10.3

Arman continued to stare at Adira, the face he had of longing and love dropped to a horrified expression.

Adira stared back at him, eyes full of venom and daggers and swords and hatred and betrayal. She watched him, her eye shape changing, her lips changing, her bone structure changing.

Her wings started to grow bigger, the feathers dropping off, the skin around the tendrils of her wings stretching and creating holes in some spots. Her wingspan grew, stretching across the sky, covering the setting sun’s middle like a garter. She pointed at him, a long finger dripping with skin and sinew as her body changed over and over, judgemental.

“You may not remember the faces that stare at you, but we remember your soul,” she bellowed. Arman stared at her, small in the shadow of her wings. One of the holes that tore in her wings poured a ray of light on his left eye, another hole shined a light on his chest, the empty spot where his heart should be.

Adira frowned.

“So you did sell your soul,” she whispered as she snapped her fingers.

Arman blinked as the sun started to melt behind Adira. He started to scream as the town beneath him started to melt, too. His knees gave way, and he fell to them but kept falling, going nowhere. He tumbled and sobbed, sobbed and tumbled in one spot in the nothing of space. Adira watched him, the light of a million stars shining on her face, showing disgust and contempt for this cowering man in the darkness of space.

She snapped her fingers again.

He opened his eyes and was surrounded by images upon images of various couples, people he’d never seen before, but he knew who they were. He watched himself in various bodies betray his beloved in various manners. He watched himself choose so many paths to end the life of the one he loved. He watched himself strangle her, run her over with various types of vehicles, open up her belly with no drugs. All just to get the baby to exchange it for more power.

Another snap of her fingers.

He fell to an all-white floor, in an all-white room, the buzz of fluorescent lighting above him made him shut the fuck up. He crawled onto his hands his knees, his face pitiful, full of tears and snot. Adira took a step towards him. He flinched.

“Poor, poor, Arman,” Adira cooed, reaching down and using the tip of her long, pointy tendril of a finger to lift his chin up. She stared at the foggy blue eyes that used to be the colors of the sea in the morning before the sun kissed the horizon. She used her free hand to cup his face, rubbing a thumb on his cheek, on his eyebrow.

He smiled at her.

She stuck her fingernails in his eyes.

Arman sat up in bed, screaming, clawing at his face for a moment before realizing where he was.

Their bedroom was dark, except for the sliver of moonlight that shone through the open curtain that Adria stood in. She was heavily pregnant. He took a deep breath and let out a sigh of relief. He got out of bed and walked over to her, slow, still trying to shake off his nightmare. As he got closer, his foot stepped into something warm and wet. His breath caught his throat, the air trying to tamp down the bile and vomit of the thoughts about what he was stepping in. He gulped and took another step, the wetness still there. He stood a few feet away from Adira, her eyes still locked onto the moon.

“NIghtmare?” She asked him.

He nodded. She smiled, closing her eyes, placing a hand on her belly. She opened her eyes, the purple irises and the whites of her eyes jet black.

“Once I finish miscarrying, you have the option to kill me with your own hands,” she whispered, gently rubbing her belly, and smiled a smile worth an infinite lifetimes. “You won’t get the chance to kill me again.”