They swirled around in my head in incessant bursts of black in varying shades, and other threads of crimson or the rusty colour of dried blood, or uglier ones, puce or sickly yellow, before they resolved and formed into a vague shape in the vestibules of my mind.

The creature that had come into being wasn't one I could put names to, and I watched in a sort of grim, fascinated horror as it held out a limb, dripping colours that quickly flew back up to form more detailed fingers.

"Come," it intoned with the whisper of a thousand voices, and crooked a smooth finger.

I gave it my best skeptical look. "Why?" I demanded of it, then, "What are you?"

It could be said that something like lips peeled back in a smile to reveal teeth of sharpest night as it laughed a wispy little laugh, and morphed into a familiar shape shot through with black nothingness. "Anger," it said, and disintegrated, to go back to its original form. Then, "Pain," as it turned into yet another familiar shape that brought an all-too familiar ache in my chest. Then - a five-foot-four figure, hair to her waist, who stared out at me from cold yellow eyes sunk-set into sockets composed of black, the perfect match to my face so pale. In its rawest voice yet, laden with malice, it hissed with a smile, "Haaatred."

Forgetting myself, I lunged at it, clawing through the wisps that disintegrated into nothing beneath my fingers only to form again elsewhere. It laughed as I kept swiping, to emerge with empty hands.

“See?” it hissed. “This is what you’re after. Come with me. It can be fixed.”

I snarled up at the monstrous affair of colours, feeling dizzy. “Fixed?”

It smiled at me, placating. “Yes. Come with me. You can change – ”

“This.” It was my classmates, jeering at me.

“This.” My father, yelling.

“This.” My friend, criticizing me when I wouldn’t go with her to the club.

“This.” You’re so fat, I jeered, I’m surprised you don’t look like Amber by now.

“You can chaaaange it…”

Eyes glimmering with resolve, I stepped forward, lips pressed together in a flat line. “Okay,” I said stiffly, and held out my hand.

The monster’s pseudo-fingers slipped around mine, through mine, and in a sudden flash of dark raced up my arm, the colours to envelop my entire body, before they were gone.

Except for a glimmer of it in my right hand, the same grey-black shades. Harder, colder, smooth. I cocked it and let my forefinger tighten.

“I can change it.”

A/N: The first figure is the protagonist's sibling, the second her boyfriend, the third herself.