I was in the forest again. The rain was dying down to a mist, the darkness of my situation overwhelming. A dead Vampire lay at my feet behind me, the essence of his soul drained away into the Blade of Osiris for all eternity. At my front was impending doom as the Vampires attempted to circle around me and cut off any means of escape.
“Well what are you waiting for?” I screamed in challenge. “I haven’t got all fucking night!”
It was the dream again, the same nightmarish hell that has been plaguing my afterthoughts every night for the past month. Yet this night, this one time, the dream held no sway over me. Tonight I had experienced real terror, came close to true death and not this subconscious facsimile of one.
Everything freeze froze, going from normal, to slow, then from extreme slow to stop. I was taking control. Taking back what was mine. I refused to be terrified by the phantom images my mind created. Not now. Not ever.
I was looking at myself. Looking at the still frame of me that was bent low in a warrior’s crouch, about to strike out at the closest person, the closest Vampire that was near me. I didn’t recognize the dress she was wearing, the torn little white dress that clung to her skin because of the rain.
I walked close to myself, circling the dream me, that innocent little girl with a face twisted into a hate fueled, murderous rage. I didn’t even recognize this girl, even though she was a reflection of myself. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to turn her from who I am now, to what she was, yet I could feel strength radiating off her person. A kind of power and conviction that I never possessed in the real world.
I wish I was as strong as her. I wish I had her singular vision of authoritative dominance. She wielded the Blade of Osiris as if it was her own, like the strange volcanic metal was just an extension of her arm, then a mere weapon. I tried to gain a better vantage point, to examine what the Blade really looked like, but upon coming closer, it emitted some type of solar flare, a bright, blinding flash of brilliance that overwhelmed and bewildered my senses all at once.
I turned my attention instead towards the Vampires in front of me, if that’s what they truly were. They looked normal enough, nothing very Vampy about them. Nothing except the eyes. The glowing eyes that seemed to drip with death and destruction. If I saw nothing else but them, nothing except the eyes alone, I would be in fear. They reminded me of the man in black. The way his eyes looked every time he punched me. His weren’t as venomous of course, nowhere near as defiantly demonized as theirs, but they were of the same brood, belonging to monsters that only intended to do me harm.
“Reverse.” I said aloud.
The dreamscape followed my orders explicitly. The world around me moving in rewind as I watched it all unfold methodically, searching for something that I didn’t even know existed, yet realizing that I would recognize it nonetheless once my eyes fell upon it.
The Vampires disappeared back into the forest. The dead Vampire ascended from the ground, my Dreamself rising in the air, to be held in his grasp, pulling the Blade of Osiris out of his chest. I’m hiding it behind me now, the Vampire is falling backwards into the mud, covered in black smoke and crackling blue lightning.
The splintered tree reforms. Lightning from the Vampires chest flies into the sky. I'm chanting now. The Vampire is talking, yet I don’t understand his words because they are in reverse. He’s staring at me, cold and calculating. He’s not moving, not breathing; he’s not doing anything other than casting his menace in my direction.
I wonder what is going on in that mind of his? What exactly do the dead dream of? I can’t shake his stare; the venom that’s woven into it so intricately, one could not separate it from the other, not knowing were the one ended and the other began. I could feel his hatred, so strong that it was almost palatable.
That’s when I noticed it. When I realized that he was staring at me! He had long stopped paying attention to my Dreamself, giving her no more thought; yet he could not keep his eyes off of me. The real me! The me that was in control of the dream!
I awoke, jerking myself foreword, choking off a scream. We were pulling into the driveway to my home. I think I scared Abigail; her face was pale white, no doubt do to my sudden night terror thrashing out the blue.