Nightmares

Cainwen: Man, you people are demanding reviewer! But, flattering, so pursuant to requests, Seàrlaid's POV piece "A Mother's Tale" will be paralleled by Cullough's POV of the same events in this story "A Father's Tale". All chapters will be the same time frame, approximately, and will share chapter titles and numbers. Understand though, if I am going to work my fingers to the bone writing not one but two prequels, you have to hold up your end of the bargain and REVIEW!!! Or else! I have a whole hive on my back now!!!

"Mama!"

The sorrowful, terrified cry echoes through the halls of the hive and startles me out of sleep. Beside me, Seàrlaid is already rising and carefully getting out of our bed, trying not to wake me, though she should know by now I am a light sleeper and I can sense her worry and our child's distress.

She wraps a shawl around her slender shoulders and slips out the room, silent as a breeze.

I roll over and readjust the blankets—she has left a warm hollow in the bed, but it will soon grow cold if I do not cover it.

From the other chamber, the sound of Durhan's sobs reach my ears, as well as the quiet, reassuring voice of my wife.

Another nightmare. Durhan has always had nightmares, and this more than his other peculiarities is what frightens his mother and I. Even when he was an infant, he must have had these nightmares. He would wake us, screaming, inconsolable until he saw the rest of his brothers and sisters, or the engine room, or his mother, or I. At first we thought that he was frightened by the shadows cast in our room or frightened of being in a different room from us. But when he began to speak and tell us what frightened him, we realized it was nightmares…nightmares like no child should have. Nightmares of death and destruction…nightmares about massacres committed by wraiths on humans, nightmares of rivers of blood, of hive walls lined with decaying corpses, of battles.

We cannot understand the nightmares or why he should so suffer from them. He has never seen battle or death. As an infant he had never heard of such things. Seàrlaid believes that he had these nightmares even before he was born. In the last months of her pregnancy, she would often wake at night or be troubled during the day because her unborn child was thrashing about, was screaming in her womb—she could feel it.

Durhan has calmed down—his sobs no longer reach my ears. Seàrlaid will probably stay with him until he sleeps again and then return to bed.

Durhan is the only one of our children who has ever had nightmare like this. The older ones, of course, have all had nightmares from time to time—it is a part of growing and becoming an adult. Taking on the troubles of others, just as they must learn to erect barriers between their minds and others; they must learn what can be shared, and what cannot, and how to create barriers for those things that cannot been breached or detected.

But Durhan is barely five summers old—he should not have nightmares.