sophie.

Chapter 18

JANUARY 19TH, 2014

My dreams seemed to stretch on forever that night. The last one began like any normal day at Garrison's Diner before I broke my leg. But from the look of the restaurant's interior, I obviously wasn't at Garrison's Diner, but rather, Ruby's Ice Cream Parlor. I was behind the counter, scooping some ice cream into a cone for a customer. But when I looked up to give it to him, I saw that his elbow was on the counter and he was looking back, through the windows and out at the sky.

"It's been sunny for an awful long time," the man remarked. The voice sounded strangely familiar to me, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

"How do you mean?" I asked, and still not looking directly at me, the man checked the watch on his wrist and said, "It's nine PM." And what he said didn't make sense, because even in summertime the sun didn't stay up that long. 

"That's not possible, sir," I told him, and put out the ice cream cone for him to take. In that next moment he turned to face me, and I finally recognized him for who he was: Daemon.  He took the ice cream and, in that strange way that dreams function, a woman shifted into existence beside him. She had a nice look about her, but in that moment her expression was full of oncoming worry. There was a little girl just next to her who held her hand, and after I made my remark, she turned to the window and stared.

"The clouds aren't moving," she said in a whisper, and confused, I followed her gaze. As if in answer, the swaying of the trees on the horizon halted, and the stillness rushed forward like the angry brunt of a tsunami. Cars froze in motion and then, blaring and deep, an omnipresent bellow shuddered over the ice cream shop. Everything in the parlor then halted, save for Daemon alone. My viewpoint thereafter shifted into third-person, and I watched in abject horror as he first faltered, aware that he had survived the death of reality. His wife and child had been frozen, and my body, too. And in a jarring, terrifying way, things started glitching where they once stood: the clouds, the cars, the trees. They glitched, as it were, and then disappeared. And not long after this phenomenon began, his daughter disappeared, and then his wife; my own body soon vanished too, and it was then that I realized I was witnessing a temporal rapture.  When the sun, the last thing left in the world besides Daemon, blipped out of existence, I knew that he was alone. Across space, across life, he was left behind.  And the only thing left to be heard was Daemon sobbing against the ground, where his wife and daughter once stood, for hours on end. I eventually woke up.

And in the same way that I knew I had to find Adrien when he disappeared, I was graced with a foreign feeling of certainty, one implying that my dream had actually happened. Perhaps not in the same exact way, or in the same place, or with me involved. But one way or another, the world went black.

I recalled a tender moment when Daemon had captured me in the year 3750: 

"What are their names?" I asked, very quietly. He didn't look away from the fire, didn't quite acknowledge me, but I felt that he would answer me anyway. 

"My daughter's name is Elaine," he said. "And my wife's, Ingrid." 

I remembered Robert telling me that Daemon was "in a bind," and I had quietly assumed that his family was dead, and that he was trying to alter the course of time in order to save them. In that respect, I simply considered Daemon a dangerous nuisance set out to fuck things up for the rest of us travellers. But in my dream, I got the distinct feeling that his family was not actually dead. Not completely. Something told me that there was a world out there where they lived full, happy lives. And if I felt that suspicion, then no doubt Daemon felt it too. I had a lot of questions, then, that I needed Adrien to answer. Like, what timespace was Daemon from? And more importantly, what happened that caused this blackness? How long did it last for? Did Adrien even know?