So we walk - in this hushed hybrid time when day collapses into night. And I dream, a dream about memories.
So many faces, so many memories. I wonder why it is that I stumbled upon these remnants of the past again. Maybe it’s because I´ve put them down – slowly and one by one, I´ve left most of them behind me, like wet footprints in the sand. Or maybe it’s that the past was that elusive thing I was pursuing all these wandering years, a chain of footprints that ends in a circle.
I haven´t forgotten these faces, their names, but I just haven’t been remembering. Seeing them again (if only in my mind) is like getting lost and finding the loveliest of flowers where once you had buried a seed and forgotten. But my dreams are not of flowers or stardust , no. In my head is nothing but the twisted whispers coward, coward, coward that hit me like a freight train of agony and regret.
I walk in silence – lost to the torment in my own head. My ignoble nose is kept gently touching the back of Kagerus. She is the cane to which I grasp like a lost bird in the storm. But if she talks I do not hear – my mind has wandered elsewhere – scattered, but she is still the anchor to where my consciousness – what is left of it, all senses and no senses, cling. Perhaps I am finally losing my mind.
I walk mindlessly, lifting my legs and tipping my head so that my soot-black hair falls to the side, away from my eyes. It gives me a whimsical sort of look, that of a girl high-stepping over puddles as she dreams of another world. But our hearts beat in rhythm and all will be well – I am a hapless shadow in the wake of Kagerus – withered and thin, like a skeleton draped with moonshine.
Then suddenly she stops in the middle of a field (the field) and with a pathetic yelp I collide into her. There is no strength in my brittle bones, but the force of the collision is enough to snap me out of my daydreams.
Is this it? I says softly, disoriented - taking a step back - standing just far enough that both our shadows could lie between us. And for the first time during our journey – I lift my eyes to look at my friend - the fading fire of the sun plays across the tapered lines of her face, touching the pressed line of her mouth, the sadness at the corners of her eyes. Suddenly I remember why we´re there, and my eyes search for the cream colored yearling, quietly wondering if he too, had followed us here.
What a sad sight we must be .
Assailant -- Year 226
"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura