QMC: Round 1

Even hell can be pretty, she reminds herself. Here, it is her garden re-imagined. Everything is here—her misplaced book, blue pinwheels and the swing her baby boy will grow into—but she can't leave. She walks for hours among delphinium, calling names she knows no one will answer to and looking for an exit that isn't there. Doesn't change the fact it's hell.

She sucks on sunflower seeds as she explores the facsimile of her memories, down to the family pond that's swelled into an ocean so large it touches the horizon. Half-eaten bodies are buried in the tall grass—the pair of swans she feeds on Sundays. Their eggs are smeared across the shoreline.

"Mama!"

He has her eyes, her husband's mouth; it is their baby, now a little boy. A thousand leagues away, he waves to her, a make-believe pirate in a pretty white boat.

He is so beautiful.

Her joyful sobs twist into screams as black, horned legs grip the side of the boat.

It rises; naked, craggy body pulsing with each beat of its heart. Human eyes dot its spine and roll in every direction. Her baby scrambles backward and shrieks.

Morpheas reaches into her mind. She looks for something bigger, something terrifying, and already her bones begin to break and reassemble. Her uniform rips, her body reshapes—an extra row of teeth, and blood-slicked mantis wings—as she becomes a living nightmare.

She roars, and with a strength unknown by many, does what she knows must be done.