Part One
I keep dreaming the strangest dreams. I know that I am dreaming, but I can never remember where I am from, where I lay down, or where I am sleeping. In my dreams, there is no beginning or end, just the black confines of the moment. There is naught but the golden thread slivering here and there.
The golden thread slithers about, meandering under the emerald trees, leaping over the ragged cliffs, riding the gushing rivers – running, slipping, gliding until it converges upon an elvin maiden. She dances haughtily, naked beneath the glaring sun. The golden thread surges forward, ensnaring her in its grasp. Then, oddly, it grows, covering her, encircling her until she is clothed in silken golden splendor.
She dances, encompassed in gold. The sun falls and the pale moon rises. The gold appears almost silver beneath the bewitching light of the night. Then, saddest of all peculiarities, her healthy pale skin turns to ashy black. She screams in horror, her golden clothes undulating and throbbing in brilliant golden array, as though the golden thread slowly yanks and unravels the life from her.
Her face turns ashen, her cheeks hollow, her eyes a vacant black. Her skin cracks. Fissures run courses down her face and over her breasts. She howls, as if in pain, and shatters. Shattered like glass across a stone floor, though I thought she would instead blow away like ash.
At the end of my dream, all that remain are the scattered shards of her remains and the golden cloth crouching over the black glass, crying over her its golden tears.
You always told me I had such strange dreams, didn't you? If only I could remember who you are, to whom it is that I speak.
Perhaps it is you, this golden thread traversing here and there, enticing me to follow. Perhaps you are the lady enshrouded in gold. But no, that cannot be, for your voice is decidedly masculine while she is enticingly feminine.
Yet, somehow, when I think of gold, I think of you.
Who are you, this magnificent voice thundering in my mind?
When I think of you each time I dream, I wake. Such a tragedy is waking, when the waking is to the nightmare.
And in my waking nightmare, I see ghoulish creatures standing over me, their drool dripping into my eyes as their putrescence causes my stomach to flip and flutter with nausea.
Cool iron clamps my hands to the rough, splintered wood table beneath me. I struggle to move my body, but other restraints that I cannot see or feel on my skin constrain me. I am constrained in a living hell and wish that I could awake.
Only, this is the waking world, isn't it?
A fire blazes by my head. I smell the acrid smoke of a forge. A hot poker is thrust into my view. Words that I do not comprehend are uttered by the monsters standing over me. When I do not answer, the hot poker is shoved into the crevice between two ribs.
I scream out in agony. I pull against the iron braces, trying to free my hands to reach for you, only I do not know where you are.
I do not even remember who you are.
Why am I, in the haze of my great pain, reaching for you?
And why are you not here?
As I scream, I wish you were by my side. As I gasp in pain, I wish you would tear these monsters to shreds. As I gurgle on my own blood, I cry out for you to just come and save me.
But when the torture is finished, when I begin to fade and sob for your not coming, I hear you—somehow I hear you from across a very great distance.
Breathe, I hear your grand voice whisper. Just breathe.
Because you commanded it, I take a ragged breath, and keep on breathing.