From Where the Wind May Blow

Prologue

Drowning.

He was drowning.

Water filled his lungs at an inhuman speed, as he tried in vain to gasp for air.Black spots smothered his vision, as his eyes opened wide. He tried to scream, but to no avail. He tried to grab onto something; to catch something, anything he could anchor himself to. Something real. Where was he? Which way was up? What was happening to him?

Then he felt weightless.

He floated in darkness. Without light, without sound, without touch. Here, there was no up or down. No world at all. His useless lungs contracted, straining to somehow adjust to the density of water, but no longer did it matter to Ian.

His life seemed to float in and out of his line of sight, but strangely, in choppy detail, and only the parts that were most memorable to him.. His fifth birthday, when he felt so grown up. His grandmother knitting in her old oak chair by the door. His father's broad shoulders holding him up to better see the celebration fireworks. All of this drifted through his hazy eyes, and he watched silently, unable to think, unable to speak.

 It was all just a dream.

The thought; it was a thought and not actual speech, floated through his mind

Just a dream.

His entire world shuddered; the darkness blurred. His limbs kicked, and then slowly came to rest, like a beached fish. He sank back into unconsciousness, not waking from the dream.

Peace filled him, the heaviness in his chest lifted; his eyes, which had been shut tight, seemed to relax. A strange glow filled the darkness. A light just as complete as the shadow, yet the shadow was still there. As if he were looking into a dark room with his eyes, and seeing a lit room with his mind, like an overlaying picture.

        And so, with darkness in his eyes and bright light in his mind, he felt peace. He drifted toward death, he knew it now. He was dying, but that was okay. It was peaceful, it was okay to be dying, it was-

"What ails you, young one?"

        That voice was soft and smooth, rough and booming. A voice as contradictory as the light and darkness. A voice heard as a whisper but that echoed as a roar. It tore through the dark in his eyes, shredded the light in his mind, and with a gasp of air sweet as honey, he sat bolt upright in his bed, breath coming in gasps his skin feeling pricked by thousands of hot needles.

        He looked around, sweat and tears blurring his vision. He was in his room, in his bed. Light from his windows flooded the room. It was daytime.

        He slowly composed himself, leaning back on the sweat drenched pillow and put his arm over his eyes. He wasn't drowning. Not anymore. Yet, he could still smell the salt of the ocean from so long ago. Six years. It had been six years since he'd had a dream, a nightmare, like that. Six years since that day on the pier, that fateful day he'd drown.

        Then why was he reminded now? Why had his dreams been tortured with the visions of murky darkness that lurked in his sleep for the month and a half gone by?

         He didn't have time to speculate, as at that moment his alarm went off. He groaned, the buzzing sound filling the room with its piercing cry, and Ian wondered if maybe, just maybe, this would be the day he finally went insane.

        He got up, threw on some jeans and a tee-shirt from the dirty clothes pile, the jeans only smelling a little like dog, and went to the bathroom. His reflection stared back at him in the mirror, his red-gold hair and eyes, light blue this morning, looking just as sleep deprived as he felt. Indeed, his fingers were not sufficient enough to tame his bed-head, and so he resorted to the rarely used comb. Contacts were put in, teeth were brushed, and he walked out of the bathroom feeling ten times more awake than when he walked His entire early morning routine went by with a rush, and so it was only after did he realize. After he'd fed his dog Leale, after he ate cereal and packed his school bag, and after he'd put in his earbuds and walked the quarter block to the bus stop. After he'd sat down on the bench and contemplated the day ahead that he realized two very disturbing, very disheartening things.

        The first realization was that, in the end of his dream, he'd heard a voice. That voice that he had never heard, and that he knew for a fact was a true memory. A voice that he hadn't remembered until just then, one that he was now certain had spoken to him in his last moments of drowning.

He shivered.

His second realization, one that caused him to groan and cover his face with his hands, was that it was Saturday.

And it is on that bedraggled morning that our story begins.

~This chapter is Dedicated to AuthorOfEverything~