Faye and Ruin

The New Reality

Softness pressed beneath my sweat soaked skin, my breath coming in panicked bursts as I waited for the next blow of Bayne's sword. But it never came.

Blinking the haze from my eyes, I took in my surroundings. My room. Dustin and I's room met my gaze. Nothing of unusual and unexplainable looks bounced around me. It was white and blue, it was warm and I was home. I was laying in our bed, the curtains wide open and faint voices reached my ears.

Maybe it had all been a dream. It had to have been a dream for the last thing I remembered was leaving the club and then I was there and now I was here in my bed. Relief caressed my mind as I sunk deeper into the bed for just one more minute. Soaking in the comfort of the city sounds and voices that echoed just a closed door away.

I glanced at the clock next to me on my wooden night stand. It read two twenty-three in the afternoon. My drunken self must have had more to drink than I remembered and passed out. Dustin had to have brought me home and let me sleep it off.

I was home.

But there was an ache in my bones, a deep ache that called to me.

I shoved it out and threw off the sheets as shock crashed through my body. I couldn't even scream with the sight that beheld me. So I ran. Straight into the bathroom and slammed the door closed behind me. Turning the lock, I flipped on the light switch and stared at my reflection in the mirror. The pins that had held up my hair were strewn at funny angles, but still, the length wasn't unusual. But it was the clothes that adorned my body that terrified me.

It hadn't been a dream.

The black leather was still wrapped tightly around me. Light and versatile, but thick enough that the blade hadn't been able to cut my arm clean off. The wound Bayne had inflicted still oozed a small trickle of blood that I needed to clean up.

No, no, no. It was real. Those nightmares hadn't been nightmares, and last night hadn't been a dream.

As I stripped from the black leather and shoved them to the back of my closet, I couldn't help but wonder what those nightmares had been. They hadn't been memories of mine, they still felt foreign enough compared to last night to have been someone else's memories. But they had also seemed so real, so alive.

Bayne's words swept through me. "Not in the way you define alive." He had been talking about his armor, but maybe he was referencing more than just that. Or my mind was playing tricks and I was reaching for something. But the reality I knew was no longer the same, and suddenly all things seemed possible. I began cleaning up the wound as my mind wandered even farther.

If I could somehow go to their world, their realm, could they come here? Would they track me here to steal me back? And what of these powers the King had spoken about? It seemed so real, but the logical part of me fought with that idea, fought with the knowledge that there was an entire world out there that consisted of magic and creatures whose names I didn't know.

They were after me, for what reason I was unsure, yet I almost wanted to go back and find that woman whom the King had once killed for a small part of me almost didn't believe she was truly dead. She had thought about the Fae blood that ran through her veins and maybe as a result, she couldn't die by a simple sword.

I needed to know more about swords and combat and magic and all things that pertained to that world. Dwarves, Elves, Faeries, those other creatures that seemed so strange, so terrifying, so majestic. And I needed to know about this place. Illesall.

But I mostly needed rest. Home was the place I had screamed for, where I had begged to come and this was where I would find my comfort. No more arena's of death.