"Yo…you were the monster?..." A shivering voice filled with contradicting emotions of wrath and fear who aimed a knife at me asked.
A woman I was very familiar with and with whom I have fallen in love multiple times.
But unlike before, I was different.
"Yes, I was." I accepted the crime, with my head high and a wide grin on my burned face
The dead flesh of the children adorned the cave walls, their faces twisted in agony and all of them looking at Meena, as if they were still alive, pleading for a release from this torment.
"You, you did this?" She asked, her voice filled with anger as if the scene of Jester touching the fog never actually happened.
"Yo…you were the monster?..." She was horrified at the truth. She never thought that the innocent young man who acted so kind turned out to be the monster responsible for all of this.
And now the same monster stood in front of her face. His body burned and his organs were exposed, finally showing the true form of the monster that he was hiding under his skin all along.
Because there was no way for a normal human to survive injuries as bad as those and still stand up straight looking at her.
"Ye.. a.. Waah." She can't hear or understand a word he said, but the mocking smile on his face along with his wide-open arms gave her the answer she wanted.
"Why… Why did you do this." Her hands were shaking in front of the monster. "Why us?" She begged for an answer, an understanding.
She wondered what it was that pushed a man like Jester to do all this.
But Jester remained the same, waiting for her to strike her knife, waiting for his death.
Meena understood that the monster had accepted his death, there was no way to fight for him. But recalling how the villagers went mad and started killing each other, she didn't drop her guard down.
She might not have even survived if she didn't find the hatch hidden in Jester's burned home.
"If you have no answer, then so be it." At this moment, Meena suddenly summoned all her strength and ran toward the body of Jester, aiming the knife straight at his heart.
Now there was no going back, the least she could do was avenge her family and village. And who knows, if she kills this monster fast enough, the mad villagers might recover their sanity back.
So with an intent to kill, her knife flew forward with Meena's whole body weight as leverage.
And Jester just kept looking at her, looking at her like she was a delicacy.
"DIEEEE!!" She cried as her knife easily entered Jester's body without much struggle, it was almost too easy.
But before Meena can reel in from the fact that she might have just killed someone, she felt a pain in her abdomen.
A pain that ripped straight into her flesh and then punctured her lung.
She tried to back off, she tried to see what and how she was stabbed. But the pain of it all caused her mind to go blank and as the body of Jester with a knife in his heart slumped over her body.
She heard in a very weak voice.
"Your dirty game is over." This time, the voice was clear and astute.
Before, the thing stuck in her lung was forced deeper into her body and started to twist slowly.
"I might be dead, but I will end this farce myself." These were the words Meena heard before she felt her heart being stabbed as well in a painful way.
Which ended her life.
*****
Little girl, a puppet of this dream and its creator.
It would have been hard to find the answer to all of this if not for the mist helping me.
The mist was born out of my death and had wished to claim me for a long time, but the loop that I have repeated all this while has bound my body to this place, letting me not die while letting the mist accumulate with time.
This mist was not dead, it was very much alive and aware of what was going on.
So in an attempt to end this farce, the mist gave me a chance.
It let me retain all the memories at once, letting me know the small inconsistencies and find the most suspicious of the bunch in the villagers.
Which led me to Meena.
Unknown to even herself, she was the master of this farce from the start. She was the master puppeteer that not only controlled me and the villagers, but she controlled herself as well.
So when I saw her again in a familiar place. I understood what I had to do.
In all the loops, one thing never changed. Meena always ends up being the only survivor.
Albeit of my limited knowledge, I and Grifter had tried many methods.
Grifter who was progressively getting smarter with each loop and retaining its memory. While I, who might have lost his memories, still made different decisions that shook this farce a bit. But none of it was groundbreaking and none of it strong enough to shake this farce.
This dream.
Yes, a dream.
In the notes, Lakyus spoke of this very thing.
He was the Prime Daemon of Nightmares, below the god of sleep. So his understanding of dreams was incomparable to any human in existence.
And in those notes, he mentions a great dream created out of tragedy in which the victims repeat their life again and again until they either let go of everything or the origin of this dream is broken.
The origin can be anything, from a simple vase to a building.
In simpler terms, one can even say that it's the heart of the dream.
And Meena was very much that.
Although unaware, she was the reason this giant dream existed. And I am a stranger that just took the place of the monster that was at the very core of this tragedy.
The Prime Daemon Lakyus, who was eternal, easily escaped the binds of this dream and left this place to reincarnate elsewhere.
Leaving his spot empty in this dream.
A spot that I unfortunately took.
Yes, you heard it right.
I am no Lakyus.
I am no one.
I was just a character that played the role of Lakyus.
Just like those rats.
Now that I think about it, humans are no better than rats.
And a rat is no worse than a human.
If not for this dream ignoring the existence of the little rat, as there was not role for it to play and then this same rat choosing to help me, I might still be stuck in this loop.
A loop that I ended when I stabbed the bone of my left hand into the stomach of Meena.
She was the woman I loved, but not so as well.
This was a dream constructed by her imagination and the souls of the departed as the foundation.
The love I felt for her was her imagination. This is how she thought Lakyus felt about her.
Probably why when this tragedy originally happened, Lakyus let himself die without much struggle.
He might have truly loved her.
But there was no love for her in my heart.
Love is a weakness, it's poison.
It makes you do stupid things and hurts you.
So I have long abandoned that love.
"Your dirty game is over."
My lips moved on their own as if my jaw muscles have regenerated along with my tongue. It was as if a burst of vitality had entered my body out of nowhere.
And the deeper I stabbed Meena, the more energetic my body felt.
It was as if a long-lost sensation was coming back.
And it was not all, even the reality started to shake.
"I might be dead, but I will end this farce myself." A clear and cut voice, with a lot more confidence, left my lips as I pushed the body of Meena to the floor with my left hand's bone still sticking into her sides.
"Why?..." Meena asked, her eyes filled with tears, still unaware of what was happening.
"You are no child Meena, stop this tantrum and go to sleep."
Like coaxing a child, I stabbed my bone deeper into her heart, causing her to puke blood from her mouth.
No, it would be better to say that she was choking on her own blood.
It bubbled up and down, as it splattered on my face.
But I didn't stop.
I can't stop until she is dead. I can't let her restart the loop once again.
Not when I was so close to success.
And to make sure that she is dead and accelerate the process, I put my working hand on her neck, and using my whole body weight, I tried to crush her neck.
Which caused her whole body to start struggling.
Yes, yes.
This is what I have been waiting for.
A success.
The dream in which I have been stuck in for who knows how long, has started to shake as well.
I can see glimpses of reality that have been taken away from me as the desperation for life in Meena increases.
Even the twisted faces of children on the totems were smiling with relief as if this was the peace all of them were wishing for.
A peace that I will drag on my own.
"Now sleep Meena, and let others sleep as well."
And with a crack of her neck, the dream broke apart like a mirror all around.
The totems, the bookshelf, and even the whole cave itself started to rot as if time was moving forward and years of beating from the water had caused the small hole that existed in the front to widen up.
This is also the time when I saw what happened after Meena survived. As the time moved on, I noticed a figure slumped over the table, a figure with female clothes with rotten books all around it.
It would seem that after everyone died, Meena never went out to ask for help. She just stayed there after cleaning things up and started to read the books that she can't understand.
No, it would be better to say that she memorized them without knowing what they were, all she knew was that they were important. And as she has already gone mad with grief, she didn't even notice it when her body got weak under malnutrition, and then she died.