Sleep is brief, with barely a restful moment passing before a coughing fit rips Nevin from his slumber and back into wakefulness.
He clutches his heaving chest as he stands, immediately aware that something is very wrong. Smoke dances around him, a light haze of grays and blacks that churn and swirl in the turbulence created by his sudden movement. A harsh orange glow hugs the ground beyond the thickest parts of the smoke, crackling and spitting and groaning as a crawling flame eats away at the circle of untouched woodland of which he finds himself at the center.
“Aidux!” he screams, whipping his head around as his stinging eyes search the haze for any sign of his missing companions. Nothing but the dull, grinding roar of flame answers him back. He wades through the wilted ferns, cupping his hands to his mouth as he calls out again and again.
“Why...why would they just leave me behind?” Exasperated, his hands fall to his sides. “This doesn't make any sense. The whole forest is on fire and-”
He trails off, a realization flashing in his wide eyes. The chaotic scene around him shifts and shudders and falls in and out of focus. The weighty roar of unchecked flame almost retreats as Nevin grows more and more detached from his place in the clearing.
“-and....they wouldn't leave me behind. Of course they wouldn't.”
A small smile parts his lips.
“This is a dream.”
He raises a hand to his face and squints down at the myriad folds and wrinkles decorating the backside of his fingers and covering his knuckles. As he watches, the wrinkles seem to crawl about in place, as if jostling for position. For a moment, he can feel his body, his real body, curled up on the leather satchel, stiff and uncomfortable and covered in a fine layer of dirt and dried sweat. While he looks around the dream, he can feel his eyes gliding around the back of his eyelids, can feel them flutter and twitch as his mind fights between the choice of remaining asleep and casting aside this false reality completely.
“Not so bad, as far as nightmares go,” he says, stifling a cough. “Hotter than I'd like, but at least I'm not hanging off the wall by one arm.”
He takes another quick look at his surroundings, half-expecting Dalen to suddenly leap out from behind a smoldering tree trunk, but he's alone. Still, a part of him thinks he can feel the old drunk lurking about nearby, silently waiting for his cue to emerge and drag Nevin deeper into the nightmare.
“Not this time, Dalen!” he calls out defiantly, shaking a fist at the retreating haze. “You're done haunting my dreams. You hear me? Done!”
He forces his dream eyelids wide, straining them beyond their natural limits. Intermittent flashes of white tear through the dream world as small slices of daylight steal through his cracked lids. A cold stiffness blooms through his body – no doubt the result of sleeping on the damp forest floor. He stretches his dream jaw wide, pulling down on his cheeks and forcing his eyes just a touch wider.
A soot-stained hand shoots out from beneath the ferns, latching onto his pants at the thigh.
“Just gon' run, boy?”
A gaunt face peels back the drooping overgrowth and emerges. Nevin jerks away, but the hand holds fast, its talon-like fingers digging painfully into the flesh of his thigh. Skin like melted wax pools around a pair of bloodshot eyes, and thin wisps of white steam shoot into the air as pus-filled blisters on the face's cheeks and forehead randomly swell and burst.
Dalen sneers up at him through cracked, bleeding lips.
“Just gon' leave me here to burn?”
As Nevin, shaking, stares down at him, the sight sparks something buried in his subconscious, and all thoughts of waking vanish.
Another hand lashes out from the ferns to grab him by the shirt, its skin splitting like a roast pig left too long on the fire. Nevin recoils from its touch, but finds himself sinking into the ferns just as quickly as Dalen crawls up his body.
He squeezes his eyes shut. “Please, Dalen. I couldn't-”
The pair of skeletal hands jerk him from his feet and slam him onto his back. In an instant, Dalen drags his smoldering form on top of him, his bony fingers digging painfully into the meat of his chest as he lowers his face to within mere inches of Nevin's. The young man turns away, dragging his cheek along the sharpened spears of broken fern stalks and tiny shards of granite.
Dalen leans in close, tickling Nevin's ear with his hot, rancid breath. The stench of sour apple wine and burnt flesh chokes him as the old drunk spits his words across the young man's cheek.
“You're weak. Never could do nothin'. And that's about all you good for, too.”
The old drunk bears down on his chest, forcing the last bit of air from his lungs and driving his bony fingers through his shirt and into his flesh.
Dalen grins. “Nothin'.”
“Nevin! Wake up!”
The frantic, child-like voice echos through his subconscious and tears the dream asunder.
**********
Nevin's eyelids wrenched open and he jerked upright. Swallowing a mouthful of air, he choked on the acrid smoke drifting in on a firm southern wind. He squinted against the false brightness created by his sleep-weak eyes. Daylight had finally given form to last night's anonymous woodscape, but the smoky haze and an overcast sky painted the whole of it in dreary shades of emotionless grays.
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He put a hand to his chest as he coughed, expecting to find Dalen's fingers digging into his sternum, but there was nothing, and the phantom sensation was quickly fading. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with a forearm and looked around, but just like in the dream, he found himself alone on the forest floor.
“Aidux?”
The single word irritated his already dry throat, and was cut short by a string of ragged coughs. A few steps in front of him, a section of ferns swayed as though something had barreled through them just moments before he opened his eyes, but they quickly settled back into the rhythm of their wind-swept brethren.
“Aidux!” he cried again, more sure of himself this time. He pulled himself to his feet, dragging the awkwardly packed leather satchel along as he stood. He rubbed his eyes again and peered up through the canopy. A featureless blanket of storm clouds had fanned out across the sky while he slept, and not a speck of blue showed through.
What time was it? Theis was supposed to wake him before first light, but by the look of things, morning had come and gone and the man in black was nowhere to be found. Aidux, either. He couldn't imagine the cat would have wandered far from him while he slept, but to get beyond earshot?
“What in the Numbra is going on?”
A gust of stinging wind ripped through the understory, and Nevin protected his face with his arms. To the south, the slow groan of cracking wood broke through the quiet, but the smoky haze was far denser downhill, and it masked the sound's source like an impenetrable wall. The distant glow of fire was not so distant anymore, and an orange glow bled through the smoke as it crawled up the hillside. More sharp cracks could be heard within the approaching haze, no doubt boiling sap bursting in the hearts of trees old enough to remember a time before men threatened their peace with fire and greed.
Aidux...Theis...where are you two?
Heaving the leather satchel in place on his back, Nevin retreated up the hill as he scanned the undergrowth surrounding the site of his impromptu nap, barely noticing the cold touch of metal on his neck as the strange weapon settled in across his shoulders. A distant peal of thunder sounded from farther up the hillside, and a fine mist wafted down through the branches overhead. The rain couldn't come soon enough, he thought, but even if the sky opened up and dumped a small ocean on the Upper Traagen, Nevin doubted it would do little more than temporarily forestall the advances of the inferno eating its way toward the Nimmons.
Still, it might buy him enough time to get clear, though a downpour would make it even more difficult to find his two missing companions.
Satisfied that Theis and Aidux were neither unconscious nor hiding beneath the sparse undergrowth, Nevin turned uphill and prepared to hoof it away from the steadily approaching smoke.
The sharp crack of dry twigs beneath boots.
Nevin froze.
The sound had come from behind him.
“Theis?” he asked the empty woods, a strange uncertainty stealing the strength from his voice. He looked back over his right shoulder but didn't fully turn, the finer hairs on his neck and arms rising up at the behest of a growing trepidation.
Out of the corner of his eye, a dark figure lurked at the edge of the curtain of smoke, motionless and unaffected by the bursts of flame-heated wind whipping past it through the trees.
Nevin was suddenly made keenly aware of his heartbeat as the muscle in his chest rapidly slammed the blood through his ill-prepared veins.
“Theis, is that you?” he mumbled. He knew full-well his words were too quiet for the figure to hear him, but the urge to speak up and repeat himself was conspicuously absent.
The figure's shadowed head twitched side to side in response.
He can't save you.
The voice reverberated through his mind like an underwater scream. His insides twisted against themselves and Nevin coughed against the wave of bile rushing up his throat.
The figure shifted its weight forward and took a single step uphill.
Choking down the ick in his throat, Nevin didn't wait around for the second step to fall.
Clutching the straps of his satchel tight, the young man bolted through the overgrowth, kicking up loose dirt and trampling ferns beneath him. He leapt over a squat evergreen bush, stumbling briefly as his feet landed atop a collection of exposed roots. He steadied himself on a passing tree trunk, glancing over his shoulder before rounding a moss-crusted boulder.
The figure now crouched in the place he'd taken his nap, its gaunt head turning to follow Nevin's frenzied escape. Though the smokey haze was much lighter where it now stood, the strange figure seemed to be enveloped with interminable shadows wherever it went, as if reality was somehow ashamed of its very presence and sought to hide its mistakes.
The young man jerked his head around in time to avoid tumbling through a patch of brambles, turning his body northward to clamber up a narrow gully of exposed granite filled with pine needles and loose stones. Pebbles squealed beneath his boots as he fought his way up the slope.
A thorn-leaved holly bush guarded the only exit to his ascent. Nevin set his jaw and dove in arms-first, shoving his way through the foliage with a guttural cry of pain and determination. The tightly-threaded branches and jagged leaves dug into the exposed skin of his arms as he struggled to protect his face, and a number of shallow cuts oozed hot blood as he burst free from the other side.
And suddenly found himself running through a fully realized Waking thunderstorm.
So surprised was he by the unexpected shift in weather, Nevin tripped over his own feet and slammed chest-first into the sodden earth. His momentum sent him surfing across the soaked grass. The young man jumped almost immediately to his feet, shrugging off the bulky leather satchel and wiping a hand through his sopping hair as he took in his surroundings.
A strangely familiar clearing stretched out before him.
An almost perfectly circular lapse in tree growth greeted him, brimming with wild grasses and flower blossoms that shouldn't be blooming so early in the season. At the far edge of the clearing, a pile of sun-bleached stones and termite-eaten pine supports hinted at a long abandoned building of some forgotten purpose, languishing beneath a tangle of creeper vines and opportunistic weeds.
Between brief flashes of lightning and through a curtain of rain, Nevin paid particular attention to the odd structure at the center of it all. Ringed in low clusters of white hemlock, a circular stone platform bore a grizzled ram's head statue in its midst, its curled horns holding a single oak leaf aloft between their sharpened tips.
He recognized the symbol immediately. An effigy to Ivvilger, patron of nature and the struggle of existence.
Bleached animal bones and meat in various stages of decay surrounded the mottled gray figure, their presence staining the stone platform with oily puddles of long-dried viscera. Though he couldn't smell it in the rain, looking at the mess was enough to set his stomach churning uncomfortably.
Utterly confused, Nevin wiped the rain from his face and looked back the way he'd came.
The holly bush was gone.
The narrow gully? Missing.
Nothing behind him bore any resemblance to the forest he'd just sprinted though. Not a single wisp of the nearly ever-present smoke had followed him here.
It was almost as though he'd burst free from the brush...and set foot in an unknown clearing, miles away from where he'd started.