Every night I have the same dream that has dogged me my whole life, a panicked nightmare that dug its talons into my subconscious as a boy and refuses to allow but a moment’s peace. I am a boy again, camping on the outskirts of the Heaven gate plateau, the sweet scents of toasted fruits drifting from the twinkling of a hundred rivers across the valley floor below burning bright against the night’s sky. I was young… I’d seen less than a half dozen summers and all of them spent fleeing toward the Heaven Gate, but I was never alone, my parents, siblings… even when all the Realms descended to chaos we’d manage to preserve our own little world.
Suddenly the fires dim, the light begins to drain and darkness itself begins to ripple like the current of a river, shifting and writhing as they dance across the sky snuffing out the stars one by one as they flood to the stone edifice of the Heaven Gate. All of a sudden the Shadow stops, coalescing into a blackened mirror that fills the gate void, and I am drawn… trembling with every step toward it. All around my the world is still and lifeless, embers once cast skyward by the night’s breeze hang frozen, the faces of the refugees whose resolute hope and joy even against the trials they have endured now lay pallid and contorted into haunting Deatmasks with eyes as black as the mirrored gate.
Still I continue, drawn to the gate with a longing that overrides every sense, every fear that now grips my body. I reach… fingers extending to run over the icy smooth lake of shadow that fills the gate, perfect… pure… unsullied darkness.
Suddenly I’m falling, the darkness that once barely reached my fingertips now rushes around me, I fall for what feels like an eternity… surrounded by both nothing and entirely too much, not a thing to grab to slow my descent and nor air to fill my lungs as my strangled panic gasp remains caught in my throat. The darkness breaks…. and I hang there in the nothing, ahead of me a form appears… a man, Aelf perhaps whose pale features are at once entirely too perfect and haunting, a perfect symmetry… an artists rendition of beauty perhaps but entirely too perfect even for an Aelf to possess. A perfection that is haunting, a mockery of true life as narry a flaw mars an inch of porcelain skin, clad in flowing robes that shift and flow into the nothingness that surrounds us, floating on unnatural…
In its pointed hands lay a thread, golden and glistening as it pulls taut, my captors’ unnatural visage contorts into a leering smile as their blackened orbs of eyes stare into my very soul and with an effortless grace snaps the thread in two.
And I begin to crumble, the moment the thread breaks I can feel it flooding through my body, first my feet… tingling in a way that sets my soul on edge, collapsing into a cascade of blackened sand, my hands… my chest that finally releases my strangled gasp until finally it reaches my neck… and I awake.
Surrounded by sand… this blasted desert sand, for a moment I panic… perhaps I am still unravelling… unbinding… ending. But it is not time for that sweet release, because I am close now… closer than I have ever been. And I can feel it… all my life the dreams have been leading me here.
