I've always had a very active imagination. My parents like to say I was telling stories since I learned to talk, and writing them as soon as I could hold a pencil. I honestly can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't imagining some kind of story.

Be it a single character just walking through some mysterious building, or an entire adventuring party traveling through dozens of fleshed-out lands that would make any Dungeons & Dragons player jealous. My mind just naturally makes these things without my having to do anything. I only write down the ones I think others would like, which is a relatively tiny fraction.

In a way, every memory I have has two layers to it: what I was actually doing, and what was going on in my head at the time. And they often have nothing to do with each other. On my first day of kindergarten, a little girl was discovering a portal to the world of faeries.

When I was the flower girl at my cousin's wedding, a vampire was running from a crazed priest. At the first party I went to in middle school, some pirates were preparing for their biggest heist yet. When I went to my aunt's funeral, a team of off-planet engineers was trying to fix up an old starship.

As a little kid, I didn't visually see these characters at all, but then they started to grow into my peripheral vision. For a while, I only saw them as flickering glimpses, like flipping the pages of a graphic novel. But lately, the stories have been even more vivid than they were when I was younger. It was a few weeks ago I started "hallucinating" more than ever before.

I could clearly see each character and the setting that surrounded them. I could hear their voices, instruments, weapons, or footsteps. They went away when I closed my eyes like they weren't just in my head but entities that existed outside of me. All except one.

There's one character that I still see when I shut my eyes. The one that's in every story I've ever imagined: the Villain. The Villain hasn't left in nearly two weeks. Always standing, looking far away but growing closer. And closer. Looking like the faerie queen, the crazed priest, the enemy captain, the ship hijacker, and all the others. Being the only threat to all my heroes, and always keeping one thing the same:

My heroes always lose in the end.

Now, I sit on my floor surrounded by books and electronics, failed attempts to keep my brain occupied. I haven't slept in so long, and I'm so tired. I feel a gripping around me like I'm tied down. I stare at the wall. I try to focus on my heroes, dead and dancing around me, looking more real than the world. Then my mind wanders farther, and I see the Villain, inches from my face.

"Thought your world could win, little hero?"