Saturday, June 17th, 2004
I never figured out when the nightmares started to appear, or when they started to repeat.
Even today , they still haunt me. They're there during the sleepless nights, and they're there during New York's busy lunch rush, flickering behind my eyelids every time I blink too long. It's a hell of a way to live, carrying a graveyard in your head while trying to navigate a sidewalk full of tourists.
My parents used to tell me that whenever I had nightmares, I should write them down, put the paper in a glass bottle, and cast it out onto the lake by our old house. They had this naïve, beautiful idea that the water would just carry the darkness away.
I used to believe them.
I don't anymore, not after they died.
Not that their little ritual ever worked, anyway. But I'm at the end of my rope, and I've run out of better ideas. It's worth one more desperate try before my life ends.
So, here I am, writing it down.
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At first, they were just small, fragmented images that I couldn't recall by afternoon. I used to dismiss them as stress, or grief, or a lack of sleep.
But over time, they stopped being fragmented—they started to become more akin to a story. One that was too brutal, too detailed, not to be real.
The same scenes. The same order. The same damn ending.
My gut tells me every time that it's real: that it happened, and it will happen again. It feels less like a dream and more like a memory being hammered into my skull by something that refuses to let me forget.
But that couldn't be; how would it even be possible?
In the first, I stand behind a boy at the edge of the sea's shore.
The shore is ruined with broken stones, the pale yellow sand churned dark with blood. Waves crash relentlessly without break, pulling and dragging fragments of armor and broken weapons back into sea.
Dead bodies lie as far as the eye can see. The myriad of different wounds on their bodies scars me every time. Some of their eyes are still open; some have their mouths agape; others died without the opportunity to do either.
The boy still hasn't moved.I still can't see his expression.
There's a sword that he holds loosely in his hand, its tip resting in the soaked sand just beyond the reach of the tide. His broad shoulders are drawn inward, his body shaking as he breaks down.
A few more steps inland, away from the waterline, a small flame flickers to life. It burns unevenly—weak and unstable—as the sea winds press against it.
The boy slowly turns to face the flame. His hoarse voice echoes across the sand.
"I was strong enough."
The flame shudders.
"I could have saved at least a few more."
The fire collapses inward into itself and fades. For a few brief seconds, he stares, dead-eyed, at where the flame once was.
Then his grip loosens; the sword slips from his fingers and falls… forgotten.
"I'm sorry."
Only then does a huge tide surge forward, its waters submerging the dead, the sand, the blade, and him—until the beach itself disappears entirely.
The dream suddenly fractures like shattering glass. Light replaces the water.
In the second part, there's another man who stands at the center of a wide, open ground.
There is no shadow following him,but instead theres an unbearably bright, radiant light that flows out from his chest. This time, his face and outline are hidden by that same light.
People—in the hundreds of thousands—are crowding around the man of light, their hands clutching at the air around him, passing right through him.
Their voices overlap, all echoing the same plea:
"Please—" "Don't let ____ destroy us." "Heal m—"
The man's breath turns increasingly shallow.
"I will," he says, his voice cracking as he forces the words out. "I can save everyone."
The light intensifies, spilling out, blinding everything in view. But I can tell that light didn't heal them—it removed them.
When the light fades and flows back into the man's chest, the people slowly but surely vanish. They aren't falling or screaming, but thinning out like smoke, their bodies unravelling.
Faces blur; voices are cut off mid-breath. One by one, they are all reduced to afterimages.
The ground is empty. No bodies, no remains.
The man stands alone at the center of the wide, open ground. There is no shadow following him, only a white silhouette. Tears splash onto the ground, breaking the loud silence.
"They aren't suffering anymore." His voice scatters into the silent winds. "I saved them all."
A moment later, his knees buckle, and a whisper escapes his mouth:
"Sorry."
The next one arrives without any warning.
A battlefield stretches as far as I can see. A war is over. The banners on both sides are nothing but burnt shades. The air smells of iron and rotting flesh, heavy and nauseating.
A man stands hanging onto a sword implanted into the earth.
His skin is a map of cuts and burns, so decomposed and charred that he didn't look human.
Before him kneels a titanic being—too big to be human— resting on its right knee, slumping forward. It is motionless, likely dead.
The broken man's hand trembles as he reaches toward it before falling back to his side.
It's clearer now: his blood is oozing out in rivulets from a perfectly shaped hole in his chest. He attempts to inhale before he coughs out blood.
A small curve at the corner of his lips becomes a fully-fledged grin as his breath begins to fade away.
"There's no one left, is there?" he murmurs.
He turns toward the empty plains before looking down at his body. "So this is the destiny of us survivors."
His expression breaks into pity.
" We couldn't do more."
"I am sorry."
The beast collapses forward as the man fades into the wind.
The fourth one is always different.
In a black slate of nothingness, a scarily familiar eeriness settles into my soul.
There is no shore, no plains, no battlefield—this time, it is a forest stretching endlessly in all directions. The air is still, unnaturally so.
Before long, I caught sight of it: a figure standing among the trees.
His form waves and strobes, the edges of his silhouette blurring and reappearing as if Mother Earth herself were trying to reject his presence.
Even as he opens his mouth, his body distorts and breaks. There is always a bow on his shoulders instead of a blade, held loosely at his side and glowing an eerie purple.
I know him—I can't remind myself how, but the certainty of it settles immediately.
"We aren't meant to exist," he says.
His voice sounds like it's coming from everywhere at the same time. There is no anger in it, nor sorrow; instead, there is a hint of pity and exhaustion.
"You are an error—one that they'll remove."
I try to speak. My body refuses.
He presses a hand against where my chest would be while the other is placed on his own, his fingers sinking into his flickering chest as though he isn't fully solid.
"I only wanted peace."
After a pause, his voice grows softer: "I'm sorry."
He closes his eyes. The forest recoils, the trees twisting into impossible shapes to avoid his touch.
Darkness takes over.
Eyes open around me.
Yes: literal eyes. Far too many to count.
Impossibly large and vast, their irises burning with shades that don't belong in the world I know. The ones I do recognize are purple, crimson, and a pale, freezing blue.
They stare at me from every direction, pinning me in place.
Slowly, the brightness in the irises intensifies, growing so sharp that it feels as if my retinas are being seared. The light of those thousands of stares pours into my skull—an unbearable pressure of being seen.
Their voices merge into a single oddity of sound that screams of the ancient:
When the dead one continues to walk,
When the one who saves leaves nothing behind,
When survival and destruction become the same choice,
The world will collapse—or be remade.
The eyes flare into a scorching, white-hot sun—and I snap awake.