spades: something personal
nine: anger, fear
3 on the die: this writing is public.
[a dream unknowingly shared with countless others, who awoke with similar symptoms sable describes in their account. entry penned early in their flight across the inlands.]
(content warning here for mentions of body horror, strangulation, death or the lack thereof, and emetophobia.)
i dreamt last night of the battlefield. it was devoid of the battle itself, however; the armies were gone, the machines unseen, the mages in hiding. the ground was still streaked with the blood of the fallen, but the bodies themselves were gone.
there was one body that was there, however, that hadn’t been there before. aphiel. red hair fanned across dry grass like fresh blood, and huge black bruises littered their neck where Her hands had touched them. their limbs lay at odd angles, and as i blinked i realized their wrists were held with copper chains.
i tried to cry out to them— i tried to beg them to rise— but from my throat came no sound. and then i felt a chill come up the back of my neck. (i am awake now and the chill still has not left me.)
few are left who have seen Her face and walked away with their life. i have been unfortunate enough to do so three times. this time felt all too like she had stepped into my dream alongside me, rather than being a projection of my terrified mind.
i know that she spoke to me. but i don’t know what she said, i was so afraid. i went to my knees and covered my ears and tried to ignore the fact that her teeth were stained with aphiel’s blood, that she had consumed their heart for her own.
“i can see,” she said, before she departed (this is the only thing i remember her saying, clearly) “why they favored you so. but you are very much not to my taste.”
and she left me there, alive, instead of taking my life for her own like i wish she had done on that battlefield so long ago.
i woke from that dream sweating and yet ice cold, near about to heave up what little food i had eaten earlier in the evening out of my stomach. i would not like to sleep again for some time. i do not want to see that image again, though it is burned across the back of my eyelids now.
when will i rest?
