Chapter 1: Half-Forgotten Dream
This is how it starts: you wake up with a feeling of a half-forgotten dream slipping away into oblivion, and no matter how hard you try, you can't remember what it was about. This is your mind breaking apart.
The Disease is cunning. The first thing it destroys is your ability to comprehend the damage it does. Your higher mental functions are deteriorating, you lose the ability to construct complex logic connections. This is when they usually catch it; but then sometimes they don't.
The body starts to fall apart next. At first, it's just small things: your hands are shaking, you're having trouble focusing your sight. Sometimes you understand that something is wrong, sometimes you don't. You might know the symptoms and you might feel them, but your brain had lost the capacity to connect two dots.
That's when you start to forget. The name of that actor is at the tip of your tongue, but it just won't come. You forget your mother's smell, your father's face. It's worse than that, though. You don't just forget; you forget that you knew these things at all. There's not even an empty space in your memory where something should have been, it's all just erased.
At this point, you're in free fall. Your brain is going haywire, sending false signals to your compromised body. Your senses are lying to you. You can break your arm and not feel a thing. Other times, you're safe at your home, but you are burning, drowning, you're being skinned alive. The danger is false, but the pain is real, and horrible.
You see things. You hear voices. The reality is breaking apart, but do you know it? Do you even remember what reality is? Do you remember who you are? When you look in the mirror, do you see a stranger? What does he do? What does he say?
In the end, your mind collapses. Your tortured brain is flooded with hormones it can not process, and it fries. If you're lucky, you die. If you're lucky, they put you down. But if they don't, if you slip through the cracks, you become a wraith: a broken, mad thing in the grasp of a murderous frenzy. Eventually it kills you, but not before you've killed someone else.
This is how it ends.
Imagine if waking up from a nightmare is more terrifying than the nightmare itself. Imagine painfully overanalyzing your every mistake, your every word. Imagine being reviled. Imagine being feared, imagine being afraid.
Imagine being us.
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