Eternal Beasts

Chapter 2: A New Dream

For what felt like an eternity, Jared swam through the thick blackness of unconsciousness, thankful that the pain, at least for a moment, was over. In the waking world, however, it was far from over. His body finally unmoving in unconsciousness, Jared's skin began to ripple and bulge, tiny bubbles racing along just beneath the surface as the homunculi jockeyed for their final positions.

Time slowed with the unnatural dance across Jared's body, the blisters shifting as wildly as the bubbles that gave birth to the homunculi on the pages of the book did, swelling and moving with forces growing from within. Even his eyes and faces weren't exempt, bulges racing across his cheeks and appearing beneath his eyelids with the homunculi's mysterious work.

Then, without warning, it was over in response to a silent signal. Forming at the top of his head, a ripple of light washed over Jared's twitching body. As it passed over the bulges, they vanished, absorbed completely into his flesh. It took only the briefest of moments for the ripple to wash over him tip to tip. And, upon its disappearance, that was when Jared's body began to spasm anew, each muscle twitching and jerking under the influence of yet another unseen force.

Within, with the ripple's cessation, Jared saw the darkness pierced by a bright light, surging into his perception until it had washed away all else with its brilliance. The lanky young man couldn't help but let it fill his mind, possessing no hands or eyelids to block it. Thankfully it didn't last long, the blinding light fading to let the mystified young man discover he had somehow returned to the waking world, a gentle breeze tousling his hair and warm sunlight brushing his skin.

But had he? Looking around with astonished eyes, he didn't find himself back in his small dorm room. Instead he now stood on top of a great stone wall, one that stretched away in both directions, easily ten paces across and rimmed by thick parapets. The wall didn't hold his attention for long; as he stepped forward to look into the nearest parapet's gap, Jared felt the wall tremble as something heavy shifted across its surface. Snatching his eyes away from the gap, Jared looked to his left and nearly dropped to his knees in amazement and trepidation at what he saw there.

It was a griffin, pulled straight from the book's illustrations, gold and sable as it moved uneasily with paw and talon on its tenuous perch atop a squat tower some twenty metres or so down the wall. Blinking wildly, Jared tried to make an estimate of the creature's size, his mind racing. If the parapets there were the same size as the ones beside him, it stood nearly three metres at the shoulder, both muscular and graceful at the same time. Even as he watched, it spread broad, eagle-like wings to give them a shake before folding them once again to its powerful body.

What could make such a creature, pulled from the heart of myth, as nervous as this one appeared? Drawing his attention back from his visual examination of the wondrous creature, Jared noted something caught its eye. Following the creature's hard gaze, his heart lurched heavily in his chest when he found it fell far beyond the wall he now stood on and onto a hauntingly familiar scene, one that he had more than a passing acquaintance with: a city of stone in flames.

This tableau, however, was alarmingly different than the one he had witnessed so many times in his dreams. For one thing, it dominated his senses instead of appearing as if observed from a distance through binoculars. A gust of wind from the city's direction even brought the warm of the flames against his skin, the scent of burning flesh to his nostrils. Eyes wide, he couldn't help but drink the vision in, fear icy cold in a headlong rush through his veins.

"More real this time, isn't it?" A man's voice asked quietly from a place somewhere behind Jared's right shoulder. Too stunned by finding his dream unfolding in reality before his very eyes to react in surprise to the man's presence or his soft words, Jared could only nod in agreement, his voice stolen. He felt the tears come to his eyes as the dark flood of destruction, watched so many times in the past, pushed through the city's outer walls to enter the great dying metropolis itself, ravaging as they went.