“Alrighty, so I’ve had that dream about that forest in Canada again, and now I can’t sleep, so following the internet’s instructions, I’m recording it so when I listen back to it tomorrow, I can see that there’s nothing scary about it.”

I was sitting on the floor, by my bed. It was around 4 in the morning, and, like every day, I had work in a few hours. Instead of trying to distract myself with watching the TV, like I usually did when I couldn’t sleep, which by the way happened more and more often these days, I had decided to look up help tips on the internet. Somewhere in the process, my phone had run out of battery (I really needed to replace that thing, as between the cracked screen and non-existent battery life it had become almost unusable) and found myself sitting on the floor, by the plug, in my pyjamas, talking to myself.

Well, technically I was talking to future me in an attempt to ‘deconstruct and understand the nature of negative dreams’.

“So, I guess I should start from the beginning,” I spoke, as I pressed the record button again. “Long, long ago, five months ago to be precise, I was your ordinary university student.”

I pressed pause again, thinking about whether or not I should actually say this part out loud. If anyone were to hear that I was actually a person from a different world, who had come here after dying in a terrorist attack, well I wasn’t sure how they’d react.

I sigh. That line of thought had gotten me into a lot of trouble not so long ago.

I decided to omit the part about this world being that of a book I’ve read, and carried on with my own story.

“Well, actually it started later, around July, when I had settled into a job at a coffee shop.”

I paused again. I wasn’t sure where this paranoia was coming from, after all, who could be listening to this apart from me? I was doing this whole thing as a mindfulness exercise anyway.

“And it’s not like I don’t already have too many loose ends out there.” I whispered to myself, thinking of the characters from the book whom I had already interacted with. “Right.” I pressed ‘record’ again and carried on. “The coffee shop got attacked by goblins. And a giant plant. And that was scary. That was also when I discovered-” I paused, stroked once again with that same dilemma. “That was when I discovered that I was virtually immortal. But it didn’t stop me from being um, apprehensive, let’s call it, of bad things happening to me. Everyone has magic skills here, so I’m sure it would be very easy for a lot of people to harm me without killing me.”

“And that’s not me being paranoid,” I continued. “There was actually a group of people who did try to capture me for god knows- for what reason. They should be in police custody now. But since I’m a high-ranker, the police and I aren’t exactly on talking terms.”

I took a short break from talking as I changed the position, I was sitting in. I reached to my left, where a short straight katana was laying inside its scabbard. The blade hardly ever left my side nowadays, although it was more often than not hidden away. Even in this fantasy-like world, civilians didn’t just go around with weapons on display.

Holding Void

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The immaculately white sword, and its polished wooden sheath both disappeared from my hand.

Having rested my voice enough, I returned my attention towards my voice recording.

“Anyway,” I continued. “That first attack by those people, it made something click inside my head. Although I’m a high ranker, and my father is rich, umm, due to, umm, external circumstances, I needed someone to act as my bodyguard. My boyfriend, well, the guy I’m dating, Etienne, would have been the obvious choice. But, I did not, and still do not, want for him to get hurt. He’s pretty good at controlling electricity, but it’s just not fair from me to ask him to fight for me, you know? Of course you do.”

I mumbled that last sentence, knowing full well that I was recording this for myself.

“So the next, and only really, best option was to-”

I paused again. How could I phrase that properly? The only option for me had been to rescue one of the characters from original book (book which I did not want to talk about out loud in fear of sounding crazy). Since he was not only crazy strong, but also young which meant that he could not go back home by himself, he was the obvious choice. Plus, and maybe even more importantly, I was doing a good thing by getting him out of that underground lab.

“Cain was a strong fighter who stayed with me for a while.” I decided to say the bare minimum. “But then we, well, mostly him, got beaten up pretty bad, and some things got said when he thought I wasn’t listening… Long story short, he’s home and safe now.”

As I tried to summarise the situation with Cain, my voice had become a little shaky. Not much, but noticeably so. I did miss him, as weird as that might have sounded. I never had any siblings in my other life, but I imagined that was what it felt like to have a little brother. However, there was always this expectation of him fighting for me, which wasn’t a thing to expect from a 12 year old with probably a lot of trauma. And there was also the fact that I was keeping a lot of information about myself from him; from Etienne as well…

“But that brings me to why I’m recording this in the first place,” I continued. “Other than the fact that some ‘sleep expert’ told me to do. As I was trying to get Cain home, I got attacked- jumped on by people from his town. In retrospect they might have been cultists, I’m not sure. That fight scene has been replaying in my head more and more often, and each time I notice new details. But I’m not sure if it’s just my mind playing tricks. The broaches for example; two tringles, a large one pointing upwards, a smaller one upside-down, slightly displaced on the bottom side of the bigger one. It’s very specific you know, so I couldn’t be making it up, well … anyway, I’m avoiding the subject.”

I realised I was trailing off. Thing was, with there reoccurring dreams, is that I could have easily used my ‘Memoire’ skill to recall the scene. But, I did not want to make the nightmares, and that nonsensical fear any worse. So, I took a deep breath, and continued:

“I’m in that dark, frozen forest. Being hunted down by that person with the shotgun. But their features are more animal-like, their clothes are made of fur, and as they try to sniff out my trail as I hide behind a tree, holding my breath, they crouch on all fours, with nothing human remaining in their form. And there’s the old shaman. Or elder. Or whatever it is. There is never a body under all those ceremonial robes; just an old wrinkled head floating inside an elaborate headdress. The elder cannot kill me himself, he always needs the hunter to do it. But the hunter does not want me dead, they know I cannot die, so they chase me down paths that loop around one another and dead, frozen, trees.”

I paused again. As far as nightmares went, this was actually pretty terrifying. I turned off the voice recorder and leaved back against my bed, thinking. Maybe I should go see an oracle again? That would be the wise thing to do, especially if I could find someone to remove those memories from my head. But, there was no guarantee that if I forgot that scene in the woods, the nightmares sound stop. Plus, that was also the last memory I had of Cain, and I didn’t want to get rid of that.

“That’s how it all started anyway,” I mumbled to myself. “With an oracle. Had I not been out in the city that day-”

I cut myself of, deciding that I had had enough negative thoughts for one night. Instead, I checked the time. It wasn’t even five yet.

Lazily, I pushed myself up from the floor, and dragged myself to the kitchen. There, I turned on the TV, and poured myself some colourful cereal while a weather presenter went on about how it was going to rain today.