8th of Vhalar, Arc 720
Soundtrack
Cierne took hesitant steps through the roiling mist, careful to avoid anything she could not clearly see. While she can see in the dark, her night vision did not equip her with the ability to see through fog and this particular fog swathed everything with its dubious nature.
There were several faint illuminations every couple of feet, projected from the common blood lights of the city. Their eerie glow only added to the sinister feel that crept slowly over Cierne’s flesh.
She swallowed thickly and took a deep breath that racked her body with its polluted oxygen. There was something in this fog that was trying desperately to be hidden. The sickenly smell of death wafted from the murk and infiltrated her nostrils. She choked on the air and spat, hoping the sensation of dread exited her body along with the saliva. It did not and the young Naer’s skin erupted with goose flesh as a result.
Where was she? What was this horrific place? It seemed oddly familiar, but only insofar as the bloodlights’ glow. Was this dream she was walking through attempting to reimagine her hometown? Was this yet another one of her nightmares that had become so commonplace so as to make Cierne no longer surprised by their constant occurrence?
A soft crunch reverberated up her leg from her shoe where she had snapped what she hoped was a fallen branch. But a branch from what? There were no trees in Quacia, at least none that she could remember.
She craned her neck to look at the sky above her. While no stranger to nightmares, the color of the sky was startling. Crimson red bled through the darkness. Like a wound from an arrow, the blackness was punctured with an onset of scarlet. Blood began to blossom like flowers in random places throughout the sky.
If she didn’t know any better, she would have believed the atmosphere was hurting. She felt the pain like she had been shot with the arrow herself.
Her chest felt like it was caving in, her lungs constricting as a sense of dread overcame her. Her frail body was racked with fear, her stomach rumbling as anxiety quickly settled in.
She did not like this one bit. It wasn’t solely because it was a nightmare, but because the nightmare was an uncanny rendition of a place she knew all too well. This was Quacia, but at the same time it wasn’t. She knew she was dreaming, but an insidious thought was nagging at the back of her mind that perhaps she wasn’t.
She took a few more tentative steps until she reached an edge. The land broke off into some sort of foul liquidy substance. It was pitch black and rippled slowly when she bravely dipped the tip of her shoe into it. It gave off a pungent scent of decay which made her wonder if something truly had died here.
Was her dream telling her something? Was this a warning or was this a memory that had been mutated to fit the haunting context of Cierne’s deepest fears?
She felt utterly alone, a prospect that demanded an answer. Was she the only one here? Was this dream toying with her, fueling her with an ache that no analgesic could assuage?
Cierne shook her head and closed her eyes. No, she thought to herself. This was not happening. There had to be more than this, because if there wasn’t she was determined to go to great lengths to wake herself up.
Her eyes snapped open and she quickly took in her surroundings once more.
She looked to her feet and found an unsettling image awaiting her curious gaze. A thick band of vegetation had wrapped itself around her ankle. Large spikes the size of ice picks jutted out from the plant at odd angles.
Cierne was suddenly overcome with the urge to touch one. If it wasn’t real as she knew it wasn’t, then perhaps her hand would pass right through it.
She reached down to gently caress the protrusion when the plant abruptly tightened its grasp on her ankle. And then it pulled. Hard.
Cierne was caught off guard and lost her balance as her feet were swept out from underneath her.
The vine was pulling her into the darkness and the only thing Cierne could do to save herself was to claw at the ground, hoping the friction of her nails against the mud would be enough to stop her descension into the unknown.
Her attempts were futile as the plant continued to pull her away. The viscous goo she had just encountered became nothing more than a memory as her vision turned to nothing but a bleak emptiness.
However, as quickly as she had been dragged away, she became motionless. Color returned to her sight as she dared look down at her leg where the vile creature had wrapped its snaking tendrils around her ankle. It was still there, but it had been severed by a large axe.
She looked up from the weapon to find a man with a blurry face. The only way she could tell that this person was indeed a man was the scruffy beard that adorned his chin and cheeks.
“Are you okay?” He asked in a raspy voice, retrieving his weapon from where he had cut the vine.
Cierne was speechless. Everything had happened so quickly; she didn’t know if it had even happened at all.
“The Creep is a nasty thing,” he said, reaching out his hand for her to take.
She willfully accepted his gesture and was helped from off the ground. Just as she had found her footing, the man shouted.
“Get down!”
He somersaulted to the side, and Cierne, knowing not what else to do but having never been one for acrobatics, attempted to mimic his movements.
She placed both hands over her head and forcefully propelled herself forward, attempting to curl her head so her chin touched her chest. The ground became the sky and the sky the ground as she rolled to a sitting position. She rubbed her head from where she had inexpertly hit during her somersaulting.
A barbed tentacle snapped across the very spot her head had been before. Had the man not warned her, she wasn’t sure she would still be in one piece.
“Thank you,” she said gratefully, dusting herself off and resuming a standing position.
“Don’t mention it,” replied the man. “Now help me with these wounded soldiers.”
Cierne was perplexed. She hadn’t seen anyone in the vicinity aside from him. What wounded soldiers could he be referring to?
He waved for her to follow. She matched his stride, bumbling through the fog like a lost child in search of her mother.
The fog slowly began to dissipate as they made haste and soon Cierne was able to see what the man had been talking about.
Several men lay bloodied on the ground. One had dark hair matted to his forehead with dried blood, another was nursing an injured arm, a deep laceration cut clean across it. She noticed another soldier who wasn’t moving at all, not even his chest was rising and falling from the breaths he should be taking had he been alive.
“If you can, please tend to him,” the man who had been leading her requested, pointing to the soldier with the bloodied forehead.
She nodded and did as instructed. She had never assisted someone with an injury before as she was no medic. Thus, she awkwardly crouched down in front of him and inquired as to what had happened.
“We were attacked,” he replied with a gruff voice. It sounded like he had smoked his entire life. “The Creep came out of nowhere, and the Changelings…” his voice was cut off by an onslaught of soft sobs.
Cierne didn’t know what to do or how to help, but she figured a good place to start was figuring out the source of his bleeding.
“May I?” She asked, gesturing to his forehead.
He nodded and leant forward so that she could have better access to his wound.
She prodded gently, removing strands of hair from their encrusted position on his temples. After she had cleared some hair away, she found a small but deep cut marring the center of his forehead near his hairline.
Without having any proper supplies to clean the wound, she opted to use her shirt. She dabbed at the cut gingerly, hoping she wasn’t hurting him, until most of the blood was gone.
“What’s a changeling?” She asked, referring back to what he had previously stated.
The man chuckled darkly. “We’ve been in this war for how long and you haven’t heard of changelings?”
His absentminded attack on her competence made her frown. She began to shut down, retreating into herself and pulling back from assisting the man any further.
“No, I don’t know what a changeling is.” She had been trying to stay away from politics and the history she knew of the city was limited. Everton hadn’t debriefed her much when he had brought her into the city, and she hadn’t been curious enough to explore on her own. This was surprising seeing as how Cierne had an innate curiosity about her.
“They are deceptive creatures. Not much is known about them, but they’re dangerous and emotionless, which makes them a formidable opponent. I can tell you they bleed though, and that means we can kill ‘em.”
Cierne was stunned at this man’s description of what a changeling was. It was quite eerie just how similar they sounded compared to her race.
His explanation was vague, and Cierne took this into account, but if he had experienced their wrath first hand, she had no doubts he was telling the truth. She hoped she would never run into one herself.
Suddenly the man who had saved her stiffened behind her. The young Naer turned to see what had made him change so abruptly.
“They’re here,” he whispered, his eyes turning into slits, his hands clenching into fists.
“Who’s here?” Cierne asked, feeling a knot forming in her gut. Her mouth went dry and she struggled to swallow.
“The changelings.”
She spun around, frantic to find where he had seen them. She wanted no part in this. She desperately wanted to wake up instead. She wanted to wake up and return to the real world, the world she was familiar with. Where changelings probably still existed, but were a dime a dozen and could not harm her.
“No, no, no,” she whispered under her breath. She began to claw at her arms and slap her face, anything to wake herself up from the impending doom she could feel swarming the air.
Just then a spiny limb jutted out from beneath the ground, and her vision went black.
She arrived back in her tent, where she was laying on her bedroll, covered in a thick layer of sweat; red claw marks ran up and down her arms and a stinging sensation irritated her cheeks.
Cierne wept quietly in her lonesome tent, troubled by the dream she had just experienced.
Next time, she thought to herself, she would be more brave. Next time, she would reach outside her box of comfort and control her dream. She would make her dream afraid of her and not the other way around.
Even if it killed her.
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