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TALES OF THE DREAMSCAR
- The First Walk -
Into the Dreams of a Boyhood Nightmare
AUTHOR’S NOTE: With the permission of Chibichocobo, and also at her request, I have written a piece of fiction set somewhat within the world of the original “Dreamscapes” story. This fic does not interfere with the official story of Chibi’s original, ongoing series or the new one and can be perceived more as a ‘side story’ if nothing else. The only thing that connects this to “Dreamscapes” is the use of that world’s characters and situations. With the exception of ‘the Dreamscar’, all other things seen and read in this fan-fiction belong to Chibichocobo. I hope you enjoy my strange take on two of her characters as well as the introduction a nameless one of my own creation. If you don’t, well I tried…but then, not everyone can be as good as Chibi! On another small point, ‘the Dreamscar’ concept could be used very easily to write about characters other than Chibi’s. Perhaps, someone else’s character will have their dreams walked sometime soon…
Ah, a Dreamscar. This one has found a Dreamscar. The blur between what is real and what is not, the shadowy line between life given and death reclaimed. This one can walk this line, this one can walk this dream. This one can see what thoughts, what fear forges this creature’s future, this creature’s fate and this creature’s destiny. Maybe this one will gain a better understanding of what the ‘human condition’ is. The Dreamscar sings to this one, beckoning and pleading to be touched, to be walked. The call is irresistible. The urge irrepressible. To walk the Dreamscar is not unlike touching the essence of Life itself, bathing in the Light of Creation. To walk the Dreamscar is to burn with the exhilaration of Knowing. To drown in the passion of Universal Knowledge. To know all, to feel all – to…become all.
This is the Dreamscar, and it beckons this one to walk it.
Yet his mind was far from the pain and weariness of his body, focused instead on a single image that floated in the blackened void along the edge of his consciousness – an image of a silver-haired youth sprawled across a hard, wooden floor; handsome face marred by smudges of dirt and dried blood. His dark eyes were wide with terror and sadness, mouth still worked in the middle of a frozen scream that never had a chance to escape his lungs. The long, unblemished steel of his sword was still clutched tightly in his grip, death-frozen hands refusing to release the hilt of the blade. But the image that forced Juneau’s eyes to burn with tears of both grief and hate was not some distant memory of the past – no, rather it was a horrifying memory of the present. Merely an hour removed since he had first left his own estates to visit a boy who had been embarrassed and humiliated by Lavoisier Archipela – Patriarch of the Noble House of Archipela. Juneau had been hoping to speak with the peasant teen, try to explain to him the error of what he had attempted to do. But when he arrived at the hovel the boy called home, he had found it in ruins and Andante Montante Fedante dead. Murdered by the hands of someone whom he had once considered his Lord and Father.
“Get up,” came a voice from before him, accompanied by the sound of hard earth crunching loudly beneath boot heels. “Get up Juneau, it has yet to be finished between us.”
Slowly, Juneau raised his head. The dirt on his face was streaked with both tears and sweat, leaving thin trails of clean skin exposed to the light of an ending day. His sky-blue eyes fell almost immediately upon the approaching man, though at first, they seemed dazed and unfocused. But with each passing step the man took toward him, they grew harder and harder. Hatred seethed and boiled in those eyes, hatred as cold and as bitter as the wind that was blowing off the snow-capped summit of the surrounding mountains. Hand tensing even more on the Epee’s hilt, fingers tightening around the coarse leather in anticipation, Juneau sluggishly hefted himself to his feet – deftly ignoring his bones as they groaned in protest. His muscles felt as soft as mud and as loose as an untethered banner caught in the wind, but still he forced himself up and away from the ground. Twice, he nearly stumbled off of the sloping ledge – his body weakly supporting his sporadic movements – until his back caught the stone-face wall near it’s edge. Juneau took a deep breath and grimaced as he did. Tiredly, he raised his sword toward the advancing man, its blade-point set squarely in his direction.
“You…are…right, Lavoisier,” he gasped quietly as his hand clenched tighter against his split abdomen. “…it has…yet to be…finished…between us. It has…yet to even…begin…”
Lavoisier Archipela acknowledged his son’s words with his own.
“Well said, boy,” the large man stated condescendingly. “Spoken in that annoyingly feeble voice of which you weaklings are so very well known for. But this is no children’s tale, is it? There is no prescribed ending in which the coward becomes a hero, defeats the adversary and rides off into the descending sun to be with his beloved forever more. This, Juneau, will not be some bedtime story where the weakling overcomes all that opposes him to triumph in the name of all that is good and pure. No, there will be no happy endings in this story, boy. You will die by my hands weakling – die a coward’s death – and I shall carry your broken corpse to the Shadow Dragon Xelandia himself. I shall set your foul carcass next to the decaying one of your slave friend and you can both burn for all eternity in the Great Lake of Fire. You who have dared to profane the name of this grand and noble house. You who would dare to call slave filth baring the thrice-damned name of Fedante a friend! You deserve worse for spitting in the face of your glorious Blood and siding with trash that isn’t fit to lick the scum off our boots! You have proven nothing more to me, Juneau, but your ignorance of the ways of nobles and slaves with this insipid attack upon my person. YOU attacking ME! You truly are a foolish, idealistic child, aren’t you? How poetic an ending for the weakling coward’s sad tale.”
A malevolent look flashed across Juneau’s flustered face, eyes ablaze with a maddening fury of a young boy on the edge of manhood who had nothing. Nothing left to care about, nothing left to love, and nothing left to live for. Angrily, he pushed himself away from the cold rock face that he had been leaning on – and found himself stumbling uncontrollably towards the edge of the escarpment. Juneau’s legs gave way beneath him as he attempted to steady himself and he could feel the cold wind press stiffly against his skin as he tumbled off the edge of the stone outcropping. For what seemed an eternity, he fell; seemingly caught adrift in a thick mire bog instead of freefalling off a mountain cliff. Yet when the ground suddenly rose up to greet him, there was no surprise in Juneau’s cerulean eyes. The impact against the uneven, hard-packed surface beneath outcropping he had just tumbled from forced the air from his lungs ruthlessly. The momentum of his fall threw his weary body into an unrestrained plummet down its wide face. His grip on the Epee had been loosened when he struck the ground and was jarred from his hand the moment he began his uncontrolled descent. It now skittered and bounced along the rocky soil of the bluff, jumping from one side to the other in high vertical arcs before finally coming to rest against a large cairn of rocks with a resounding clang.
Juneau’s own plunge down the cliffside was no less kind, ending rather abruptly near its base. For a long moment he laid there, his body wracked with pain and his breath escaping through barely parted lips. They were dried and cracked, with a thin layer of darkened blood masking their rough surface and the air that flowed from them came in ragged, raspy gasps. Each inhalation that he took brought white-hot pain, every labored breath drawn seared his throat and burned his lungs – the cold air of the mountain seemingly trying to pull out more than it put in. He fought to drag more of the frigid wind into his empty lungs, hungrily drinking it down like a man dying of thirst; gagging on almost every breath as each one sucked in sent wave after wave of agony coursing through the open wound across his middle. Even the slow rise and fall of his chest brought a new rush of fire – a superheated jet pain and anguish that tore through him with such intensity that his body shuddered and convulsed frenziedly. Such was his torment that he barely noticed his father’s slow approach.
“Look at you,” Lavoisier said casually as he tossed one side of his ebon cloak over a shoulder. “Go on, look at yourself.”
Raising a gloved hand, the man who had once been his father gestured arrogantly to the emptiness before him. The air seemed to shimmer momentarily, then stilled just as quickly. Suddenly, it began to ripple as though a pebble had been cast into a clear pond. The wavelets spread out slowly from an unseen center, and in their wake was left a dark and watery surface which gently wavered as if a calm wind were sweeping across it.
As the last of the ruffles smoothed from it, the opaquely glimmering surface of the suspended circlet deliberately began to reveal a smoky reflection. Within it’s span, swirling images danced somberly amidst the slowly dissipating wavelets, eventually molding themselves into a single pattern – a cruel likeness of Juneau’s battered and broken frame. The dimness of the hovering image painted an even grimmer portrait of his condition than actual reality did, but could do nothing to relay the pain that slowly ebbed its way the through the fallen boy’s form. For long moments, the shady reflection mocked Juneau, beckoning for a reaction that never came.
Lavoisier, apparently not content with his son’s lack of response, gazed down dispassionately at his nearly unconscious body. Shaking his head lightly to himself, the man strode toward his fallen adversary – each step taken was slow and deliberate, as if he had all the time in the world. With a smooth and chillingly casual wave of a hand, he dispelled the wavering image that hovered insultingly before Juneau and stopped just short of his son’s pummeled body. He stood there for a moment, conceit and arrogance twisting an aged face, framed by long waves of gray-streaked black hair that lined his shoulders lazily. Dignified wings of white rested at his temples, giving Lavoisier Archipela the statuesque highborn appearance that Juneau would never have. Those cold, lilac eyes burned intently.
“It is truly sad that even within your own dreams, you cannot defeat me,” the elder Archipela stated harshly as he placed a hard boot down on Juneau’s wounded abdomen, bringing forth an agonizing scream from the teenager’s mouth. “You are a pathetic excuse for an Archipela, boy. How someone as weak and wretched as you had the strength to crawl from your mother’s womb will forever remain a mystery to me. Perhaps it is her weak blood that has tainted and dissolved the strength of your heritage. For certain, you are no warrior. You merely play at it, like all children do. Perhaps it is for the best that you die here in your dream, like the weakling that you are, Juneau. It would spare you the dishonor of a coward’s death in the waking world – on a true battlefield.”
Lifting his foot unhurriedly from his son’s torn midsection, Lavoisier Archipela unsheathed his own sword for the first time since he had given Juneau the wound that was slowly killing him. Lowering the point of the blade against the boy’s pale and fragile throat, Lavoisier gestured grandly to all that surrounded him.
“To think that you would toss away all that has been handed to you, Juneau, all the power, all the privilege, everything. Hurl it all away for some archaic and outdated ways that teach you nothing more than how to bend knee to those lesser and weaker than yourself. Chivalry? Ha! You, child, are a fool who should never have squirmed your way out of your mother’s womb. Your very life taints and pollutes the noble line of the Archipela’s and it is time that I removed the black stain that you have come to represent. Fare thee well, Juneau Archipela, weakling and coward; friend to slave-boys and a child who took his mother’s life so that he could come into this world to shame and befoul the proud name of the Archipela House. May Xelandia show you the mercy that I shall not!”
With
very little hesitation, and even less remorse, Lavoisier Archipela drew the
sword back slightly and then plunged it viciously into his son’s throat. A thick gout of crimson flew into the cold
mountain air as Juneau’s final, gurgled scream faded silently in the howling
wind.
This one does not understand. What is the ‘human condition’? Is it fear of death? Is it fear of betrayal? Of failure? Of regret? What drives the human to these thoughts? Why does the creature agonize over such trivialities? Why should it matter what path the creature chooses? Why should the man-child show emotion over the blood-connected’s actions? All things die, all things end. This one does not understand.
What is the ‘human condition’? Will this one ever understand? Will this one ever find the Knowing? Perhaps walking another creature’s mind would provide this one with answers. Is there another Dreamscar that this one can walk? Could this one find the Knowing if this one walks another mind?
A song in the dark, a Dreamscar has formed. It sings to this one, beckons this one to walk it. Pulling and tugging, this one does not resist. This one will find out what drives the creatures called ‘humans’. This one will learn of the ‘human condition’ and what it means to the creatures that drape themselves in the Skin. This one will gain the Knowing and become one with the Universal Knowledge.
And until that time, this one shall follow the lure of the songs and walk the Dreamscars that sing them.
- The End? -
