The Hades Throne

Chapter 25 - Ignorance

I haven't dreamed since my Hades Test concluded.

It was, possibly, even before that mark on the timeline of my life. If I close my eyes, keep them shut, hold them there, I can remember the dream like the one that just finished playing behind my mind.

There were rolling green hills, green carpets folded over each other. A lake sparkled in the manifested sun, like the sapphire of death had been embedded into the Earth. The sun that shone overhead felt cold, but its beauty matched that of the landscape.

The view was only outdone by the cold voice of my father's spirit.

This dream, the image that visits me in my sleep, unwanted, is nothing like that memory. It glimpsed, though, the only thing that could ever push me away. It sinks my heart, so deep into the trench that I'm not sure it can be retrieved. This is not the dream from my past, it is one of the future.

"Adalia, wake up."

I don't need to wake up. It's nice down here. There exists a kind of peace that I've never felt before, and it's beautiful in entirety. Like the melody that sings on the sails of a symphony, or unbroken and untainted young love, it's perfect in its beauty.

And I don't want to wake up.

Someone is sniffling, the kind that takes over once the tears have left, but the sound is moving away.

It feels like floating. By air or by water makes not an ounce of difference. The sensation is oceanic, aqueous in the ebb and flow of feeling. In the summer, when the currents shift about the water to its own design, you can float without thought of sinking. The sun lazes about in the sky above, and the wind has that salty spice, reminiscing of days long past.

This feels of something comparable. My mind floats in this sea of between, where there is nothing.

Not even regret can stand in such a place that takes the emotion from you.

Someone, something, is calling for me. There is a beckoning, to come to the voice that promises everything in return for nothing. It crosses my fog loaded mind that perhaps an Heir to Hades doesn't have an afterlife. Maybe I have nothing else.

I wonder why I can't find the death date for myself. I could never feel that flash of a death, a method, an age, for those closest to me, for whom I care, but there's not a way for me to care about myself. I'm lost, without a hope, somewhere in between.

"Come back to us. Wake up."

I register it as a threat, not a promise. Up there, back in reality, is harshness. I know that there's trial and anger and grief and everything else that life brings. See, if I block out the sounds that my ears are trying to relay, it's quiet. True silence, like the kind you find in a desert, or at the highest peak on a mountain.

The other call, the one that asks me to come to a place of no pain, no anger, no nothing, is stronger. I'm fading away.

And I want to.

But then a voice shatters the silence, and I have to wonder if the place my mind went ever existed in any other than fantasy.

"Hey, Ad." I know that voice; I know it like I know the smell of my house, or the bark of a dog.

He sounds so much like Nathan, that at first I pass it for a cheap trick.

"Ad." My eyes are forced open, and it's not an inexpensive ruse. "Miss me?"

It's so overwhelming that I'm torn between tears and laughter. So, I don't ask where my friends are. I don't ask what happened to Nathan, or to Jacob. I just close my eyes and hope to go back to where I could float, where I could fly.