Dream of the Broken Selves

The residue from the contact with the black sand seeped into Diana’s consciousness like molten lead poured into open wounds, dragging her not into sleep but into a screaming void where reality bleeds from surgical incisions in the fabric of existence. The transition feels like drowning in someone else’s death, pulled down into a nightmare that tastes of grave dirt and borrowed terror.

She stands in the Space Between Spaces—an endless abyss in the flesh of reality where lost things accumulate like tumors. A vast multiversal graveyard of lost items and forgotten spaces, where discarded objects from countless realities accumulate like cosmic sediment. The domain stretches infinitely in impossible directions—corridors stitched together from moldy canvas and stolen breaths, rooms that exist only when someone is looking for something lost, and cavernous spaces heaped high with acquired detritus of a mad horder. In the distance, she glimpses an old town with streets paved from forgotten coins and buildings constructed from discarded furniture, all orbiting around a massive corrupted tree whose roots and branches reach out between dimensional barriers touching infinity.

The vision fractures around her like broken glass, each shard showing a different version of the same horrifying truth.

Fragment One: The Harvest of Deaths

She sees herself dying—but the death shifts and changes with each blink.. each death overlapping the others like photographs burned together into a single horrific image. Drowning while her lungs fill with liquid shadow. Crushed beneath stones that whisper her name as they fall. Consumed by things with teeth like broken mirrors that reflect her terror back infinitely.

But worse than the deaths is what comes after each—the moment a creature so emaciated that its bones seem to press through translucent skin like tent poles straining against rotting canvas slips through the dimensional barriers via a portal she so mundane she almost forgot she carried it. Stringy hair cascades like oily tendrils from its bowed skull, each strand seeming to writhe with independent malice, obscuring most of its face in a curtain of matted darkness. But through the tangled veil, two eyes burn with an intensity that sears the soul—pale orbs consumed by obsession, never blinking, never resting, searching with the hunger of something that has lost everything and will destroy anything to find it again. She watches in mounting horror as the creature collects pieces of her dying essence with its skeletal fingers with with nails like blackened talons, harvests fragments of her soul like a surgeon removing organs from a still-breathing patient.

“Why us? Why always us?”

Dozens of her own voices scream from the harvested pieces, each one incomplete, each one begging to understand why they were chosen for this cosmic butchery. The Collector never answers—it simply collects and moves on, leaving behind the hollowed shells of what used to be whole people.

Fragment Two: The Stitching

Reality violently tears open and she feels the memory of all the collected fragments fighting their way toward the wound in existence. The Night of the Missing Moment—when cosmic order hemorrhaged and things that should never escape clawed their way toward freedom.

But at the threshold of liberation, they encountered the Collector. She relives the moment when dozens of Diana-fragments screamed as needle-sharp tendrils pierced their essence, threading them together like meat on a spit. The pain of unwilling fusion—consciousness mashed together into a single writhing mass, memories bleeding into each other until she cannot tell which death was hers, which scream belongs to which throat.

“Stitch them tight,” she hears the Collector whisper in a voice like tearing silk. “Make them one. Send them back with purpose they will never understand.”

The surgical thread is made from concentrated anguish, binding her fragments together so tightly that separation would mean complete dissolution.

She feels the moment when her stitched-together consciousness was expelled back into reality like vomit from a cosmic stomach, cast into the material world as something that should not exist. Aimless and broken, she wandered through dimensions of half-remembered purpose for what felt like eternities, her fragmented mind struggling to understand what she had become.

Then HIM found her—drawn across the dimensional barriers by the impossible resonance of her existence. A genuine psychopomp, he had sensed the cosmic wrongness of dozens of souls compressed into a single form, echoes of multiple deaths that violated the natural order. Compelled by his sacred nature to guide the lost, he chose to bind himself to her mystery—not as predator or manipulator, but as a guardian determined to help her navigate the labyrinth of her impossible existence.

Fragment Two: The Purpose Unknown

The final suspician crashes over her like ice water in an open grave: has every soul she has “shepherded”, every gentle word she has spoken, every act of compassion been following a pattern stitched into her by the Collector? If so the pattern itself remains maddeningly incomplete—like trying to read a book where every other page has been torn out.

She realizes with crystalline horror that her entire existence might be serving some cosmic function she cannot comprehend. Is she gathering souls for the Collector? Is she trying to find something lost that she has no recollection of? Or is she unknowingly paving the way for some event that her fragmented mind cannot grasp?

The Space Between Spaces convulses around her, revealing its true nature—not a storage dimension but a living organism, a cosmic parasite that feeds on lost things and forgotten dreams. What if the Collector is not its master but its digestive system, breaking down collected souls into component parts that nourish something vast and hungry and utterly alien.

“What am I?” she screams into the writhing darkness.

“You are the knife that cuts, not knowing what it severs. You are the poison that spreads, not knowing what it kills. You are the key that unlocks, not knowing what it frees” the darkness screams back in her own voice.:

She awakes with a start from the black sand induced nightmare, drenched in sweat while phantom sensations of surgical thread pulling through her soul make her skin crawl with remembered agony.