Monster Girl Dreams Diminuendo < Ultimate ✰ >

But in the dreams, she unfolded.

The sound lasts for miles. Birds fall silent in respect. The moon flickers.

She is seventeen feet tall, give or take a vertebra. Her horns curl inward like a question she has forgotten how to ask. Scales the color of a dying star flash beneath a too-thin nightgown. In the dream, she is always trying to fit inside a room built for someone else—a classroom, a café, a childhood bedroom with a twin bed her tail spills off of like a wounded river.

Her shoulder blade aches. Not with pain—with memory. A phantom weight where wings almost were. She touches the skin there, and for a second, it feels like velvet over bone. Like the dream is not finished with her yet.

She closes her eyes and whispers into the dark: Tomorrow night. I’ll stay bigger tomorrow night.

So she folded herself smaller. Smaller. Until her spine curved like a bow. Until her voice became a polite, airless thing.