This wasn’t how the dream usually went.

It always began the same way; it was the only way he knew that he was sleeping. There was no light, no way to tell if his eyes really were open. There was no sound, except for the laughter.

And the dream always started the same way.

A hand, reaching out from the dark, that he could never reach. Words whispered to far away to hear, pleading, weeping, laughing, screaming. He stopped pulling on chains in an effort to reach them a handful of eternities ago.

Or maybe just seconds. It was always just beyond the length of metal, fingers outstretched for him to take. It was always hovering over the skull, a direction he never looked.

There was never any light, and he didn’t dare make his own. He would see what he’d done then, what he’d done to the body, the bones. No, never make any light.

He sat back onto the wall, uncoiling from his position of keeping his head between his knees. The cool metal was the only thing to give him any sense of spatial awareness; the manacles only bound him to the void, tried to drag him deeper into the abyss. He felt them pull sometimes, those hands grabbing at the links and trying to reel him, pull him down, suffocate in the darkness.

That was the dream, and it always began the same way.

And it never ended.

Except for this moment, this infinitude was different than the rest of them. The dream began with a slot of light expanding sideways like a door opening.

He closed his eyes against the glare. Don’t look. Don’t look at the light, it could only show him his wrongs. The bones, the skull was snarling at him in that light. Don’t look, don’t listen to the footsteps coming towards him.

He knew who it was, he knew who was there to take him. He didn’t open his eyes.

She poked him in the cheek.

This definitely wasn’t how the dream began, but if he just didn’t open his eyes, maybe it would restart the right way. He was either dead, finally out of Blessing, or his abyss-twisted mind was tormenting him.

She poked him on the cheek and spoke a word he didn’t know.

If this was a new dream after all, perhaps it was best to see how it played out so he could prepare to witness it endlessly. At least his mind was giving him some variety in the madness, rather than the same nightmare. Maybe it would even give him a third hallucination if he was patient enough.

He opened his eyes.

It wasn’t who he that it was. This woman’s face was wrong, her look too intense.

She spoke to him in words he didn’t understand. His mind had forgotten his language apparently, yet another thing consumed by the dark. He didn’t respond, curious to see how this dream went.

It turned cruel. Of course.

The woman unlocked his manacles from their chain and tried to pull him to his feet. Fine. If the dream wanted to do this, then he would cooperate, even if it later meant begging the dark to come back. Better the emptiness than the hope. After eons of failing to reach those hands, he knew that his mind only fed him hope to be cruel.

He stood, a motion that proved no easy feat, seeing as how his legs and the floor had become one long ago, and let himself be pulled forward.

Towards the light.

No. He wanted to speak, to tell the woman to stop, to tell her that the light was the last place he wanted to be, but she just kept walking, pulling him with her. He kept his eyes on the woman. Looking away meant looking at the skull, which screamed at him to stop, to not leave it behind.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Why was it yelling at him? They both knew he’d back in a moment.

The woman walked into the light without hesitating, but he froze at the seam of the abyss and the bright torment beyond.

She spoke to him again; her voice was gentle, but insistent and her fingers pulled at him to follow.

He took a step into the light.

And it faded. His eyes and mind adjusted to the illumination in an instant, bringing a hallway into reality. It hadn’t looked like this before, all manufactured and metallic. Before the dark, it had barely been more than dug out tunnel.

He was impressed at how creative his madness was. Only a mind forged like his was capable of conjuring such detailed imagery from nothing. The carvings on his left were intricate.

The woman stopped in front of one and pointed to it, then to him and spoke again. Was this the first sin she was going to torment him for?

He looked at the woman, studying her. She was so genuine, and her expressions were so real, like she really was trying to get him to confess. And her skin, her fingers brushing his manacled wrist, felt real, warm.

Is this really a dream? he wondered, following the woman into a smaller, well-lit room. They were the first words he’d thought in a while.

The woman pressed a small circle on a panel of metal and the small room jolted, whirring as it began to move upwards. Last time, going down, it wasn’t as spacious; they’d stood shoulder to shoulder in a tiny platform.

She spoke again, seemingly asking him something in her language. That thought proved to him that his mind hadn’t forgotten words at all and that she really was just speaking something else entirely.

Was his madness so strong that it invented a whole new tongue?

No… he realized. No, what is this? Something else was going on here. No dream had temperature, no vision let him feel the air around him, and no nightmare ever spoke to him directly.

This was real.

The elevator opened into hell. Lights were glaring and flashing, crimson and terrible. The world screeched at him because he was doing wrong. He wasn’t supposed to be here, he was supposed to be in the dark.

It was too much. It almost overloaded him, it should have overtaken his senses, but he saw the woman. She was scared. Scared of these men.

She’s not here to punish me, he realized. She wasn’t some judging agent of the Great Dragon after all.

She was his savior.

She was taking him out of the dark. Away from the chain, the hands, the skull that he still heard screaming so far down below and begged him to come back.

And she was terrified.

He watched her shout to the men, one hand on his restraints, the other holding some sleek, black object. The men in robes looked angry, so he stepped in front of the woman to protect her. Their own sleek items, definitely weapons by the way they held them, exploded with bursts of violet light.

Five somethings tapped against his chest. He glanced down, spotting little beads of metal at his feet.

His Blessing still runs in my veins. He checked on the woman. She looked utterly awed and confused, but alive. Other people shouted from the side, these weren’t in robes and only two held weapons.

The woman grabbed his manacles and pulled him away quickly into throng of people. The skull in the dark stopped screaming, or at least was muffled once he stepped outside.

It was nighttime, dark sky absolute, but lit by the buildings nearby. It looked like a whole town, but not one he remembered.

The woman hugged another girl and a taller. They looked incredibly happy to see her, all smiles except for the older man, who looked like he was chastising his savior between hugs.

She took him by the arm after peeling herself away and gestured urgently to her companions before pulling him along into the town. They walked past an array of statues, each grand and impressive in their craftmanship.

That man… he studied the tallest one with the long axe and a hate burned in his gut, flowed up his arm, then tingled at his fingers. It scoured through his veins and pressed out of his skin.

Melokon’s Fire sparked in his hand, crimson and purple arcs jolting between his fingertips. Nobody noticed in the chaos of the moment, but he felt its power in his core. It was still there, waiting for him to wake up and claim it once again.

His savior and her friends weaved between the squat building of the town until they reached one with a wide, metallic rolling door.

It ground up to show a room fool of tools he recognized and some that he didn’t. There was a large empty spot in the middle, like something was supposed to be there. The woman paused at the entrance, then turned to her blonde companion and yelled something.

The girl blushed and mumbled something but seemed to only frustrate his savior further, who huffed

Family, he realized. Only sisters could talk to each other like that. They placed him at the back of the room, then closed the rolling door and surrounded him in a wide arc with his liberator across from him, back to entrance, and her sister to his right. The two men stood together on his left, eyeing him with no small degree of wariness.

They started to talk to him, asking him question, judging by their tone. He really needed to learn the language, otherwise this whole ordeal would be a waste of time.

This will only take a second. He took a step towards his savior and raised his manacled hands.

Everybody panicked.