(TLO) Chapter 63: To Dread Is To Accept (Patreon)

Later that night sleep came to Seth. It was a welcome slumber in darkened shadows and endless night. His fire had since gone out, and while his shelter smelled of burning meat, it was faint, washed away by the shrill smell of violent snow and angry nature that came from the blizzard that still raged outside.

Slumber, being his friend, cast him into a dream older than his path in search of reia, a path he hadn’t chosen; a path he’d been snatched away and dashed upon by a man too strong to be unheard of in the whispers of the seminary.

It was odd how the only times the name Jabari was ever mentioned in the seminary was in reference to him. Sometimes he wondered if the Rector was the only one who knew the man’s name. He doubted it while doubting his own doubt. It was a conundrum of truth. Because regardless of everything that had happened, there had to exist another priest who knew who Jabari was.

There was no way a priest that strong would exist, unknown by the priests of the seminary.

But the nature of the seminary’s tight-lipped silence on the subject of his kidnapper was of no import now. Greater worries plagued him. Within the heart of his slumber, curled up like an old fetus in a dying womb on a dying night, he dreamed a dream he’d long since thought forgotten. A trauma long since thought healed.

He dreamed of a world broken and a hand useless. He dreamed of an origin to headaches that never leave and music that never helps. He dreamed of the day his arm gave up on him. He dreamed of a day the world broke.

The evening was old and darkening, and night was beginning to pull on its shawls, unmasking it for the darkness it truly was. He was young again; a child with no more worries than the fact that his oldest brother rarely ever spent time playing with him and he simply didn’t like his immediate older brother for reasons he did not have.

He sat in his room with a book in his hands and a sharp awareness of the fact that he sat in a dream. The walls around him were a lavender blue, four squared corners entrapping him in its safety. In one corner of it the paint was old and crispy. There was already a patch of it that had fallen off to reveal the brown screed that protected the coalition of bricks and whatever else served as the framework that held up the house. The room had only a single window that faced east, designed to show him the rising sun.

If memory continued to serve him right even in dreams, Derek had been the one who’d taken the broken piece of paint to play with. What had become of it remained a mystery, and if his father had ever asked was equally so.

Up against the back wall was his bed, equidistant from each wall on the side. It was as high as his waist, its frame fashioned from wood was as brown as earth and he sat on the cold floor with his back rested against it. He thought the mattress was laid with flowery sheets but couldn’t be certain. Actually, he was very certain—it was the nature of his memory. But without verification, he refused to afford it his complete certainty; his complete belief.

Seth chuckled at the thought process and his refusal.

Once, he had possessed a quiet arrogance. It was one that came with always being the smallest in a group. He had thought himself nigh infallible. He was always in the right, rarely—if never—wrong. And if he was ever wrong, it was because nobody had been right.

The children bigger than him had continued to intimidate him with their size because they did not possess the confidence of certainty to oppose him with the simple truth of being right. They had always bullied him for it. When they moved to West Blue and his father had become a lord there, it had become different but only in that he was not bullied. Much was required to bully the child of a Lord. But he always saw it in their eyes, in the way they looked at him. They hated him because a child so small was always right. They would have beaten him if they could, but they could not so they didn’t.

Seth found it interesting to think he had thought this way once. To think he had been—one armed and head-ached—so confident in himself.

His confidence now, however, was a shadow of itself. The seminary had thrown a simple part of the world at him in his short stay here and that quiet arrogance had fled him. It was odd to think he’d been that child. Although, he couldn’t attribute it all to the seminary. After all, Jabari had done a considerable amount of chafing before he’d met Dante Faust and his flock of Barons.

In hindsight, even as a child there had been nothing unique about him. His quiet confidence was an illusion of the mind. A trick he played on himself so that he would think himself special. So that he could forget the fact—every once in a while—that he was a boy with only one fully functioning arm and a head that always hurt. Or that he was the smallest and weakest of his peers even before that.

He was a child that lied to himself that he was special so that he didn’t feel less. After all, every confidence was one he’d had in his mind with no real world evidence to support. He had been a child with a friend who’d chosen every other member of his gender except himself. Giggled and laughed and made herself genteel to all but him. He had told himself she was the way she was only with him because he was special. She was comfortable around him. He made her feel safe.

He shook his young head sadly, book still in hand.

Even then, all that time ago, he had known in a tiny part of him he never gave the chance to voice itself that the things he believed were a lie. But he’d never allowed it tell him, because he already knew but refused to face the truth.

Seth sighed, banishing the thoughts of the child he’d once been from his mind, and turned a page of the book.

Curious of whatever he’d been reading all those years ago, he looked down at the words and found he could not read them. The words were there, written in a language he’d read and spoken all his life, but it was suddenly as though he had simply forgotten how to read or had never even known how to.

The sensation birthed a zygote of panic within him but in his lucidity he did not allow it bother him. It was the price of his awareness in a dream, at least he told himself this. The truth was as elusive to him as it was nonexistent. Still, he didn’t let it bother him. Out in the real world the cold was probably seeping into his bones from the raging blizzard outside, stiffening his skin and congealing him like a day old corpse plagued by rigor mortis.

He turned another page of the book in his hands absently as he panned his gaze around his room. It was as simple as he barely remembered it in a house he’d allegedly been born in yet could also barely remember.

In a corner of the room rested a brown bag of clothes that belonged to him. They were not new but they were clean. Thinking about it now, it was a bit strange to know his father had been of gold authority at the time but they’d lived like the poor before he’d sworn his fealty to the Baron.

How his mother had remained by his father’s side long enough to have four children at that time despite her love for the expensive and classiest things was a knowledge that would always be beyond him.

Tired of his own self-introspection he pulled his attention away from himself and listened to the sounds around him. His dream was in a time too long ago that he remembered very little of it. Now that he thought about it, he remembered almost nothing of this time except what was here in his dream; a book, a bed, and an old room.

He looked down at the book once more, making no attempt at reading its words, and smiled. To think he’d played at being a reader as a child just because Jonathan loved reading. Here and now he realized just how much he had actually looked up to his brother growing up. If it was a fond smile or a self deprecating one that touched his lips was knowledge he didn’t have, but it sufficed to alleviate a touch of the dampened mood his self-introspection had settled on him.

Listening quietly, he continued to hear nothing. The world beyond his room was hidden away from him in both sight and sound. So he placed a gentle hand on the hard wooden floor beneath him and push himself to his feet.

He heaved a deep breath and knew it was time to make a choice. Wake up or keep dreaming.

“What do you think?” he asked his minds.

Silence met him like the deafening boom of thunder and his panic grew by a gentle flicker.

“I guess I didn’t see that coming.”

Making his choice from nothing but the reward of each action he took a step forward. Adventuring in a world of dreams was better than waking back to the blizzard's chill.

The door to his room was a deep brown made of strong wood with a metal handle finished with a golden visage that was already flaking. It was cold to the touch and he tried not to think of it as an interpretation of the weather around him in the waking world.

He pulled down on the handle gently, guided buy an instinct he chose to trust and it opened. A quiet groan followed the door as it opened outward. It’s hinges apparently needed more care than it had been receiving and Seth remembered why his instinct had bidden him to gentleness, memories of his mother’s annoyance at how loud the door always was when handled roughly fleeting to mind.

They’d never had to be gentle with any part of their house in West Blue.

Beyond the door Seth strolled into a dark corridor. It wasn’t a long one, no more than four steps forward and wide as and full grown adult’s wingspan. Yet he found himself taking more than five steps with more of the quiet and dark corridor ahead of him.

Moving forward, he walked a distance before the first sound penetrated the silence. It was the whistling of wind like a mighty breeze before a heavy rain. Then there was the sound movement, gentle and quiet like someone sneaking around, trying to accomplish a difficult task without making a sound. There was a groan, presumably from whoever was moving, then a grunt.

Seth held his silence through it all, continued listening. This was a dream, and whoever his guest was would be a part of it. Maybe it would even be his father.

The thought froze his approach. He paused, eyes wandering in the darkness, tilting up and away as he searched his memory for his father’s face. He knew what it had looked like before he’d left home, but what had it looked like during this time?

With no answer, he shook the wariness from his bones, straightened his shoulders and took another step forward. One became two, and two became six, and the corridor went on and on as all unreasonableness in dreams do.

The sounds followed along, slow growing companions in his advancement.

At this point, the inconsistency of the length of the corridor didn’t bother him again. Dreams were never really the place for logic or obedience of physics. If the world started to swirl and turn, then he’d start to worry since he was already poisoned before falling asleep.

Reflexively he listened for a response before remembering his minds were not here to give opinions to his thoughts. At a time like this one of them would likely berate the idea of the world going into such a ruckus, or one would complain about how the corridor was refusing to end.

“Perhaps they would berate me for even leaving the room,” he said with a fond smile.

To think he’d ever display a positive feeling towards those bundles of ever present noise.

His thoughts were still turning over the absurdity of the emotions towards the voices in his head when he heard the sound of something breaking. It poked at his senses and focused his attention on it. It was strangely the only oddity in the sea of sounds around him. It pierced the air once more and he turned, tracked it to its location.

There, he thought, looking to the side to discover the corridor wider than it was. In the heart of the darkness, in a small point hovered a broken line of the softest white. It was easy to look at, a gentle white existing within the oppression of darkness.

He approached it cautiously. He didn’t know if it was curiosity that guided him or something else, neither did he care. There was simply something about the light, and he approached it with the same casualness he’d done all things since waking up here.

His steps echoed in the darkness. They usurped the sound of the heavy breeze and of someone moving. It cast aside the need to know more, to hear more, and left only an echo of itself in its wake. One ahead of it to herald it, and one before it to guide it. But as he walked, his steps slowed and the panic meant to be guttering out within him rose.

Something was off. He knew it as surely as he knew he was not really here. This was not right. The line of white cracked again, a line branching out of equal white, and his body hesitated. Suddenly he wasn’t so sure his initial lack of care was appropriate. Whatever the crack was, his body was wary of it where his mind couldn’t be bothered to care.

For a moment he thought of fighting his body’s panic but found there was no need for it. Whatever fear was ingrained in the body of the child he was proved insufficient as he took another step. At this point his arrival at it was guaranteed. All he had to do now was master whatever panic his body seemed so determined to foster. But each step he took made it only worse. Panic turned to fear. Fear turned to Dread.

It was a gangrenous leap, for fear is a natural instinct, an impulse that serves to preserve a man’s life, to aid his survival. It is a rejection of something known and unknown, and believed to be above the person; to believe without proof. For to fear is to believe. Thus, it applies to a general concept.

Dread, however, though synonymous, is a different kind of poison in the minds of men. More than a rejection, it is an acceptance of inferiority. An evolutionary step in the impulse of fear. It is a fear of a known unknown, with the wildest of imaginative skills to serve as an accompaniment. To know that what lies before a man is without doubt superior; a catastrophe with no hope of escape.

To dread is to accept.

And it seemed his body had already accepted long before he’d taken his first step.

When he pulled his mind back to his action, he was already standing before the crack. Another line spread forth, another crack in the world, another white of its dullest form.

He knew what it was now, knew why he feared it so much and raised to hand still holding onto the book he could not read to halt the approach of the other. His memory of this point in his life might not be much, but he knew enough to know one thing.

Do not touch the crack.

“That’s enough of that,” he muttered. “I have to wake up now.”

With a force of will he was surprised worked, he turned away from the almost broken world and ventured back into the darkness. His legs obeyed him with only the slightest touch of resistance and he took two more steps before another crack appeared beside him.

He started, jumped to the side like a frightened child and cussed under his breath. He looked behind him to be sure his dream wasn’t playing games with him and found the other crack in the world still there. When he looked back at the new one, he was forced to stop his hand as it reached for it.

“Do not touch it!” he shouted at it, scolding it like an incorrigible child, then he willed himself to wake up.

As if on command, rather than come awake, the crack reacted to his will and spread further, widening like a spider web with an overactive spider.

He took a step away from it fast enough to make Domitia proud of his movement speed, but not enough to escape what was beginning to seem like a dying world.

Before he could escape, the crack in the world reached forward. Another line crept out from it, cracked the world, and touched his falling hand.

Pain blinded him. The world grew white around him, and everything rushed him like a man rushed his sworn enemy.

……………………………………..

Seth woke up with a start, sweating in the cold winter. Panic still filled him and he felt threat to his life. A part of him knew it was an after effect of his dream, a phantom following him from the world in his mind. But it wasn’t enough to stop him from reaching for his swords.

He grabbed up a sword from the three lying on the ground of his shelter, took it in both hands and pulled the blade free in one draw. The hiss of metal leaving its scabbard brought him an odd touch of comfort but not one strong enough and he discarded the sheath without care. He waved the sword from side to side. His eyes wandered his dark space, searching, seeking, frantic. There was no foe here, he knew this as he knew snow was cold. He was alone, plagued by a fear too ingrained in his bones to understand.

Still, he did not calm down. Reason did not return to him, and he continued to brandish his weapon like a mad warlord drunk on the blood of enemies felled in combat.

Then gently, like metal pulled to a magnet, his sword lowered so that he pointed with the tip of it and settled. His hand moved slowly, slightly.

Feeling any better now? A mind asked.

“Not yet,” he muttered, knowing they were the reason his frantic brandishing had eased into a gentle sway, attempting to calm him in a way he did not understand.

Well, another mind thought. Just a little more to the left.

Seth’s brows furrowed with confusion but he obeyed. He moved the blade to the left gently.

…Annnnd… stop!

Seth held his position with a force of will, consciously reminding himself that the world wasn’t cracking around him as he focused his paranoia on one spot while waiting for his minds to tell him why.

A response came to him before his minds’ did.

“Must’ve been one hell of a dream,” someone said in the darkness.