Fungal Halo

She loves you. She barely knows you, but she loves you, and you come to know her through the love she lavishes upon you. Her kiss is like corrosive acid on your mind. It eats into you a little more with each visit, but you are too small to push her away.

The signs are subtle at first, easily missed. A faint shimmer in the sky. A whisper on the breeze. A thought that tastes a bit off. This time I was lucky and caught them early, giving me time to prepare. Not much that can be done, but I could cancel plans and send people away.

To have stumbled into the favor of some oneiric power is to awake each morning gripped with impulses not entirely your own, mind stuffed with fresh memories from a night of visions more wild and vivid than ordinary dreaming or even waking life.

The thing in your skull stirs.

She smiles when she breaks you.

It hurts, of course, like nothing you ever felt in your life. How could it not?

Not just a pain that jolts through the nerves of your body, this is a shattering of awareness, a fragmenting of your selfhood.