A Tale of Twisted Minds and Warped Realities

If I hadn’t killed her, maybe I’d still be alive too. Not brain dead. Not fighting the thoughts that trap me in an insane asylum with no hope of escape but death itself. It’s like hell, but a whole lot worse. The fire is hotter. The pain is deeper. The chains are tighter. It’s worse when hell is in your mind. Tormenting. Whispering all the possibilities you could’ve taken and should’ve taken. Haunting you with the memories of failure upon failure upon failure and the life you could’ve been living. It’s worse when hell relentlessly targets the one thing that makes you sane. Logic. And when hell tears apart logic, that’s when you go insane.

I’d hate to say I’m insane.

I’d like to say I’m just pondering a twisted conscience.

It’s as if I can still feel the smooth gun in my hands, the rattle of a bullet spiralling from the barrel, the terrified reflection in her eyes as it pierced her chest. But what’s worse? If I hadn’t pulled the trigger, she would have completed her plot to assassinate the King of Axebedis. And I would have to live with the guilt, the result laying in a coffin in front of me. Either way, death still sits like a meditating zen god at my feet. Just me and my mind. Trapped in a room of isolation. With nothing but a pen and paper to calm my nerves. But as I continue writing, the paper fills. So now, I’ve moved to the walls, and nearly the entire box is full of words. From the beginning of the mission to the lingering convictions. On and on, the conversation between me and my morality loops like a broken record. Its relentlessness is haunting.

“You shouldn’t have killed me,” she whispers. “You know this better than I do. Than anyone. Your father taught you well.” Her voice is like frigid water trickling through a river. She circles around me, every step disturbing the dust in this little grey box.

“You didn’t give me much of a choice.”

“But you…You gave in.” Her perfume glides on the wind.

I say nothing in response. My tongue is numb, and the tides of panic rise in my chest.

“What’s bothering you?” She lunges toward me and lays her head against my chest, big glossy eyes staring vacantly at me. Her hollow expression stabs into my heart. She’s dead. Nothing but rags and bones.

“You’re not real, Vera. Just another vision.”

She nuzzles into my neck and breaths soothingly. “What’s the matter, Dante. You’re so…distant after what happened.”

I can’t fall for her again. She nearly tried to kill me with her sensual acts as she hid the blade under her garments. But I uncovered her plot, and she with mine. We both knew we were poised against each other from two warring kingdoms, and betrayal was the only option. She had me in her grasp from the day she revealed her beauty. One look, and I was hooked. She knew what she was doing. And so did I. We were avenues into each other’s houses, little doorways to hidden places no other heir has been. And then the passion ended abruptly. One shot, and it was over. I sacrificed my sanity for the king.

I shove her away and cower from my confused reality. “Please, just go.”

“Do I…haunt you? I do, don’t I?” She stares down at the hole in her chest, her long blonde hair falling over her shoulder in scraggly locks, damaged by the fall from the cliffside. “I’m sorry.”

Her voice bounces from the walls like an echo in a cave, followed by a whisper from a ghostly wind. She circles her fingernail around the bloody hole and looks up at me again. “You didn’t want to kill me. I can see into your mind. Your morality says it’s wrong…but you…you say it’s…right? Why?”

“You were planning to kill the king, that’s why. I couldn’t let you do tha—”

“But isn’t killing a crime here? So you saved me from a crime by committing your own.”

No. She’s trying to manipulate me. She begins to circle like a wolf around me, sizing me up and preparing an attack. I had to save the king. It was the only option. It was for the sake of Axebedis. And nevertheless, it’s a crime. One that I could’ve escaped if my heart hadn’t been so ruled by aggression and fear. It could’ve been Vera battling the demons of twisted conscience instead of my own restless mind. A mind that traps me in an insane asylum of wicked thought. And she, this relentless figment of imagination, surrounds me with confused anxiety. The whole in her chest only mirrors the fear that she’ll take revenge on my own. But she can’t hurt me. She’s nothing but the personification of my insanity.

“Tell me, Dante…why do you struggle?”

My teeth grind together and clench my lip until it bleeds, a method I’ve learned to wield when fighting the waves of ambivalence. Why do I struggle? Is it fear of the uncontrollable nature of insanity, or something else? Something about her. It’s in the way that way that she walks. The way she crookedly smiles with a hinted glimmer of revenge in her eyes. Her movements condemn me for the wrongs I deem so right.

“I killed you, Vera. The only thing I ever loved…”

“And now I’m here, Dante. You’re not alone anymore.”

“Sometimes I wish I were.”

“Ti amerò sempre, Dante. Do you remember when I told you?”

“Yes,” I stare at the dusty floor to the left of her where a flickering light casts its shifting presence. And then she moves into, her shadow suffocating the light.

“I sense you still loathe me…even after everything I did for yo—”

“Everything you did was a lie.”

“But it was a lie you fell for, and one we both savoured.”

“Leave me alone, Vera.”

“You’ll have to kill me…again.”

She stabs my soul with her words. To kill someone I love…again. To relive the horrid memory of her death by my hand. She stands tall in front of me, shoulders held back as she waits to oppose me. She knows my thoughts. She is my thoughts. Every waking moment, I live in her torment, and every night that I lay on this cold, concrete floor, I sleep to the sound of her purring attack. She feeds my nightmares and haunts my daydreams as I wait for my own demise. A life for a life. I killed her, and now she plots my own assassination. But it could’ve been her, and I tormenting her mind. But no. I had to step in. I had to pull the trigger. All to save the king.

And now…I must save myself. From Vera. From the wicked way she walks. How she never fails to remind me of the horrors that ghostly night. But she’s in my mind. Living in insanity. Only if I can control the hysteria.

I stare into the gaping depths of the glistening wound. But she does the same to me. My injured heart stifles a beat. The vacancy in her gaze tears the insides of my chest into little fragments of red debris. No! She’s accessed my insanity.

“Dante, take my hand. I will join you in the life you wished we had…”

The allurement in her eyes controls my reactions like a clown and a puppet. She smiles, teeth tearing a gash in her face. She takes my hand, and with a swift turn, returns the favour I handed to her. An identical hole bleeds in my chest. A life for a life. Two wrongs will make a right. The writing on the walls mushes into a hazy disillusionment like twisted mirrors. I crumple into her deception, and she whispers cooly into my year, “I was never really dead.”