White Dragon Stories

Sweet dreams

Nightmares were nothing he never had before, but usually they were about strange creatures chasing him. Albeit they never caught him. This nightmare however was different. It was pitched black, so it was hard to even see one's own hand right in front of one's eye. Different voices reached his ears. They were screaming in pain. What was going on? He couldn't see anything. It was hard to run away, when one did not know, what was going on or were to run to. Where was the attacker? The smell of smoke rose into his nose. Fire? Where? Panic! His heartbeat increased, tears began to stream down his face. Without a second thought he started running. All he could do, was to hope that it was the right direction. He had to find his brothers, his mother, someone. Hakuyuu and Hakuren were able to defeat the enemy! And his mother surely knew, what to do. She always knew! Hopefully, Hakuei was safe. Where was she?
The darkness slowly vanished, but what was revealed was not a pleasant sight. Seeing less would have been a blessing, dead soldiers on the ground, fire everywhere, the smell of burned flesh in the air and the screams of the dying. Now he could see that he was inside the palace, but why was it on fire? Why were they attached? Where were his brothers? At least he knew where he had to go to leave the palace, theoretically. It was questionable whether the enemy would let him escape. Probably not. But there was nothing wrong with trying to escape.

*

When he had that nightmare, he never thought that it was a dream. One could argue that it should have been obvious that he hadn't been in the real world, but the fear had blocked his mind and therewith his ability to think rationally - and he had been a small, stupid child. For his past self the dream had been real and so was the fear and the pain. Never before had he had such a realistic dream. The few nightmares before and those which came after were clearly just that, he knew it the very second his dream self saw the monsters. Not that it made the nightmares pleasant, but they were more pleasant than the realistic one. Usually it had only been his life, which was in danger, but in this dream he had thought that also his family was endangered. While his brothers had life-and-death situations on the battlefield very often, therefore they knew how to react, his sister Hakuei and his mother Gyokuen did not - just like him. The palace had many escape routes and he remembered some of them, but in his panic he had totally forgotten about them or only remembered those that were far away from his position. Maybe the same applied to his mother and sister. What if they were too far away from a secret passage to escape? To be honest, his thoughts hadn't been that specific. Of course he had thought about the whereabouts of his mother and sister, because he wanted to be saved by them and he had asked himself, what would be in case those two were dead.
Back then it had been a horrible thought, now he only gave a weary smile to this kind of thought. His mother was dead by now and his sister, he did not care about her well-being that much anymore, was still alive. It wasn't like he did not care at all anymore or wished death upon her, but back then he had feared her passing and now he would still be sad about it, but he did not fear it. An inconsistency, he cared and did not at the same time. One could compare it to losing a relative one had barely known. It was sad, yet one could live on without any problems and much sorrow. If someone had told him that one day he would feel like this about his dear older sister, he wouldn't have believed them. His sister had been his everything for so long and now she was nothing. No, this was not his fault. She was to blame, because he had done everything he could for her - all he ever wanted, was to protect her -, while she never had cared about him. A hurtful realization, but a necessary one. Better later than never. How things would have turned out, if he had known, what was ahead of him? Well, the answer to this question was irrelevant now. The past was the past and no matter how much he wanted to change it, he couldn't do so. All he could do was laughing about how he more or less had foreseen the future - the current present - in a highly bizarre way. Only a short while ago, he had realized what the dream from back then had meant. Honestly, he had forgotten about said dream and had remembered it only recently due to a mindless comment of his only friend. What a strange world they lived in. The nightmare had hunted him for many years and suddenly he needed someone to remember him of it.