I approach within arms reach of the pergola arch when something whips around the opening in front of me, something grey, long and roughly rectangular catches me in the chest, blurred into a grayscale mass from the pace it moved.

I crumpled to the floor, wheezing and struggling to breathe. Whatever it was, it had managed to wind me from the sheer force of the impact severely. Somehow it failed to actually wound me, a rather unexpected but welcome surprise nonetheless.

My vision was cloudy; I couldn’t make anything out while a horrifically loud high pitched ringing pierced my ears. I kicked my feet wildly against the pavement, trying to push myself away from whatever was around the archway blindly.

Being so close to the ground caused the sickly fog around the grass to blur my sight even further; I could feel it clinging to my face like a weak adhesive weighing me down and slowing my reactions.

I managed to scramble a few feet back from the archway; my vision began to clear up right as something pale reached around the arch, a hand perhaps?

I shook my head, and I had now writhed back far enough that I was no longer on the slab path; my vision was still blurred either by the fog or by some other unknown means. I was barely able to confirm that the object was indeed a hand.

And then I saw it...

Gliding around the archway with an eerie silence was the outline of an all too familiar face, only this time I didn’t have the blessing of it being both a reasonably safe distance away from me and appearing during a fleeting encounter. To my dismay, the hazy blurring effect appeared to gather in such a fashion that her face remained in perfect focus whilst the rest of the world was nought more than malformed blobs of colour.

Her face remained virtually the same as when I saw her, only now the details were a touch sharper. Her blue irises spun around her pupil like a maelstrom; the outer edges appeared like dark ultramarine, shifting to a bright ice blue around her pupils. I noticed that she had not one but two pairs of eyes; the second pair was set just above and to the sides of the first pair so that the pupil of the second pair would be a few inches above the lacrimal glands of the first. They bore twisting blue eyes just like the first pair and appeared to work in unison with them.

Her “skin” was definitely made from some rocky substance; there was no sign that something like her should even be capable of locomotion, let alone complex movements, such as striking something around a corner. The stone appeared to be diorite, judging from the splotchy nature of the white and black pigments in the material, which was exceptionally well polished; I could faintly make out my terrified face in its reflective surface.

Both of her cheeks were completely gone giving me a clear view of her jaws, wickedly sharp teeth which looked at a glance to be locked in place. Still, something told me that she could move them; the way her face had been carved implied that this was an intentional design rather than the effects of wear and tear on the statue. Her lips were still there, though the corners of her mouth were gone due to the aforementioned missing cheeks.

Her elf-like ears were remarkably long, they protruded around an inch from her head, but their helices must have stretched a good six inches in length. Unlike the rest of her stone-like construction, her ears appeared to behave as one would expect and seemed flesh-like in texture, a rather strange detail considering they to were seemingly fashioned from diorite.

I could see part of her neck and left shoulder while it leaned around the corner, staring at me with its abyssal eyes. Its neck was the same as her face, splotched diorite like skin polished akin to a mirror, though there were a few scratches and grooves around her neck and shoulder as if somebody tried to fight her at some point.

The thing stayed perfectly statuesque and still, watching me with its horrific eyes beaming into my very soul. It felt like the very essence of my life was being sucked out of my body, only to be devoured by her swirling eyes. Something about them kept drawing my gaze to connect with and explore their oceanic visage, an urge I would have to actively fight while my eyes were being subconsciously drawn to look...

She, it, whatever they were, was just waiting, watching. I couldn’t tell what was more disturbing, the sheer lack of noise, the unjustified desire to look into her eyes or the fact that she was standing bolt steady without a single shred of evidence that she was capable of moving in the first place.

I knew I couldn’t stay where I was; I was far too close to this thing for comfort, and being prone on the grassy ground was certainly not a good idea.

While clambering back to my feet, I break eye contact with the statue thing for a matter of seconds; in my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of its head cocking to the side while lowering her jaw to flash her vicious teeth; each one shaped like daggers, her canines were significantly larger still, they must have been foldable like snakes considering their length. I hear a low guttural, growling hiss erupt from her maw, and I could feel my skin vibrate from the bass alone.

By the time I had looked back at her, a mere second since I had broken direct sight, she had managed to move a considerable distance around the corner. While she was originally behind the arch, she had managed to shift around the corner almost entirely; only her right foot was still behind obscured. The clarity of her figure contrasted unusually with the abstract shades of the incoherent background.

The rest of her figure was carved with the same level of detail as her face, smoothed to a perfectly reflective surface with no blemishes or imperfections to be found. Her body was covered entirely with a full suit of armour; the layout of the plates and chain sheets suggested that the suit was possibly stylized after gothic plate-mail. Her legs and arms were concealed by a long flowing amber robe that she wore beneath her armour. However, rather than carved stone, her robes were constructed from some kind of fabric. The threads were so tightly woven that they appeared to be a single continuously flowing mass of material rather than a woven fabric sheet.

I could feel my body slowly turning limp, my mind failing to resist the urge to look at the beast while she approached with malicious intent at the edges of my vision; my eyes drifted into and out of focus yet further, granting it time to act.

I stood there, helpless while I saw the figure clamber out from under the archway; the vague and splotchy image stood tall, easily around nine or ten feet in height, looming over me, looking down with a dismissive gaze.

I could see the vagueness of her arm reaching out for me; I felt her hand clamping down on my shoulder. Her hand was glacial and frozen but unmistakable. The cold, Stoney hand embraced my shoulder while my vision continued to fade away, another low hiss sounds out.

Everything went black as charcoal, not a single light or texture other than a disgustingly cold feeling across every inch of my body.

I woke up a few moments later; even though the heating was on and my window was shut, I found myself shivering from a non-existent chill in the air. My head felt as if somebody had taken a splitting maul to it, and a violent throbbing sensation was drawn across the top of my skull that ached and tensed with every rogue sound.

To my dismay, it also appeared that I was suffering from some rather serious eye strain; I could barely look at a computer monitor for any longer than a few minutes at a time before it felt like my eyes were being torn free of their sockets.

Other than spending most of the day either in bed or reading books, as fleetingly as I could read them given the eye strain, I spent the entire day inside my flat recovering from that shockingly detailed nightmare, reflecting on the prior night's events. Since it was Friday again, I had to email in to inform the tutors that I wasn’t going to be attending a class today, citing the sudden “unexplained” bout of illness, omitting the actual details, of course.