Broken Glass - Taekook

DREAM #1

The world is painted in various shades of grey and blue, a cold collage of colour that seems to dull the universe with its very presence, as if the life has been drained from it. I find that I'm floating, weightless and numb, in the middle of a pale blue stream of water, my hands empty, my mind stuck on a singular concept, a simple idea that seems to have nothing to do with my position.

When the world around you has frozen, it's up to the individual to set things in motion again. When the universe itself stops for a breather, sometimes a single kick of a piece of snow can set off an avalanche. After all, a stone grows moss if it doesn't grow, and then it ends up cracked, broken from the inside by its own inability to continue.

In that moment, that is all I feel, all I think, in this odd colourless world that I have come to inhabit. 

And then the colour rushes in, too fast to compute, and I get fast flashing images of frozen frames, frozen seconds in time. In a world that has been ripped to shreds.

The scowl of a king on his throne, pretending to listen to subjects that fear him more than death itself, toying with their lives simply for the sake of his own sick entertainment. The tears on the face of a young boy who can't breathe, shoved into the cesspit with fellow prisoners who were starving. The agonising pain in his eyes when they begin to tear him apart, driven mad by the torture of being known.

The rivers drenched in the blood of a nation, stained a grotesque rainbow from the various species that have been destroyed, killed mercilessly through some sick campaign I can't understand. 

The scene shifts, and I'm faced with a bridge, stretching over the water, made of weathered stone and twisting ivy, dull from overuse and damaged by the feet of thousands of soldiers who pass through without consideration for any other users.

The land tastes the iron armour, and reels back. For a moment, it flows with a deep golden substance that isn't quite liquid or gas, but something that cannot be described, hidden thousands of miles underground, pushed down further than usual by someone who wants to destroy it, corrupt it and turn it into something else. 

The river becomes golden, too, flowing with that same substance. But before I can reach out and taste it, touch it, see what it is, a sword cuts through like a knife through fabric, tainting the gold with a deep crimson. Turning it into something putrid, decimated.

As I watch, the stone on the bridge begins to decay, too fast. It turns a dull shade of red, the colours start to bleed, and then it slowly crumbles into nothing, the remnants falling into the bloody river.

But the soldiers still come.

They built flimsy wooden bridges, lay down planks and balance their way across the river, which roars with fury at being tainted by the madness of a tyrant. Who is selfish enough to believe that anything with more power than him shouldn't exist. The waters rise, engulf screaming men in rusted armour that drags them to the depths.

I look into the water, see them dashed against the riverbed with a violence similar to their own.

I turn around, and see a village that's been burnt to the ground. Decayed bodies attracting flies to half-charred human meat. Shells of houses and barns, clinging to the earth as if scared to see the end. In some places, the flames still flicker, but they're dying out too. Faces melted off of children, jaws still wide in death from screams of terror, of torment.

Rangy wolves patrol the area, snarling, burns dotted about their flanks, eyes wild with a savagery that seems impossible even for them. They snap at each other like enemies, but shy away from the charred remains of a barn, despite the chances of free meat within.

When the world is poisoned, there is nothing to eat.

A howl starts up, a sound that sends a chill through my spine. It's a mix of a screech and a cry, something feral dragged up from generations of canine heritage, thousands of years of evolution tugging out a desperate cry. And then it stops, halfway through, as if something has killed it.

Then I see the wolf, dead. Lying on its side, mouth still open in an interrupted howl. A human figure kneeling over the corpse, throwing fist after fist into its ravaged sides. A closer look gives me the horrifying image of the person's knuckles: decorated with spikes, drilled into each knuckle, gore stuck to each point.

The person looks down, sees the destruction, and smiles.

This is the land that I have been dropped into. It has been poisoned by an evil that no man could ever understand, a greed too strong to contain, driven to extinction by someone who just wants to see the aftermath of disaster. This land needs someone to fix it. Someone to travel through the darkest parts of hell, someone to come out on the other side stronger than ever, someone to bring a tyrant to his knees.

The flowing golden substance reappears, and I find myself wrapped in it, enveloped by an incorporeal presence too complex to understand, different silk strands woven together in a tapestry of different shades of gold. And the closer I look, the more I can see, the more shades I see. Orange, dark copper, a pale and sandy yellow, metallic gold, and the glorious gilded shade of sunset.

"Why was I brought here?" I ask the nothingness, not expecting an answer. I'm searching for a human face in the confusion, trying to find someone who can explain my situation. 
"Eithyr needs a Saviour," something whispers, directly into my ears.

"What do you mean?" I call out.

"Eithyr needs a Saviour," the voice repeats, circling round my head. I turn my head, baffled, looking for the source of the words. But I see nothing, nobody, except for the swirling cloud of gold.

"How can I find them? What can I do to help them? Where are they? What is a Saviour even supposed to do?"
"Eithyr needs a Saviour." 
"Who are they? What-"

"You are the Saviour."