Ryo dreamed of moon fires and sun flowers.
They traced each step he took in the dark. When Ryo looked up, the sky gazed back down, and it wasn't all that different from the sky back home—except the lights were not stars, they were incandescent and mechanical, and the breeze that blew from heaven shone metallic and false. But they were beautiful. The Digital World unfurled before him, each layer overlapping, where one began and the other ended interminable.
He was being hunted.
A pack of fangmon skulked in the shadows of his steps. Ryo quickened his walk, strides brisk, then broke out into a run. They raced to follow him—as did the moon fire and sun flowers, delicate petals frozen forever on the point of blooming and flames twisted blue crystalline—baying for blood. The fangmon had deep voices, their howls strident as the clarion call and vast as the ocean that covered the net.
Ryo ran fast enough to stay ahead of them, but never quite fast enough to lose them. Their howls changed to laughter, vicious and relentless, wild exultations building to a fever pitch. Then Ryo tumbled over the ledge of a cliff, plunging down, down, down, swathed in flora and flames—
He awoke screaming.
The dream throbbed behind his eyes, so real, realer than anything here, and the terror of it caught in his throat. Ryo screamed. He screamed, and screamed, and screamed again. It was the cry of a cornered animal, torn and ragged and shrill, only rising in pitch the longer it lasted. There was no relief, only insistence that something they had no words for must be born, born amongst sound and fury. It was the truth of the universe as a primal scream.
Ryo was terrified. It swooned over his soul like snow and set his nerves aflame with the desire to unleash, to be set free at last, to—
"STOP! BE QUIET! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! I SAID, SHUT UP!"
Suddenly Cyberdramon towered over Ryo. He roared, loud enough to drown Ryo's screams; choke them out and wrestle them into the ground. Ryo stopped, more frightened of Cyberdramon than his own nightmares. In the darkness of night, Cyberdramon's outline could have been mistaken for a demon. Earth lingered above and behind them, sun and moon both.
His throat hurt. Ryo could taste dust there, dry and grit-caked, even as his chest heaved and his hands shook with barely suppressed emotion. Cyberdramon stared while Ryo found control once more. It had submerged again, the primal fear, to lay in wait for another dream or moment similar to what he had experienced before. Ryo would not experience it again if he forgot.
But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
Yes, forget. Forget, forget and trap the terror and the memory of the terror in a box. Then place another box around it, then another, like a series of Russian dolls, before burying it six feet under in the deepest furrows of his mind. It would be easier to move through this world ignorant, more a spectral creature than a person once fashioned from flesh and blood and bone. If Ryo wanted to survive, he must become stronger.
Cyberdramon watched Ryo stand and survey their camp. After a moment, Ryo spoke:
"I'll keep watch." His voice was hoarse from the screams, but intelligible.
The decision to act as if nothing had happened seemed to soothe Cyberdramon. He relaxed and turned away. Ryo paced around the perimeter they had established, lost in thought, waiting for time to pass and night to end.
