Not By Means of Morpheus - NSW [PG-13] (complete)

[Tiana Calthye]

Not By Means of Morpheus

 

Genre: Fantasy, surrealism, original fiction

Rating: PG-13. For surreal bull. Oh yeah, and for the fact that this story existed for me to torture a character a lot to try break her... so, y'know, it's by no means a pleasant fluffy story.

 

A/N: I had literally no intent on ever posting this anywhere public. It is a surrealistic bit of experimentation that has not been edited, primarily done to experiment with descriptive writing rather than to tell a story. The tense and viewpoint is inconsistant and shifts from place to place. This is as I wrote it, literally as I wrote it, in its original rough form. I also know that it's not going to make sense, so here's the background.

 

Her name is Saerin Vilanar and her powers are dream magic. She is an immortal who's lived past two ages of the world falling apart. She was formerly the Maldlahin of Dream's guardian and after his death took his place. In order to keep her in control he occasionally used nightmares to keep her where he wanted her. Saerin is always the narrator through this story. She is the "I" as well as the third person voice.

 

WTF is a Maldlahin? An elemental diety. There are six: Mind, Dream, Memory, Time, Order and Chaos. WTF is a guardian? Their servant. WTF is a Calthye? Mind, and one of the three rulers of what used to be Almaera, their powers were a telepathic empathic thing, giving them the potential for pure control over the world through the minds of their people.

 

It's LONG, by the way. I'm just warning you, don't read it if you don't want to read a lot of experimental surrealistic dreamscape plotless bull.

 

[CRITIQUE WELCOME - I would particularly like to know what you guys think of the writing style compared to my normal style. I was trying to expand on my normally bland descriptions. This is ENTIRELY unedited, sentence by sentence with no looking back, so I fully expect grammar issues, inconsistancies and word errors, as well as it making no sense, in fact, I can name some of these problems, I'm just too lazy to fix them.]

 

 

 

 

 

7023 MST

 

I watched myself take stride, my feet no longer bare and my arms darkened with time, and even my hair itself seemed to have been faded away from golden blond to simply wretched, pale white. Her eyes were amber, but she was still me. Watched, as from a distant pedestal, unable to command or control my actions, as though everything that’d given life to my powers now had been torn away. My breath was heavy, yet she walked confidently across the sands, leaving barely any footprint behind her.

 

Brutal yellow grains of sand coated the horizon, the horizon itself a silver shimmer in the distance that suggested somewhere—somewhere it wasn’t like this. It was no longer purple, the skies a faded and ragged shade of crimson and hoary mist. Here my dreams were like snow but the heat sent horrible gasps and shudders through the air as the air itself fought for freedom from this insistent dreamscape. If it could be called such, for mine are dreams and this one evaded even my deepest focus and deepest touch as I watched my pale-eyed phantom stride ever so calmly across the shifting sands.

 

Out somewhere was a city, a city that swam up on the rippling horizon. It looked not a thing like any architecture I’d ever laid eyes on before, black and silver spikes made up its brow and at its feet a wall of solid glass, but the glass was obsidian. Yet somehow it was transparent and behind it I could witness the city going about its business, busying itself with the laughter and hysteria of life and death.

 

At its heart was an eye. The eye roamed the sands, searching, screaming. Its fingers were made of ice, and around those fingers the desert fled away and left bare earth in its wake, scorched and tormented earth. All plants withered as those groping fingertips sought for one thing.

 

Her.

 

I watched as around her the golden sand swept up and fled away with a scream that cut through even the deepest part of my mind. This was no ordinary dream, no ordinary nightmare, for when Dream placed things in my mind it was always playing upon one of my fears. The deepest set fears of sheer, stark white… but this place was warm, even if so warm that everything was dried away. No, it wasn’t the cold and metallic, frightfully desaturated dreams that bore themselves across my mind as I tossed and turned in my sleep.

 

This was no ordinary sleep, if it were sleep.

 

But surely it was, as I recognized I stood behind my avatar as a distant figure, watching and unable to make her hands mine.

 

If I had been able to, I would’ve fled as the sand tore itself from the barren, scorched earth, fled with the sand as the eye settled upon me with its deep hum. The earth vibrated with the sound of the eyes and the rush of the sand screaming into the distance. Around her, plants withered and dried up, vanishing into the earth itself.

 

WORLD DESTROYER, accused the eyes, and she didn’t move.

 

I didn’t wake up.

 

<><><>

 

Before her stood the Eye of the World, the monster who made claim to rule. So long had she fled that now she stood with hands clasped around her staff, leaning heavily against it with her colorless eyes gazing forth. What devilry had caused this creature to be made, she knew not. So many thousands of years lay behind her and yet, even now, she couldn’t name the Eye. What was it, beyond a monster that hid in the cities safely built upon the ruins of Metruis?

 

Carmenjia, it called itself, but Saerin knew it was not its true name. Carmenjia, the Eye of the Worlds—and it stood before her in all its blazing glory.

 

With a snarl, it screamed out her name: WORLD DESTROYER—and around her all remaining life shied back. Even her hair was swept back and the hat she’d worn to protect her scalp from the wicked heat of the red sun caught up in the breath and vanished into the distance. Her hair shuddered and finally fell back to her shoulders, and Saerin sank down, covering her face with her free hand, her other wrapped around the staff.

 

“At last we meet,” snapped Carmenjia, the Eye, as its form wrapped around her staff. Saerin cried out and hurled it away, and the staff rose up on its own accord, standing as a blazing pillar in the midst of the desert. “So long you’ve evaded my gaze, but even the pale wanderer cannot hide forever in the ruins of the world. Not from I, not from anyone!”

 

Saerin risked a glance up, and the blaze from the Eye was too much for her. She grimaced and looked back down to the desert earth now streaked with tears. Not hers, but rather, the tears of the world as it sobbed, pleading with anyone that might dare to hear its words. Give us back our protectors, it wept. Destroyer.

 

Even the earth beneath her had given her up.

 

“You will come to the city,” snapped Carmenjia, and with that its presence left her staff, and it clattered to the ground. Sand began to blow back in, covering over the horrified earth, and Saerin crawled back to her staff and pulled it back into her hands. She stayed on her knees as the sand gathered around her, and even as it covered her feet and the trailing ends of her cloak, she pressed her forehead to the ground and sobbed.

 

“You too?” she whispered, and her only answer was the sand piling up against her back. She groaned and drew herself back to her feet, rising up once more with her eyes half closed and sandy grit covering her skin.

 

The city waited with open arms.

 

<><><>

 

Five days she walked, five days with the weight of the world scooping her back. On the fifth she collapsed, her staff rolling from her bare fingertips and catching between some stones. Her breath was ragged, ragged as the robes she still wore—robes she couldn’t remember when she’d bought from that village marketplace before the Eyes had consumed it too, sucking all life from it and scattering it into the desert. Then there’d been nothing more than the remains of a village surrounding her, every voice of every person who’d ever walked upon its ground screaming. Destroyer, it’d screamed.

 

Every death on her shoulders.

 

When her eyes managed to open again—they seemed to open of their own accord, as she could barely think to breathe, let along desire to see the barren landscape again—all she could see was sand. The city no longer waited on the horizon. She choked out a sob, it was gritty and her tongue felt swollen as though to five times the size.

 

She stared with blank eyes at the dark stones.

 

So many hours passed, the sun rose once more and the sky shivered as clouds began to roll in, collecting around the mountaintops. She lay in the mountains alone and cold, though the very air was rank with the heat and stench of the burning, dying sun. Saerin groaned. It was a bitter mockery that, at that moment, the sand began to hurl itself down the stones and again the red light covered her. She collapsed with her face to the stones.

 

“Come to the city,” Carmenjia snarled once more, and the bones of the earth rattled with the force of her voice.

 

“I cannot,” Saerin moaned, and again the world fell silent.

 

Mere minutes passed before the clouds broke open and rain began to fall upon her shoulders. She shivered in the sudden frigid cold, fingers stretching out to try catch the blissful moisture. It continued to rain, water hurling itself in large droplets from the sky, catching in cracks in the stones and soaking into the broken earth. Eventually she struggled to pull herself to one of the cracks, trying to lap the water up like a dog in her weakest state. Yet it continued to rain, even after she’d drank, and even after she was able to wash her wounds and the dust from her face and from her hands and arms. Even after she was able to adjust, and peel off her clothing, rinsing it in the water that poured down in streams from the mountain stones.

 

Even as night grew near again, and she was forced to pull herself under a stone for shelter, wishing so desperately that fire had been hers, rather than the earth that now despised her very step.

 

She sat under the shade of the stone, her arms wrapped around her legs, staring blankly out at the stars that speckled the sky. The world wept, but the sky still smiled down as it had two thousand years ago, as it had five thousand years ago, as it had seven thousand years ago… the stars didn’t change. Or maybe they had, and she was remembering it wrong. The silver speckles of starlight were relieving to her, alone in the exhaling night.

 

“Come to the city,” again screamed Carmenjia, startling her from her reverie.

 

“I cannot,” Saerin groaned once again, but Carmenjia had command. Carmenjia spoke, and all obeyed, there were none who could stand against the might—or even the voice—of the Eye of the World.

 

If Carmenjia spoke, it would be.

 

The Eye was upon her now. And the eye would not settle for anything less than the return of the World Destroyer… for the day when the Pale Wanderer walked no more.

 

That night they came upon her.

 

They were the Crimson, they wore bands of blood about their foreheads and around their arms and wrists, and their boots seemed to shake off the sand as though they were coated in slick oil. Not a mark of the desert was upon them, and their eyes could not be seen for the shadows that encased them, and they walked for the will of the Eye.

 

They came upon her, her eyes crusted shut and her hair damply strung against her face from the rain that’d come to give her strength in her weakness. But even that wasn’t enough to wake her spirit again. Her fingers were pale and blue, and even the deep heat awakening once more wasn’t enough to give her strength as they hauled her out of her shallow cave and presented her, standing on shaky knees and with her bleached hair only barely beginning to dry, blinking pale eyes at the bloody sun.

 

They bound her hands behind her back and took her away, across the relentless sands.

 

The city waited.

 

<><><>

 

They drag her, helpless and bound, out into the city. Here things begin to look more familiar: the building is white inside, the floor long and polished, and all the walls white, draped with pastel hanging curtains and white statues. No statue I recognize, nor the language that decorates things. Only occasionally is there one recognizable motif: one rune amidst this polished place. A teardrop.

 

Memory.

 

Here she almost blends in, her with her pale hair and pale eyes and sun-darkened skin. Her clothes do not fit in but that is hardly relevant as she walks with the Crimson Guard, if you could call being dragged walking. Through the city, there were no people, and through these halls, there are no faces. Now and again I spot barely any movement, and realize there are white robed people blending into the very walls. No one speaks, no one moves, no gestures are made. Just the guard hauling an ageless woman across the threshold of death.

 

They toss her down at the feet of another woman. This one is tall, polished. She looks so very much like she’s part of the palace itself. Her hair is black, yet it’s bleached white. Her eyes are hollow, polished white orbs pressed into her skull. Her robes stream down around her, but her arms and shoulders are bare, and pale white with tattooed markings almost paler than her skin itself. On her forehead is emblazoned the crest of the Calthye, on her brow the teardrop of memory, the eyes of dream burnt onto her shoulders and at her heart the hourglass of time. On her breast is chaos and on her palms, order.

 

Carmenjia.

 

The Eye of the World, the entity manifest.

 

Even Saerin inclines her head, her eyes falling shut at the presence of this woman.

 

The palace is entrancing, soft music drifting in on the harsh desert wind and the alluring, seductive scent of exotic flowers swirling about them in the air. The Crimson fall back, fading into the walls with the other white robed attendants who can barely be seen. Here, the Eye of the World’s voice is gentle, soft, seductive and gentle. It is a whisper barely to be heard above the wind and soft tinkling music.

 

“World Destroyer,” she breathes.

 

At that, Saerin grimaces and straightens up. “Not I,” she says boldly.

 

“You were summoned and you came!” yells Carmenjia, one hand outstretched, her finger trembling. “I called the name of the Destroyer and the Eyes fell upon you! You are she! Ageless, immortal, lifeless… heartless…” she scoffs. “Yet you still heed the call of the Eyes.”

 

“You’re no Calthye!” Saerin screams. “You’re a mockery of the long dead past!”

 

An invisible gust shoves her to her knees, and this time she doesn’t have hands free to push herself up off the polished ground.

 

“A mockery, am I?” asks Carmenjia, grabbing her by her hair and hauling her back up after a few moments. Saerin spits at her and she laughs, throwing her back down. She’s stronger than her stature would suggest—the tall, slender woman is somehow capable of moving mountains with barely a gesture. She shrugs and steps back, sinking down into her crystal throne. “I’d say quite the contrary. You are the mockery, the remainder of things past. Yet here you are. You can hardly deny my authority, you are here at my feet even if unwillingly, Pale Wanderer… World Destroyer.”

 

Saerin shudders and lies still, her eyes half closed.

 

“Tricking fate! Tricking death! No more.” Her fingers idly close over the armrests of her chair. “I command the world that remains. I command, I destroy, and you are but a figment of the past. Years of research have gone into finding the way to destroy a lingering Maldlahin.”

 

“I’m not.”

 

“You cannot deny that when Dream died, the role stepped forth to you. You held him as he drew his last breath.” Carmenjia idly drew in the air with her fingertips, trailing white mist sliding out behind them, shaping the runes of an older age. “You took on his role, and became the last Maldlahin. Five thousand years have passed, and none have been reborn. There is only you, dragging out your life by unnatural means, when even the husk of Memory has lain down and let himself drift into the arms of a forever sleep, though he still breathes. Entombed forever in the heart of the ruins of a world you destroyed!”

 

“I did not destroy it! It destroyed itself.”

 

“A world’s lifetime of screams rests on your shoulders! Every person that’s died, you still remember them! Their eyes haunt you!” Carmenjia yells. “I see them, I see every ghost walking behind you. It’s in your eyes, Pale Wanderer! You run but you can’t hide from them! Now you are here! I am every ghost you left in your wake, I am every family you tore apart, I am the tears and sobs and agony you let free upon Almaera as you lived a thousand lives!”

 

“You are but a woman!”

 

“As were you! We are what we make ourselves.”

 

Saerin groans and shifts somewhat, pushing herself onto her side. “You summoned me here to kill me, even to sending your guard to finish the job as I grew blind and weary in the brilliance of the last remaining fragments of humanity. Have your way.”

 

“Kill you?” Carmenjia taps the side of her face. “It is true. I know how to destroy the fell magic keeping your body from disintegrating, and I know how to melt your mind from the very face of the Mythos, where you will join the others forever in eternity, trapped with the sins of your life. But I did not call you here to destroy you, World Destroyer.”

 

She steps forward once more and hauls Saerin to her feet, holding her up with one arm. “Rather the contrary! I have called you here to face every death you’ve instigated, every crime you’ve committed, every life that’s been destroyed at the hand you stretched out! Every scream, every tear, every ounce of agony that you poured out shall be returned to you! I shall not grant you the small mercy of death!” She throws her out and Saerin slams into the floor, sliding backwards on her shoulder. But she’s without a sound. Carmenjia steps forward with a sneer on her pale face. “I would have you beg for death by the end. I have stepped into the past and I have read everything that’s happened by you and your master’s hand. Every crime of yours, every crime of Dream’s is yours to bear. I have summoned you here for justice!”

 

“No small words,” Saerin groans, opening her eyes cautiously to stare out at the Eyes of the World, “though they come from the self-declared ruler of everything.”

 

“I have the power to bear the weight of the ruined world.”

 

“And apparently the power to deal justice.”

 

“A hundred years I’ve spent chasing after you.”

 

“You destroyed a village!”

 

“And brought them here, where they will be safe in the crystal of eternity.”

 

“You’re no better than I!”

 

“No!” yells Carmenjia. “I seek the renewal of the world.”

 

“By binding their souls into the fabric of your castle and leaving the rest to dust!” Saerin sobs out a gasp, trying her best to sit up. She fails. The strength of Carmenjia is too great for her. “I am but the powerless remains of an ancient order.” Her head falls back. “Pale with time, alone for even my powers have evaded me for thousands of years. It would be a small mercy to just destroy me.”

 

“And one I cannot grant.”

 

“Because…” Saerin coughs. “You know that if you kill me I’ll only be reborn as Dream and the cycle will begin anew.”

 

“I would die a thousand deaths before I’d see you sit as Maldlahin.”

 

“I already did die a thousand deaths,” Saerin whispers.

 

“And now you will relive them! Yours, plus the deaths of everyone you ever hurt. Every pain is yours to bear!”

 

Saerin lies still. “You know if the Maldlahin are renewed, you will lose your self-imbued power.”

 

“I am the Eye of the World. I see all,” Carmenjia snarls. “None deny my godship.”

 

“You are not a god.”

 

“But who would say that to my face but you, World Destroyer? You destroyed Almaera, Metruis, Carmen! I am Carmen reborn! Face the agony of my world!” Bars broke through the floor, weaving around Saerin like a transparent basket.

 

“You didn’t do this to the Sleeper!” Saerin cries, muffled through the barriers. “You merely let him sleep!”

 

“He was innocent. You are guilty.” Carmenjia gestures vaguely. “Take her away. An eternity of agony is her fate.”

 

<><><>

 

The transparent basket stops in the middle of a completely white place. This was to be anticipated. White remained ever her fear, and being trapped in a white place was the first step to breaking her mind. They left her bound, as that was a second step to her slipping sanity. Saerin shivers. The place wasn’t cold as it ought to have been. She remembered another imprisonment that’d broken her down. The steady drip of hot wax on her face… stone walls…

 

But here it was all white.

 

“Arget?” she whispers. “Sleeper, I’m sorry. I am certain your powers granted her the memory to know of me and my past, and trace me through to now. Arget…”

 

Her voices breaks off as something shatters through her mind. One spike, a spike like ice. She remembers…

 

Every possibility is a new spike, every alternate reality a new scream torn from her already dry throat.

 

After a few hours, she’s no longer sure what happened to her in her past. Did Arget shoot her? Did Xan strangle her? Did she attempt to kill Elion? Did she poison the Calthye? Did her children die in a fire?

 

Did…

 

She…

 

He…

 

Father…

 

Was…

 

WORLD DESTROYER.

 

She wasn’t sure whether days passed of memories, but when they finally stopped, she collapsed to the bottom of the white cage and her throat was too dry to speak, her mind felt like a hundred headaches and her hands were too numb to feel.

 

Were they memories? Were they alternate possibilities?

 

She was so uncertain.

 

That day they let her hands free, and even while she was still in pain from the blood trying to rush back into her now white fingers, the torment started again.

 

Days passed.

 

Nights passed.

 

Months passed.

 

Years passed. Every day she swore she could no longer breathe or see or hear, but sometime she still realized she was screaming again, and one day she even saw Carmenjia standing before her. She struggled to grab hold of that reality, amidst the Fall replying countless times in her mind, from all the perspectives she could possibly stand in. Teniae’s death, she’d experienced a hundred times. Arget’s transformation, Xan’s first death, her own pain, the destruction of a hundred civilians… Anyira trapped in infinite stasis…

 

“And we’re just getting started,” Carmenjia whispered, kissing her on the forehead. “You have seven thousand years of this left to go.”

 

Saerin could no longer speak.

 

It began again.

 

After the Fall there was a period of stress in Almaera, and she relived the fright, she relived every moment she’d spent fleeing from Xan and every nightmare a thousand times over. The black and white places splattered with blood, the people dead in the streets of the white city, their faces and hands painted with white paint. The houses that stood up and stalked down the street leaving white prints behind, the rooms dissolving into white mist, the strangling mist around her throat. Sometimes she thought that maybe that was real, that there really was a white mist permeating every bit of her body, feeding her and keeping her from falling into an eternal coma. It kept her healthy, while the technology kept her unable to die…

 

Sometimes she just saw Dream again and again, horrified at her betrayal. She wanted to apologize, but her throat was hoarse from screaming.

 

Sometimes she saw Memory.

 

Sometimes he was dead.

 

Every nightmare she relived, the worst of them she saw again and again: the sun exploding, the sun exploding, the sun exploding…

 

WORLD DESTROYER.

 

Maybe the nightmares had been visions of the future. They gave her a break from the mental torment for a little while and she was able to crawl away from the table in the middle of the white cell—she thought it had been black at the beginning, but wasn’t sure anymore, because now it was all white, continually whispering. Corpses, death, nightmares…

 

She couldn’t close her eyes, and she couldn’t wander. The cell was only two metres long, and she could barely lie down without hitting the electric barriers.

 

This was not the White City, but it felt so very much like it.

 

Once in a while it snowed in there, tiny flakes drifting down to her naked body. She couldn’t remember when they’d taken her clothes away.

 

Then they started with the physical torment. Carmenjia herself hooked her up to some sort of machine, and this permitted her to feel without actually experiencing any physical harm. It directly sent the feed into her brain, Carmenjia had told her—at least, Saerin thought it had been her, everything looked the same now…

 

Gunshots. Knife wounds. Her head lopped off a hundred times. Whips and chains. Drowning. Fire. They liked the fire, because where she didn’t scream when she was shot, the invisible flames brought her to hysteria once again, somehow tearing its way out of her already ruined throat. The rest was just pain, but the invisible white flames that she couldn’t see, those hurt. So many times she screamed at that…

 

“Where are you?” Carmenjia would ask. Then the pain would stop, or at least lessen, and Saerin would sink forward with her eyes half closed.

 

“Four hundred years…”

 

“So many thousands left,” Carmenjia breathed into her ears. “You will not see freedom until you’ve undergone every possibility, every pain you left behind. We will keep you alive.”

 

“J-just kill me.”

 

“Why would we want to do that? Almaera still craves vengeance!” Carmenjia leaned in and whispered in her ear. “This is your legacy.”

 

Again.

 

WORLD DESTROYER.

 

This time it was physical agony along side the moments that’d hurt the worst. Every time Ytho died, Elion’s death… she lived for moments as these people, experiencing their pain. Every moment that passed, she could feel fire lapping at her feet, and when she grew weary of that and began to stop breathing so heavily and relax into the repeated memories, it would change. Cold water pouring over her face, hot water, sand sucking her under… always invisible, always white. Sometimes she tasted salty blood in her mouth and wondered if it was an illusion.

 

Sometimes she just wept.

 

Sometimes she helplessly pleaded, “Stop it, stop it…”

 

“You still have another six thousand, two hundred years to go,” a harsh voice would tell her. Or another number. Sometimes they lied, and gave her hope, but always she knew that the memories still hadn’t reached far enough.

 

And then they’d start again, shoving her back to the Fall, just to see her scream in frustration.

 

“Arget,” she sometimes sobbed, and sometimes it was Moresby’s name, sometimes it was Xan’s, sometimes it was Audreidi’s, sometimes Fen, sometimes Xendor, sometimes Hamir, sometimes even Adhene, even Adhene was more merciful than this…

 

When they noticed trends in the names she pleaded for help, the memories would turn to them.

 

How many times she watched and felt them die…

 

The Eye was upon her and she could feel it burning.

 

WORLD DESTROYER.

 

The Pale Wanderer was no more, just like the world outside. One day Carmenjia unhooked her and dragged her outside, and Saerin stared at her reflection in the mirror while pleading for the sun to give her strength. Haggard, her eyes were now white and her hair silver, her skin bruised and broken.

 

She couldn’t speak anymore. Her voice felt as if it were destroyed.

 

“Only five thousand, nine hundred and twenty seven more years,” Carmenjia whispered in her ear, and it began again.

 

The memories of the outside world flitted away. Saerin wasn’t sure whether time passed or if all the pain was in an instant in her mind. She could no longer scream, her voice was numb.

 

Maybe…

 

They made it worse by pausing for a while to give her body time to rebuild itself. Her voice came back, her tears returned, and she was able to plead and sob again. Her legs renewed themselves, broken bones restoring to their former state with the maximum amount of imaginable pain.

 

Then again! Days and nights spent screaming. Her only relief was that time was passing. Now the memories moved on to Fen…

 

And Xendor…

 

…Talnaver…

 

And…

 

The things she watched her memories do to her family were worse than the agony they still fed through her body.

 

Sometimes they skipped ahead in time just so she could watch herself kill Moresby over and over again.

 

When they grew tired of that, or perhaps she just grew hardened to the image, they switched to Ariane. Her daughter, pleading for mercy…

 

No mercy for her daughter.

 

WORLD DESTROYER…

 

Everything ground to a halt. She collapsed, naked, to the ground, her feet overlapping the electrical fence. Jolts coursed through her until even that turned off, all the lights vanishing, and the cell becoming as dark as the day they’d placed her in there. Was she dead? She tried to ask the question but her voice was little more than a hoarse croak.

 

How many years have passed?

 

A rough cloak was thrown over her shoulders and callused hands pulled her up, tugging it around her neck. The fabric hurt so much against her raw skin, and naked she collapsed against the black robed figure, unable to move. As her eyes adjusted to the dark she realized it was one of the Crimson. Tears streamed down her face, burning the sores on her face.

 

“Please kill me,” she whispered.

 

“We have mere seconds,” he rasped, sweeping her off her feet and fleeing the room. The lights came back on the second he crossed the threshold, and with a groan he fled into the passages. “Eyes are everywhere.”

 

So long he fled with her in his arms, until he reached a small doorway and ducked into it, placing her on the ground. She lay against the cool earth, shaking in pain and terror. He kissed her on the cheek before picking her up again.

 

“Please kill me,” she repeated, a plea now more desperate.

 

The Crimson shook his head, striding down into the darkness. Forever he walked, and occasionally Saerin would repeat her plea. She felt helpless, broken apart into a hundred tiny pieces. Her body wanted to break apart, but it was maintained forever, unless magic destroyed it…

 

Then lights flew on again and he stepped into a round chamber. A tomb.

 

“We are far beneath the city,” he whispered. “Carmenjia will not reach here so quickly, but she will know soon enough that you are gone.”

 

“Please kill me,” she gasped again, “I can take no more.”

 

He set her down beside the tomb, kneeling beside her and taking off the hood which made him so very featureless. She stared him before covering her face with both hands. “Your Highness!” Her rush of Ekaeli came out jumbled. “Please, I beg you for the small mercy of death.”

 

He stroked back her hair before taking her into his arms once again. “Shh. I’ve watched you for years. This is not justice.”

 

He held her in Memory’s tomb, lightly brushing her hair with his fingers, and his touch seemed to erase the years of agony engrained in her mind. “I give you another mercy. Return. This path need not happen… leave this one to me.”

 

The agony fled as she sank against him, eyes sliding shut.

 

Upon his brow the crest of the Calthye was emblazoned.

 

<><><>

 

She flew up with a muffled scream, blankets wrapped around her and for a moment she fought with the claustrophobia, the laughing claustrophobia until she managed to shove the blankets aside and stare out at the…

 

Perfectly ordinary room.

 

Saerin exhaled with a shaky breath and sat up.

 

World Destroyer! Carmenjia laughed in the back of her mind, and she felt the Eye upon her once again. The eye of the worlds…

 

The worlds which still remained.

 

It was just a dream, she told herself. Something blown so far out of proportion by her imprisonment by Elion, by watching Arget collapse, and Xan bringing her to Carmen… the memories jilted in her mind.

 

Just another weird dream.

 

Being Dream’s guardian had to account for some of the weird dreams, at least. She sat back down on the edge of her bed, her hands shaking. It had to have come from… her imprisonment. Nothing else made sense. So few of the words she’d dreamed made sense.

 

Almaera still lived.

 

1 MST – Almaera

 

[fin]

[Amidala Skywalker]

You know Tiana, sometimes you amaze me at how you come up with all this. I loved it. It was intense, it was ethereal, and it was awesome. It felt like a dream, while I was reading it, which is a great achievement. It's easy to go crazy with dreams, but you kept to it and really brought it full circle. I sympathized with Saerin, and really enjoyed seeing how they played her worst fears and experiences against her.

 

Good ending line too.

 

I think you really worked it out with this. I loved your descriptions; there were a couple that really stood out to me throughout this piece. I also liked the style, and had no problem understanding the switches between seeing herself and being herself.

 

Excellent stuff. I very much enjoyed it, and I'm glad you posted it.

[Tiana Calthye]

Thanks for reading it and loving it. This haunted me until I got it down, and I certainly doubted the readability of it. I'm glad you sympathized with her. It's hilarious how she started out as my evil character, intended to cause a whole lot of terrible things (as was said) and now she's my favorite character to write from. Good to hear it felt like a dream...

 

I think the only way I could've brought it around better would have been to begin with the line 'Almaera was dead'.

 

Glad you loved the descriptions!