Kaelen sat up abruptly. The cold hit him like a freight train. He was in his bedroom, still, but the roof was gone, the ceiling was gone, hell, even the walls were gone. Save for his bed and the floor immediately around him, everything was just a frame. And everything beyond that was fog.

Kaelen felt his breath get shallow - not out of the thinness of the air, but out of panic. He was back. In his head or not, he was back. He was in the cold again.

He was able to fight back the panic long enough to scream before it paralyzed him once again.

After maybe thirty minutes. Kaelen was able to control his breathing long enough to think rationally. Either he was having a traumatic nightmare, or he was back in that place again. Either way, he had to get through it. Maybe I can find answers, he thought.

He looked around for something warm, but there was nothing except the blanket on the bed.

"Better than nothing," he muttered, and grabbed the blanket off it. He wrapped it around himself like a cloak and walked himself out of...well, what was the room.

The downstairs of the house was sort of there, but not quite. There was furniture, but it wasn't the furniture his parents had. It was older, a mix of mid-century, art deco, and Victorian. His parents did have some pseudo-Victorian items, but everything in the house currently was obviously more dated and worn. None of it was familiar to Kaelen, so he figured he really was in the other plane, whether it was real or not.

What struck Kaelen as odd, honestly, were the photos and paintings. They were all from different decades, and of different couples and families - none of whom he knew or was related to. Their faces were mostly obscured by the worn nature of the painting, save for one - two women, with very distinct features from each other, posed for an old-fashioned photo that looked like it was from before women's suffrage.

Kaelen spent a while staring at that photo, for some reason. He couldn't take his eyes off them. One of them was blonde, or maybe redheaded, one of them was brunette. Their eyes were gentle, and there was a slight blur to the photo, as though they'd struggled sitting still. He even caught a glint of a smile creasing the brunette's pale eyes,.

Kaelen left the frame of the building and got his bearings. It did look like his neighborhood, but the buildings were farther apart than they were in real life. Certainly, not as far apart He couldn't see much through the snowstorm, but within his eyeline he could see the National Cathedral looming over this portion of D.C., but the sky obscured the nave.

That's when Kaelen heard them.

"Why the fuck are there wolves here," Kaelen muttered.

The barking of wolves was coming from...somewhere on the Maryland side of the neighborhood. It had started as one wolf, but he counted maybe four distinct barks which meant at least four distinct wolves. That was deeply disquieting.

Kaelen kept the blanket wrapped around him tightly and decided to walk away from Maryland. Despite the dilation of space that was occurring, he figured under normal circumstances that Friendship Heights was a ten minute walk. All he had to do was walk parallel to the cathedral until he got to a road, and civilization would be on that road - or, what was left of it. That neighborhood was dead these days.

The boy took a deep breath, then began his trek.

Despite the fact that the snow had seemingly not slowed its pace since he was last in this snow-filled landscape, the blanket of snow was not especially thick. He could easily get through it while it barely soaked through his socks. On occasion, a snowbank would be up to his knees, but he tried to avoid those areas as much as possible now that he wasn't fighting head trauma.

When Kaelen finally got to the edge of the neighborhood, he realized he was cold, but that he wasn't losing feeling in his feet. Curiously, he shed the makeshift cloak and took off his socks. His feet had not lost any of their color, and had no indication of frostbite. He held out his arm, and while the snowflakes were freezing against his skin, he could scape them off easily. The skin underneath the snow was not discolored.

Okay, a point for the dreamscape angle, he thought to himself. Mind over matter.

He folded the blanket up, then slung it over his shoulder before continuing on his journey.

Finally he hit Wisconsin Avenue. The buildings were elongated along the avenue, and curved like waves...or melted plastic. Kaelen realized it was the latter when he approached a building on the DC/Maryland border and saw that the stone itself had melted. It looked like poured concrete mixed with plastic, frozen over. Some store windows had melted as well, and where the glass met stone, the melted material was volcanic glass.

Kaelen tried to peek into the store windows, but it was impossible to see anything. The fact that he wasn't as affected by the cold as he had been previously didn't mean that flying white things made it easy to see.

Kaelen looked up at the building, which had once been offices with shops on the bottom. The glass windows were all broken, and he could see abandoned office equipment in the darkened rooms. The fact that there was office equipment in these buildings he'd only seen from outside meant that there had to have been other people here...

...right?

By the time the thought entered his mind, Kaelen heard something that was most assuredly not wolves. He looked across the street and saw one of the other buildings splitting open. It was more than just a crack, it was more than collapsing - the building itself was bending, contorting, ripping itself in half. A black oily substance bubbled out from the building's foundation, as black vines - or tentacles? - erupted from the crack. The vines reached wildly, writhing, and...screaming, maybe? Kaelen wasn't sure if he was imagining that.

And then, they just stopped.

The building was disfigured, and that was that.

Kaelen did not have the wherewithal to actually grapple with what that was. He stared at the image in front of him and tried to commit it to memory so that when he woke up (if he woke up) he could deal with it then. He took the growing sound of wolves closing the distance as his cue to get the hell out.

He began walking, then running, down the avenue to get away from the wolves. He realized distantly that he didn't trip as he ran, even though he wasn't actively looking at his feet or trying to evade the snow. He ran what felt like ten blocks, but was actually two.

He didn't know what caused him to run towards the abandoned shopping mall, but he realized he was pushing the doors next to what had been the Cheesecake Factory once upon a time.

He ventured a glance at the direction he'd just run from.

A tidal wave of snow was coming down the avenue, kicked up by something that sounded less wolflike and more human the closer it got.

Kaelen pulled open the frozen door of the mall, dove inside, and pushed it shut. He took a few seconds to catch his breath.

That's when he realized...

"...huh."

The mall was packed.

And warm.

The once-empty mall was packed with people, going in and out of shops and excitedly talking about things in overlapping, indiscernible voices. All of the shops' lights were on. All of the people seemed happy.

It wasn't the vast amount of people that surprised Kaelen. It was the fact that there were people at all.

Of course, looking at them longer, he realized they all had cloudy, misted-over eyes to varying degrees. While they all looked alive, some had irises and pupils that were milky white. Some had the sclera of their eyes turning a sickly yellow. Some didn't have eyes at all, instead had black voids - not sockets, voids. He wasn't sure if they were dead or not, but at this point anything was possible. He just wished she recognized any of them.

Kaelen found himself walking through the throngs of people, trying to get to the bottom floor. If he recalled correctly, there was a coffee shop down on the bottom floor, next to a fountain. The fountain would be turned off during December and replaced with a Christmas tree. He managed to push himself towards the end of a balcony that looked out over the underground floor.

That...wasn't a Christmas tree.

There was a real tree, growing from the fountain.

Kaelen had to push back a group of people (who were oddly polite about the situation) to get to the escalator. He sprinted down it, feeling the snow melt off his skin from exertion.

He ran towards the tree. He had to know.

He tripped over a root, and fell on the unblemished tile. He shouted in frustration and pain, realizing he'd split the skin on his knee open. However, he was more annoyed at the distraction of pain than the pain itself.

He looked up at the tree. It wasn't a pine, it looked more like a laurel, but that wasn't what stood out to him.

Hanging from its branches were coins.

As a child, Kaelen remembered throwing coins in this fountain, making wishes. He was young when the fountain was torn up, and replaced instead with a lackluster plant display. It marked the beginning of the end for this little corner of the world.

And here it was, manifest and twisted into something else, reaching towards the skylight.

Kaelen felt something slither around his ankle. He looked down and watched as the brown roots of the tree wrapped around his leg and began strangling it like a boa constrictor. He cried out in pain as the branches crawled up his leg, then his waist. Another crawled up his other leg. A last one curled around his wrist.

"Excuse me, sir, are you lost?"

Kaelen felt the cold again, this time in his blood.

He knew that voice.

He knew that voice.

When Kaelen turned to look, craning against the roots that were now encasing his chest, the mall was abandoned. No one was there. The shops were empty. The roof was gone. The snow was falling.

Kaelen felt his lips move, but the voice that came from him was barely a whisper.

"Lysander?"

The roots climbed into his mouth.

Kaelen awoke from the dream with an insane cough.

Instinctively, while coughing, he looked for his watch. It was still locked away in a plastic bag he refused to open. He reached for his phone, groggily trying to remember when he went to bed.

"It's...ten...forty..." he said between heaving breaths. Strange. He went to bed around ten. He sighed and took his comforter off to get up.

That's when he realized his sheets were stained red. His right knee was bleeding.