Alcmene knew she was asleep before her eyes opened. She felt the cold grip wrapping her shin, and felt the eyes burrowing into her before she saw them.
She was cold. So cold. Her hands moved about herself to find the pouch, or the robes, and came up with nothing. Her eyes opened to a cavern. Blue steaming down from above in a stream, water dropping ceaselessly into a lake at its core. The whole place looked like the innards of an eye, with branches like tendrils looping through the large opening hole above her. She shifted to sit up, and the grip on her ankle disappeared with the sound of a fast scuffle.
She still felt the eyes, and the water seemed to resonate its sound a second too late then when it should. The walls of the cavern were lined with runes and drawings, carved into every part of it in depictions of people praying, worshiping, applauding. Although Alcmene had always assumed the last two were the same thing- it was weird seeing them here, split up as if they were different.
Once she stood, her mind partially realised, then immediately ignored, the fact that she felt taller. Her hands and feet aged like when she was older. Alcmene stepped into the light by the lake in the cavern, watching as the soil was ebbed and flowed in and out of place where water met land, her hand going into it before she'd even registered that she was close to it. The world felt fuzzy, quiet. The child tried to stand, only to realise that the water had followed her hand, surrounding it like the tension just refused to break. She whipped it around with a vague panic, and watched it as it moved like a gelatinous blob refusing to let her go.
It crawled up her arm in small, soft, tiny hands and fingers of water. Every now and again, Alcmene saw one of the tiny hands point towards an island in the lake, bathed in the light and a luscious bright green. Her eyes followed one of these hand gestures, only to see a coffin laying open in the grass, beneath the shade of a weeping willow tree. From here, she couldn't make out who was lying in it. All she saw was a blurred image of dark, midnight blue draped languishly over one side, as if they'd been placed in and then moved haphazardly. Alcmene looked back at the liquid grabbing her hand, only to see it dripping off.
Maybe it only wanted to get her attention.
As she wandered the outer side of the lake, watching the ripples follow her with life just too low for her to see, she noticed there wasn't a way to get to the island.
Her feet fell through the grounds underwater if she tried to cross it, the surface tension forcing her under until she blinked awake back where she was.
The body was still there.
Unmoving against the gold lining of the coffin its corpse spilled out from. Alcmene could barely make out chestnut skin, and hazel-brown hair curling from its head.
Then, once she wandered just a little too close to the edge once more, she found herself waking up in someone else's bed. Her body looked the same from what she could see. Still taller than it should be, like she was older again. A girl, of equal approximate age, was sat reading in a second bed on the other end of the room. Her hair was dark, and her skin a warm brown, and her hands a slender kind of perfect that one could only garner from a life of privilege. She looked how Alcmene wanted to look. It didn't take long to figure out that Alcmene wasn't at the helm here. No. Someone else was in this body with her- feeling and thinking and doing. Speech heard muffled, like she had dirt crammed into her ears.
"A—mene!" someone yelled from just beyond the door. It sounded like mama had, Alcmene realised. She assumed she'd said her name, because the body responded by following the almost identical girl out of the bedroom and into a small, cottage-esk kitchen. A woman who looked suspiciously like mama was cooking over a stove. She looked up with a kind smile- though Alcmene couldn't see her full face from where her body had stood itself.
She hadn't realised the woman was talking until she tuned in to the end-
"– don't let A— touch the–"
Alcmene blinked, and was back in the cavern.
She didn't know what to say. Didn't know what that was. She felt a lump in her throat that didn't belong to her. Felt a tremble in her hands that wasn't her own. Suddenly the cavern felt like loss. The Erosion of the lake expanded, taking up most of the hole, save for the small section she was stood upon. She'd never been scared of the waters before. But suddenly the heart that wasn't hers was beating out of her chest, breaking her ribs with every pulse, shortening her breaths into pants as the knees that weren't hers buckled under her weight; hands that felt unknown ran into her hair and pulled, pulled, pulled. Pulled until it came off in those unknown fingers and then pulled more. Until her scalp bled onto her fingers and her voice ran hoarse, and kept pulling even then. She didn't know what words she was yelling- none of it was making sense, none of it was what she was thinking. She was forced into a mind that wasn't hers as she watched it tear itself apart. It kept mumbling and screaming the same name, "Ismene! Ismene!"
Followed by a long, drawled out "I'm so sorry!" as the red coated her vision.
Alcmene was confused, and scared, and curled herself into a ball in her mind to try and escape- covered her ears with her hands and her biting her tongue closed to try and get it all to just stop.
She squeezed her eyes shut until she saw fireflies flutter into vision, blinking aimlessly and randomly.
Alcmene woke up screaming, clawing at her neck, yelling out a name she didn't know nor recall ever hearing from any voice but her own.
'Til-'