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Why had I shut them like a coward?!
I couldn’t answer my question, screaming as the crawler’s human hands appeared in front of my face, her neck slit, body convulsing, before she fell to the ground in a heap. I shuddered, a blade piercing my stomach, glistening with blood that wasn’t my own.
I pushed past the loathsome creature’s corpse, fading into mist before I reformed around her. I was greeted by wailing as Sun clutched the bloody black robes of a taller human who still looked like a child, his chest ripped asunder, cradling the mirage of my mate. Maybe he had shielded him as the unseen warrior behind me killed the crawler just before it had a chance to kill both of them.
“Kai! Kai!” Sun wailed until his voice was hoarse. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”
I dropped to my knees, unable to bear the misery, attempting to wake up. But I found no refuge, smoke and fire lighting the world up as that vision burned away, replaced by a new scene.
“Die!” a deeper voice from a familiar face shouted.
I looked up, a fountain of blood covering my body, surprised to see yet another version of Sun that I didn’t recognize above me.
This version of Sun was more how I knew him, but his hair was jet-black, without streaks of white, smaller and thinner than the man I knew, eyes wide and wild as he panted. His feet were lodged into cracks in the wall, one arm clutching the hilt of a broken sword piercing the pit just below the entrance. Sun was covered in fresh scars that had faded over time, by the time I met him. And, in his hand he held the severed head of a naga.
I knew it couldn’t be Kiar, yet his face resembled his, then it didn’t, shifting over and over again between friend and stranger until I was dizzy with terror.
A symphony of hissing erupted as many hands, arms, heads and tails surged forward piercing my ghostly body.
“Yes, come at me and hasten your deaths, bastards,” Sun gloated.
Then he sneered, tossing the head aside, ripping the blade from the wall, as he fell to meet his enemies head on.
I covered my face, falling backward, tumbling through a web of nightmares until finally my body was flung from the sea of memories to the frozen ground of somewhere that felt too real. This time, I had a feeling I would know the Sun who greeted me as I opened my eyes and lifted my head to the voice calling me.
“Give it to me, Clem!” his voice, the one I had first heard shouting orders as his men besieged Yewan, finally called my name.
But it was more rugged, filled with unchecked rage as my mate commanded me to open my eyes again. Why did they keep closing when all I wanted to do was wake up!
What I saw made my blood run cold, and despite wanting to hold him, I crawled away in fear. Upon a hill of bones and a mountain of shadowy corpses stood Sun. One of his arms was severed, held in the jaws of a large noc made of shadows with many legs and hands…
“Master Bracken!?” I shouted as Sun slashed at Master’s swooping claws, rolling away just in time to dodge the blow.
Bracken screeched, the war cry amplified by his pain, blinded, bleeding from empty eye sockets as he spiraled into the darkened night robbed of his vision and a large part of his wings.
“Give me the stone!” Sun roared, whipping around, using his remaining hand to drive Blood Onyx shaped like a dagger through Kiar’s throat, who lunged at him with bared fangs and claws.
I looked down, confused, yet sure enough, in my hands was a strange orb of light. A face shifted on the cool, luminescent surface of the glowing stone that resembled a mirror. A woman’s face, blindfolded and tearful with blackened teeth, cried out for me.
“Reconcile! It is the only way to free me, my emissary.”
I didn’t understand and had no time to ask. It was no sooner than her face disappeared that a shadow wielding a blade replaced her. Sun was bearing down on me, ready to end my life with a lifetime of hatred channeled through his sword, directed at my heart?—
“Clem! Wake up.”
“Haaah!” I screamed, clutching my neck with two hands as I jolted awake.
Bracken and Kiar flanked me while Sun hovered in front of me. I grasped in the silence for a split second before Sun snatched me into his embrace. It was dark, too dark to be in the mountains, and I wondered if this was yet another inescapable nightmare.
I fought, unable to decipher reality from his memories and visions of an impossible future until finally, as he patted my back and I knew this was my Sun, not the famed Noc Slayer of Naran.
“Shh. It’s alright. It was just a dream. Damn it. I should have killed it before it got a chance to lunge at you like that or we wouldn’t have ended up in this pit.”
I shuddered, knowing in my heart that what I just saw wasn’t a dream. No, it was a memory and a premonition of a future in which our tether was dissolved, because why else would Sun turn his blade on us which was tantamount to suicide?
Unless…
I pushed him away, shocked to see we were inside a pit of sorts through a halo of moonlight far above our heads rapidly fading, as dark storm clouds eclipsed its rays.
