Tall, -- altogether too tall to be a human being- it stood at the end of her bed, muscles arranged in strange patterns rippling with tense, barely contained energy, promising danger, promising... well, whatever it wanted. It could barely be seen in the heavy night-time gloom, but its silhouette told the story clear enough. Eyes like distant, ancient starlight, two pairs together, regarded her the way mountains must regard the settlements of man; fleeting, temporary things, embers that would all too soon go out, so transitory in the greater, cosmic scale of things that they could barely be said to have been present at all. Certainly too short lived for it to matter what it did to her.
On its back, only visible in the second-hand light of her alarm clock, bands of pure muscle extended down like some alien cape; tentacles of varying thickness and size, moving near imperceptibly in the night. It was then that she heard them, the background noise that had been so constant, so omnipresent as to fade from her mind, the slithering of those probing eldritch lengths, grasping at the edges of her room, strangling the night. Alone on her bed, with the darkness pressing in from all sides and limiting her sight, her ears strained, senses reaching out into the murk... and apprehending the sound of tentacles, of unseen motion, in and out of her awareness from every angle.
She could even hear them up above, the soft, wet sound of them dripping from the ceiling like thick, heavy tar. Unbidden, a mental image of her room, that familiar space, covered wall to wall with their writhing mass popped into her brain, projected though near blind eyes onto the dark around her. Tentacles, extending outward from it- from him- to embrace her bedroom in its entirety; coiling in the corners, rising to the ceiling and wrapping around the stem of her ceiling fan, filling the view from the windows with sinuous dark flesh, pulsing gently with the intruder's ancient, unimaginable life.
This was the point that she would usually wake up from the dream; she had been having it long enough to know, night after night, watching this strange being draw closer to her on each and every one of them, until she woke up in a cold sweat with its hold on her broken. The dream was largely the same each time, the entity did not speak, it merely moved, first from out of some... gap, at the end of her bed, a window through which the being's body dominated the view, but from behind it could be seen strange new stars, glowing in colors unseen on Earth. Eventually though, on one night earlier in the week, its feet touched the ground that she walked upon ever day, and from that point on it was in her bedroom, stepping closer by the night.
And now, it had reached her bed, and she wasn't waking up.
When the first firm, coiling tentacle touched her, it came from behind her head, slithering down over the headboard to wrap around her shoulder, under her armpit, encircling her before she found the sense to even cry out. Cry out she did, however, though there was little hope of anyone coming, as the tentacle spiraled down her arm with a sudden sense of purpose, until the whole of her limb was bound with the cold, unrelenting strength of the creature.
She had no doubt that struggling would not help, as the warm, damp flesh manipulated her arm, moving it behind her back with the ease that she would have in moving the arm of a doll. If it wanted, if she resisted, then it would be her bones that would yield, crack and break so that it could continue to do what it wanted; so she let it move her, wondered at the dimensions of the thing as it continued moving out from her arm, reached across the gap to coil around her other wrist and pull it behind her back too. One single tentacle extended, ultimately, from the top of one shoulder to the top of the other, a binding so simple and effective that it made her shudder with its effortlessness. It had her. Without even trying, it had her.
She could not fight it, but she gasped as it tugged backwards, pulling her down helplessly onto the bed, that unnatural strength pinning her in place. Again she cried out, shouted to the rafters, which were no doubt still buttressed with the writhing limbs of the being before her, as it lifted one reverse-jointed leg to kneel on the bed, hands with too many fingers kneading the sheets as it drew closer. Pulse racing, she kicked out uselessly, the heel of her foot sliding off the creature's abdomen as though friction didn't exist for it, the possibility of another such kick disappearing as a second and third tentacle wrapped around her ankle and then disappeared under the bed, taking her legs to either edge, spreading them wide.
A shiver went down her spine. This was beginning to look awfully familiar, thematically.
Eyes that looked out from the edge of the universe regarded her, intelligence both obvious and vast burning in them. Its body seemed to blur at the edges, as though its very form was a lie that she couldn't quite see through, something unknowable in its enormity shrunk down into something that could bind her and spread her, could take to her on a level that its true form could barely even perceive.
When it reached in with one hand and tore her nightgown off as though it were some irrelevant piece of detritus, she wasn't even surprised. Something in its expression changed, though she knew not what the new expression meant. A mouth that may or may not have been there a moment before opened, teeth like long-formed stalactites in a deep forgotten cave lining it, framing a tongue like none other she had ever seen. It moved closer to her, between her ankles.
Stripped naked now, bare and vulnerable, the cold air hardening her nipples and raising goose bumps on her skin, she committed every detail of the creature looming over her to memory, all that she could see in the blackness of the night. The body that it wore was a strange parody of the human form; the muscles were wrong, curling, pulsing strange patterns below the skin, looking as though they shouldn't function.
And what skin it was; this close, she could see that it wasn't a concrete physical form in itself, there was depth there. It was possible to see through its skin, simultaneously there in the room with her and something that could be perceived further, distant stars twinkling out there in the blackness of its form. Now she was surrounded by tentacles, they bordered her bed, caging her in even if she managed to slip the creature's grasp, and the cosmos boiled in each and every muscled length. From the ones closest she could even see the light of it spilling onto her pale skin in pinpricks of illumination, the light itself behaving strangely as it refracted through the creature's skin.
Eyes wide, she realized that whatever happened next was entirely out of her control. The entity's strength had hinted at that before, but now she knew, looking out into the star-flecked expanses of the intruder; there was no hope that she could fight back against something like this, to escape it, to do anything other than give it what it wanted. It could break her and walk out of the world; there would be no challenge to it.