The Mall of Stone
The dream began beneath cold fluorescent lights. Lalaport should have been crowded, alive with voices and footsteps, but in the dream it felt wrong. The corridors stretched farther than they should. The air was too still. Every shop stood open, yet there was no one inside.
Only us.
At first, I did not notice the statues. They stood scattered throughout the mall, silent stone angels with cracked wings and hollow eyes. Decorative pieces, I thought. Nothing more.
Then the elevator stopped working.
Its doors remained shut no matter how many times we pressed the button. The lights above flickered weakly, casting long shadows across the empty floor. That was when I noticed one of the angels. It had moved. Only a little. Only enough that I knew it had not been standing there before.
My stomach dropped.
We hurried away, pretending not to see it. When I looked again, another angel had appeared farther down the corridor. Closer. Watching. The realization spread through me like ice. They were moving whenever we weren't looking.
Soon there were dozens. Waiting. Following. We ran. Down endless hallways. Through empty stores. Into the car park beneath the mall.
The angels came after us without sound. No footsteps. No warning. One moment they stood far away, and the next they were impossibly near. We escaped into a car. The engine roared to life. For a moment, I thought we were safe.
Then the angels appeared in front of us. The impact shattered stone. Pieces of wings and faces exploded across the road. Yet when I looked behind us, the broken statues were standing again. Whole. Unharmed. As though they had never been touched. No matter what we did, they kept returning.
The car failed. We fled onto a motorcycle. The angels followed. The roads twisted back toward the mall again and again, as though the world itself refused to let us leave. Then the motorcycle ran out of fuel.
Silence.
The kind of silence that presses against your ears. We hid inside the building once more. The angels found us. Stone faces. Stone hands. Frozen in place whenever our eyes met theirs. But the instant we blinked, they moved. Closer. Closer. Closer.
At one point they surrounded us completely. I could feel their presence in every direction. Waiting for a single mistake. A single glance away. A single blink. My heart pounded so violently that I thought it would wake me.
Then, somehow, an idea came to me. When the angels found us again, we did not run. We stood perfectly still. We became statues ourselves.
The angel stopped.
Its empty eyes remained fixed on us. Seconds stretched into minutes. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. The entire mall seemed frozen in time.
Then, I woke up.
And for a brief moment, lying in the darkness of my room, I was afraid to blink.
—
Some nightmares scream.
Others simply wait and watch.
The silent ones are often the hardest to forget.
Roseheart 🌹 | 22 June 2026
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