That night, I had a dream unlike any I’d ever known.

I found myself by a riverbank, in a dark, alien place, beneath the frail light of a lonely moon. My dreamscape was a low-lying plain glossed in monochrome and cut through by many rivers. The silent, reflective waters paved the lifeless landscape in mirror roads, twinkling with motes of dandelion light. My bare feet sunk into the earth as I stepped forward. Mud squelched up between my toes, wet with the scent of clay.

A darkness hung upon the land, a midnight mirage, a weighty darkness like wings of vultures, with a breadth and thickness that suffocated the reflected light. And though the air was wet and dead, the darkness still seemed to quiver.

A rancid taste like dried blood rotted at the back of my mouth.

I was afraid of the dark. I had been, for almost as long as I could remember.

“H-help!” Somewhere in the darkness, a voice called out.

I ran toward the sound without a second thought. I scrambled across the mud and waded into the current. Water rushed up to my belly. Its dripping cold weighed down my nightclothes. Clawing my fingers into the silty riverbank, I clambered up the other side of the river, dragging myself across the curve of the land.

“It hurts!”

I heard the voice more clearly. It was a child’s.

My pulse quickened.

Dashing over the hilltop, I skid to a stop halfway down the other side. Another, far wider river gleamed down below. Then, as I looked up and down the riverbanks, I saw it.

A little girl.

She clung desperately to a luminous, faceted boulder that jutted out from the middle of the river. The current tore at her. It ran her over, hoping to pull her down.

“I’m coming!” I yelled. “Just hold on! I’m coming!”

Her grip was nearly gone.

I bounded up the muddy riverbank, leaping into the water upstream of the boulder. The river bore down on me in slabs. I kicked my feet, propelling myself forward, scraping my toes against the rough riverbed. My head bobbed at where the water met the sky. The motes in the current streamed to either side of me like a veil, endlessly parting, with fringes that sparkled and eddied. Up ahead, they parted again, and in between them, the girl flailed.

I reached out to grab her, but the river pried her hand from the stone. Splashes and cries burst out of the water, only to vanish as she sunk beneath the surface

“No!”

Water got in my mouth, making me gag.

Taking in a raggedy breath, I dove down after her. The motes swirled around me as I reached out with my arms, stretching them as much as I could.

Come on! Come on!

I kicked my legs frantically to send myself deeper, but all I saw were more of the motes.

No…

My lungs burned for breath.

I was no swimmer.

Please, no…

—!!!

Skin brushed across my finger.

Lurching forward, I dug my left hand into the pebbly riverbed, scraping my fingers as I fought the current. I flailed my free arm until I could close my hand around what was either an arm or a leg.

Silt knocked loose from the riverbed mixed with the motes, filling my view with a golden spray.

I clasped her tightly and pulled her close. Wrapping my arm around her, I clutched her against my chest as I kicked off from the riverbed and surged up to the surface. I kicked at the current, picking up speed as we flowed with the stream, angling toward the shore with desperate strokes of my free arm until I crashed into the mud.

Inch by inch, I clawed my way up the muddy incline, dragging my body out of the river. As soon as the water passed below my knees, I loosened my grip on the girl and flopped over onto my back, beside her. I didn’t even bothering to wipe off the mud as I rose into a kneeling position.

All my thoughts were on the girl.

She wore nothing but a nightgown. It was a size-and-a-half too large for her, and colored like wispy clouds strung across the sky. Her long, cerulean hair was partly splayed out on the mud, and her skin was so pale, I had to press my fingers against her neck to find where it ended and her gown began. But, most of all, she was injured. Terribly injured.

I pressed my fingertips against her neck.

Angel, she’s so cold…

There wasn’t the slightest trace of a heartbeat.

Her body was covered by strange, bloodless lacerations. Bruises stamped her skin like too many kisses. Around us, motes dripped off us and puddled in the mud where they glistened by the light of the moon.

“No…” I muttered, pressing my hands into the mud. My head hang low.

Not again…

I would have started to cry had the girl’s eyes not fluttered open. They were the color of a stormy sea. She coughed. I helped her sit upright as she gasped for air.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

She was frail, like a phantom brought to life.

“Who are you…?” she asked.

She looked at me as if I was the ghost.

“Genneth.”

She stammered. “I… I…” Her gaze drifted into a distant stare.

“Do you have a name?”

She looked up at me. “And-a-lon and-a-do and-a-dee…” Her words were like a half-remembered melody. “I…”

She looked off into the featureless distance once more before turning back to face me.

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

“Anda…” closing her eyes, she gulped. “Andalon,” she said. “I think…” She held her hands in front of her face, staring at them like she’d never laid eyes on them before.

Wind whipped across the dreamscape.

Andalon tucked in her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees.

“I’m cold. I’m so cold…”

I placed my hand on her shoulders. She looked at it in awe, and then reached out to touch it. The way her fingers trembled as they pressed the back of my hand, you would have thought I was made of glass.

“You’re so warm…” she mumbled.

For the first time, I saw her smile. She crawled onto me, clinging to me, leaning against my chest like the rock in the river. But her smile was short-lived. Almost instantly, it cracked into a grimace and tears. My warmth and brought her hurt to the surface. Against me, she melted.

“They hurt me.” She started to shake and sob. “They hurt us. I…”

“—They? Who hurt you?”

I took a deep breath, calming my racing heart.

Andalon stammered. “I… I…” She stared into my eyes. Seeing her pain—a child’s pain—was like watching her drown all over again.

She looked left and right, eyes darting wildly. Terror lived in her.

“It’s alright,” I said, softer, staring her in the eyes, “you’re safe. It’s safe here. I’m a doctor. You can tell me.”

She broke down, sobbing into me. Gently, I placed my hand on her back and held her as she trembled with emotion.

“You’re safe,” I said. “You don’t need to cry anymore.”

I rubbed her back and slowly ran my fingers through her hair. Gradually, she calmed, and she pulled her face out from my chest, staring at me once more, now all puffy and red.

“Who hurt you, Andalon?” I asked.

Once again, she stared out into space. But this time, there was determination in her eyes.

“I… I…”

But it wasn’t enough.

“I—I don’t remember…” she said, shaking her head. “Why? Why am I here?” she asked. “I can’t…” She ran her fingers through her hair. She looked at me again, with loss in her eyes, nervous and afraid. “Why can’t I remember?” Her voice cracked.

Not knowing what to do, I gazed at the silvery rivers, hoping an idea might strike me. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

Andalon’s eyes followed mine, staring out at the dreamscape, but then her hand shot out and clamped down on my arm as she gasped.

Her voice trembled. “Th-there’s something there…”

Vague shapes moved across the land, barely discernible. Maybe they were within the darkness, or, perhaps, they were part of the darkness itself. I couldn’t tell. The only proofs of their existence were the shadows that they cast. Tall, broad shadows that loomed with portent over the mirror road rivers, like the shades of giants, inexorably marching forward. The sight made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up on end. It squeezed the breath from my lungs.

I only remembered how to breathe when her nails dug into my skin.

Like I said, I’d always been afraid of the dark.

My fear had its roots in my childhood, in a memory of perfect darkness. To an adult, it was just a power outage on the night of a new moon, but, to the child I had been, it was the claw of terror slowly scraping down the side of my head. I remembered thinking that the Moon had wanted me to die, that it had opened the gates to the land where the shadows lie, to loose monsters upon the world with a bounty on my soul. Why else would it have abandoned me? Why else would it have withheld its Light? Not even Dana could convince me that Sun would return. She came to me with a lit candle in a cup, and held me close until the dawn, guarding me from the demons waiting in the dark. The memory was etched onto me, a cold inferno that would burned in every dark corner and dreary night.

Now I felt that same fear all over again, as ripe as the night that birthed it.

“I don’t like the dark,” Andalon said, trembling. “I don’t like the dark…”

I wrapped my arms around her. As a father, and as a doctor, I hated the thought of a child in distress. I couldn’t bear it.

Somewhere in the distance, something fell. The earth reverberated like a muffled drum. Both of us shuddered. My heart raced as I looked around for the source of the sound, but I couldn’t find it.

Tightening her grip on me, Andalon buried her face in my chest and screamed into my nightshirt.

The earth shook again—a second strike—louder than before. A single wave rippled across the river delta, moving one river to another, as if they were all part of the same body of water.

“No! No!” Andalon shrieked. “It’s here! It’s here!” She flailed her arms like a frightened little bird.

Then the third blow was struck, and all fell into darkness: earth, moon, river. Everything collapsed. Space and time imploded, squeezing together until there was so little room that the sounds of my breaths were thunder in my ears.

Then, with a fluid ripple, it recoiled. It came to a stop mere inches from my face.

Something had held it back.

A light. A soft glow. The only remaining shred. And it came from…—

—I turned to the source.

Andalon.

Her sea-storm eyes were refulgent and brilliant. Her hair was a sea-foam dream, luminescent in pale blue. Motes within the mud smeared all over us glowed like pinpoints of distant fire, twinkling and resplendent.

Then the darkness bled into them, but slowly. Like a haze, it swept over us, and in this dream that was not a dream, the last lights began to dim.

“Something terrible is going to happen,” Andalon said. She brushed her fingers across my nightgown. Her face was a ghost.

The halted implosion shuddered as she faded away. Only her words remained.

“I don’t want you to die.”

Then the last light went out, and the darkness swallowed me whole.

— — —

I lurched up from my bed with a soft yelp. Adrenaline squirted into my bloodstream, making my heart race.

Deep breaths, Genneth. Deep breaths.

Slowly, I managed to calm the panicking ganglia of my sympathetic nervous system. I kept blinked my eyes until I was confident that I was actually awake.

Oh, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, where would we be without you?

Answer: less panic and less running around like headless chickens, but also less post-meal naps, and less sexy afterglow basking.

The symp and parasymp were the mediators of our “fight or flight” and “feed and breed” reactions, respectively. For me, they were up there with the testicles and the blind spot (courtesy of our optic nerves blocking our retinas) at the top of the list of “most wryly amusing parts of human physiology. It could be as clear as day that there was no real reason to be afraid, but you would still have to wait for your parasympathetic nervous system to sound the “all clear” and get your body to calm back down. At the end of the day, thought could only move at the speed of chemistry.

With a shake of my head, I continued my breathing regimen as quietly as I could while I waited for my heartbeat to relax. Pel was on her side of the bed, as flawless as ever. One of the anxious coils inside me loosened a bit as I realized my wife was still asleep. Sure, she could be pretending, but she hadn’t done that in years, and now certainly wasn’t the time for her to suddenly change her habits.

I glanced over to my nightstand at my left. Time flashed green on the digital clock.

I had five more hours before I needed to be useful again.

A wave of dizziness passed through me, making me lick my lips.

I was thirsty.

Slinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I made my way over to the bathroom, our shag carpeting tickling the soles of my feet. I didn’t bother to turn on the lights. A nightlight in the form of a specially designed lambent fiber-optic cable skirted around the base of our bed, casting a gently blooming yellow halo on the carpet. There was also a direct line of sight from the window of the master bathroom to one of the street-lamps outside.

As I entered the bathroom, I winced slightly at the icy touch of its tiled floor on my bare feet. I should have stepped on one of the rugs, but I hadn’t. Alternatively, slippers would have helped, but that would have been overkill. I was only middle-aged. Weary-eyed, I grabbed my cup from its spot on the porcelain shelf by the sink and filled it to the brim with cool, refreshing water. I drank it down in one long gulp.

Holden Hall Reservoir provided, hands down, the best tap water I’d ever tasted. You could bottle this stuff and sell it at supermarkets outside of the city, and only folks with Elpeck in their veins would know that it wasn’t actually artisanal water.

I was about to set the glass back down on the self when I heard…

I didn’t know what I heard.

Turning to one-way window on the wall across from the bathtub, the street-lamps outside joined our garden lights in splashing golden pools across our dewy lawn and our rambling flowerbeds. Beyond, the city was like a nest of fireflies tucked into the bay. I looked around, trying to find the source of the noise. Chugging sprinklers rose from our next-door neighbors’ yard to spritz it with fans of falling water. Listening to the spray, I was about to dismiss that strange noise as a figment of my imagination when, suddenly, I heard it once more. And, more than hear it, I saw it, too. Short red beams flashed in the clouds above the sea, lighting them up like distant gunfire. For an instant, a larger brightness bloomed, illuminated a long, sinuous silhouette, but then everything went dark and I saw no more. Bleary-eyed, I stood in the bathroom for several minutes, waiting to see signs of debris or an aerostat crash, but, no, there were no more signs of strange occurrences.

Well, whatever it was, I’d probably hear about it on the news tomorrow.

Tried, I turned back toward bed, but just as I took my first step, the moon came out from behind the veil of clouds. It was a lovely sight. I spent a moment drinking it in. Beneath the moonlight, I could just barely make out tides of glistening dust floating over the hills. They tinted the air with the subtlest shade of green. I watched the play of the current, its eddies and its streams, wondering what trick of light was responsible for it. But then I yawned and turned away, shuffling off to bed, where I quickly fell into a dreamless slumber.