Chapter 32

Ilias smiled to himself as he was pleased by his own workings. He needed Orion to return to Eden, so he deliberately plotted Beth, Orion’s first female Dreamkiller, against her father. Seeing the thousands of warriors ready to fight Orion, he knew it must be time for him to go back to the garden.

He was saddened, also, when Tracy abandoned him to go back amongst the living. She was not mortal but she was not spirit either. He would have to keep track of Tracy; she was the first soul he ever met that wanted to go back to aid the lives she left behind.

He was not upset with her, just curious. He wanted to know where her soul will go when she does die.

But now he had Orion to think about. He was going back to Eden to gain more knowledge and when he, Ilias, confronted him there, he would get back all the power he had given the bastard.

Maybe when he had stripped Orion of his powers, he would be accepted into heaven once again. To live among God was one thirst he could never quench.

But what would happen if Orion defeated me? What would become of me? I would not be worthy of heaven for sure, but I’m not evil. I suppose I would live out the remainder of my days in Purgatory.

* * *

“Where are we?”

He turned and smiled at Mykella behind hurt eyes. He had chosen to be some less horrific abomination and had let her see the man he once was. “I suppose you’re in my dream.”

She looked at her father and found it hard to believe that she had just had a conversation, via telepathically, with her father who told her to enter the dreams of his future self – no matter what has become of him.

Mykella wasn’t sure what was going on. She had taken her father’s advice, but would that lead to her premature death? “Are you going to…to kill me?” She felt like a child asking this.

Vince laughed and then shook his head. “Orion has damaged my brain, Mykella, but you’re still my daughter no matter what happens.”

A great relief overcame her and she glanced around the nondescript room they were in and saw a chair and sat down. “Dad, what happened to you? When?”

Vince closed his eyes and lowered his head. “The day you attacked Orion – the day I led my army against him – was the same day Orion won. The only humans he kept alive were the weak ones, myself included. He told me,”

Mykella stood up and saw that her father was having trouble finding words beneath his trembling lips. “Go on.”

Vince opened his red eyes and looked down into Mykella’s greens. “He told me that you were dead…that he had crucified you.”

Something strange came to her mind – she had never heard that her father was launching his own attack against Orion. His father was defeated. He was most probably outnumbered. Maybe if he had more people,

“Dad, what happens when Orion takes prisoners?” She paused and remembered her past. Everyone thought that Orion took no prisoners, only to discover that he did in fact take them. But where to and why?

“He uses their dreams,” answered Vince as he looked at her behind confusion; he apparently thought everyone knew about the Network. “It’s been running for as long as I can remember – the Network. That’s how the Dreamkillers survive. Without dreams, we die and Orion knew that, so he created the ultimate Network. Hundreds of human dreams and one Host connecting all of them.”

“What happens when some of the people die?”

“Why do you think Orion takes prisoners?” He gave her a small grin. “If anyone should die, Orion replaces them with someone else.”

“Can,” she was worried by his reaction. “Can I see the Network?”

Vince stared at Mykella for a short eternity. A long time had passed since he had seen her alive. He could remember telling her that he was going to go out in the middle of the night, and that he would see her in the morning. He never saw her again. That was such a long time ago (how long, no one could calculate it anymore – time is insignificant when you have God-King Orion as your master.) and he almost forgot what she looked like.

“If you keep quiet, I suppose you could come with me. The humans need tending to anyway,” he finally responded and she shook her head in pity.

“You are human, too. Where I come from, you are still human.”

There was no need to argue with her now. She was of a different time from him. If things were different,

“Let’s go,” she said, knowing he wanted to argue a point but was unable to. “I’ll be quiet.”

Vince shook his head and grinned. “You’d better,” he said. “I’d really hate to lose you a second time.”

She grinned back and then winced and cradled her crushed hand in her other. As they walked, she kept her broken hand in her other hand wondering why, if she is a Dream Crusader, she couldn’t mend the damned thing.

In the distance Tracy could hear Chris and Karl taking their troops deeper into the forest, knowing that the meadow was only a couple of hours from then. She looked down and saw that her son had fallen asleep in her arms.

She would keep him alive as long as she could. She would not ask Ilias for help, she had just left him and his schemes to be with the mortal race again. If she were mortal again, she would have slipped into her son’s dreams and helped him from the inside. She closed her eyes with that in her heart.

When she opened her eyes again, she was horrified to find that she was no longer sitting on the ground near the mouth of a forest, holding her son. She was, instead, sitting on the cold stone floor of a castle corridor.

She quickly stood up when she heard whispers coming from a nearby corridor and she found a door near her unlocked. She opened it and pushed herself into the room, not caring for what room she was in or who was in it with her.

What she didn’t expect was that the whispers were getting closer, only to stop just outside the door she had her back to.

She pushed her body up against the wall behind the door as much as she could to hide herself. She looked down and saw that the handle was moving and she held her breath. She had forgotten what it was like to be afraid – it had been such a long time ago that she tasted fear.

Even as an adult, the visions of Orion didn’t scare her much; it was when she was fighting him when she was a teenager. She was young and naïve and didn’t know anything about fighting. Especially a timeless man with powers she had never seen before.

The door opened and two people entered, not noticing Tracy hiding behind the door in the cover of the shadows. “Oh my Jesus,” cried a woman whose back was turned to Tracy.

That voice was too familiar, she thought. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. But when the other spoke, it was like all the air she was holding suddenly caused her lungs to collapse.

“And that’s not even half of them,” he said.

Tracy stumbled from her hiding place and looked as white as a bed sheet. “Vincent?”

They turned around at the sudden voice behind them and Vince stared at the woman with confusion in his old eyes. There was a lost look in them. “M…mother,” he whispered in confusion. The woman looked so much like his mother, although he had not seen his mother in a very long time.

Tracy returned the puzzled look with one of her own and nodded her head. Then her eyes went to his side and she smiled at Mykella. “I don’t ever recall really meeting you face to face, Mykella,” she began. “But I guess I’m your grandmother.”

“How did you find me?” There was a look of suspicion on her young face as she looked at the woman claiming to be Vince’s mother.

Tracy shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I was thinking I wanted to find Vincent in his dreams and help him. I didn’t think it would ever work.”

Mykella narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, considering you’re dead.”

Tracy blinked several times as she studied the young Dream Crusader. There was a lot of hostility emanating from Mykella and she wondered why.

“Mykella,” said Vince and she turned and looked at him. “She wanted to come into my dreams, and you found my dreams. She must have connected with my dreams anyway.”

Mykella shook her head and walked back to Tracy and raised a finger at her. “Look, Grandma, this is my war. Don’t get in my way.” There was no way she was going to trust someone who was supposed to have been dead for at least twenty years.

Before Tracy could say anything else, Mykella turned back around to take another look at the awesome construction of the Network. There was one human sleeping in what looked like a stone tomb except that the stone material was transparent. She looked at the young man’s brown hair which had grown down past his closed eyes. She studied the thick tubes that ran from the man’s head and spine to a larger tentacle which had then been attached to another sleeping person and that person was attached to another and so on and so on. The young man was down on some base floor and the other thousands of sleeping humans were in columns and rows above and around the Host.

“Who is he?” Mykella didn’t think she needed to know, but for some reason, she wanted to know – she wanted to know everything Orion was doing.

Vince gave a slight shrug. “Don’t really know him personally. Someone said his name was Barker. Clarence…no…Connor. Yeah, Connor Barker.”

A mental banshee screamed inside Tracy’s head and she fell to the floor and caught herself before she slipped over the edge of their balcony overlooking the Network. “That…that can’t be.” She stood up and turned to glare at her son. “You must have heard wrong,” she said and he shook his head.

“No. I remember clearly that that was his name,” responded Vince.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Connor Barker’s been dead for like forty years, damnit!” Tracy shook her head; there was no way that the young man down there could be the same young man who had asked her out so long ago. A tsunami of guilt crashed over her as she couldn’t help the flood of memories, especially the one where she had rejected a date with him when in reality she had no boyfriend at the time. “He killed himself. I saw him do it.”

Mykella took a mental note of this – she had to ask Orion about this before one of them died. “We have to shut production down,” she said.

“No,” said Tracy, which surprised Mykella (she had expected reluctance from Vince, not Tracy). “You shut that thing down, it may kill Connor.” How can I be having these feelings all over again? It’s like I’m a kid again.

“You said it yourself: You watched him kill himself. If he’s already dead, then he can’t die a second time,” said Mykella. But she knew deep down that Tracy was right – right about this Connor Barker. How could he be in this future? And how could Orion keep him looking that young?

Mykella couldn’t keep her eyes off the sleeping Host. There was something so innocently beautiful about him as he slept. As much as she had just fallen in love with him in that exact moment, she knew that it must end. But still, she wondered what kind of dreams he was having.

Tracy felt a tickle in the back of her head and she grimaced. Someone was trying to contact her from the other side. She had to leave Mykella and her son for the moment, not wanting to leave her questions about Connor unanswered. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said to them and vanished from the room.

Mykella stared a moment longer at the spot where Tracy had vanished, realizing that she must have had some sort of a calling, and then returned her gaze back down on Connor’s calm body without saying anything about Tracy. For some reason she couldn’t put her finger on it, she really didn’t like nor trust this woman claiming to be her father’s mother – her grandmother.

She looked up from her thoughts to the man standing at her side. “What did you think when I said that production had to be shut down?” She saw that his eyes were avoiding hers. “Truthfully,” she said.

Vince sighed and then looked down at Mykella. “I am frightened. I couldn’t face the thought of losing you again,” he said and she smiled warmly. “And then again, if you shut down the Network, that would mean I will die, too.”

She turned away from her father and nodded. Anger simmered in her being at the thought that, even now, he didn’t know if he could sacrifice himself for his own daughter. But if there was a way to…She looked back up at him. “Maybe I could shut everything down from the inside. By doing that, the Network would still operate normally. That should give you time to – “ She didn’t know what she wanted to say; time enough for him to convert back to being good? She turned away again, as if embarrassed to even have that thought enter her mind.

She felt her father place his hand on her shoulder and she turned back to him. “You must understand, Mykella, that I am already dead. I traded my soul for eternal life in hell because I truly believed you were dead.” He dropped to his knee and took her hand. “Forgive me for being weak. I was only human then.”

She shook her head in pity and felt the tears fall off her chin. “There’s nothing to forgive you for. You did what anyone would have done.”

“No,” he shouted and stood back up. “When I saw that you had died…” He stopped himself suddenly when he saw her shocked expression.

“Wait,” she said. “You…you saw me dead?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She didn’t want to hear it.

Vince lowered his eyes. “No,” he replied. “I saw you die.”

Mykella balled her hand in an effort to make herself not vomit. The feeling was becoming overwhelming. There were mixed emotions clouding her head at the same time. She felt sick knowing that she was going to die – that Orion would win. And at the same time, she was sick knowing that her father did nothing to stop Orion from killing his daughter.

“I have to stop this,” she said behind gritted teeth as she looked at the Network but Vince shook his head.

“It won’t matter. Can’t you see?”

She turned at him again with a pale face. “Why?”

“If you destroy the Network now, then so what? It won’t stop you from dying in the past. And when that happens, the Network begins. Don’t you understand that your future – Orion’s future really doesn’t mean shit? If you are to make a stand, it must be in your own time.”

She did understand but she liked it no less. She was still curious about this Connor Barker and why he looks so damned good for being dead for about forty years. She had to go in – no matter what her father said.

“You should go now, Dad,” she said and he looked cautiously at her.

“But you’re inside my dream. I am your Host. You cannot be here without me.”

Mykella closed her eyes and smiled. “You forgot too easily who I am and what I am.”

And then she vanished from the room much like Tracy had done earlier.

When she opened her eyes, Mykella was looking into the dark orbs of those belonging to Connor Barker who was smiling down at her as he stood over her. She found that she was lying on the floor. He reached out his hand and she accepted the help with a smile of thanks.

“I’m,” she began but he closed her lips with just his eyes.

“I know everything about you, Mykella Brown,” said Connor in the softest voice she had ever heard spoken.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, sounding like a young child asking for that one thing that she could never have – that one chance to play outside at night.

“I can tell you everything that will happen and everything that has happened, but that would serve you no purpose, Mykella. There are souls out there right now fighting the Dreamkillers with nothing to fight for. They believe they’re fighting for their freedom, but they know deep down that they will die.”

Mykella was lost in the seas of Connor’s dark eyes as he spoke.

“Like the followers of Christ, Mykella, these warriors are hungering for a Messiah. You are that Messiah, Mykella Brown. “

She shook her head in disgust. “No, that can’t be true. I’m supposed to be mankind’s savior, not their salvation.”

Connor smiled. “Those words are synonymous, Mykella. God closed the gates of heaven when Orion entered the Forbidden Realms. He chose you to open them once again.”

Mykella couldn’t find words to argue with – he was just so damned cute and sincere. She looked around and saw that they were standing in a bedroom. She saw an unmade bed, a dresser which, oddly, had a statue of a skull on it, and she also saw a window. She crossed the small room and made her way to the window and looked outside. Her eyes widened as she stared in awe.

She had never seen a street like the one this window overlooked. There were those things moving up and down the street (she thought her father had called them cars) with wheels moving them. There were people walking and riding two-wheeled mechanisms, moving them with their feet on pedals. And on top of everything else, there were people walking with animals using a rope tied around the animal’s neck.

“Where are we?” she asked and was unable to remove her eyes from the beautiful houses that lined the street.

“This is my bedroom when I was growing up. I chose to live here for as long as I am a prisoner,” explained Connor. He didn’t look as excited to see everything that was exciting to Mykella. “This is where everything began for me.”

She nodded as she understood what he meant; his association with Orion. “How has Orion been keeping you alive for so long?” (and looking pretty good). “Tracy said she saw you kill yourself.”

Connor walked over to the window and sighed. He spied several people walking and turned his attention back to Mykella. “See them?” She nodded. “They are inside my dream. They have no idea where they’re going or why. I imagined them and so they come.”

She really didn’t want to know the science of how this Network worked. “Nice,” she said. “How did you survive?”

“A long time ago a Dreamkiller inhabited my body; Alexius. He used my body as a disguise to get to Tracy, your Grandmother.” He closed his eyes and fought to remain in control of his mind. “To make a story shorter than it should have been, I was able to free myself from Alexius’ hold and we split apart. What Tracy and Rick thought was that I was finally dead for good. They were way wrong. Almost as soon as my body separated from the Dreamkiller, my heart began beating again – except I was six feet underground, if you take my meaning.”

She formed a hideous scene in her head which dealt with Orion finding Connor and he smiled and opened his eyes.

“No, it wasn’t that bad,” he said and she smiled in return. “What I do remember is I was in pain, both mental and physical – I had just recently shot myself in the head. And then my casket lid was ripped right off and there stood my enemy. He held out his hand to me and promised that the worst is over and then he showed me. Everything was dead. Humanity had been wiped out. Every living organism was destroyed. I fell down on my knees and cried for what felt like an eternity. And that was when I took his hand.”

Mykella went back and sat down on the bed and shook her head. “So he went back in time to get you. Man, he really messed up your timeline, didn’t he?” She was trying to figure out why Orion felt like he had to travel back in time just to get this one individual soul to play Host.

“I’ve asked him that a couple of times, myself,” said Connor as he went over to her.

“Please stay out of my head; it’s making me nervous.”

Connor agreed with a nod and an apology.

“So what did he say when you asked him?”

“He told me he wanted me because I was the first human soul who had actually challenged him. He said that the Grendels had challenged his Dreamkillers, but never him.” He shook his head at the memory of shooting Orion with the gun he found in his pocket. “He’s keeping me alive through his dark powers.”

Mykella understood perfectly well about Orion’s dark powers. And then she thought of something and turned to Connor. “You said I was to open the gate of heaven?” She didn’t need to have confirmation, but he nodded nonetheless. “Who is going to stop Orion? Someone has to,” she said and he smiled.

“You’re absolutely right – someone has to. But will someone be able to? I see everything, Mykella Brown. The universe is easy to see through. But his powers are strong enough to cloud universal questions.”

She lowered her head and a thought came to her and she glanced back up. “Connor,” she almost whispered and he looked at her behind a grin.

“I won’t get into your head,” he said and she nodded.

“What would happen if I just woke you up?” She was full of hope, but he had ways of shattering all hope.

“I’ll die.”

“How?”

“I’m alive in the dream world. My heart is still beating somewhere, but that’s all I am. In a way I should thank Orion for keeping me alive for as long as he has.”

Mykella cringed as she listened to him. There was no way she would ever thank Orion for anything – especially for her shattered hand that she had forgotten about for a little while (the pain lessened as she jumped into her father’s dream).

“Are you truly alive?” she asked and he sighed. As she had remembered her hand, she lifted it. “Feel this,” she said and held out her hand.

He took her soft hand and gently applied pressure. He lowered his eyebrows in confusion and then looked into her eyes.

“Orion has clouded his actions,” she smiled and pulled her hand back. “Orion had smashed every bone in my hand,” she explained and he tried to apologize. “No,” she stopped him. “This was only one hand. He’s not through with me yet. A while ago – but it might only have been tonight – he told me that I would begin to feel pain. I need to do something before too much pain causes me to give up; that’s what he’s hoping for me, to give up.”

“If I could find a way to heal your hand,” he began but she lifted her good hand and placed her index finger to his lips.

“There’s no need now – I understand my prophecy now. Do you truly believe that I was chosen by God to open the gates again?” Here she waited and listened not to his voice but what was in his heart.

Connor bowed his head and closed his eyes. “I do, Mykella. You are my savior, my Everlasting Queen.”

She moved closer to him until they were mere centimeters apart. “Then you will understand what I’m about to do and why.” She closed her eyes and felt something cold suddenly materialize in her good hand. She didn’t want to look down; she knew it was a hilt; she didn’t need to see it to believe it.

Before she could change her mind she pushed the blade into Connor’s chest. She knew the bones would be tough to penetrate, but once she felt the blade going through, she didn’t hesitate, but only pushed harder until she found his beating heart.

He looked into her eyes but he did not scream out from the pain he was in. In fact, he even smiled a little. “I’ll be waiting for you at the gate,” he whispered and then closed his eyes again.

She opened her eyes and looked into the smiling face of Connor and in that second before death he saw the worried look in her eyes “Don’t worry, Mykella,” he said. “I’ll make sure that everything that’s happening will take place in your time and not in your future.”

She had remembered what her father had said about killing Connor, the Host, in this time – that it wouldn’t help her past if she killed him in her future. At least what he said gave her some relief.

At least, until she wakes up.