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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Ink_Wielder on 2025-07-07 02:38:49+00:00.

Original Post

The night before we prepared to scale the cliff side, I had the dream I’d been waiting for. The one that I’d been dreading.

The ebony desert of shifting glass dunes whirred around me among its ever-present storm, clawing at my exposed skin as sand bits ripped and tore past. I huddled into my jacket to take shelter from it, but that issue was the least of my concern.

Like the first dream, I was alone this time. No clones or friends with me. Not even another dying beast to share in my fear and suffering. It was just me, the black hills, and the abyss around me. My only company was the incessant whispers shuddering from the dark, the weak fingers of their words reaching out to tug at my ears.

“Please make it end…”

“It never ends…”

“It’s infinite…”

“It’s too much—oh God, my mind… I can feel it bleeding the longer I’m here… Like little slivers of glass collecting in its folds…”

I stood motionless there, shivering among the valley of the dunes and whipping my head violently in all directions. It was nearby. It was watching me. If the whispers were calling to me for help, then I knew their keeper was close enough to sense my presence too. Il-Belliegħa. This was finally it.

The sickening popping of bones being cracked made me jump, and for the first time that I’d had one of these dreams, I found myself able to move. The fear was so great at hearing the beast’s movement that the pound from my heart rattled loose the chains holding me in place.

The crackling was coming from just beyond the ridge of the dune ahead of me, so I spun on my heels and took off the opposite way.

“Please help me…”

“Are we so deep that not even death can find us?”

“We didn’t know how deep the earth went—We slipped through the cracks and just kept falling…”

“I don’t remember her face… it was my only solace—please, give her face back to me!”

 There’s the feeling of running in a nightmare—everyone knows it. That slow, sluggish trudge where you pump your feet with all your might, and yet it seems like your body refuses to cooperate. It’s a sensation that everyone loathes once they wake up, but I can tell you with confidence that feeling is much worse when it’s not the dream that’s slowing you down.

I had full control of my body—I had all my usual ability to run. As I clawed and stamped like a maniac at the steep dune before me, however, I made little progress. My limbs woke up the sand as they stabbed into it, and in its anger, the shifting mass threatened to swallow me whole. The ground parted around my hands and feet to swallow them, carrying me back down the slope a foot for every two that I advanced.

Still, my body didn’t give up. A sensation in my unconscious mind, something akin to adrenaline, flooded me like fuel. My heart became the pistons that ignited it, and the ensuing combustion exploded out through every muscle in my body, demanding that they work at max capacity. Even in a dream, I could feel my familiar weak, aching bones, but I didn’t dare let that be an excuse.

Crunch—crick—crack—pop!

The steps paced themselves almost; a couple at a time, then silence to let the whispers recite their desperate poetry. Each time they’d start and stop, the sound would draw closer, and I couldn’t help but toss a look back at the opposing dune. It was quickly fading from my limited vision into the fog of the abyss, but that was much worse. I didn’t want to finally learn what the creature was, but if I was going to, I at least needed to see it. This wasn’t an option that coexisted with escape, however. I may not be able to see it, but I had no doubts that its beastly eyes could slice through the darkness to find me. I turned back to the glistening black shift and pressed harder on the gas.

It was stalking me. Like an animal, its pauses were a hound trying to catch a fresh scent. It knew something was here with it in this strange pocket among the abyss’s folds, it just needed to weed me out.

I was nearly to the top of the dune when the snapping limbs began cracking the air once more. My heart began pounding to its limit when I noticed that they were slower this time. More deliberate. Something was wrong and I knew it. A cat rearing up to pounce. The surrounding whispers only confirmed this when they began to cue up again, this time loud and no longer quiet gasps.

“No—No! No, get away! You need to get away!” One screamed.

“Go find help! Please don’t leave us here!”

“My thoughts are already so fragile… I can’t bear more choking them down—I can’t bear more!”

My body ached so badly and my blood was pumping so furiously in my ears that for a moment it almost occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t dreaming. Maybe I had finally slipped over the edge of the shelf into the darkness of the all-consuming void. It all was too real—too tangible to be a dream.

I could see the top now, the spot where the twinkling black stones gave way to pure darkness. My trembling hand shot forward again, hooking the ridge of the dune that melted away like ice. Still, it was enough to take hold, and I hauled myself upward, kicking furiously with my feet until I felt gravity change directions. The last thing I managed to do before my body vaulted the lip and went tumbling down the other side was spare a glance back at the pit of the mountains.

Like the other details I’d seen of Il-Belliegħa, I couldn’t make out much from the shadow, especially with the whipping sand and blurry smears of shapes as my body began to freefall. All I could see was a mess of colors on a massive face peering from the dark; pale like bone, blue like choked skin, and crimson like dark blood. The shapes they were in made no sense to my frantic brain, but one unusual bit stuck out to me unmistakably. One of the shapes cast in scarlet.

A perfectly painted set of red lips, their plastic sheen contoured into an almost lifeless smirk.

I fell for what felt like a mile, this pit far deeper than the last. My head spun and pounded with adrenaline and vertigo, my vision a black washing machine window of glistening sand. The whispers became more and more distant as I tumbled down the dune, grunting and crying out in pain as I slammed against the packed sand. It was decidedly more firm falling down than climbing up.

I thought with each punch that eventually one would wake me, and I’d jolt up in bed back at the tower, but it wasn’t happening, and though I had been relieved moments ago to have escaped the beast, that relief was quickly dwindling as I drew near to the bottom. I wasn’t going to have the strength to escape again if it followed me down.

That went doubly so at what happened next.

Something they warn you about with bone cancer is just how brittle your limbs become, making it much more easy to fracture and break them. It was here, somehow, despite everything that I’d already been through, that in this dream, my body finally shattered.

I landed weird on a leg and felt an unfathomable level of pain spike through me as it went limp and unresponsive. The dangling bottom half of my limb flailed wildly in the wind before repeatedly slamming back down with each tumble, making it mimic the sounds of the creature above me when it moved. I felt wet stuff splashing my face as I flopped, a clear sign that bone had punctured skin, and I wondered if it happened again when I felt my arm crunch at the shoulder.

If I had any hope that the beast hadn’t seen me when I fell over the dune, it was gone as I wailed into the night. It and anything else wandering this forsaken Mojave would know exactly where I was. I couldn’t help it—the pain was too great, searing through every inch of muscle and nerves.

By the time I hit the ground for the last time and felt my body slide to a stop, tears, blood and snot ran down my face as I just lay there and whimpered, unable to move. The pain was nauseating alongside the dizziness that had just been inflicted, and it was all I had not to roll my head and puke into the sand.

Why was I not waking up? How on earth was I able to dream such vivid pain and fear? That sudden worry came over me again that maybe this wasn’t a dream. Maybe somehow Il-Belliegħa had finally gotten me, and this was simply my fate. The thought only made my heart beat faster, and I squeezed my eyes shut tight to clear them of tears. I was ready to resign myself to this. Whatever this was, be it dream or reality, I was ready to just give up.

In my last moments of desperation, however, the ghosts of Trevor, Dad and Mom came to haunt my memories, and I felt my body roll over, propping myself up on my good arm.

‘Not yet.’ I told myself, ‘Not till we make it home.’

I began to crawl as much as my body would allow, one leg kicking and one arm to pull. I wasn’t making it far, but I was moving, and that was all that mattered. Occasionally, I’d toss looks back up the massive slope beside me and listen, waiting to see if I could hear any whispers or bone snaps over the wind, but I never did.

The pain in my bones was unbearable as I shambled along like a moving corpse, dragging a trail of blood behind me. The black sand burned and itched as it crawled into my wound, nestling in folds of tissue and muscle that were exposed. I tried to endure it the best I could, but I collapsed to the dirt...

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