I hastily dreamed another avatar, back at the gates, the furthest I could penetrate into the nightmare. All of Zenvo was changed, streets and buildings, much like people, were covered in calcareous stone and zooids. and my maneuverability as a dream was severely limited. Each time I did it, each time I conjured a new avatar, I made a new race for the workshop, trying to cut corners, to shift through some obstacles and even walls as good as I could, but The Angel was ineludible. None of the gates was this close to them, and the gaze of the monster spanned the whole city. But the gods know I tried to reach them from every little corner, or hole through the walls. One of my avatars even died lost into the city’s sewage system, before even surfacing. I must have tried three dozen damned times before I wasn’t able to form a coherent avatar anymore. My time, like Zenvo’s, was up. As The Angel’s draconian stare continued to loom upon what once was the city of my dreams, I finally lost the last trace of consciousness. I believe then, or shortly after, I died.

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I woke back by the cave’s entrance as the sun surfaced through the eastern mountains. I parsed my memories back, my movement as stiff as if I were still made of stone. I extended a hand out from the shadows of the cave, and my own shadow still remained with me. Now, however, I was able to shift normally.

I checked on Cirruin, to make sure he was still dreaming. “Thanks for the shadow, I guess.” I said meekly, and then walked away.

I walked like a dream does, revisiting the path to Zenvo. The boulder where I had given myself a concussion was clean, only a little dent remained where I had slammed my cranium. The wolves that tried to attack me after so long weren’t the same, the plants had succeeded one another, even new trees had grown to the sides of the way, and one even in the middle. I cried all the way. I didn’t want to arrive. I didn’t want to corroborate the damage done by the angel. But I needed to. I had created it: it was my duty to, at least, suffer the consequences.

Reaching the city walls, I found out the bryozoans were gone, only the stone of their skeletons and the statues they had made remained. The colors left with the organic matter, turning the city into a bleached image. I walked straight through the main street, caring not for checking the houses of them who I loved. I had a hope still, a hope that Dariel, Orphela and Sihea had avoided doom by being away in the country house, that they had not become another of The Angel’s works of macabre art that were now forever crawling or running through the streets, hiding under banks, or barking at the menace. The Angel’s stare spared no faithful dog, no cunning cat, and, judging by the small piles of rubble that seemed to have patterns typical of a feather or a beak in some of the debris, not even birds on the flight.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

It took me some hours to transit through the entirety of Zenvo, zigzagging around people that, maybe, I one day knew.

“Luberto, there’s no way you are alive in there, isn’t it?” I said when I passed in front of the library.

I shifted inside and I found an image not different from the one outside. People had died while hiding under the tables, among the bookshelves and one man even spent his last moments reading, with a book on his hand and sipping from a cup of a drink that had long ago evaporated or drained through the cracks. One could admire his cool-headness in such a situation, or his magnanimous stupidity.

I checked behind the counter, expecting to find Luberto’s mummified body there. But I found nothing. Then I trotted to the back room, and shifted in, because I was scared of breaking someone if I opened the door.

And there he was: he had tried to hide in the darkest corner of the room, his glasses shattered by his side, his hands scratching his scalp, his face contorted in a rictus of desperation.

Before shifting out of the library, I searched for the one guilty for this tragedy. I quickly found it, still intact: The Devils of Drussiltan, by Sefferio De Dalmea.

I wanted to tear the book to shreds, to burn it until not even ashes remained, to destroy any trace of that thing on this city I used to love. But I couldn’t get myself to do it. It was not the novel, but the dreamed hands holding it that had caused this. If one deserved to burn, it was me.

I left it on its place and shifted out of the library. I exited the city, and kept on walking north, towards the countryside house of the family I loved. My heart, had it been beating, would have skipped several beats when I saw the family’s carriage was nowhere near.

I entered the stable, and Dusk wasn’t there. There were no recent dog droppings nor the smell of urine in the air.

“No… no… Maybe they left after seeing the city in ruins?”

Checking inside the house, I found it has abandoned and recently untouched as the stables were. Some of the doors even had spider webs growing on them. There was no chance they had been here by the time of the tragedy. I sat outside the main door and I watched a pompous white cloud pass by. How cruel it was that the world kept on spinning, how cruel that it didn’t cry for the people of Zenvo.