AN: Let me know what you think. This is just the prologue. I'll post the first chapter later if anyone seems interested.
Illusory
by opaque mask
Prologue.
It's often been said that dreams are a reflection of your fate. Kind of like looking into time's own mirror, seeing the image of your future self floating in a pool of water. There's the constantly shifting tides, the surface trembling with the weight of gravity and potential pushing down into it, and all of this comes to you while you sleep. It's still the same face peering down through the shallows and into the changeless undercurrent - only altered in ways you cannot yet imagine.
This is merely a theory - an according to some original.
Let me give you some advice - don't believe everything you hear because a lot of it (if you want the whole truth) can't live up to its own rationale. People say a lot of things. It doesn't mean they're all true. That crazy old man with whiskers growing out of ears who sits in the back of the bus screaming over the end of the world for the last twenty years – he sure says a lot. But everything is thrown out of your head the second you step off that bus because you know it's all bullshit, right?
I've learned, over time, that as far as animals go (because it can't be denied that we aren't animals) - we are a voluble species. We know how to disarm logic and turn it into meaningless, colorful oration; we are lovers of words and speakers for infant greatness struggling to fit into its first bloom. But it's the proof I'm looking for – that we're all looking for. And for most people, well…proof is something they're clean out of.
Dreams, to me, are just dreams. It's still the same person you've always been - and always will be - staring into the abyss of unconscious reflection. Vain details. Insignificant moving pictures that a restless mind makes up to pass the time. Sure, there's hidden meanings – aren't there in all things concerning life? But in the end we forget them. Because they don't matter.
Deliberations of the imaginary, of a brain at rest, can't change the course of your own future. You control that.
It began, one night, when a storm tore open a sky black with swollen heavy clouds.
And all across the desert, terrible pelting rain bled into the melting sand.
I shot up sometime between three and four, eyes wide and glazed with fear.
With a cold dripping sweat clinging to my skin and fusing me to the tangled sheets,
a scream tearing through my parched throat, drowned out by the sound of rolling thunder.
I'd wondered if dreams really could be more than illusions of the night, of a pale shade reflection of our waking moments.
His hands are stained black by the conspiring fingers of night. Outside, it must be dusk, the world's color draining, sinking into a formless star-dusted gray. He is cold, pressed up against my skin, propped over the raised flesh that recoils away from his slinking beast-like form. I can feel him breathing. Like the infecting calm that plagues the frozen air before a winter storm. But maybe that's just it – it isn't him radiating all that cold. Maybe it's me – the paralyzing ice fear seeping out of my pores.
The voice, now. Not human. Maybe the hollow ash-riddled voice of a demon. Snake-like, it slithers into my ear, urges me forward into the overgrowth of gloom shrouding the hall. Further into the peeling twilight I go. He leads me there, his sharp teeth grazing my neck, the muscles failing me and straining back to let him closer in.
And I can feel him, all of him, his body of pale ice marble and his cruel demon's leer pinned against my bare throat.
Two words are all I remember before the black receding void swallows me whole.
"All mine."
They're really only dreams...
Aren't they?