Benny was woken up by a dream. A peculiar one.
The dream entailed him sitting by the side of a stranger. The man was somehow familiar, but his face had been blurred by something that Benny couldn't recognize. Like looking at someone through frosted glass. He sat in a hall that was similarly and oddly familiar. It looked like the rat kingdom's halls, but he couldn't be certain.
The man didn't move or speak. He was dying. And Benny was there looking at him, wondering where he was. Why did this scene feel familiar? It was an odd feeling, but he knew he hadn't been there. Yet he also knew that there were parts of himself that he had lost and couldn't understand. Fragments missing from the whole.
His realities had blurred between having been there and having not. The line between memory and imagination was razor thin.
The dream moved on to another scene. There, another man lay lifeless on the ground. It was inside a very dark cave with nothing else around. No features. No landmarks. Just stone and darkness.
But fortunately, or unfortunately, he could actually see around him despite the lack of light. There, another man lay wearing armor and carrying things that looked similar to his own. But he couldn't really tell for certain. The man, on the other hand, like the other before it had no face to speak of. Just a blank space where features should be.
And Benny was there too, lying down, looking at a part of the cave. At a huge coffin bigger than anything that he had seen before. Monolithic. Ancient.
Just by looking at it, Benny felt fear crawl up his spine. There was a certain darkness enshrouding that tomb. A presence that radiated malice and power. But why could he feel fear inside his own dream? That he didn't know or does any of this make any sense. Dreams weren't supposed to have weight like this. Weren't supposed to feel this… real.
Nor did he know anything about any of this. What could it all mean? He couldn't tell. Nor could he connect the dots between the scenes.
All he could take from this was that there was a man who was either dying or was dead. And he was beside that man, looking. But the question remained: was he really there, or was he not? And was his perspective really his own? Or was it someone else's? Was he looking through his own eyes or someone else's?
Then Benny woke up.
That was the first dream he'd had in a while. Something that made him take longer to get up and set himself to work for the day. He lay there, staring at the ceiling of the sanctuary, trying to make sense of what he'd seen.
Though the moment he fully woke, he instantly panicked as if he was falling from somewhere high. His body jerked. His heart raced. He looked around frantically, touched his body to confirm he was whole, and found himself still in the safety of the sanctum. Still alive. Still intact.
He then began to scan his surroundings and recognized no threats to his person. No monsters. No danger. Just the quiet sanctuary.
Although he felt like a pair of eyes was watching him from the back of his neck. The sensation of being observed was overwhelming. And something heavy was breathing beside him, close enough that he should feel the warmth. There was nothing there when he looked. It was a very weird dream and an even weirder way to start your day.
But he tried to put that off for now. His plans? Well, you know what they were. An endless slaughter against the monsters of this floor. Same as always.
After further inspection of the space, he confirmed he was safe. This could be paranoia setting in, he thought. A consequence of being outside in the dark for longer periods of time. It was beginning to eat him up inside, mentally eroding whatever was left that was keeping him sane.
The sanctum was probably the only place keeping him from fully going mad. The only anchor to anything resembling humanity.
He feared that if he had no place like this, then he would have transformed completely. Would have become a creature amongst the darkness. A part of the labyrinth that walks and breathes its insanity. No, he would become a monster itself. Indistinguishable from the things he hunted, despised and was disgusted of.
Before he could get out of the safety of the sanctuary, something pulled him back. So desperately. It felt like two hands gripping his shoulders. And then it became four. And then many more, countless invisible hands clutching at him, pulling him backward.
But when he looked at his back, there was nothing there. No hands. No figures. Nothing.
Instinctively he found it eerie, but he also felt that if he went out of the sanctuary now, then whatever he feared would become true. That crossing that threshold would be the final step into something he couldn't come back from.
A strange phenomenon, though his day had started strange even before this. From the dream to the waking panic to this.
The hands. How could he describe them? It felt like they were begging him to stop. The hands, he associated them with someone he knew. Or multiple someones. Some felt heavy, like the hands of a grown man. Some felt warm, like the hands of a woman. And some felt small and delicate, like the hands of a child.
Benny didn't move further than he already had. He stood frozen almost at the boundary between the sanctuary and the darkness of the third floor space. Right at the edge where the oppressive weight of the labyrinth began to press down again.
His body wanted to move. To defy whatever powerful force was stopping his own control. But he couldn't break free from the invisible grip. And so he gave up and went back to sit around his campfire.
He sat there for a long time. His mind went blank. Well, it was full of questions, but it was being overrun with so many thoughts that it went blank from the overload. Like a candle snuffed out by too much wind.
It hurt to think until it didn't. He became comatose and just sat there for the longest time. Hours passed. The bioluminescent plants outside shifted from their day glow to their night glow, and he didn't notice.
His body moved on its own like another was guiding it, and he was like in his dream. The spectator of a dead man. Watching himself from outside himself.
His movements were familiar but felt like they weren't his own. Everything felt familiar but then not his own. Like wearing someone else's clothes that happened to fit perfectly.
It felt like his body was telling him to stop. Or maybe he was actually just making up the voices of the whispers that told him to stop. As a weeping voice talked inside his head, pleading with him to stop and do no more.
"Please, no more. You've done enough. You've suffered enough."
And so Benny was paralyzed for the day. A strange feeling washed over him. A feeling of nostalgia that wasn't entirely his own. Memories that belonged to someone else but felt like they should be his.
It started with a strange dream and became a day that felt unproductive. But it also felt like he needed it. Not only his body but also his mind needed this rest. This pause. This moment of stillness in the endless violence, amidst all the darkness he was in.
Well, from our perspective, though, Benny as he began to sleep once again, was seeing himself from the past. Versions of himself that had died. The first Benny who died in the rat kingdom. The second Benny who died in Sitan's realm. And what weighed him down was a subconscious act of his body. Or whatever ghosts he had accumulated.
Versions of himself pleading with their current self to stop. Because they understood how close Benny was to the threshold. How close he was to losing himself completely. Any more beyond this was going to cost him another life and another version of himself. Another fragment torn away. Another piece lost forever.
Though Benny didn't understand any of this consciously, his other selves did. And from their perspective, Benny was going down a path of destruction. Not just to monsters and this hell, but to himself. He was spiraling down into self-sabotage. A complete destruction of one's self, piece by piece, death by death.
Thankfully, they were able to stop him. No, it was more accurate to say that he was able to stop himself. That some deep part of him that still wanted to survive, that still remembered what it was to be human, listened to his own madness and heeded the warning.
The sanctuary hummed with silence around him as he slept. And for once, the dreams that came were peaceful. Empty. A void of rest that his fractured mind desperately needed.
Tomorrow, he might go back to the killing. Tomorrow, he might step back into the darkness.
But today, he stopped. And that small act of restraint might have saved whatever remained of the person he once was.
Even if he didn't remember who that person had been.