The First Dream

A young girl, maybe a pre-teen, with sweat dripping from every orifice and her tattered, shredded casual clothes, shivers and twitches while holding, rather forcefully, a long knife gouged into a human body underneath her small and kneeling frame. Her teeth grind and chatter from the swell of emotion inside of her and the cold she feels. Her eyes are obscured by her auburn hair that falls erratically around her face.

The body underneath her is of indeterminable sex, as its face has already been impaled several times, much like the rest of the body. Blood has poured out over the surrounding area and coated the girl’s hands and knife.

She cries out suddenly while pulling out and knife and ramming it back in, right into the neck. Only a moment passes before she pulls the knife back, towards herself, through most of the body, ripping apart its insides and sending a torrent of blood shooting out into the air. The gallons of blood are ridiculous in amount as they saturate the girl completely and threaten to drown her.

When it has all ended, she takes a breath, rises to her feet, and makes the sign of the cross on her forehead, using the blood and two fingers. In her free hand is a rose with a deadly, pointed stem. With one swift movement, she twirls the rose in her fingers and plunges the stem through her own heart.

---

I suppose I woke up rather suddenly after that wild and vivid dream. The details are fuzzy at best. I know for certain, though, that I went over to my bags and pulled out Caladbolg, my samurai sword. Legend has it that the owner of this sword is cursed to have prophetic dreams--or rather, it’s not so much legend as it is fact, obviously. It was made in the late 1800’s, commissioned by a wealthy Japan enthusiast (or maybe just the equivalent of a modern American otaku, considering it’s named after a mythical Irish sword and not a Japanese one, like “Masamune” or something of the like), and cursed--somehow; it’s all legend and conjecture, after all. The sword has only seen three owners before myself, and all of them went mad from the nightmarish premonitions and killed themselves; obviously, it’s easy then to lose the backstory aside from the base legend. Besides, it doesn’t matter; the katana shows me dreams of things I cannot change and slowly drives me insane. The world spins and time passes. I looked at the clock and saw it was time for me to take a shower, eat, and get to my first class. I hung the sword by its sheath from the little (white-painted) coat-hanger barely stuck in the concrete wall, then went on my way without thinking about the dream for months.