Heroes of Dreamland Rewritten, Book 1: Stars Amidst Lightning

Chapter 29

Sakura Dee | さくら•ヂィー

Thankfully, we ended up being able to have a nice, long rest that night— er, yesterday. It was probably afternoon by the time Kirby, Bandanna, and I all woke up, but you could hardly tell it by looking at the sky. The world was barely any lighter than twilight, and every few minutes, a low, quiet rumble of thunder would crawl across the hills, an ominous signal of a distant storm that somehow never seemed to draw any closer. Once in awhile, I'd notice a small flash out of the corner of my eye, as though a small amount of lightning was jumping from one cloud to another somewhere in my range of vision, but I never managed to glance fast enough to see it actually happening. Meta Knight kept suddenly giving the sky brief glances as well, so I assume he noticed it as well. The kids, on the other hand, other than seeming a bit nervous after waking up (mostly from fear that they'd wake up into another awful, vivid nightmare, which I think we were all worried about yesterday), didn't seem to notice the worsening weather.

Like I said, though, we all spent the first day after the cave tense and quiet, all of us still processing what we'd been through the night before. Even after that long rest, my head still had a dull ache to it, and if I pushed at it at all, it felt rather tender. Meta Knight advised me not to do so, as it'd probably slow down the healing process, but it was hard not to. When your head hurts, you're tempted to rub it. It's just a basic fact of life for most people.

But worse than the headache was the cold feeling that filled all of us. I don't know if it was just the nightmares, or the weather, or what, but yesterday afternoon, as we all stood around silently munching on the small loaves of bread Meta Knight passed out from our supplies, all of the feeling of teasing camaraderie from the days before was completely gone. Even the kids were quiet, and even Kirby's enjoyment of the simple meal seemed uncharacteristically muted. It wasn't that we were upset at each other— if anything, we seemed to have even more of an eye out for each other's safety yesterday than usual. We just... all were quiet. We didn't want to talk. Even if we weren't physically exhausted anymore, the night before had all but drained us of our emotional and mental strength.

And... I don't know if the thought occurred to anyone else... but if a little, inconsequential monster who had nothing to do with our quest, whom we just happened to run into, managed to do this to us... I don't know. It just makes me more and more anxious about the monster hidden somewhere among the clouds. If the monster we weren't even supposed to face succeeded in hurting and upsetting the four of us so much, what will the mighty giant succeed in doing to the pesky, weak flies?

Well, even if all any of us really felt like doing was sitting around and staring off into space, we still had a job to do. We spent the rest of the few remaining hours of usable daylight scouring the rest of Cookie Country, searching for the monster. We didn't find the Lightning, unsurprisingly. We were nearly finished when night started to fall, so we found another safe-seeming tree to spend the night in. Last night, I took first watch, despite Meta Knight's initial protests. At first, I thought he was going to win out like he always did, but last night, his mind seemed to be elsewhere, occupied by other things, and so after a single attempt to tell me to go to sleep instead, he quietly agreed to my offer to keep watch first. Sometime around midnight, just as I was starting to get really sleepy, he quietly approached and we wordlessly changed the guard. I fell asleep soon after, and dreamed nothing all night.

This morning, Meta Knight woke all of us up not long after dawn. The night had been uneventful. Now that some time had gone by after the whole cave... incident, everyone seemed to be in better spirits, even Meta Knight, to a degree. But even so... Sir Knight seemed to be anxious about something, somewhere underneath the surface, even if he was doing his best to hide it. The kids and I, on the other hand, were pretty much back to normal, or at least much more so than we were the day before. Breakfast was accompanied by the laughter of the kiddos and Kirby inevitably proclaiming that he was still hungry, and even though the clouds still hung above, seeming almost to keep drawing closer to the ground, it was like a fog had been lifted.