Eternal Sleep [On Hold but Not Forgotten]

Premonitions

                   

We hadn't been riding long before the air about the forest had changed dramatically. The farther we got from the castle, the more desperate the situation I was in began to seem. I couldn't help but let the gloom and doom of a possible failure completely cloud my thoughts, despite my efforts to wash those ideas away. I was anxious.

Phillip hardly spoke as Charger thundered between the trees at a break-neck pace. I had to hand it to Phillip—he was an incredibly skilled rider. I would have fallen seconds after having left his quaint little cottage. I hoped that, once we were freed, that he would rescue me. The constant thud of Charger's hooves were a comforting reminder that we had not been swayed from our journey and that my mother had not returned. She had no reason to: I was not visible to anyone but Phillip.

Leaning my head between his shoulders, the sound of his heart made rhythmic palpitations to accompany Charger's swift, beating movements. I could be swept away in the sounds of the awake and the living; I envied how they could run and dance in the waking world without a second thought of having to sleep again soon. I was stuck sleeping and I could be stuck that way forever. If Phillip couldn't save me, he was my one true love—my only chance at making it. I knew he wouldn't marry my mother to save the kingdom. He would abdicate and she would take over without a hint of rebuttal by the people. What chance did they stand against such a powerful daemon?

What would a kingdom run by a daemon even look like in the first place?

My mind a wandering vagrant in a city of more hopeless wonders like my own sleeping soul, I allowed it to drift into a future where my mother, God forbid it, was the queen of the kingdom.

From the throne room, my mother cast dark shadows across the length of the kingdom. Phillip was nowhere in sight and my mother seemed none the wiser to his absence. So much for "loving him" as she had proclaimed. Another male daemon who was far less appealing in physical appearance had taken my mother's arm in his and they laughed together.

Her pregnant belly was a whelp upon the face of the Earth—another me, except, this me would be the most treacherous creature to haunt the lands of Archeon and its surrounding provinces with nightmares that would end in nothing but fiery pain and suffering. If there had been any chance of their being happiness in the kingdom again, my mother had made sure to squash those hopes as foolishly as I'd squashed my own finger on the spinning wheel that started this whole mess in the first place.

Lilith's chilling laughter left my spine in an icy bath of dread to coil about my veins and arteries like an unforgiving constrictor snake. I had let this happen out of my own selfishness. I had allowed my own needs to come before the needs of everyone else. Why would I have put my faith in the one person who had wanted to kill me in the first place?

Her eyes caught mine and they glinted with pleasure. She knew I was seeing this thread of the future—she knew that she'd won. I dampened any thoughts related to my plans with Phillip and gave her the most vile hate stare that I could muster in this form. I wanted to bludgeon her head in or spatter the walls with her hateful blood.

"You should know better than to trust me, my dear. Sometimes I wonder how you were even my daughter in the first place. If it weren't for your looks, I'd say it was the wench of your father's wife that bore you and not me," she laughed.

"As far as I'm concerned, you're not my mother. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," I said loftily.

I would not give her the satisfaction here. I would make her writhe and doubt that she would win. I would not let this thread of the future become reality.