Scourge of the Gods

# # Chapter 1 # #

(PROOF COPY -- Not for distribution.)

Her head spun, aching, and Xanthane trembled, her body cold as death. All around her shadows massed, a blur of reality she wasn't ready to face, and she shook her head, trying to clear it. She couldn't remember anything beyond taking her medicine, falling asleep, and now waking, the nightmares a haze that refused to clear. Lingering, the residual sensation brought a sour tang to her throat. The same process repeated every night. Dream. Wake. See. Dismiss.

Her eyes narrowed with thought. Something tickled in the back of her mind, something relevant. Something she couldn't find. Memory remained elusive yet tangible, weaving in her head like webs of silken thread.

What had she forgotten?

Pushing the surreal experience out of her thoughts, she focused on her surroundings, her breathing quick and sharp. A tent enclosed her, familiarity that attempted comfort. The room was cold enough that she saw her breath. Xanthane lay on a cot covered by sleeping bags, but underneath them the chill permeated, her teeth chattering, her body racked with tremors caused by the freezing temperature.

If only she weren't so confused. Worse, a feeling like abandonment filled her, creating a sadness that was both inexplicable and wrong. Things were good in her life, assurance of it settling deep inside.

She shouldn't feel this way.

Slowly, recollection crept back. Yesterday. Last week. This past year. Nothing was different except for those few minutes while waking when she somehow managed to mentally misplace all that happened to her. The strangeness of it took a while to disappear, and it happened each and every morning.

She shook her head again, clarity sinking in. Yup, she was awake. What a wild night.

A yawn escaped her dry mouth, even as the horror and stench of illusion stuck to her like glue. At least the memory of dreams were familiar, though as always, unwanted.

Her gaze narrowed, and once more, she looked around. Her throat tightened, catching mid-swallow. What she saw shouldn't be there, even though the sight of demons in her dreams were habitual. No matter how commonplace seeing them had become, it still terrified her.

Darkness spilled over into morning's reality, everything inside her screaming that she was still asleep. The depth of the vision warned her that Xanthane wasn't dreaming any longer. Dreams were hazy and intangible. What showed itself was real.

She couldn't swallow as anxiety pooled and the images conglomerated into a mass of raw black. Laughter sounded, a cruelly maniacal magnificence with venomous intent. Shadows swayed like misshapen dancers, twisted, macabre figures standing at the end of the bed as though they belonged there. Ghostlike in form. Harrowing in appearance. Frigid as arctic winds. Shadows that haunted her. Shadows that stalked as they moved.

Night-monsters crept towards the edge of her camp cot. For a moment, their bodies were incomplete, like mist that rose from the heated ground. She recognized them, a manifestation of false-waking that taunted and teased and refused to leave.

This time, as they arrived, it was different.

She wasn't sleeping.

No, Xanthane was very awake, and now that she saw them, there was no way in hell she would move a single inch. Not that she could. Her body stiffened, paralyzed, her mind racing.

The shadows moved closer, congregating until they stood near her single-sized cot. She lay on her side facing them, covered to her chin by the heavy sleeping bags, and with squinted eyes peered at them, unable to do anything but pretend she was still asleep.

One of them leaned low, their whisper a scratchy hiss. "You see us, Dreamer. We know you are awake."

The figures crowded in. They were long, their backs hunched and their bodies almost ethereal, the stuff of children's late night fears. They were her fears, every night just before waking.

They were the stuff of dark dreams and darker desires. Voids of deepest terror.

There was another issue. Nightmares stayed in the world they belonged to.

Didn't they?

Her vision wasn't normal or rational. She questioned everything she knew, spinning through the stories her magic-believing father told about what happened when dimensions crossed paths. When otherworldly portals opened and dissidence oozed out into humankind, festering among the moral realm. Xanthane never thought he spoke the truth, and especially since he grew senile. Right now her opinion changed. Her Pop might be right that she was the target of sludge and ichor. Of darkness and fated destruction. Of inescapable horror. And of things going bump in the night.

The monsters were still there. Their jaws clicked, more hissed words escaping to condemn her.

"Look at us, Dreamer. See the result of what you have done. See us. See what we can do."

She closed her eyes, the most movement she could accomplish. She felt them hovering near her, the hair upon her neck bristling with the recognition of her predicament. Her arms grew goosebumps and a rush of adrenaline ran along her spine.

Xanthane forced her eyes open. If they were going to attack her in any manner, she'd meet them head-on. Fear could be tamped. Fear could be conquered. Like a poof of breath on dandelion seeds, the spawn would disperse upon her command, vanquished.

Except, the words of biting dismissal didn't escape her lips. She couldn't talk. Even tiny movements were impossible, as though a weighted harness trapped her. As if the creatures tossed out an inescapable web, with them as the spider inside, and she the tasty morsel.

Would compliance make them leave? Unlikely. That's not the way nightmares worked.

Her eyes skirted bedside. If only Xanthane could grab the gun she kept next to her camp light on the upside-down plastic construction barrel beside her. Could these things even be killed? Would they be furious if she tried?

No doubt.

They seemed to know what she imagined, ready to thwart any resistance. Any hint that she'd rebel, they squashed by tightening their invisible trap. Her sleeping bag felt like a hundred pounds squishing her slight frame. She suffocated under its sweltering heat. No more was she cold. Now, her forehead brandished sweat, and her hair dampened with fear.

It was pointless to fight this. She held out hope this demonic intervention wouldn't last much longer.

The creature leaned further over her. Its long fingers with pointed claws raked her side lightly. So lightly that she might have imagined it. Its low-toned chuckle was smug.

"You think to make us leave? To hurt us? No, Dreamer. We cannot be hurt, and we leave when our Master commands it. No sooner."

God, she was having a panic attack. It brewed inside of her, churning ever upward in a wayward spin. Her lungs wouldn't expand. She couldn't catch a damn breath.

Sweat trickled along her breasts. Her doubled sleeping bags smothered her. Only her face peeked out, but now, with what scared her, she yearned to slip deeper into the heat. Wheezing desperately, her throat felt like a hand squeezed upon it, cutting off all air.

Her mind ran wild, a torrent of unwanted communication. It told her things she didn't want to hear. What if she was like her father. What if she lost her mind, and this was proof of it?

Please, Sacred Mother. Please, don't let me be like him. I'm not ready to wither away.

Once, her Pop hadn't the inclination for the surreal, the mystic, and the unknown. Something happened, he claimed, changing him into the man she knew today. He never spoke of what exactly that was, his eyes blurring with dim recollection, as if he attempted to find logic and truth in his words, but failed.

That was a concern for another day. A different moment. The here and now pressed in on her. Xanthane cringed.

The beings whispered among themselves, the sound resembling wind in the hollows, faint, with a soft whistling. They stopped conversing, apparently coming to a conclusion.

The monster closest to her spoke again. "Tell us, Dreamer. Will you listen to our king? Or will you make us hurt you to prove his point?"

Their eyes scarred over as if razors cut their vision away. In spite of the horrid-looking holes where pupils should be, they saw her. They reacted and fed upon her terror.

With each sparse movement she made, their heads, shaped like bullets with meaty jaws and narrow foreheads, followed her. Each inhale of weak breath, each minute shift upon her cot, their dead eyes were upon her.

Their mouths were hollow, no teeth, no tongue, nothing but a dark cavity. A black hole of eternity. Empty grins mocked her.

Her breathing shallow, it was all she could do to swallow the bile churning upwards. The demons never spoke to her before, but these disastrous beings weren't finished tormenting her. She cringed as oily darkness spilled out in another threatening demand.

"We carry this message from the Nightmare King," the one closest to her bed said. Its breath was cloying, a mixture of rot with a tinge of sweetness, a strange and unlikely combination. "Visit his land, steal from him again, and this time, he'll make sure you never return. Forgiveness, he said, is a long time in coming."

Xanthane nodded, the movement so slight, even she barely felt it. It satisfied them, for with one last pat upon her hip, the shadows materialized into nothing.

They were gone.

Xanthane unfroze, a gasp leaving her lips. Sweat glistened on her skin. Her breathing was still sharp.

What the hell did the Nightmare King have to do with her? She didn't even know him, though his identity belonged in fairy tales and delusion, known to her from childhood.

Nothing made sense. Her dreams were many, and most of them lucid, but they were dreams, nothing more. Dreams weren't alive. Fantasies of sleep didn't come true.

Tell that to her heart, skipping as if she'd overly exerted herself. Xanthane threw the thick bed covers to the side. Shakily, she sat up, resting on the edge of the mattress. She forced her breathing to calm and her mind to stop racing.

Creatures of darkness didn't belong in the real world. They didn't exist.

No, they couldn't exist.

Now she had to stop believing they did.

# # #