Trust Issues (1)

The birds chirped, signaling a new morning.

Slowly...

The green-haired lad blinked his eyes open, feeling oddly refreshed and strangely at peace. It was one of those rare mornings where everything just felt... right. 

Varden felt aches, no exhaustion, just a cozy sense of restfulness wrapping around him like a warm blanket.

Then the first thing that greeted him was...

A face.

A close-up, unholy grin stretched across that face. Where the sheer look alone made Varden's brain short-circuit.

His sluggish mind took a moment to process what he was seeing, and for a fleeting second, his sleep-addled brain whispered, 

'A devil?...'

For another fleeting second, he considered the possibility that a demon had come to claim his soul. 

After all, those eyes, that unsettling smirk, the way this person loomed over him... it was the textbook definition of nightmare fuel.

And then, just to make things worse...