First Dream

The first sense to return to me was hearing.

There was a quiet... something different from the one that had covered me up to that moment. From the lack of white noise, I went to the shifting quiver of sand over stone, with a rumble in the distance.

Touch and balance were still far from me, and even with my returned hearing, I felt like falling sideways while at the same time there was no end to my body. Used to have a clear limit defined by my skin, I was almost like a splatter of ink on a folded page, spreading, spreading...

After some time, or no time at all, with the sounds I could hear constantly waving between overwhelming and faint, making me feel like my eardrums, if I had any, were about to burst, only for the quiet to become once more so all-encompassing that there was no end between me and the nothingness that was still everything that I could see.

Grunting, I discovered that I had a mouth capable of uttering sounds, and as if I had turned on a switch, the world rippled around, me, nothingness fading away as it was switched for a black, inky, steam covering everything until that too was siphoned away by some force I couldn't see.

And my feet were left standing on an endless expanse of sand. Like a desert moving as if it was the sea, trying to casually swallow me whole.

I didn't know if I had a face, but if I did, I'd surely be frowning as I saw the grains of dirt slowly climb over my limbs.

I blinked, and I realized that I had suddenly obtained an actual body: with a distracted expression of my will, I took a step forward, the sand breaking apart as it resulted incapable of holding me still. Why does the sand feel alive?

I looked around as I picked a random direction and started to walk: "For that matter, what the hell is going on? This must be the weirdest dream ever."

As I walked, the rumbling and the scraping of sand over a stone that had lulled me out of the bleak nothingness of Before became steadily stronger, and at some point, under a slate-grey sky that covered a too uniform sea of ever-shifting sands, something appeared on the horizon.

Once more, time felt immaterial to me as I crossed an unimaginable distance while I came to the realization that the rumble was, in fact, a growl.

And the shifting sands started to show nook and crannies that were of the same inky blackness that had covered me before... No. I realized with a new frown, these are blue... I looked intently, and saw how different those signs were from each other, and from the shapes that one would find in a canyon-riddled area.

Finally, I reached the stone against which the sand had been grating until then, and I saw that there wasn't only one: very much like a Menhir, a giant structure made of stone seemed to build a cage that stretched into the grey emptiness of the sky: within it, there was the origin of all the growling that had made my metaphorical bones quiver up to that point.

Churning restlessly on itself, growling at the world beyond his stone-made prison, there was a giant Tanuki.

One I had seen a lifetime before, colored cartoonishly and more or less harmless. This one though... this one was a completely different beast.

The sand made his body churn and move constantly, while the inky grooves of arcane symbols stretched one into another, their colors never changing despite the differences in the faint light and shadows that reached him through the stone-y cage he was held within.

Then, the One-Tailed Demon turned towards me, its four-pointed, yellow eyes pinning me as it opened its mouth and outright roared: the wind whipped past me as deep gouges were dug into the sand behind me, hate and sheer bloodlust running past me as if in a wave.

"Youuuuu!" the Tanuki howled, and its voice was the whisper of a hurricane, the rage seeping within it coloring the entire world I was in of a red, toxic tint as the mere sound carried the Chakra Beast's Killing Intent in a large scale attack that threatened to drown me.

Instinctively I rose a hand in front of me, and just as naturally, a wall of sand rose to intercept the offensive of the one-tailed Tanuki.

I blinked in surprise as I felt a strange connection to the sand, something unique: not quite like having another limb, but similar to what I assumed being in two places at once would be like.

With another thought, the sand rose from the ground around me, twirling constantly around the cage in front of me until it was buried. A last flex of will made the desert I was in swallow the cage, and I was left once more in an empty, evershifting plain: but this time the rumbles and screams of the Tanuki were muted, and only a single pillar of stone jutted out of the ground where the cage had been.

I took a step forward, my hand still held aloft and almost touching the stone.

I could still feel it the Tanuki, buried deep, the impossible weight of the sand muting it. Some part of me was aware of the Beast, and of a 'power' of sorts that I could perceive at the edge of my senses.

For the first time, I spoke: "What the actual fuck?"

Not quite like one of the traditional senses, but... as if I was tensing a muscle while knowing that I could do more.

With that same awareness, I knew that something was changing, albeit slowly: as if I was rising from deep underwater, I shook myself awake, a startled scream leaving my lips while confusion immediately rose to the forefront of my mind.

My voice isn't like that, even screaming because of a weird dream... My thoughts were sluggish as I turned my head slightly, only for my neck to jerk uncomfortably, unable to move my head as I wished.

Around me, there were voices speaking animatedly, and the world looked fuzzy to my eyes.

This better not be some reincarnation-related shit! But just as the thought formed in my head, tiredness overwhelmed me, and I fell asleep.