The Dream of Hendrake

"Mother. I believe I had a nightmare.", I said rising from my bed.

"Oh? But if you do not know, then how can it be called such?", she replied. Her black skin of obsidian shone with blood and the flames that were her hair still carried the scent of scorched flesh. It was obvious that she had just returned from some battle.

"I dreamt of thunder and lightning...

Thunder and lightning cracked the sky into fragments. It was a brief prelude of what was to come. This shadow and everything in it, infinite in it's boundary, was but a glorified field of battle. The forces amassed against me shook the very foundations of what reality could contain without collapsing in upon itself in a wave of inconceivability.

The number...

Oh but to speak of them in numbers would be a folly, a misdirection into believing the uncountable could be counted. Entire shadows had been emptied to fuel this. They surrounded me not in any direction, but in all dimensions.

The Logrus told me such.

Not the fleets of all the greatest navies that now sailed upon the boiling methane seas of this world or the ships that soared upon the sky was the extent of this, and they were counted as one counts the atoms in the sun. No. They were only what could be contained in this miniscule infinite universe that I stood in. In truth the shadows around me teemed with mirrored force. So grand was it to be compared to the ancient Thunderbirds of legend, whose form was so mighty that the most one could take in at once was a single feather, and that feather took up the sky.

Silhouetted by 100 suns brought in to illuminate the battle was the form of the god of war, confident, expectant, and eager to meet the challenge of a brash child who would play at his game. Perhaps he was even a little hopeful to find something he had not seen in so many ages.

With silence, for no sound could exist that could drown out the ambient rumble of this war machine, the silhouette raised his spear and his forces fell upon me.

With fury, I gave my battle cry in return and it was heard. For it was with the Logrus that I brought into these worlds the death cries of the fringe shadows as they fell into Oblivion and Chaos. The sound which cannot be described and survived knocked down the first wave of my enemy, infantry equal to 10 shadow worlds of men, I say.

Horribly they died.

But more were to come.

My forces began to rise.

The God of War smiled, but all I had for him was a grin of sharpened teeth.

Woken by the sound of oblivions call, each grain of sand and every blade of grass grew into demons of the Abyss. They fell upon my enemy. The living stars in the sky began to fall at my command, collapsing in upon themselves as the entropy of my heart tainted their fusion souls. As they struck my foe each went nova then black, taking a world of men each time.

The battle continued still.

No longer did our armies of armies meet upon the field, for the field had become naught but the layers the of felled and broken before them. It was not long that mountains were buried under bodies and the oceans had been overflowed by 100 times their amount in blood. This infinite shadow had been one vast world, but even that battlefield had been too small for out meeting.

Finally there came the time when no more could die. The shadows were all full. It was as if the rules laid out by Chaos and Order in the beginning of time had not accounted for our scale of death and had passed into shock. It was then that I faced him.

We were unrecognizable, more gore than anything else. It is a truly disturbing and exhilarating thing to discover the amount of death one can carry upon his or her person. We had found this limit a million times over before this meeting, and the only parts of him I could still see were the whites in his eyes.

... and that was my dream". As I spoke these last words I realized that I had closed my eyes to relive the vision and quickly opened them again. I noticed that mother had closed hers as well. Moments passed in silence.

Patting my head as if I were still a child she spoke softly to me. "My daughter Aife. It was not a nightmare that you had but the Dream of Hendrake and the destiny of our Great House." Mother gently pushed me back into bed. Caressing my tired face once she whispers, "now go back to sleep and may you find sweet dreams again".

Comments

Ooooo! Very fun!

-- LeslieLightfoot - 09 Jun 2007

Nicely done!

-- ChrisLightfoot - 14 Jun 2007