I woke up from a nightmare,
One I sense I’ve had before
Me and some friends are will workers, wizards you’d say. Not the Harry Potter type but workers in deadly seriousness. We had just met with success in some endeavor or another, and are walking past a graveyard. We’re joking and laughing.
Our youngest member is skipping and playing with her dog which looks almost like a wolf. My perspective shifts from the me character to the most powerful of us.
He knows this graveyard. It is no mere collection of interesting architecture and moldering bodies. It is a prison. For horrors beyond imagination. But for some reason pieces of the fence are down. The prisoners must be working on it from the inside, causes pieces of the heavy wrought iron fence to crumble or disappear entire.
I am speaking. Warning everyone that this place is dangerous. But I can tell they are unimpressed. They nod but cannot understand. The young woman and her dog disappear.
The dog is running deep into the cemetery. She chases. Towards the mausoleum. If they cross it’s threshold they will be trapped forever. Being chased forever by whatever they fear the most. I tear off after her.
Running as fast as my tired body can. Forcing myself to draw on my reserves. Burning the pilot light of my magic out to pour on speed. I pull the girl back before she crosses the fatal threshold.
Terror and fatigue pumping through me. My future burned away. My magic may come back but it may not. For now, I am merely human. Weak as I have not been in a long time. The dog plays out its fate in front of us. It hits the threshold. It goes wild in panic. Whining and with eyes rolling in panic it runs back to the group.
My perspective shifts. I am back in the me. But the things I learned in the elder are not accessible. I am a passenger only. I watch this poor animal lose its mind again and again and again. The elder makes it back with my darling impetuous daughter.
That’s quite enough of this. I expend a bit of power. Freeing the dog from the embrace of the curse. Unfortunately, death was the only way. But in interfering with the prisons magic, I freed a nightmare.
As the passenger I know this. But as the driver, I’m just pleased that my daughter won’t see her childhood pet tortured.
The elder looks at me exhausted and in horror. He explains that he is retiring. He does not explain why. We leave and find our way to an abandoned hotel we have used before. I sense something different, something off.
Everything proceeds normally until I find the elder explaining to thin air that we are all cursed. That if he’s going out he going to rekindle his pilot light.
He has a mini blowtorch and is pressing it to the skin of his wiry exposed arm. He looks like John Constantine, comic book version. His skin begins to bubble and he laughs.
I get out of there before he notices me. I go and find my family. They are eating a meal. Perfectly normal, their backs to me.
I go around the table and see that they have cut open my brother and are cutting and eating raw bits off of him. He is still alive. But they have cut out his tongue and eyes. My wife grins bloody bits of meat stuck in her teeth. She gestures for me to join them. I run.
Normally, the dream gets worse and worse until I figure out how to defeat the ghost. But not this time, this time I wake.
I’m in Seattle. Another dreamscape but I don’t notice. That dream proceeds normally. Some laughs, some friends.
Then I wake. For real? But I am unsettled. It feels unreal.
I stand up, go to the bathroom then go back to bed.
I wake, again? This time for real hopefully
Pelgris 