Be it your imaginationno
Reality is only what it pretends to be
~Unknown
I was a weightless thing in a world that was always changing.
Always shifting out of alignment. None of it made sense, but I was beginning to accept that that was just the state of things.
It was all pieces strewn together in no particular order and our madness came from trying to make sense of it.
I was just one piece. A small one at that.
I floated in an endless ocean staring up at a sky littered with stars but no moon.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been drifting.
I found it calming. Even as a child, I enjoyed letting the current take me, but always, my mother warned me of the surface.
They all did. Monsters sailed upon the water in giant structures made of wood, harpoons and blades ready to rend and destroy us. All they were good for was dying.
I began to hum again. I’d been doing it for hours, over and over singing words my mother had lulled me to sleep with.
Our scales are stained with crimson red,
The hunters track us 'cross the sea,
They'll slice us down and leave us dead,
No mercy in their savagery.
Heave ho, beware the siren's cry,
Where blood and waves together churn,
Our voices echo terror's sigh,
As pirate blades begin to burn.
Our voices break like shattered light,
Where sailors' bones forever sleep
Our rage against their brutal fight
Will crash like waves both dark and deep,
Heave ho, beware the siren's cry,
Where blood and waves together churn,
Our voices echo terror's sigh,
As pirate blades begin to burn.
Our waters where such horrors creep
With vengeance in our melody,
Their cannons primed to rend and reap
The singers of the cruel, cold sea.
I beat my tail gently in the water, letting it push me wherever I might go. I was so alone in that place. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been anything but alone. I could see faces when I closed my eyes, but they were blurred, distorted versions of themselves. Ghosts.
Perhaps that place was my afterlife and solitude was all I had. Silent, cold solitude.
I did not mind it. I kept searching for something to grip onto. A memory. A figure. A desire. There was nothing.
And there was a certain contentment in having nothing. Nothing to gain. Nothing to lose.
I began to hum the song over again, letting the gentle undulation of the waves steal away my worries, whatever they might have been before I was in that place.
I could have stayed there forever, counting each little glowing flicker in the black sky.
Perhaps when I was done counting them, I would name them.
But then the blackness began to stir, to twist and bloom like ink bleeding into milk.
A sickly green seeped through the dark, staining my beautiful sky with its unholy glow.
I blinked myself from the dream’s soft hold, rising to see what hand had marred the heavens.
Turning slowly, I searched the horizon and there it was, the source of that dreadful light.
It lingered, still and spectral, casting its pall over the sea.
Through the shroud of green mist, I saw it take form.
A vast and solemn silhouette, a jagged crown of stone and shadow rising from the ocean’s depths, clawing at the trembling sky.
Everything in me told me not to go toward it, but for some unfathomable reason, I did.
I ducked under the water and I began to swim toward the strange mist. I thought I might have to resurface when I reached it, but as I approached, I found that what stretched beyond the water’s surface was but a fraction of the monolithic structures.
Below the surface, a city lay in ruins against black, volcanic stone as sharp as knives.
Gateways crumbled. Statues lay in pieces.
Towers looked half-eaten by time and disaster.
I followed a passageway between what were once buildings, each carved by meticulous hands, and came to an incline leading toward the surface.
When I emerged, I found myself in a colossal dome, illuminated by light for which I could not find a source.
I rose up on my arms, dragging myself out of the water along the rough obsidian until I could regain my legs.
Rising on two feet, I stared in awe at the intricately carved interior of the giant chamber.
Images of gods. Sirens. The fury of an ocean I never knew.
History written in stone with an artist’s chisel decorated a great hall.
Waves crashed against the exterior wall like angry animals stampeding to break through.
It shook the whole foundation. From above, water rained in like a storm, funneling through a rounded skylight.
“How did you find this place?” a voice said.
I spun around to see a tall, slender woman sitting in the shadows, her ebony hair hanging over her bare breasts.
She looked like… me. Or what I thought I looked like.
I scarcely remembered my face anymore. But then a memory flickered before me like a spark between two stones that had been struck together.
“Lyla?” I muttered.
The woman uncurled from the crevasse in which she was tucked and looked me up and down, her eyes darker than the obsidian beneath our feet.
“Has he grown bored of you?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Oh,” she smiled. “Losing ourselves already, are we?”
I wanted to ignore that. It made me feel cold and wretched inside, so I turned my eyes to the dome again.
“What is this place?”
“You don’t recognize it? This is where we were born. The city of the gods.”
I searched whatever fragmented recollections I had. I saw blood in the water. I heard screaming bouncing off the walls.
“Theloch,” I whispered.
“A dead city now,” Lyla said. “But still more lively than the depths. At least here, there is sound. The waves. The wind as it howls through the peaks. Sometimes, there is even light.”
I listened and as if on cue, the winds shifted and the whole dome sounded like it was a chorus of humming women.
The melody was haunting, yet strangely tender, and I found myself lulled by its ghostly grace.
Lyla, however, seemed to cherish it. Her eyes fluttered closed, a serene smile softening her face as she tilted her head to the dripping sea above, letting the falling water anoint her like a blessing from the heavens.
“How did I get here?” I asked.
“Dreams don’t often make sense.”
“Dreams?”
Lyla paused and stared at me. “Right. Well, soon, it will do no good to remind you that you are dreaming. Soon, he’ll have all of you and reality will mean nothing. The lines will blur until everything is just one big fucking nightmare.”
“How can I be dreaming? I am not even sleeping.”
“That is the beauty of dreams. They fool you. No matter how outrageous, you will always think them true.”
“Then how do you know this is a dream?”
“Because I can walk in dreams with my waking mind intact,” she sighed, running her nails along the stone pillars. “A trick I picked up over the years. It’s rare, I understand, but not impossible.”
My heart began to race, drowning out any other sounds. I shook my head, shrieks reverberating against the inside of my skull. The screams of many in agony.
“How many times has he made you watch them die, I wonder,” Lyla said. “Your pirate. That Naros that follows you like a pup. You remember every one, you know. Deep down. That is the point of this. To destroy the foundation so your walls simply crumble.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, come now, Dahlia. You’ll bore me with your stupidity.
I can’t help you, you know. Even if I wanted to.
You have wandered into my dream, but you won’t find sanctuary here.
My mind hasn’t been my own since I ripped my way out of mother’s womb.
He’ll find you. Then he’ll punish us both because he enjoys it.
” She raised her hand, looking at her gnarled nails after the walls had chipped them to rigid points.
“There was a time I grew to enjoy it, too. I suppose when something is done to you enough, you must find delight in it or it will just…” She looked up at me, smiling. “Destroy you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” she barked.
I began to pace, scraping my fingers through my wet locks. “No, this isn’t right.”
“Your hunter will give up soon. You’ve been asleep too long and humans are so fickle. Or so I’ve heard. Until Dornwich, I’ve only come to know corpses. Living humans are quite… interesting. Somewhat unpredictable, which is more than I expected.”
“Vidar,” I whispered. His face flashed before me. The smell of rum and leather and salty, ocean breeze. My heart flipped with worry. “He wouldn’t give up.”
“Wouldn’t he? You are just using him, are you not? To shield you from father’s gaze? Once he realizes he is nothing more, I imagine all this will seem rather unimportant to him. Perhaps he will have mercy and just kill you. Although he cannot even build up the will to kill me.”
“He should,” I said, falling to my knees and covering my ears with my palms, though it did nothing to guard against the remnants of agony playing in my head like the wrong chord on a violin. “Then this would be over.”
“Don’t be so na?ve. It will never be over.” Lyla stepped forward, slowly crouching in front of me and canting her head to one side. “And this is just the beginning.”
As if answering my panic, the stone beneath us began to shake.
The tremors rippled across the floor and the waves outside began to beat with an even deadlier rage.
I looked back to find nothing but empty darkness where Lyla had just been standing.
Once more, I was alone, but my soul knew I had not always been that way.
I’d lost something. Someone. I watched the stone crack and crumble around me, burying me in rubble.
But as the rubble rose, blocking the light, it all disintegrated into dust. And then into whisps of black smoke.
I was in the water once more, my body getting dragged down into that stifling, impenetrable darkness.
It invaded my lungs, my stomach, owning me. Eating me alive. Violating me.
“Shall we continue our game?” a deep voice thundered from the void.
All went black. Pure, dense shadows wrapped me in nothingness.
When the silence came, I truly felt as if I had been erased from the world.
It was only when something broke the silence that I realized it was just another page turning.
The in-between was so empty. I peered down at my feet and found myself standing on black water, ripples expanding from my bare soles.
“Where is this?” came a faint whisper.
I turned to see a figure in the blackness sitting on her heels and hunched over herself, her bloodied hands in her lap. Long, silky tresses of black hair hung over her sharp shoulders.
“Another dream,” she whispered.
From the dark came another figure, separating from the emptiness in the shadowy form of a woman with no features. She walked like she was made of vapor, incomplete and phantom-like.
“Another dream,” she shadow whispered in an almost identical tone.
“Why?” the woman asked.
“Why?” mimicked the shadow.
“I’ve given him two daughters already.”
“I’ve given him two…”
“He wants another.”
“Another. This one he will keep.”
“This one he will keep? But…”
The shadow crouched behind the woman, putting its smoky hands on her pale shoulders and whispering into her ear.
“This one he will keep. You will be done.”
“I will be done,” she repeated.
The shadow dissipated into the void like it was never there, leaving inky stains on the woman’s shoulders. She slowly raised her head, revealing a rounded belly… and a face I would never forget.
“Reyna,” I muttered to myself.
She stood on two legs, staring up at something I could not see.
Blood began to pour out of her, turning the black water a deep crimson.
She collapsed to the ground, biting back the agony of childbirth as a small, bloodied infant emerged into the world, wrapped in its own umbilical cord.
With tiny hands, it ripped at the fleshy restraints and from its mouth came a deafening cry that sent ripples vibrating through the water’s surface.
My mother lifted her head, staring down at the bloody mass writhing between her legs, but before her hands could find the babe, tendrils shot forth from the dark and coiled around the newborn, dragging it by its tiny ankles into the shadows.
The screams grew louder. Shriller. Tortured.
I went rigid at the terrible sound as my mother reached silently toward the dark for the little infant she didn’t even get to touch or see.
I had never known my mother to love anything, but if I were a fool, I would say those wary eyes loved that child as it was taken from her, but there was no time to mourn it before she began to strain again against the pains of labor.
She swallowed her suffering cries as another bloodied infant slowly slid from her body into the water, silent and unmoving.
The shadowy figure of a woman returned from the darkness and stood over her as Reyna pushed up on her elbows to ogle the motionless babe.
“Another,” the shadow whispered.
“Another?” my mother said.
She struggled to sit up, scooping the little baby into her hands. She brought it to her bosom, cradling it until its little hands flexed. My mother stared at it, her face vacant of expression as the newborn gradually came to life in her palms.
“Another,” she said softly. “He does not need to know.”
“He does not need to know,” the shadow repeated.