Submission (#8865) Approved

Dainsleif was by no means a stranger to the world of nightmares. There was a time when he was plagued by them on the daily, and they had continued onward seemingly as if they had no end; some had guessed then, that they lingered so long as he suffered the remnant of an unstable early life. Or, perhaps it was owed to some quirk within his own making, a hitch within the materiel. It could have been the fitful and capricious nature with which he was born, or the strange alignment of moons on the day of said happening. Whatever the origin was speculated to be, he had always seemed easily prone to weaknesses of the heart. Indeed, even now still, on the evenings when soulful malaise crept back into his self, and when the past had caught up with him once more, the nightmares came more easily than the good dreams. He himself had attributed these struggles to an overactive imagination that continued to the point of its own collapse. Over time, he had found ways to control it, and of unpleasant things and days of melancholy he would send into the dark corner of the mind where he did not frequent. 

But his brush with the corruption past the overwild had seemed to unravel the years gone by, returning him to where he was before. He was afraid to sleep, for at night he dreamt of the enigmatic daevas, forming them into everything that his mind believed them to be. Monsters great and small, in twisting shape and fiery form, danced stark in beastly shadow. They had an elemental silhouette, writhing unbounded and free, amorphous bodies punctuated at intervals by features that could be recognized as fragments their hellish anatomy. Beady eyes glowed through the miasma, and clawed hands stretched out to grab. Jaws snapped, open and shut, and the rhythmic rattling of bone and sinew curdled the dreamer’s blood. It was dark, very dark —

His mentor had told him once that nightmares were tests. That some elnin believed they were a sign of things to come, and a way for the body to prepare the mind for battles it could not as of yet begin to fathom. The things within nightmares are distortions of the truth from the real world, Dainsleif had remembered him say. Choosing the urge to escape can also be a response to it. But to banish the nightmare, well. You will have to understand it instead.

He was being chased by the daeva now, and he ran with as much force as his legs could muster. The creatures bayed like wild dogs, animalistic in their pursuit. They reached with spindly fingers and bit at his ankles, one moment close enough to be within reach and the next, yards and yards away. Fear kept him from looking back, and as his distance from the beginning grew greater, the dreamscape began to morph.

—What do you mean, understand?

He was back at the mountain in Kyendi, and it was as dark as the night that he had been born. The path to the mana well remained green, but as he chased it deeper into the forest, it withdrew into a point in the far horizon. The grass withered before his paws could brush against it, and the branches that decorated the canopy shriveled before his very eyes. He wanted to cry out, to ask the magic to stay, but his legs could not catch up, and his unheard voice fell behind in the wind. When he finally teetered to a stop, breathless and distraught, he found before him the well as it really was, once again — a lifeless amalgamation of rock and thorn. The colorless crystals stood leaning, inert sentinels in a sleep deeper than death.

And he saw the others, too. The corruptions that he blocked from his heart, for the hurt had grown too strong. The desecrated shrines with their broken roofs and torn rope, and the flowing of thick miasma through their eaves. Everywhere it had spread, turbid streams trickling into the clouds, returning to the earth as miry rain. Why did it all happen? he would sometimes ask towards no one in particular. And he never did dare to seek the truth, for in his soul he knew that what he feared greater than the answer was the possibility that it simply did not exist. He didn’t want to believe in the pointlessness, in the hopelessness.

—Let it guide you instead. It is a part of you, after all.

And so he continued to run, but he remembered as he ran. The daeva still howled, still demanded their cruel injustice, still tried to drag him into the blackened mud where he had lost all else. Shutting it out and closing his eyes, Dainsleif recalled the face of his caretaker. He remembered the late birdsong that would echo across the valley as the sun perched upon the horizon, and he remembered how the cool dew would slide from its morning cradle and land lauhging pellets upon his head. He recalled the kindness and the warmth, the belief that all would be well in time. He had sat underneath one of those great growing crystals one afternoon, and it was the first time he had made the trek alone. A book, taken from a desk he was explicitly told not to touch, lay open on his lap, and he carefully traced the unfamiliar scripts by crystallight. Puri… purif? What was that word on the page again...? He could not recall.

The growls of monsters had stopped. He looked up from the book, and watched their rippling forms disappear into the coalescing rays of the sun. The rain had just stopped, and the clouds were parting their slender fingers from the sky. The valley opened up before him, and his vision became awash with the glow of green.