06-26-2022, 12:30 PM
cause if we don’t leave this town
we might never make it out --
There are others that arrive, but he hardly notices them. The storm that he walks into does not afford him the chance to be distracted by anything else. He is surprised to find how easily he took to having wings, that even though they still feel clumsy they still have become an involuntary action that he does not have to focus on to keep himself aloft. Had he not seen the things his mother could with simple threads of starlight he might not have trusted moonlight wings to carry him into the swirling chaos ahead of him, but so far they had not faltered.
From the moment he enters the storm he is bombarded with images and a torrent of emotions. Fear is the strongest of them, an overlapping theme that ties all the nightmares together no matter how different they may be.
Some of them show as an unwilling series of images in his mind, as if he is replaying a memory that he does not recognize. He sees a spinning vortex in a lake, follows as it sucks him down and spits him out in a land of blinding white, and thinks he hears the echo of his mother’s voice calling out from the other side.
He is ripped from that nightmare and into the next, this time tasting what he thinks is fire on his tongue and the smell of smoke and volcanic ash in the air. It is dark, not the kind of dark that night brings, but the kind of dark brought on by shadows and smoke, a thick kind of dimness that you think if you blink enough your vision might clear. There is a stallion with a halo and blood streaked across his pale coat, and from this viewpoint he looms above him, and he thinks there is a flash of white dragon scales. There is anger, too, a feral sort of fire that feels like it might burn him alive from the inside out, and then from the corner of his eye there is a glowing, star-dappled mare rushing towards him, and the impact hardly registers before the world goes black.
Sweat glistens across his pale skin now, exhaustion beginning to settle like lead in his bones as he tries to fight his way through, only to be grabbed ahold of the next nightmare, only it is not so different from the last one.
This time he is running across the same shadow-smoke land, and there is the same haloed and bleeding stallion, but he is hurtling towards him and the white dragon that sits poised to strike above him. The anger in his chest is second only to fear and panic, and the stupid kind of desperation that love seems to always create, and he sends himself directly into to the side of the white dragon and lets her shatter into pieces.
A bright flash, and then dark again, and he is in a labyrinth below the ground, where the ground pulses like a heartbeat and walls inhale and exhale like a ribcage of a sleeping monster. Fear, again, this time the claustrophobic, choking kind, a bubbling panic as he makes his way through the maze. The nightmare leads him from dead end to dead end, he sees bodies broken and lifeless eyes, and shadows that crawl and snake around his legs and up his chest until they manage to claw their way down his throat. The darkness is inescapable as it consumes him from the inside out, and he does not know how this nightmare ends because he never makes it out of the labyrinth.
He is lurched back to reality all the same and he finds himself almost to the eye of the storm.
we might never make it out --
There are others that arrive, but he hardly notices them. The storm that he walks into does not afford him the chance to be distracted by anything else. He is surprised to find how easily he took to having wings, that even though they still feel clumsy they still have become an involuntary action that he does not have to focus on to keep himself aloft. Had he not seen the things his mother could with simple threads of starlight he might not have trusted moonlight wings to carry him into the swirling chaos ahead of him, but so far they had not faltered.
From the moment he enters the storm he is bombarded with images and a torrent of emotions. Fear is the strongest of them, an overlapping theme that ties all the nightmares together no matter how different they may be.
Some of them show as an unwilling series of images in his mind, as if he is replaying a memory that he does not recognize. He sees a spinning vortex in a lake, follows as it sucks him down and spits him out in a land of blinding white, and thinks he hears the echo of his mother’s voice calling out from the other side.
He is ripped from that nightmare and into the next, this time tasting what he thinks is fire on his tongue and the smell of smoke and volcanic ash in the air. It is dark, not the kind of dark that night brings, but the kind of dark brought on by shadows and smoke, a thick kind of dimness that you think if you blink enough your vision might clear. There is a stallion with a halo and blood streaked across his pale coat, and from this viewpoint he looms above him, and he thinks there is a flash of white dragon scales. There is anger, too, a feral sort of fire that feels like it might burn him alive from the inside out, and then from the corner of his eye there is a glowing, star-dappled mare rushing towards him, and the impact hardly registers before the world goes black.
Sweat glistens across his pale skin now, exhaustion beginning to settle like lead in his bones as he tries to fight his way through, only to be grabbed ahold of the next nightmare, only it is not so different from the last one.
This time he is running across the same shadow-smoke land, and there is the same haloed and bleeding stallion, but he is hurtling towards him and the white dragon that sits poised to strike above him. The anger in his chest is second only to fear and panic, and the stupid kind of desperation that love seems to always create, and he sends himself directly into to the side of the white dragon and lets her shatter into pieces.
A bright flash, and then dark again, and he is in a labyrinth below the ground, where the ground pulses like a heartbeat and walls inhale and exhale like a ribcage of a sleeping monster. Fear, again, this time the claustrophobic, choking kind, a bubbling panic as he makes his way through the maze. The nightmare leads him from dead end to dead end, he sees bodies broken and lifeless eyes, and shadows that crawl and snake around his legs and up his chest until they manage to claw their way down his throat. The darkness is inescapable as it consumes him from the inside out, and he does not know how this nightmare ends because he never makes it out of the labyrinth.
He is lurched back to reality all the same and he finds himself almost to the eye of the storm.
-- tiernen.