I’m just playing with having no visuals or dialogue, so this one doesn’t really have a plot.
In the inky blackness of Between I feel hands all over me. They paw at my face, clutch my hips, tug my legs. Every hand belongs to a different spirit, yearning to be released into our reality. I can sense hordes of them, all slipping and oozing through the other spirit bodies in order to reach me.
It has been years since I last stepped into Between, but the overwhelming sensations have haunted me since the very first time. The darkness makes it feel claustrophobic, even though the space itself is huge, if not infinite. Those unable to travel think of it as being suspended in nothingness, but that isn’t true. There is gravity there, there are edges and dips and firm shapes that you can only feel your way around. More than once I’ve fallen off a path, crashing down to a new area of darkness.
It is only the spirits that lack solidity. Their bodies stretch and shrink at will, and although their hands at first have a gel-like texture, they firm them up once they have made contact with me me. Some beings can turn their fingertips into thin claws and hook into my skin, others can remould their palms to have suction cups and cling onto me with those. No matter how strong I feel when I venture there, I return scarred and exhausted.
Between is mostly silent. Sometimes I hear a whooshing sound in the distance, somewhere up above me. I think it may occur when another person with a physical form arrives or leaves, but there are so few of our kind that I cannot be sure. On rare occasions the spirits speak. Every voice is a growl so low my ears can barely hear it and I can never make out the words. The sounds somehow hurt my throat, as if I have been the one trying to make them. My own vocal chords do not work here. When I am in pain I cannot scream to release some tension, I can only open and close my mouth like a helpless fish.
Today I am looking for a particular type of spirit. Something vicious, but tameable. Every hand that touches me transmits some sense of who they are. One yanks at my hair - they are a thing of aesthetics, who would radiate beauty if pulled into reality, and mould anything they touch into a work of art. A hand with impossibly long fingers has curled itself around my thigh - they are a thing of progress at all costs. In reality they would become a visionary, guiding humanity to a new future if given the power, but they would not care about those they crushed under their heel.
Then I feel a hand that pours itself over the back of my neck like ice water. This is the one. This is a thing of violence, one that could rend a person limb from limb with just a flick of the wrist, and guzzle up the remains.
I do not want to do this. By bringing them into reality I am only replacing my human captors with an inhuman one. The alternative is death, and I feel I am a coward for not choosing it.
I pour a tiny bit of my spirit into the ice cold hand. The other hands begin to fall away, unable to grasp my body as it shifts out of the Between and back into the world I know all too well. I have no control over what happens next.