Mirror

Nightmare

I clamped my hands against my ears, but the desperate cries of rage and panic came from in my head, not from my classroom. The voice, a woman's voice, airy and sweet, narrated for me, but I had long since stopped listening to her words. It had been like this for a while now.

A month ago I first heard her voice in my dreams.

"Lithallia, look," she had said and I did not. That's all I remember from that first dream, but a week later I heard her again.

"Lithallia, open your eyes." I did.

I would have laughed or cried out in delight, but I had no breath. I would have smiled, but I only gaped in awe. I would have turned to find she who brought me here, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the immense mountainous peaks stretching out in endless waves of rock and snow before me. Like the whole ocean had risen up in a catastrophic storm and been frozen in time. "What is this?" I breathed and the question was swept up in the wind, carried across the vast expanse of land never to be heard. I stepped forward and fell, caught up in a tide of icy water that rushed down the mountainside into a crystal clear lake. The current deposited me on a bank of smooth stones under the soft rays of sunlight. I caught my breath. The perfume of lush green grass hung in the air, mingling with the smell of the sea. It was there I stayed until the sun dipped below the horizon, casting out brilliant streams of sunset color. As I walked toward rolling hills through the tall grass, feeling the soft loam depress under my weight, the first stars began to appear in an indigo sky. The intensity of the tiny pinpricks of light diminished as the night drew on, but only to make way for the pure white crescent of the moon.

"This," she whispered in my ear and I had the sense she was drifting along behind me, "is a pure world you see: unpolluted by human interference, untouched by modern warfare, and undisturbed by overpopulation."

I felt light upon waking up. I went to school feeling cleansed and happy. I smiled at everyone. "Unpolluted by human interference, untouched by modern warfare, and undisturbed by over population," I repeated to myself frequently throughout the day just to bring back glimpses of that dream.

Then two weeks ago she showed me a village nestled in the woods and bordered by a narrow river, crystal clear and nearly three meters across. A simple life I witnessed in half-conscious reminiscence. I woke each morning then with the bittersweet feeling of parting with loved ones. Their voices: "I love you's" and "Be nice to your brother's" and "Have a good day, dear's" would linger briefly on my mind. The smell of damp pine needles and baking bread in open fire ovens would flit in and out of memory as dreams do.

Until six days ago came a man. The ever-present voice called him a shadow. The first night my only memory of him was slate-gray eyes and toothy smiles. Oh, and the smell of iron. That rusted, nauseating stench was what woke me that night.

I couldn't have ordered the events of the next five nights if I tried and I didn't. It wasn't iron it was blood. I gathered a knife was his preferred weapon, but sometimes he used his hands because I saw the black bruises around Jeriah's neck. Yes, I remember her name was Jeriah. "No, don't touch my baby, that's my Jeriah. Don't touch her." I thought maybe that was her mother after sweet Jeriah was pulled from the river. I think maybe she was the next one dead. A knife wound, or maybe four. Maybe that was the boy. It was his voice I heard now, even while awake. He wasn't really a boy. He was probably my age.