There was a boy, called Alex, who had a serious problem. He was an only child, and he never knew his father. When he was a baby, his mother noticed his behavior was more peculiar compared to his peers; he slept very little, and was often awake during the night, screaming for hours incessantly. This way of behaving didn’t stop; the mother took him to various physicians, but it was all in vain – they couldn’t find a cure. He started speaking pretty late, about the age of three, and it seemed for a while that all the problems disappeared; that Alex would continue to live a normal life.

Yet, when he turned twelve, he started complaining about weird monsters that chased him in his dreams; he couldn’t wake up, and he would have a feeling that the dream had lasted for hours. The nightmares were unpredictable, and their frequency varied, too.

One day he went to his friend for a sleepover. He had told him about his “situation,” and he feared he might get possessed by his nightmares. Luckily, such a thing didn’t happen, and Alex spent a completely normal night at his friend’s house.

After some time, he went with his mother to Greece and again tested the “nightmary absence” experiment, with a positive outcome – there were no nightmares. Due to this fact, his mother concluded that maybe there was something wrong with their house – perhaps it was haunted or something, so they decided to move out. Unfortunately, the relocation did not help, and the nightmares kept on appearing in another house.

The years went on, and the boy entered adulthood. After he turned eighteen, he was able to control his nightmares to some extent; the monsters started disappearing, yet there was still a brief moment when chaos emerged – when one monster, in particular, would not stop haunting him. The monster was covered with hair; it had teeth that resembled boar tusks, and it also had the tail of a scorpion.

It happened once that Scorboar – which was the name of the monster that would never leave Alex alone – had caught up with Alex while he was running away in a nightmare, and it had stung him with the stinger, after which the youngster was left in the sleep paralysis for a few hours. Due to this occurrence, he started visiting a psychiatrist, but the therapy wasn’t of much help to him.

One day, after ten years, he dreamed that his mother got sick. Scorboar was in that dream, who had ripped the mother’s belly and chewed her bowels over her bed. After he woke up, he discovered his mother dead in bed; later on, he found out from a doctor that the cause of her death was sepsis.

After a couple of years, he got married. One day, while they were sleeping together having sweet dreams – a frightful nightmare appeared to him, so terrible that it gave him cramps all over his body. In the nightmare, the malevolent monster was gnawing his wife’s leg, and the next morning his wife got leg paralysis. Consequently, this was the reason his darling spent most of her time at home.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Alex had to solve the problem that existed; he’d been looking for solutions in various places for months until he heard of a sage who lived all alone in an abandoned village. He came to see him in the village on one occasion. The sage told him that the same thing had befallen him and that all his relatives had kicked the bucket in a horrible way, each death different from the previous one. He also said that after his second wife’s death, he fled to the village and met a lot of friends who all died soon after. Luckily, the sage had found a remedy for his sufferings – a tea that could suppress the awful dreams that had constantly exasperated him.

Alex gladly received the news and he started drinking the miraculous tea. As a consequence, for years he had not had any dreams at all, so was able to catch some z’s in peace.

One night, after several decades, Alex’s daughter stayed in the apartment to look after her now-aging father. The dad was senile, and most of the time he didn’t know what he was doing. The daughter had been very busy, and she forgot to make the special tea for her daddy – the tea that she knew he’d been drinking for as long as she could remember. Due to this negligent lapse, Alex had fallen asleep jauntily, not knowing that he would encounter that night his old monstrous friend after all those carefree nights. However, the old Scorboar was nowhere in sight.

Instead of him, now showed up his children, little scorpions with hooves who chased after his daughter and stabbed her in the head with their stingers. After they were done with her, frightened Alex watched those baneful scorpion hooves trample on his wife and her throat being torn by their tusks. In the morning came paramedics. The daughter had suffered a stroke and died, together with her mother who had suffocated in her sleep. The senescent Alex had also not awoken from his last nightmare. He joined his family, and they were all in a better place.

The sage that had given Alex the tea turned one hundred twelve. After Alex’s visit, he tried to puzzle out the reason and link for the curse that had been troubling both of them. After some time, he came across a book of curses in one library, which shed some light on the matter. It turned out the curse that had been cast over their families lasted till the death of the member on which it had been cast in the first place.

The ultimate calamity was that all the beloved die to the cursed one, while, on the other hand, he is gifted with a long lifespan, during which he would suffer a great amount of sorrow and ruin of everything nice that he had ever experienced. At first, he had some trouble understanding why the curse occurred only to Alex and him, but then, after some thinking, he realized that his second wife must have become pregnant and that Alex was his child.

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