it’s as if someone was pulling - ripping - the air from my lungs, forbidding me from screaming. Tears gush from my eyes so fast they feel like they’re not moving at all - just a constant state, clinging to my skin. A thick, sickly humidity that cuts through the cool droplets of midnight that surround me.
As I heave through shattered, stolen lungs, I see it. There in front of me, rests the monster.
And the knowledge washes - floods - over me, delivering a crushing blow that drowns me in the heat of wrongdoing and chills me to the last shard of my spine. The monster was once an indestructible being of wrath and anger, one whose only goal was to kill everything you love, and the only way to stop it - to destroy it - is to love it, genuinely, and wholeheartedly.
And I suppose I did. I suppose I found a way because there it is in front of me, curled up in a fetal position, tail wound around itself, arms cradling its chest in one last desperate attempt for comfort, its pitiful corpse weighing down the dewy blades.
The air, once suffocated with the silence of the witching hour, now splits open with a scream - the most desperate, broken, gut-wrenching, pain-burdened scream I’ve ever heard. The exchange of such extremes is so sudden, so instantaneous, that my clouded mind takes a moment to register the change. It takes a few moments more before I can identify myself as the source. It is at that moment, with my eyes locked on the lifeless creature before me, that my tears blur - then overcome - my vision, and grief finally drowns me.
Because with such a monster as this, it doesn’t matter if you defeat it or not. If you save it or not. Either way, something you love dies. Either way, you always lose.”