Chapter 28

The First Encounter

Part 3B

Julian Point of View

For the last hour, I have been in a state that has affected me physically and emotionally. For one thing, I have never walked or run approximately all my life. The one I did today was meeting the famous emperor in this forest, then again meeting this other group of people. Some of them look suspicious to me, though I can't figure out the reason. I was trying my best to keep calm, and stay away from the sight of the people, and not to get the attention of any of them. I don’t know why?. I am here, but when I saw the emperor and heard his story later, I got a little excited. I felt like I was on an adventure, but that excitement quickly changed to anxiety, which overtook me completely when we came to the place where we were supposed to rest. I was tired and hungry at the same time, although usually I don’t mind the hunger that much since I usually eat less than anyone else that I know of, and the small meals that I have, which are mostly two meals a day, were enough for me to keep going until the next day. But since I was running for a distance I couldn’t tell how and walking also for a while, that consumed the small amount of energy I had in my body. That was the reason I felt what I was feeling, including that I was scared of what I didn’t know, but without a doubt the situation that I was in was not one I could control the outcome of. That may be part of the reason, but still, with all those people around and beside me, there was nothing that could make me feel relaxed and not make me feel afraid of what may come or what will happen in any minute.

The feeling of fear, the feeling of hunger, feeling cold during the night, when there is no cover from the heat of the sun during the day, how many people can say that they get to feel all those feelings every single day in their life? All living being feel one of those feeling several times in their life time, some doesn’t even for once in their life, lets start with the feeling of fear, when this ominous feeling called fear starts invading your body, it starts form the heart with feeling that is like something squeezing your heart, and from there it radiated to all your body flowing the veins of your blood, then the body starts shaking, your arms and legs becomes week, so week that you cat even hold your body, here people are different since there are those who are able to face their fear, and still try to go ahead even a step at a time, and those who became overwhelmed by that feeling and who froze in their place, and those who can’t endure it and lose consciousness at once as a defensive mechanism from the brain to save it self from that overwhelming shock.

As for the hunger its totally a different storey, since no one can describe the true feeling of the hunger, people my miss understand the word hunger by being hungry, which are totally different things, although everyone feels hungry sometimes even during the day when you miss a meal, that when use that word “I am Hungry” some even go to the extant and say “I am Starving”, but far from it he or she never felt the real feeling of starvation of hunger, the real hunger when you are starving even you are unable to breath, your body consumes itself until nothing remains from you except some skin and bones that will fade with time it self, when you become like a ragged doll without weight or power unable even to fend the wind from yourself by covering this skin and bones with even a sheet.

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Those were the feelings that I grew up with every single day and night, whether I was awake or asleep: hunger mostly during the day and fear at night; fear of the unknown; fear of the things that I see when I close my eyes; nightmares that, when I wake up, still follow me during the day; vivid in my memory if I was able or had the items for drawing, I would be able to draw them. Unfortunately, I don’t get those nightmares only at night; even during the day, they don’t spare me. The difference is that between day and night, there is only one thing: at night, it comes as a dream, but at daytime, it comes as a different episode that makes me look like I passed out and lost my consciousness, but the fact is that I enter a state like a dream and awake at the same time, a state like I am dreaming at the same time I am awake. In that state, I become in a strange state where I am able to see what is going on around me, but I cannot communicate with anyone. At the same time, the vision of the nightmare I see, which is not all the time much different from what I see at night, still runs in the background like a suppurate scan that I can watch both of them simultaneously, and on some occasions, it involves the people or the places that I am around. That same thing was what happened to me right now. While I was standing and waiting for the instructions of the emperor about what we were going to do next and ready to assist with setting up the tents, suddenly the nightmare started. I don’t know when I fell on the ground without any notice this time, not like it used to give an advance notice, but I used to it, so I developed a sixth sense for it when it was about to attack.

But this time, my nightmare was totally different than any one I have ever seen before. It felt like I was literally looking and watching myself from above, and I was looking at the same place that I was at this moment, but instead of being on the ground, I was standing beside the emperor, his wife and kids were behind him, and his brother Luke was guarding them from behind, carrying the same rifle that he had on him last time I looked at him a few seconds ago. The rest was in front of us, making a semicircle in front of us, between each one of them a little more than two meters. The view didn’t change for a few seconds; nobody was moving or talking; everyone was looking in front of him or her. I looked at the location they were looking at in front of them; about five hundred meters ahead of us, there was a mass of black smoke, covering almost, if not more than, one hundred square meters, from above where I was watching at that moment. I could see clearly that it was shaped like a cube, although it was not a solid, and I could see the smoke moving within it and at the same time around it, but still, the shape of the squire cube was totally clear to me. The height was the only thing that was different from the location I was watching, which was increasing and reducing simultaneously like it was breathing going up and going down.

Suddenly it shook, like somebody was shaking it, and on the front side, or accurately, the side that was facing us, it opened up, like waves parting ways, and what came out of it was one of my worst nightmares. the one that whatever happened I will never forget, the one that always when I see it in my dreams or accurately nightmares, the one that gives me the most fright and scares me the most always, and the worst thing was that it was looking for me specifically; its eyes were directed above everyone else and looking at me directly. That happens a lot of times, and it's always my que to wake up since my week heart can't hold it anymore. The fear inside me goes to a different level, but this time something else tells me that what I was seeing was not just a dream or nightmare, but it was real. When I have those kinds of nightmares, I always can't wait to open my eyes and see that everything around me is different from what I was seeing in the nightmare. But this I wished that everything would just start as a nightmare and end as a nightmare. This feeling that when I open my eyes, I am going to see that thing in reality was truly overwhelming, because simply because I always used to see the nightmares, but I was just a spectator, but this time I was in the nightmare, and that was still looking at me, and I didn’t wake up.