She’d become addicted to sleeping so she could see again.

To see lights, colours, things, places… people. 

It had taken a long time to realise that it wasn’t the loss of sight that was so egregiously agonising; it was no longer seeing the faces of those she loved most. 

So she slept… and she dreamed. 

Dreamed of her brothers, her mum, her dad, her friends, her wife… 

But she saw no faces now. 

This dream had started in the same shadowy darkness she woke to every day, which had never happened before, and while she’d had incredibly lucid hallucinatory dreams over the years, they’d never felt this real. 

Sand as sharp as glass and searing hot blistered the bottoms of her feet, and a scorching wind ripped at her skin. Her movements had quickly become a dance to lessen the damage to her feet and avoid the swing of the other man’s weapon. 

Keep your mouth closed, she thought to herself, which was easier said than done as she struggled to breathe in the hot, sand-filled air. She kept her eyes closed to keep sand from getting in them, not that she needed them. 

Take shallow breaths. Her lungs would no doubt have more sand in them than the Sahara when this ended, if it ever ended. 

The man she had just dodged again had run past her and skidded to a heavy halt, maybe eight meters away, and bellowed a monstrous cry that mixed with the roaring sound of people screaming all around them. 

They were up high and far away, but there had to be hundreds of them, and their voices echoed like they were cheering in the stands of the London Stadium. 

A crowd of spectators looked down on them. 

The man hollered again, his voice rising over the crowd’s cheers with a dense vibrato that sounded more animal than man, and charged. His enormous feet slammed into the ground so hard she could feel the vibration of each individual impact reverberate through her burning toes and up through her body. Each thump punched through the wave of sound from the stands, air whistled around the textured blade of the weapon he held, and the wood of the handle creaked beneath his tightening grip as he prepared to swing the weapon down at her head. 

Down. 

Because the man stood at least a meter taller than she, from what she could discern thus far. 

That’s not right. 

She was always the tallest person in the room. For a man to be that much taller than her, it would put him at over ten feet tall. 

That wasn’t possible. 

That wasn’t real. 

This is a dream. 

She ducked quickly beneath the whomp of his lumbering swing, her movements quick, lithe, and practised while his were heavy and slow. He may have been built like a monster out of one of her fantasy novels, but monsters still had femoral arteries. 

Her grip tightened on the handle of her rusty machete, and she swung upwards as his weapon thunked into the ground beside her, and she ripped it through the tough, textured skin of his upper thigh. It sounded like rough fabric tearing and felt like she was slicing into the side of a leathery-hided beast, and blood, as hot as the sand burning her feet, splattered against her face. 

His pain-filled scream hit a new octave, and she ducked behind him and out of his sight before he could grab her. 

She listened hard to the thump of his enormous heart, to the ragged breaths moving in and out of lungs higher than she was tall, to the creak of joints, the soft fluctuation of skin, the movement of sound as he turned his head this way and that, his fumbling steps on the ground, his toes curling in the sand, the way the noise of the crowd changed and bounced off his body.

Every sound, every lilt, every movement he made added to the picture being painted in her mind of the scene before her. 

“Your eyes don’t work anymore, but your other senses can see plenty,” her uncle’s words echoed in her head. She’d always relied heavily on her beast’s senses to move around, but the choker that lay heavy around her neck had cold iron in it. She could feel her skin itching all around it, and cold iron had always damped her people’s senses. 

“If you keep relying on her, you’ll never learn to manage without her.” Her uncle’s words rang truer now than they ever had. 

She couldn’t pull on the slightly less destroyed eyesight of her beast, or her heightened senses, so she had to rely on her own, which were far better than a typical Human, but as the sounds around her ebbed and flowed between clarity and cacophony, she worried they may not be good enough. 

A new sound burst from the man’s throat, bringing her back to the present, and she leapt backwards, barely avoiding the fumbling swing that threw him off balance. 

He was fading fast from blood loss, which meant she’d definitely hit an artery in his leg.

If he had a femoral artery, then he must have other vital organs. 

He hefted his weapon again with a grunt reminiscent of an angry bull, and she didn’t hesitate. As soon as he lifted the weapon over his head, she launched herself forward in a movement so fast the larger man had barely comprehended it before her machete was buried in his body, right up to the hilt.

Right through his heart.  

He gasped quietly, and his head lolled forward, his arms going limp, and the weapon landed heavily beside him with a thick clunk. 

His body slowly fell backwards, and she let the weight of his fall pull the blade free while she held onto the misshapen handle. 

It slid out of his body with a wet squelch. 

The cheers exploded around her, causing the echoing feedback loop to become exponentially worse. 

The overwhelming assault on her senses, combined with the severe fatigue of fighting man after man… Monster after monster… 

Her muscles trembled with exertion, her breath came in ragged heaves, but she kept her footing, and her resolve. 

She wouldn’t drop until she was dead.

Four people had tried to kill her. Four, since she had woken up in what had been little more than a dog kennel. Then promptly dragged out into the sand-filled stadium. 

That was all she could think to make of her surroundings. A sports stadium in a desert somewhere, full of sadists who liked to watch monstrous creatures try to kill people.

A flicker in her right eye made her flinch. It must have been extremely bright outside for her to get a glimmer of light in that eye. Of her two, her right was the one everyone hoped would recover, though they estimated it would take years, decades even. 

She’d be an old woman before she could see well enough to read a book again, if she were lucky.

Vibrations continued to tickle her feet as she kept moving, turning in a circle, trying to pinpoint what was coming next, to hear beneath the stadium noise. 

She used to love going to the footy and cricket games, before and after her accident. 

Not anymore. 

How anyone could tolerate being stared at and jeered at like this was beyond her. 

Never again.

I must be on some powerful drugs, she thought to herself, even though this was unlike any drug-induced hallucination or dream she’d had before. 

New vibrations tickled her feet, and it took a long moment before she began to pick out the sound of new steps out of the onslaught, but it was there, a new fighter that was smaller than the first four, but still large. He stepped lightly, no, they. 

More than one.

Her head moved side to side, trying to find the source of sound from each one, waiting for them to get close enough for their heartbeats to become clear, for their breaths to become clear. 

It was harder this time than before, as the trembling in her legs came in sudden, uncontrollable bursts. Her joints were weak and stiff, her senses growing more muddled and dull with each passing minute.

She was fading. 

It didn’t matter how hard she tried to fight it. Her body was going to betray her sooner rather than later. 

There were at least five of them she could pick out, all fanned out in a circle around her, moving closer, one quiet step at a time. 

She heard a grumble, which she then realised was more of a laugh than a growl, followed by a series of barking sounds from the man to her forward right, which was answered by the one hovering around her seven o’clock. 

They weren’t barking; they were talking, and laughing. 

What could be so funny at a time like this? 

The logical side of her brain said that if she let them put her back in the cage, she’d wake up, because that would be the end of the dream, but the instinctual part of her brain… the beast who lived inside her, had other ideas, despite the distance the collar put between them.

Kill them all.