The old nursery is as silent as a grave.
     The human-sized statue of a grinning, evil turtle is shadowed in darkness. No light comes from the doorway—no torches would illuminate a place that no one wants to visit. It would be a waste of oil, and a waste of effort to keep them lit when not a single soul comes near this place. Not since it was used to house baby mice during the war against the rats last year.
     This place was abandoned until about a month ago, when I returned here to hide from Luxa, Nerissa, Vikus, the guards, and every other human who insists on worrying over me so much that I can't find a moment of solitude anywhere in the castle.
     Except here of course. No one visits me here.
I lean back against the wall, arms crossed, and try to remember what it was like before the visions started to consume me. I used to like being around people, didn't I? I liked being around Luxa and Mareth and Nerissa and Henry. And Hazard, Dulcet, Vikus, and Howard, too. I used to have fun with them a lot—both during the warrior prophecies and for about a month after the Flood. I liked being around the people of Regalia too, and helping out in the new fields and groves. Training with the other kids, and helping train the even younger ones as well. I used to feel like I belonged. I used to be happy.
I used to be a lot of things.
     Now it feels like those things are being erased from me, like the rough draft of an essay in a notebook. I used to be draft one, and now I'm becoming draft two, though not necessarily an improved version. I glare down at my bare feet, as if they're somehow responsible for my transformation.
A sharp pain suddenly lances through my skull, like an electric shock arcing from my left to right temple. For an instant I feel my whole body tense up, then I can't feel my body at all.
Shifting shadows. The darkness flickers through shades of black and grey, like the rippling swath of a dark curtain.
A patch of light appears for a heartbeat, and something scuttles across the surface of a rock. The long segmented legs of an insect. The shadowy curtain shifts closed and the movement is undetectable again.
Soft tapping fills the silence, like a thousand fingernails clicking against stone in unending repetition. The air smells of earth and stone, and something wet—rotting and alive.
     A chill creeps through my bones—my thoughts—my mind—and the shivering sense of wrongness increases until it's a physical pain. But nothing else moves. The curtain remains dark and soft and shadowed, yet I want to scream that something is coming—something is dangerously wrong. Someone is going to die.
     Then the curtain of midnight shifts, a gust of wind tossing it to the side and revealing what lies behind.
Then the darkness is consumed by fire.
The vision ends suddenly, like a switch is flipped in my mind by an unseen director. I gasp for breath, gulping down air like a starving man inhaling food. My skin is cold and numb, and my fingers start to tingle as blood flow resumes. I shift up onto my elbows, realizing that I somehow went front standing against the wall to lying on the floor. A headache emanates from a knot on the back of my head where I must have hit the stone.
Why, why, why? I turn sideways and press my cold cheek to the even colder floor. Why is this happening to me?