Every dream exists on the precipice of nightmare. Nowhere else but in the subconscious is the divide between comfort and horror so narrow, and so fragile. It is almost as if a dream is just waiting to be toppled, its hopes dashed, its promises broken.
Nyssa sometimes dreamed of Traken, but the dream always tipped over into nightmare.
And the nightmare always ended the same way: she would be hurrying through the gardens and cloisters, calling for her parents, warning them of the disaster she knew was coming. But no one could hear her.
Worst of all, she couldn't even find her parents.
In her dreams, her mother was still there, a half-remembered face made clear by the imagination. But in the nightmare, Nyssa couldn't find her. She ran and ran, and searched every secret garden and grove, all the while knowing that time was running out.
Her father had disappeared too. In his study sat a man with a dark beard and even darker eyes. He would laugh at her when she arrived, breathless and soundless, at the very moment Traken vanished from the heavens.
And she saw that as if from a distance, the whole planet fading away into the awful blackness of space as if it had never existed.
Nyssa woke up, breathing raggedly, the bed sheets tight around her sweating body. She was shivering, although it wasn't cold. It was dark, but she had her eyes shut anyway. There was something nagging at her memory, something she had read in one of the books in the TARDIS library. Nyssa usually stuck to the extensive science journals and textbooks, but she had come across this slender, dusty volume of Earth poetry wedged between Wisden's Almanack and A Brief History of Time only a few days ago. It said Keats on the spine, and it had fallen open on a page where two lines had been circled in green ink:
The thought,
The deadly thought of solitude.
For some reason it had stuck in her mind, and now she realised why. When Traken was erased from the cosmos, it had left her the sole remaining person from Traken in existence.
She had felt so very alone.
She felt alone now, sitting on her bed in the dark, listening to the hum of the TARDIS around her. With nothing else to distract her, she was able to concentrate on that noise: the soft reverberation of distant, mysterious engines powering the vessel through the space-time vortex. If she listened carefully, she could imagine that the engines were made quiet only by distance, that the almost subliminal hum was just the final echo of massive, churning machinery. Somewhere deep in the TARDIS, its ancient dynamos thundered with terrific, unending exertion. Nyssa found the image quite disturbing.
Only then did she realise that normally, on her waking, the TARDIS would automatically activate the lights in her room. Softly at first, gradually increasing the lambency as she threw off sleep. But now it was pitch black. She couldn't see a thing. And yet she had the feeling, growing in intensity, that she was not alone.
'Is there anybody there?' she heard herself asking plaintively.
There was no reply. Nyssa pulled her knees up and wrapped the sheets around her more tightly. She peered into the gloom, hoping that perhaps her eyes would soon grow a little more used to the dark and she might be able to see something. Her ears strained to pick up the slightest sound, but all she could hear was her own heartbeat and the deep, alien breath of the TARDIS.
'Wh-where are you?' she asked the darkness. There was no reply. Nyssa immediately decided that she had imagined a half-formed phantom left over from her dream of Traken. The perspiration was cold on the exposed skin of her back now, and she felt a droplet trickle down her spine like an icy caress.
Why wouldn't the lights come on? Perhaps the TARDIS had malfunctioned; it wouldn't be the first time.
She realised that her eyes were indeed growing more accustomed to the blackness, now. She could just make out the bedclothes in front of her as a dull grey rectangle in the gloom. Staring, Nyssa picked out the edge of the bed itself, although beyond it there was nothing but the dark. It was exactly the same darkness that Traken had left in its place. Nyssa experienced a nauseating sense of peering into an abyss; of her bed floating like a miniature island in an ocean of night.
And then she saw it.
At first it was just smudge of black against the greyness that marked the end of her bed. Then it inserted itself like a dark finger into the sheet, plucking at the material as it was dragged along the edge of the mattress.
Nyssa stopped breathing. But she could hear a low, rasping susurration in the air around her. There was something in her room with her. Something that breathed.
Rigid with fear, she watched the finger of blackness spread out into something the size of a hand. Then it started up the bed towards her, expanding like a dark stain across the bedclothes.
She cringed as the darkness approached, convinced it would feel cold and wet to the touch. And as the blemish crept up towards her, so the shadows gathered around her, above her, behind her.
Soon she would be submerged in the blackness.
She opened her mouth to cry out, to call for the Doctor and Tegan. But at the last moment she halted, frozen by the sudden, sickening fear that her voice would be as silent as it was in her Traken nightmare.
The darkness rose up and engulfed her like a shroud. The loss of vision was so absolute that, for a long moment, Nyssa thought that her eyes had been taken from her.
