The Dream
In the middle of the field, the air is still. The stones are cool white, and the light is soft and warm. The grass is a strange, rich, deep green, as though the Earth's blood itself went into its colouring. A sweet smell drifts slowly around me, fresh and earthen, dim, still, and ancient. It is the smell of stones, and plants, and the loam of good earthbound soil, dark with clean, cold water.
It is the smell of land - land I've never seen.
There is a mist in the distance, so I cannot see far, but the land rises up around me like the levels of a Skycity, only rounder and greener - softer, smoother. Hills, I think they are called. And the stones are steel-grey, cracked and worn and old. Nothing like the sharp, evenly-sized, pale beige drainage gravel which is the only rock I know.
And away there - and there! - in the mist, fading off into nothingness, there are other things. Rustling, imposing things. Huge, even though they are a long ways away. . . though, not so long as that, now. They rise up before me, up and up. . . not nearly as tall as the Spire, but these things. . . are moving. They sway in the soft, sweet breeze like nothing I have even encountered before. A swishing, whispering, sighing, dancing, hoard of. . . of. . . A word drifts up from my long-ago school days, and falls from my lips in a horrified whisper.
"Trees."
There are so many of them - they surround me. I try to shrink away, to run from them, but all at once I am among the great columns. They close in upon me, a fell multitude of giants, cold green and brown and black. The ground is now a blank, grey surface, and smells harder, colder, more menacing.
What lives here?
The mist is nearer now, a wall of it in every direction, swirling, flowing, whirling round and round me like the eye of a storm. Through the trees it is all I can see - a pale, heavy fog that tingles against my skin and pricks in my nostrils. There is no way out - the trees go on forever. . .
Then, there is a chime of bells, very far off. I look straight up, and there, a single bright star sits in the middle of a circle of velvet black, even though the mist glows as if the sun is out. Another rushing, whispering sound whips past me in the mist, stirring it to a frenzy, and a smell of some wild flower I do not know breathes in my face.
The mist curls up closer and closer to me - not grasping, which would be bad, but constricting, which is far worse. I look up again, desperately holding on to my one star as the walls of clammy cold close in. It winks and blinks and wavers with the mist - a great eye, unbound by time and space. For a moment I taste blood, and then I scream, and scream, and scream, but there is no sound, the mist has taken me.
I awake, not with a start, but with a sudden creepy feeling of being watched. The air is hard and stifling in my mouth. A distant growling roar sounds all around me.
A sudden stabbing flash of caustically bright white light slices across my vision, and a keening, shrieking howl deafens me.
I nearly cry out before I remind myself. Rain. Lightning. The wind over the algal mats often brings electric storms with it. There is nothing to be afraid of. A nightmare and a storm. Nothing more.
I sit up, carefully. Fat, icy droplets are crawling their way across my little window. There is a slapping sound as another sheet of water pelts my small shelter. I watch the tiny cold black shapes squirm across the plastic, thankful I have this protection, at least.
A faraway bolt of lightening flashes between the clouds, and for a moment, I think I see. . . something.
No.
Someone.
It is the merest glimpse, in the wavering uncertain light of a momentary flash of lightning.
But there was a man. I'll swear to it, even now.
A man. Tall, broad, his arms out in front of him, oblivious to wind, and rain, standing not ten feet away from my tent. The light flashes behind him again, and I swear, he was looking at me.
For a heart-clutching moment, I wonder if I am still dreaming.
Then the lightning flashes yet again, and there is nothing.
I decide it doesn't matter. If I am dreaming, or if I am not, I am going back to sleep.
Another long string of sharp white flashes and clapping rolls of thunder delay my rest for some minutes, but eventually, the rattling, shushing, tap-tap of rain takes hold, and I drift away again, this time sleeping until morning.