Alone and in the silent dark, the nightmares still come.
She has grown used to the running in her sleep, the useless scraping of the ground as she tries to outrun the faceless monsters that pursue her past consciousness. She knows how the images will blur at the edges, how they will become less defined and somehow more terrifying for it all the same. How she wakes with her heart in her throat and her sides heaving with terror and breathlessness both. She is used to not sleeping much, now.
So tonight, hours after the latest nightmare has come and gone (a stormcloud with a thousand faces all leering at her, their smiles sharp as a thundercrack), Glaw moves through the forest. The light is beautiful and strange and it is enough to keep her going, this rare pursuit of wonder. She is unbothered by the shadows and sounds of the night nowadays. A fair trade, she supposes. And even as it grows cooler the further into the tangle of woods she goes, goosebumps do not prick at her skin.
There is nothing out here that can be worse than what she has seen so far. There is no monster stronger than the one inside of her head. For when she was Called before, was it not her own misery bleeding out, poisoning the fairy magic that had swirled all around her? Was it not her own many shortcomings giving rise to terrors dredged from the deepest pits of her?
Nowadays, she is more scared of what lurks in the shadows of her mind than anything set before her eyes.
She presses on until the trees become so dense it is as if they are holding each other close to ward against the chill. The copper-haired girl takes another determined step forward and silently gapes at what she sees. A lake laps at a shore in a space that had just been occupied by more twisting trees. The repetitive sound of the water’s gentle advance and retreat against the bank keeps her grounded to the spot, steadies her feet from turning back and running as fast as she can. Because surely this is just another nightmare? Places can’t appear out of thin, silvery air unless they have been conjured with ill-intent. Even the bodies (the bodies?) are hallmarks of her nightly battles within herself. Death features prominently, after all.
“Wake up,” she says, her voice as dull and lifeless as the forms carelessly slumped on the shore. But if she is speaking to them or herself, even she is not sure. She is only sure that they don’t listen and she doesn’t open her eyes for the second time to find she had been asleep. Instead, she stares longer than she probably should, looking for any twitch of a muscle or rise of a flank. Glaw knows little of the rearranging of the lands and less of the politics making a tangled mess of the changes. She would grieve for any life lost, even if she is not convinced that any of this is real.
She wants it to be real, because anything is better than the nightmares.
The shame of it should make her turn around and find the forest again. But as the sprites spin more frantically, she knows that she will not leave. To leave would be to deny herself the truth – is it fact or fiction? Is she so consumed by her fears that she cannot separate reality from that place beyond it? The sprites illuminate the sandy shore as they form their gateway. Glaw hopes they can shine light on more than that and follows eagerly into the portal. She has to see this through.
glaw