Jocelyne didn't know what else think, except that the hall she had just entered was extremely beautiful.

It was a huge room, made of gold and white marble, with beautiful chandeliers encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. All the people inside were dressed in sumptuous and magnificent clothes. She felt like she had just entered a fairy tale palace.

The only strange thing was that all the people inside the hall were masked. None of them had their faces uncovered. They were beautiful masks, of course, but it almost seemed that people wanted to hide their true identities. The women all wore the mask of a doll, some resembling porcelain dolls, some rags, some plastic, but all beautiful beyond measure. Men, on the contrary, had a mask that vaguely resembled an animal, while some even had one that even resembled a demon. Those with the demon mask, in particular, were the most beautiful of all and dressed in the most beautiful clothes.

The only exceptions were her and her parents. Her mother wore a fox mask, while her father wore a falcon. She, on the other hand, had no mask. She didn't know why. Maybe she just forgot to take it when they left the house. The rest of the people didn't seem to notice, but she felt… naked without a mask. Even vulnerable.

However, that didn't stop her from enjoying the evening. As the orchestra began to play, the combined music of violins, guitars, drums and oboes seemed to ignite her desire to dance. And not just her: all the other people in the room started dancing, in perfect harmony with the music.

A kind gentleman came up to her and held out her hand. Jocelyne didn't hesitate and grabbed her, letting herself be guided carefree by the music. However, suddenly the gentleman looked… annoyed, as if he didn't appreciate the way she danced. He didn't send her away, of course; after all he was well educated. But Jocelyne could clearly feel from her grip that she was uncomfortable. When the music ended, the man quickly vanished and went to another woman, with whom he seemed much more satisfied. Jocelyne was a little disappointed, but she could understand why the man preferred the other woman: she was not guided by the music, but by him, following him in every step of her and harmonizing with her way of dancing.

When the second song had begun, another gentleman came to invite Jocelyne to dance. Again, she let the music guide her, but she also tried to match the movements of her accompanist; even so, however, it was not enough. Every time Jocelyne moved a foot of her head, letting herself be carried away by the music and her desire to dance, the man got annoyed. Eventually, he too left her for another woman.

Jocelyne was certainly not discouraged. She danced with dozens, maybe even hundreds of men that night. Yet, none of them seemed to appreciate her. And not just the men she danced with: all the people in the room had started looking at her, continually turning their heads towards her as they danced. It was as if she were a cog out of place, unable to follow the right path. Jocelyne didn't understand; she just wanted to have fun! What harm was there in letting oneself be guided by the music, and not by one's companion? She initially tried to ignore her stares, but soon she started to feel pressured.

And then, she appeared.

Jocelyne didn't know where she had appeared from; she didn't remember seeing her walk in the door, or her walking toward the center of the ballroom. As soon as she made her appearance, that woman immediately attracted everyone's attention. She was perfect in every feature of her, beautiful and with the carrying air of a queen. She wore a dress so dazzling it looked like it was made of sunbeams, and her doll-like mask was made of such perfect porcelain that it reflected the light from the chandeliers.

Jocelyne was dazzled by the beauty of that woman. She was so perfect, so unfathomable, goddess-like. Instinctively she withdrew, wanting to leave the ballroom all to her. The other people in the room did the same too. The woman stood motionless, her right hand raised, waiting for an escort to pick her up and dance with her. The men looked at each other fearfully; who could ever have taken that hand of hers? Who could ever measure up to such beauty?

And then, someone stepped forward. He was a man, the most beautiful Jocelyne had ever seen, even if his face was hidden by a hideous demon mask. His elegant dress was silver and seemed to reflect the rays of light coming from the woman, as if she were the sun and he was the moon. The man walked towards her, whereupon he grabbed her hand and the two began to dance.

It was a magnificent dance, such as no one had ever seen. The man guided the woman perfectly, and the woman responded by blending her movements perfectly with her movements. The music intensified, became faster and more chaotic, as if the orchestra were testing the two dancers, but not for an instant did they lose their perfection. Finally, the music stopped and they locked into a perfect casquet.

The rest of the people in the room erupted into a barrage of applause, and even Jocelyne couldn't help herself as she stared in awe at the two dancers. The man pulled away from the woman and then mimed a kiss with her hands. The woman reciprocated by signing that she had accepted that kiss.

Jocelyne felt a little envy. She would have liked to have been like this too, so perfect, so acclaimed. Maybe that woman could help her understand what was wrong with her in her dance. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that the man had gone towards the other guests to talk about something, while the woman was leaving the room through a huge golden door studded with a thousand gems. Even though he knew he was wrong, he sneaked up behind her and followed her through the door.

She found herself in a bedroom. Gorgeous, with a four-poster bed of gorgeous red silk, and hundreds and hundreds of dolls scattered across the floor. How strange, she felt like they looked the same as her… but at the time she didn't care. She only had eyes for the person who was sitting on that bed, who was taking off her mask.

"Hey…hello" he greeted her. "Sorry, I know I shouldn't have gone in without permission..."

"You don't need permission to enter your room"

The woman's voice was gentle and melodious, but Jocelyne felt a strange sensation as soon as she heard it. It was as if her angelic tone contained an infinite sadness. "Um... I don't think I understand..." she whispered, but receiving no further answer, she decided to ask her her question: "Well, I wanted to know how you dance so well. I'd like to dance like you, but I am. .. I don't know what the problem really is. Maybe I'm clumsy, or out of harmony with the music..."

"No," the woman replied. "You are simply autonomous"

Jocelyne froze. "You are welcome?"

"You follow the music. That's not your job. Your job is to dance as your accompanist decides you dance"

"But... why? Isn't it better if we both dance the way we want, and complement each other..."

"It's not what other people expect" Jocelyne felt her blood freeze; the woman's voice had suddenly become more sibilant, more menacing. "You don't have to have autonomy. You don't have to think for yourself. You have to do as your companion tells you to do. He's your master, and you are his game" and having said this, he took off his mask.

Jocelyne couldn't suppress a cry of horror. The woman's face was beautiful, but deep scars marred her perfection. The blush on her cheeks bore the inevitable slap marks, and her bruises were evidence of countless punches. But the woman didn't stop at taking off her mask; she stood up and shed her sunbeam-studded robe, losing all her majesty in an instant, revealing a body scarred by countless wounds.

Jocelyne couldn't stop staring at the woman's battered body. She really wanted to leave, she wanted to at least look away, but she couldn't. It was as if her body froze, she wasn't even able to close her lids.

There was no part of the woman's body that was still intact, apart from her face. Scratches and cuts completely covered his arms, legs and torso, some of them clearly infected. Everywhere there were bruises left by slaps and punches, and even on her stomach one could be seen so large that it was evident that it could only have been left by a kick. Her wrists and ankles were almost a single graze, a clear sign of constriction. Her breasts, once beautiful and round, were now full of clear bite marks. At the base of her thighs were scratches so large they looked like claw marks, as if something had imprinted all of her strength to open them. On her back were dozens of deep wounds that looked as if they had been left with a whip.

Jocelyne was terrified. She couldn't figure out which people she could commit such barbarism. The woman only looked at her compassionately.

"What... What is this?" the little girl whispered.

The woman shook her head. "This is you. One day. It's our destiny, which we can't escape"

Jocelyne flinched slightly. "No..."

"It's no use running away, Jocelyne. None of us can. So..." and suddenly the woman's face wrinkled into a grimace. "...stop fighting and accept it!"

The woman's wounds exploded and golden chains emerged from them as if they were worms coming out of the earth. The woman assumed unnatural positions and her blood flowed from her wounds making them unrecognizable, but despite this she didn't show the slightest sign of pain, on the contrary, a crazy laugh began to emerge from her throat rising more and more in intensity.

Jocelyne tried to escape, but her chains slithered towards her as if they were snakes and wrapped around her legs causing her to fall. The little girl tried to drag herself away, but she realized that her hands were different…they were smaller, less plump, squared off, and the sleeves of her dress were no longer blue, but white and decorated with decorations. ..

A mirror appeared in front of her, completely out of nowhere, finally allowing her to see her reflection. Jocelyne's lips trembled. She now she no longer had her skin, replaced by a thick layer of porcelain, and a white wedding dress covered her from head to toe. As the golden chains continued to wrap around her and the woman's demonic laughter grew louder and louder, Jocelyne could see in her mirror's reflection that a shadow had appeared behind her; a tall, massive, wardrobe-like shadow with eyes red as blood. Jocelyne recognized him: he was the man who had danced with the beautiful woman, but now he seemed to have lost his beauty, and suddenly she realized that the demon face wasn't a mask, but his real appearance…

The demon let out deep breaths, similar to hellish moans, and then put a hand on her shoulder; a hand covered in scabs and ending in monstrous claws that dug into her flesh hurting her.

"Accept it... you are mine!"

***********

"NOOOOOOO!"

Jocelyne woke up so suddenly that her body was thrown backwards at almost unnatural speed. After a few seconds, she heard a thud and then a pain in her back. It took her a few seconds to realize that she had just fallen off the chair.

She pulled herself up, looking around to make sure everything was okay. She was still in her room, in her house, and there was no chain or monstrous hand binding her. Her body was made of skin and flesh again and she was no longer a porcelain doll. She wasn't wearing any fancy clothes, just her pajamas. The clock on her bedside table said three in the morning and she was lying next to her desk. Apparently she had fallen asleep while she was studying.

'It was just a dream...it was just a dream...' she repeated in her mind several times, trying to calm her heart that was pounding.

Suddenly Jackson's voice came from behind the door. "Miss, are you okay?"

Jocelyne shook her head. "I'm fine. It was just a dream. Go back to your work"

"As you wish," Jackson replied, and soon after her voice disappeared as it had come. Jocelyne sighed. Until a few months before her, her security chief would rush into her room as soon as he heard her scream, even breaking down the door if necessary, but by now that situation had repeated itself so many times that even he must have gotten used to hearing her scream at night.

With an effort that seemed inhuman to her, she stood up and dragged herself to the mirror. She was in a disastrous state. Her hair was matted and her tear marks were evident on her face. Apparently she had been crying in her sleep again. Her eyes were red from crying and her skin had taken on an almost cadaverous pallor. Her expression, then, seemed that of a suicide.

She sat up on the bed, holding her head in her hands in an effort to ease the headache. She remembered that at one o'clock the night before she was still busy studying, so she couldn't have slept more than two hours. And she hadn't slept a wink for at least two days. Her body was begging her for some well deserved rest, especially her poor brain which seemed about to explode.

But she couldn't satisfy it. By now she was terrified of falling asleep. The demons of her mind tormented her when she was awake too, but at least then she managed to hold off them; but when she slept, there was nothing she could do to placate them. Now, as soon as she gave in to exhaustion and fell into the world of dreams, a nightmare ten times worse than her previous one came to torture her.

With her hand still shaking she reached for her pack of antidepressants, but she was so tired it slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. Jocelyne didn't flinch: she simply scooped her pills and without even checking her dosage put them in her mouth and swallowed them.

She couldn't take it anymore. She was tired and she just wanted to sleep. But just the thought of what awaited her in her dream world was enough to make her fight to stay awake. Even though she knew this wasn't healthy at all and that if she continued like this her body chemistry would eventually take over, she couldn't muster the courage to close her eyes again.

The psychologists treating her were doing everything to help her, and she was working hard to get the therapy right, but no matter how hard both parties tried, it seemed that the situation could only get worse. It was as if something in Jocelyne's mind had broken beyond repair. By now, she had almost come to hate counseling sessions, as she knew they would prove futile. And in a way, she had also stopped fully opening up to them. Even if at the beginning of the therapy she had tried to be as sincere as possible, by now she was no longer able to do it; no matter how hard she tried and how much in each therapy she heard a voice in her head screaming at her: 'Tell the truth!', her words never managed to take shape in her mouth. She didn't because she knew her parents would then know what she said, and she didn't want them to know what was going on in her head. Although the psychologists swore that what she said during her sessions would remain confidential, she was not stupid; in a nation like the one in which she lived, if a rich man like her, her father, asked to know something, there was no moral or work constraint that would have prevented him. She could tell by the way her parents acted that they knew what she said. Especially, she could tell by the fact that her bedroom had recently been completely emptied of any potentially sharp objects, that any handholds in the ceiling had been removed, and that grates had been placed in her windows. Even though her parents and her entire servants kept pretending it was just for her safety, Jocelyne knew they wanted to make sure she didn't do something irreparable. Like cutting a vein, hanging yourself or jumping off the third floor.

And she in a certain sense she could not blame him, since she had seriously thought about it. It would have all been so damn simple. A moment, a brief instant of pain, and then it would all be over. No more nightmares, no more hallucinations, no more demons of her mind that haunted her constantly. And she finally could sleep. Eternal sleep was still sleep, after all.

She hated herself for those arguments. She knew she shouldn't do them, she knew they were unhealthy and wrong. Still, she wasn't able to help it. No matter how hard she tried, she kept thinking that shooting herself in the head wasn't such a bad idea.

She looked at the spinosaurus model, still sitting on her bedside table. 'You'd be so angry if you saw me like this…' she thought. She remembered well how the spinosaurus had looked at her when she had shown the slightest sign of weakness. Perhaps, if it had been in front of her, it would have roared at her again, as it had when she had nearly frozen at the sight of a stomatosuchus.

Maybe it wouldn't have been bad. Maybe a good scolding was what Jocelyne needed. Someone to yell at her, to force her to sleep, to face her fear, whether she wanted or not. Maybe she wouldn't even mind getting a slap across the face.

But there was no one who did. Her mother, even if sometimes she got angry, avoided yelling at her too much, as if she was afraid of making the situation worse. And her father... she rarely saw him now. It was as if he had decided to distance himself from her. The only times they saw each other were at meals, and even then they hardly spoke to each other. Initially she Jocelyne had enjoyed the situation, too angry at what he had done to talk to him, but now she felt that she would gladly have back the apprehensive father she had before her, rather than this distant and almost insensitive here.

She got up and went to sit at her desk, which was stacked with book after book, many of them open. Now, studying was the only thing she could do to make her feel good. In those moments she was forced to focus her mind on something, forgetting everything else about her. And indeed, she now spent her time solely reading and memorizing any book she could get her hands on. After more than a year she had memorized every treatise on economics, jurisprudence, politics and science contained in her father's library, and every day she requested new ones. Her servants were seriously starting to wonder if she was willing to learn all human knowledge. In a way they were right: if she Jocelyne had run out of books, she probably would have started studying children's stories or even dictionaries, just to keep her mind on something.

At the age of only thirteen she was able to make calculations so complex as to make university students pale. All this knowledge, coupled with her brilliant mind, allowed her to reason beyond normal people. Every now and then, just for fun, she had found herself taking a look at a problem that her father was trying to solve, only to be able to identify dozens of solutions in a short time and indeed, even begin to calculate entire plans so that from that situation the greatest profit possible could be obtained, putting every contingency into play and causing the plan to change for each of them.

And while she could solve such problems, she couldn't solve hers. The human mind was not something that could be repaired. There was no calculation, mathematical formula or strategy that could put everything right.

Jocelyne knew it was selfish to complain like that. In a way, she could still say she was physically fine. Many people in her same condition weren't so lucky. There were people being abused nonstop every day. People who had suffered such great trauma that their minds were broken. People who for everything they had endured had become downright catatonic. She had no right to complain after all. But she couldn't help herself from doing it. After all, being forced to eat vomit was not justified by the fact that others ate shit.

She shuffled back to her desk despite her weary limbs. She was about to go back to studying, when Jackson's voice came again from behind the door: "Miss, far be it from me to criticize your behavior, but I would like to remind you that your mother has ordered you not to stay awake beyond a certain time"

Evidently, the head of security had noticed that Jocelyne still hadn't turned off the light. It couldn't have been difficult to notice her seeping through the door. "I know. Don't worry, it's my problem"

"I'm afraid that's not the case. I urge you to go to sleep"

A shiver went down Jocelyne's spine at the mere mention of 'sleep'. "I'll deal with my mother. Now shut up"

"I inform you that your parents have given us permission to confiscate your electronic devices"

"What?"

"You heard me right. If you refuse to put out the light and go to sleep, my men and I will enter and take away any lamps or other sources of light. We will return them to you as soon as the sun comes up, but I think it would be best for all to avoid to get that far"

Jocelyne clenched her fists so tightly that her knuckles threatened to snap. She felt the urge to pick something up and throw it against the door. Had she come to that? She to even be monitored on how much she slept? "As you want!" she exclaimed in a voice that sounded more like a growl.

"Thank you, miss" was the only reply she received.

Jocelyne turned off every light in the room and then slipped under the covers of her bed. She found herself staring at the ceiling in total darkness, aware that she wouldn't have been able to sleep.