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“Who-who’s there?” I coughed out, spinning wildly on my heel until the world was a blurring motion around me. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t pinpoint the stranger's voice.
In all my panic, I almost missed the second, more-feminine voice. “What’s this? Porridge?”
Still no bodies in sight.
A third woman's voice, deeper and more powerful than the first. “Looks like it. Your favourite.”
“Yuck!” the second voice squealed. “I think it’s poisoned!”
The same guttural voice that spoke first let out a cackle. “Perhaps she is not a friend after all.”
You’re losing it.
The third voice matched his cackle. “Not poisoned, idiots. She just can’t cook.”
“Who’s there!” I screamed again, still spinning around like a topper-toy. “Show yourselves! I-I kno-know karate!”
“What’s karate?” one of them snickered.
“Something that she doesn’t know,” another answered.
All three of them erupted into a bout of contagious laughter that floated high into the clouds, forcing the sun to somehow shine brighter upon me. Upon my deathbed.
Damn you, Charlotte. It was starting to look like I would be reunited with her far sooner than we planned.
A crack sounded against the earth that resembled a whip, followed by what I swore was a misting of purple dust.
Then a person. From nowhere.
“W-w-what the –”
“Easy, now,” he murmured, one hand stretched out as if to balance me.
Stammering backwards, my heel hooked on a small rock and sent my whole body whirling down to the ground.
All that I had left was to look up at him, at this strange hallucination that had appeared from thin air.
But his voice, I recognized it immediately as the one who had spoken to me.
For a moment, the world halted around me.
It would have been logical to leap to the occasion and defend myself against the sudden stranger, but I was rooted within my own dread, my whole body taken hostage by exhaustion and an overall lack of care.
So instead of doing what any logical person would do, I dropped my eyes to my knees as I pulled them to my chest.
“I’m going insane…” I began to mutter to myself, rocking back and forth on the hillside as he stared down at me with a predatory slant to his neck.
Long, dark-brown hair that bordered black — even beneath the sun — slid along his neck, the waves and kinks of it curtaining his face until he reached up and pushed some of it back.
“Calm down.”
“C-calm down?” I stuttered yet again, even though I tried with all of my might to bottle the fear.
There was something in the air. Nothing tangible that I could reach out and snatch, to roll it around my palm and examine it with reason.
Instead it was as soft as a breeze over my skin, yet as searing as steam from boiled water as it rippled over my body.
The hairs along my arms and neck stood at alert as I snapped my eyes up, examining the stranger in front of me.
Was I drugged?
Perhaps not intentionally. It was very possible that the water that I had used for my breakfast had been contaminated. Maybe it was the mushrooms that my spoon had touched. Perhaps I was hallucinating, or maybe I had fallen asleep on the side of this hill without even noticing.
My eyes roamed over his body, accepting the latter as the truth. He did seem like the type of thing to be born in a dream and only a dream, from his sharp features to his brutish body. Even the way that his eyes seemed capable of weaponizing charm was like something right out of my sleep.
Another body appeared out of nowhere, just behind him. “Are we sure this one is completely sane?” Her voice was light and elegant, her head tipped to the side where some of her coffee-like hair dripped over her face.
“Are any of them sane?” A third appeared, the woman with the deep resonation to her voice. Violence and chaos swarmed in the depths of her eyes, making me wonder if the hair that was pulled back into a braid was actually dried blood and not just dyed to look that way.
“Don’t look at them,” the man commanded me, his dark eyes latching on to mine. They faded into the vast shadowed-green that surrounded us, as if they had been born of the same pigment. “Look at me.”
“You’re not real,” I said, though it was more of a question than a statement.
It had been many years since I had partook in vivid dreams like this one.
The medication that I pumped into my body every morning was enough to numb me to the world, continuing into my unconscious state and stealing all possible whimsical dreams. On occasion, when sleep eluded me for hours and I took enough melatonin to knock out a horse, I’d be lucky enough to have vague memories appear in the hours of my slumber.
But nothing this vibrant, nothing as powerful as what I was within at this moment.
He tipped his head back, parted his lips, and let out a grumbling laughter that was capable of silencing the entire meadow. “Oh, I’m real.”
I wasn’t thrilled with how his eyes roamed all over me, going glassy occasionally before he blinked and brought them back into focus. Clutching my spoon tight in my hands, I lifted it up and in front of me.
“What do you want?”
“What do you want?” He cocked a dark brow.
It had been many years since I had wanted anything. And a few more since I had spoken of any desires deep within my heart.
“I want you all to get away from me.”
He crouched, his towering height still several inches above mine. “That’s not how this works, darling.”
Slowly beginning to crawl backwards and away from him, I felt my brows press against one another. “How what works?”
The one with cocoa-hair giggled to herself, a natural joy to the creases against her eyes. “I don’t think she meant to provide this offering.”
“Be quiet, Niamh,” the man hissed. When his eyes finally met mine again, he tried his best to relax his scrunched face. “You provided us with offerings.”
As if I didn’t understand — because I didn’t — he rose and moved towards where I had been seated moments prior. “Porridge, it seems. A necklace – though I assume Shea has already claimed it for herself. And… dust?”
“Ashes, Killian,” the crimson-haired woman growled, who was starting to look like Shea due to the fact she had Charlotte’s necklace wrapped around her fist. “You can be so ignorant.”
Killian, the man who had approached me, shot her a look full of unpleasantry before he moved back towards me. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I just stared at them all, blinking rapidly to try and wake myself from the strangest of dreams.
“An offering — intentional or not — to pixies can be rewarded with a blessing.”
Did I even need any further evidence that this was a dream?
I let a bitter laugh out. “What? P-Pixies? Seriously?”
The look on all three of their faces suggested that it was, indeed, serious.
“What is it that you seek?” He crouched once more. I was starting to think that it was supposed to make him less intimidating, but it somehow made him worse.
For the briefest of moments, I felt something other than drowning as I let my mind settle into this dream. If I was lucky enough to have one after not for so long, it seemed only right to lean into it, to drink it up and absorb as much of the vividness into my memory as possible.
So I did. I opened my mind, something that I had not done in almost a decade, and let the world in.
The meadow around us was alive with the symphony of nature; a chirping and trilling from deep in the trees behind us and a buzzing of insects beneath me.
The sun was more powerful than I ever remembered it being, warming every inch of my exposed skin as I looked to the man crouched at my side.
I didn’t want to admit it, not to myself or to the witnessing world beyond, but I was feeling something other than crippling darkness.
Dreams have a purpose, right? This emergence of my subconscious mind in front of me was asking me what I sought. Maybe I no longer sought anything, but a younger version of myself did. One filled with hope and optimism that there would be an end to this tunnel.
So I whispered the one and only true desire I had allowed myself, “I want to see the light.”
He cocked his head at me. “I have no idea what that means.”
There wasn’t judgement in his eyes. All that lived within that dark-green was an intense curiosity as he watched me, unblinking.
“I’m shrouded in darkness,” I admitted, still pretending in a way that I had fallen asleep on this hillside and that I was speaking to my guardian angels. They looked far too ragged and of-the-dirt to be angels, but I wasn’t one to judge.
The corners of his lips pulled tight before a smirk flashed pearl teeth at me. “I’m not sure that I am capable of removing that from you, but perhaps I can give you something better.”
I could only stare at him.
“Ask me to show you something magnificent.”
That wild, unruly grin was contagious. As the seconds passed by of us staring at one another, I felt it transfer to me and wrap around everything that I was. Nodding, I let my intrigue spark behind my eyes. “Show me something magnificent.”