phantoms

Lyrics

[narrator] In this deeper sanctuary, he had never left her. He hadn't made the noble mistake. For what felt like months, he lived out the ultimate fantasy, meticulously rebuilding the glorious, romanticized paradise of Evermore. They danced without phantoms. They spoke without barriers. He convinced himself that this illusion was his true reality, a place where his heart wasn't a hole-ridden cup. But a dream cannot sustain its own weight forever. They were sitting by a tranquil, glass-like lake when the sky began to flicker like a dying television screen. He reached out to touch Lorna’s cheek, but her skin fractured beneath his fingertips, turning cold and scalding him like dry ice. The soft contours of her face glitched, stretching and distorting until the warm hazel of her eyes burned into that predatory, cold amber. The illusion shattered. The emerald grass turned to ash, and the Evil Queen leaned in close, her breath smelling of ozone. "Did you really think you deserved a happy ending?" she hissed. Her laughter was the sound of a car crash, and it violently threw him back up through the floorboards, slamming him face-first onto the cold, rain-slicked hardwood of his Oakhaven apartment. The phantom of Lorna now evaporated into black smoke. The queen’s  final, cruel question echoing in the chambers of his mind:  "Did you really think you deserved a happy ending?"