bad dreams

[illimitable dominion over all.]

I think a lot, and not just lately, about dreams and sleep.

I think a lot about Elves, both those dark and pale, about whether or not they sleep; about whether they dream, whether their dreams are vivid or draped in the thick, messy fog that most people say theirs are.

Mine are as vivid as they come, I guess. Sharp images, like a slap to the face that doesn't ever stop stinging. Every time I shut my eyes it's there, one of those "friends" you'd really just rather forget.

Recurring nightmares, the easiest identifiable sign of this particular flavour of bad blood.

***

I'm in Pa's old house, even with rickety floorboards and the leaky bit in the corner. I'm a little boy all over again, except I'm sized just normally. All grown up, as if I'd somehow gone back home.

This isn't a good dream, of course, because they never are. So I'm all suspicious, heart pounding a little bit because I'm not armed, and then I see Her sitting by the hearth like She belongs there.

Old, mottled and coloured blue like a shrivelled up fruit or a walking, vaguely feminised bruise. She smiles, turns at me. The eyes are a cliche sort of villainous red, but my blood freezes, not because of the colour of her eyes, or the old Icewind cold, but more due to the fact she just referred to me as "husband."

I'd dreamt this one, and others, so many times and it always made me want to scream. They all did. That was how things worked, just how it was. There was an easy sort of resignation in that, in letting terror make all my moves for me.

She, it, my wife lifted a wrinkly and ugly finger, then she crooked it in a commanding beckon. There's a nail on the end of that order, a ragged talon that's coloured the sickly sort of yellow you might find in a beggar's mouth.

I came forward, shy, but mostly because I didn't have much choice. It wasn't a good dream. If it was, I would have done something else.

Then she told me to kiss her, and I did.

There was that, familiar taste - a sharp stinging scent as her mouth opened, like garbage that had been left to ferment in the sunlight for a day or two. The kind that sticks in your nose for a while, and makes you gag when you think about it.

I tasted that in my mouth, I most definitely wanted to gag, and I almost did. But I didn't.

It was a bad dream, so the kiss didn't break.

It was a bad dream, so we went down.

It was a bad dream, so I felt those fingertips rake into my back with the hateful sort of love that only happens when nobody wants it.

I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth.

[illimitable dominion over all.]

Occasionally, one's dreams may hardly be the product of blood, or an overactive subconscious imagination. They have many forms, all of them austere as the memories of just yesterday.

Even if they are not, in fact, yesterday's.

***

This one always began the same: snowy hills, a night sky and the most vague sense of guilt, try as I might to strike things like that out of my life. Selûne shined so bright, casting the white topped hills in a sickly blue glow. It called to my mind image of an elderly man turned thin by the cold, all wispy hair and cyanotic lips.

Which, of course, brought memories I quickly dispelled with a fast exit out of introspection's lonely halls. I shook off the snow on my shoulders, giving a peer around to the firs I sat obscured between - a watchman for the busy bandit camp on the hill behind and beneath me.

The timing of footsteps and movement of vague, brutish silhouettes amidst the snows ahead of me was placed with the deliberate coincidence only the nightly terrors I suffered could perform.

Orcs marched in the slow steady pace of the maggots that they personified, their rusted axes and tattered chain glinting with predation.

My mouth opened to shout and warn those that slept, they who relied upon me to defend their defenceless forms from attack.

My thoughts, at the same time, turned to the ink that ran down my arms: bulls, bears, a Mulhorandi elephant and even the Ogre there at the bottom of my left bicep. Then I considered the lavender writ into my chest, of a sunburst and skull without a jaw.

Memories of memories flushed through me, of a treatise on the various forms of blasphemy and how easy it was to succumb.

A quote: "Friendship, or to love, is to put another before or equal to yourself. To put anyone before or equal to yourself, thus placing them before or equal to the One, is to sin."

I was unholy, unclean and stained with the metaphorical filth of the False, and so I recognised these agents of One-Eye's rapine as what they really were: the unified harbinger of my purification.

Thus I remained, silent, still between my protective fir trees as the Orcs marched by.

The screams of my companions, my lovers and friends, split the night's peace apart like an axe wound. There were a few that lingered almost until the dawn, and all of them female.

Danifa's, our wise leader, blessed of Icedawn, were the loudest to my ears; when only those remained my eyes welled, and my chest tightened with a rage to spite the Dale's cold.

I settled only when logic prevailed, that I was very close to passing this test the Sun had set for me.
As the sound stopped, tears rolled down my face; I was purified! I was made holy, and no longer was I living for another.

The gelid air bit into me, though, and I knew soon the Frostmaiden's displeasure at my extended stay close to Her grace, coupled with my indifference toward one of her agent's demise, would make itself known.

As I stand up, triumphant - and this never fails - I awake.

Always, my face is stained by the saline of joy.

[illimitable dominion over all.]

Dear Father,

I know it has been so many years since we've spoken, and more than that since I've sent a letter; indeed, now I can write with more legibility than the lofty station of fisher's son might require, and I know you can read. I had thought, perhaps, you might be interested in hearing how your only son's activities bode.

The answer to that is "quite well," actually, not that you'd ever ask. I wonder if your hair is all grey, now, or if it still keeps some of its fairness despite your age - what are you now, sixty one? I wonder how you keep coin in your pocket. Surely you're much too old to fish, these days.

You might be interested in knowing I've made some associations here, and important ones! A number of skilled arcanists make my acquaintance, but more pertinent is that they're quite knowledgeable men and women. Verily, I've discovered so much about myself. About you, perhaps by extension.

We've both always known there was, Something lurking beneath your sweet, sweet child. A blade's edge threatening to break the skin, but not quite there; the most noticeable point of the knife being a difficulty in getting some decent rest. Something horrible has always been happening just inside of me, and you said you didn't know why.

I found out, and I'll admit to some vague notion of a curiosity on the specifics.

Right now I'm on a rather infamous isle off the Moonshaes. If I don't have a letter back by the year's end, I'm coming home.

All of my love,
Anec-kel

[illimitable dominion over all.]

Bony, gnarled fingers run over the surface of a crisp parchment, writ with a message both joyous and foreboding. Dreyfus Tarsys was a fisher, but a wise one; either by virtue of fate or simply due to the grey that dominated his scalp, and was as such not ignorant of the implied threat in his son's letter.

Rising steadily to his feet, he took hold of his old wooden cane and moved with a shuffling gait over to the rickety wooden door of his one room home, and peered out over the gathered snowfall with mind abuzz in antonymous thought.

"You could leave," cried one shrill voice, "to save yourself from your child's wrath." Another rumbled more gruffly, imploring him of the stern virtue of duty. Feebly the shrill voice attempted to convince Dreyfus that his son cared not for duty, and this was a useless gesture that would only get him killed.

Still the old fisherman's mind was made, and he moved to sit back in his chair by the embers of a never-proud fireplace, exhaling softly before he prepared for the arrival of his only child.

The shrillness came unfounded, and the preparations wasted. Anec-kel never arrived.