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The woman collapsed to her knees, the dirt and rusty-colored blood tainting her simple white gown and her beautiful appearance. Her dark gold hair frayed heavenly around her heart shaped face, the only pure thing on her being. Tears streaming down her alabaster cheeks mixed the dirt and the blood to pool on the underside of her chin before dropping onto the silk fabrics she wore. Her frail hands gripped the dress that folded over to white ground, knuckles turning white from the skin being strained so much. Bleary sapphire eyes stared at a towering statue a few meters ahead, letting out more salt water to clean the blood and grim from her face.

The statue stood many times higher than the fragile woman’s full height, a figure of a finely robed angel standing on the top of a working hourglass. The stature looked like it was not made of stone though it stood frozen still, save for the angel’s clock staff’s ticking and the hourglass sand draining to the lower half. A blank stony face seemed to stare back at the woman without any spark of emotion, the eye sockets left hollow to see all truth and all lies.

A strangled scream tore its way out of the stunning woman’s throat, making anyone who hears it cringe. “Please! All I ask is for more time! Please! Even if it’s only a second!”

The still angel only remained silent as the pleas echoed out into the white void around, the gigantic gates some ways behind the statue standing forebodingly. One lavishly decorated entrance was of gold and white wrought-iron, white bars and golden ivy woven between them. The other was dark and ominous with it twisting barred doors and stone gargoyle guardians. But the woman paid no mind to the gates that both beckoned for her to come and open, her watery eyes were set on the angel that stayed silent to her cries.

“Please! I need more time! Please, please, please, allow me more time!” She screeched in her hoarse voice, making it sound as if she had been begging for hours and not minutes. “I’m begging you!”

Sobs racked her small ribcage, choking her lungs and heart like the sand from the hourglass was stuffed down her throat. And God knows she would willingly do just that for her request to be fulfilled. But let there be no God is if her objective wasn’t achieved. Desperate from the Solemn Angel’s apathetic silence, another blood-curdling scream ripped through the woman’s scratchy throat. She didn’t have eternity to wait and not even get a second more of time! She needed more sands in her hourglass!

The blinding white void around her shifted, like worms were crawling through a thin layer of the nothingness. Transparent vines of watery black ink split through the air near the woman, moving with the eerie locomotion snakes use to move. The blonde beauty jerked her head in shock of the vines’ appearance before staring up at the angel with wide, confused eyes. Her fear only grew at the sudden sound of a child’s soft humming filling the still air, soon becoming the sound of multiple children singing disturbing notes.

“What’s going on?! I’ve asked for time, not shadows!” The look in the woman’s eyes turned from sorrowful to fierce, giving her fragile appearance some strength.

The angel’s hollow eyes still showed no emotion while watching the inky snakes writhe in the air, some starting to coil around the woman. The stony ears hearing the echo of the woman’s shrill screaming and cursing. The gates shook and groaned with their metal and stone writhing against their hinges. Even they seemed to sense her agony and fury.

Time.

That was all the woman asked for.

But would she get it? Just one little second?

I don’t know. That’s where I woke up, jolting to sit upright and breathing so heavy I thought a lung collapsed. The panic my mind was running around in wouldn’t allow me to be able to tell if the crimson I saw on my night shirt and blankets were real or not. If the blood I saw dripping from the ceiling above my bed was reality or part of some separate dream. The room was freezing, even more so with the thin sheen of sweat the nightmare produced. And that’s when I started crying, wanting so desperately to know if the Solemn Angel granted the blonde beauty’s wish for time. I wished for the same thing for some odd reason; my screams echoed off the walls of my room, twinning itself with the wail of the woman’s.