The Queen of The Skies

Chapter 1

 Cerry sat up with a loud gasp. 

Panting, she took in her surroundings and sighed in relief when she realized she was in her room.

"It was just a dream," she whispered to herself. She placed a hand over her pounding heart and  inhaled, then exhaled slowly. The darkness of her room did not help with her attempt to calm herself down, as her eyes scanned the shadows. She slowly turned to her bedside table and picked up her phone, turning it on. She quickly covered her eyes, groaning at the brightness of the screen.  Squinting, she quickly reduced the brightness and checked the time. It was 4 a. m. She sighed, two more hours before she had to get up. 

Not feeling like sleeping anymore, she got up and went to her study desk turning the lamp on. Yawning against the back of her hand, she grabbed a pencil and her journal and sat down,  opening the book which was titled My Dreams.

Countless pages were filled with written accounts of dreams and pictures of what she had seen. Six months ago, after her 18th birthday, she started having weird dreams that kept her from sleeping well at night. Sometimes they were peaceful but most times they were dark nightmares. Her mind always travelled to these dreams and the weird characters she'd seen in them. She found that writing the dreams down calmed her mind. It was like coming up for air after almost drowning in a see of never-ending thoughts.

Writing was not enough, because images kept coming back to her during the day. So she began drawing what she could remember. Her journal was filled with illustrations of angel like creatures and a weird city elevated in the sky. The winged creatures were extraordinary. Some had orange wings, others green, ash gray, and even dark blue. The colors were beautiful and made her dreams magical and even, she dare say, enjoyable. But what usually turned her dreams into nightmares were the angels with the black wings. 

She shuddered as she paused at a picture she had drawn a few nights before. The creatures eyes were deep black and it was elevated in the air wings aloft. The scary thing about the image was the pitch black of this...being. She had not figured out what to call them yet. 'Angels' didn't seem to fit. 

She found an empty page and was going to start writing, but paused and stared at the portrait of a young man she had drawn from the dream last night. She studied him. Most of her journal was filled with drawings of his face, with that same intense gaze she remembered from the dreams. She shook her head, unable decipher what all this meant. 

She had done her research. Tried to find out the meaning behind dreaming about the same thing over long periods of time. She found that over thinking about a situation, being traumatized by something, or watching too many movies or reading too many books could cause the mind to replay images when one is asleep. Except she never read, watched or even thought about angels or whatever these creatures were, and she had never seen this guy before . Not in a movie, a magazine, online, nowhere. And she definitely refused to believe that the Universe was speaking to her. 

She quickly wrote down the dream. 

In the dream I had been running away from this dark mist which swallowed everything it passed by including my parents and Arya-  

She paused, sighing in relief as she glanced at a photograph of her parents, her, and Arya. She remembered the day that picture was taken. They had gone on family vacation to the Amazon forest and had invited Arya. In the photo Arya, Cerry and Cerry's mom were laughing at her father who had slipped and fallen into a river. The tour guide had captured this moment without their knowledge saying, " The un-posed moments are always the best." 

She sighed again, closing her eyes. "They are safe", she whispered to herself.  After a few moments she opened her eyes and continued writing the dream.