( written for the October cdc prompt "spirit" !! )

If there was one thing that Wormwood really hadn't been expecting, it had been to see Judith again. After what Poetking had done to her, he had figured that his Mother had passed on to heaven or hell or wherever the fuck rotten spirits like hers ended up, and for a while it had seemed as though he had easily been right. However, it turned out that if you hadn't slept for hours for several days, and you were essentially running on pure fumes as you tried to get your daily duties done, you had a chance of hallucinating. Wormwood had known in the back of his mind that it was a possibility that sleep deprivation could cause strange hallucinations, but he had never actually figured that it would end happening to him. However, it seemed as though this wasn't the case. The large lion found himself practically ready to collapse as he walked into camp with several pieces of prey clenched in his jaws, the result of a rather long hunting trip he had gone on by himself to try and help out. His legs were faintly trembling as he went to deposit the prey in their stores, before he finally just let them collapse beneath him once he was back out in the main camp area. His chin sat down against the dirt of the ground beneath him as he panted, his eyelids already beginning to droop from the tiredness that gripped at him. He tried to fight against it, but he could already tell that he was fighting a losing battle. He had been avoiding his dreams so damn much ever since he had that strange angel dream filled with visions of Poet screeching at him, and it was finally catching up with him now.

The male could feel himself finally beginning to drift off when suddenly a voice cut through the air in front of him, a certain cruelty in the female voice's disappointment tinged tone, "Sleeping on the job, Wormwood? I guess you always were the more disappointing of my sons." Almost immediately all of his fur spiked up with anxiety, and he lifted his head up to look at the hallucination in front of him with his one good eye. Before him was Judith, although she was a mangled approximation of herself, with all of the wounds that Poetking had afflicted upon her before he had run away, her wounds still torn open and bleeding, splattering against the dirt ground beneath her, as far as Wormwood knew. Almost immediately the chaser felt his heartrate increase, his body moving backward as a frightened noise left his throat, his single blue eye a wide disk of petrified terror as he rumbled softly, "No, no, no, you're dead... you're dead, I saw you. I saw your body. Get away from me..." His voice was weak and strained as he struggled and failing to get to his feet, his body still weak from exhaustion. The hallucination of Judith's raised corpse laughed cruelly, saying with an evil smirk as he stepped closer to her son, one claw tracing along his cheek and making him whimper weakly, "What's the matter, Wormwood? Can you not even deal with an old dead lady? How pathetic. Now we know why you never got anywhere in this world, now don't we? Wormwood broke as she began her cruel tirade, backpedaling further and mumbling weakly as he covered his paws with his eyes, beginng softly, "Stop, stop, stop, please... get away from me. Go away! Go back to wherever the fuck you're supposed to be!" Of course, Worm didn't know that really he was just laying near the edge of camp, whimpering softly to nothing thanks to the sleep deprivation that was currently effecting him.