A Dream:

As your vision starts to clear you notice instantly that you are still limited in what you can see, the room you are in is filled with a thick black smoke, the smell of burning wood and various other materials fills the air. The room is very well furnished, silk drapes hang burning from the windows, and the cloth clad carved wooden couches and chairs too are slowly burning. The heat in the room is excruciating, the light of the fire that is filling the room disappears into the blackness of the smoke. Small swirls of air allow for momentary sight into inferno that surrounds you. The thick panes of glass making up the window beyond the burning silk curtains make a sickening groaning noise and then crack splitting and shattering. The bits of glass seem to explode both inside and out as the air rushes in from outside only to be met with the expulsion of flame and heat and the fire inside seems to gain a new veracity. With the shattering of the glass you hear a whimper in a corner of the room. You suddenly become aware of something else in the room, someone else. A small figure, humanoid it seems, curled up in the corner of the room, his appearance distorted by the smoke. It is curled up its knees to its chest as rocks back and forth slowly. The whimper followed by a violent cough. The fire shows no sign of stopping, it sounds as if it has an almost beastial roar, as it consumes, the flames now crawling and spreading towards and out the now opened window.

You blink and you are still in the same room, but it is different, the walls charred black, the floor too charred in places and in others thick layers of a grey ash is all that can be seen. Small sticks of furniture still remain, embers still alive in the remnants let out small wisps of smoke. The smell in the room is the same and yet also different, a more acrid acidic note on top of the smoke and ash. Small distorted shards of the now partly remelted glass shards litter the floor where the window shattered. Suddenly a figure appears in the doorway, the one through which the fire had spread, from the interior of this once fine structure. A hunched and hooded figure navigates around the room, avoiding the damaged floors as it moves the small charcoal piles that were once tables and other pieces of artistically carved furniture seem to be pushed out of the way by the presence of this figure. It moves directly to the small curled up figure in the corner of the room. The small figure still remains there just as you had seen it before, now absolutely motionless. This new figure moves over and once it is stood in front of it reaching out a hand, it speaks a word or two in a hushed whisper, you can barely make out that it makes any sound at all. The small figure in the corner then moves, reaching out a hand to catch the offered hand. With little assistance the short figure of a young humanoid is helped to standing. The larger hunched figure pulls from its waist a large piece of cloth and wraps it around the shorter figure, covering its head and shoulders, the cloth falls rolling down to almost the floor like a cloak or robe. The taller pulls the smaller one close and leans in to speak something to it while they make their way to the doorway through which it had originally entered. In the same manner as before small bits of debris and detritus seem to make way for the figure as it moves and as it passes you note that it leaves no disturbance in the ash, the smaller of the two however does leave the small prints of a small booted human foot in the ash. They exit together out of this room, out of the soot and char and ash.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

You wake.