Frozen Nightmares

I dreamt a dream once. A safari into the deepest heart of the African jungle, surrounded by the ruins of civilizations Father Time himself had damned. I dreamt a vision once, an illusion of frozen wastelands, plain in their beauty, hidden in their nakedness. I’ve dreamt of cities of sand, songs of screams, caverns of mist, and cathedrals of fire. I’ve seen beaches of black sand illuminated by flickering stars and ivory moons burning their splendor away as a silver tide brakes over the ebony dunes, wetting their lips with the kisses of the deep. I’ve visited lands bordered and shrouded by thick jungles and forests where angels dance among the greening leaves of trees thousands of years old and demons bathe in crimson waterfalls that flow from one side of the world to the next uninterrupted. I dream of dreaming. I love to dream. To set my sails against alien breezes in worlds unmapped and changing as the wind carries my ship across a sea of azure waves, is not but a joy, but a passion. As I settle in the warm satin of my cradle of fantasy, I can only wonder where I shall be whisked on jasmine scented breezes. Often, I do not remember those subconscious journeys, but those whose embraces linger but a moment longer after I have returned from their cities; those are all the more splendid. There is one dream, one fantasy of phantoms to which my memory clings as a man to a rock as the waves of a storm threaten to rip him from his savior. I do not know why I cling to this epiphany as I do, but I do not care for such a question, for dreams are not to be understood, but to be enjoyed.

It is amongst the frozen mountains of Antarctica that my mind wanders on this cold and lonely night. I find myself in front of a cavern of crystal. The moonlight filters through the opaque gems, the light dancing its way through the darkness, racing to light the blank, staring eyes of my enemy. An icy wind whistles across the chasm, the waiflike sound echoing amidst the mountains, haunting, caressing, and seducing my mind into the icy fingers of the coming darkness. It feels almost as if death himself were dragging the blade of his scythe across my back, breathing down my neck, his breath rank with the stench of rotting flesh and greasy maggots. My heart races with the anticipation, and certainly the fear of the hollow place. A tear. A final embrace of humanity spills from my eye as I confront the abyss. A tear of blood. The wind dies, and yet, that sound remains, the melody ensnaring all of my senses, drowning even the frantic, pounding of my own heart. I close my eyes in the final surrender, and I pray. I pray to the stars above for deliverance, begging for strength, begging for life, but most of all I pray for peace, oh that those heavenly bodies take away the blackness gnawing at my very soul. The only sound accompanying me into what was to be my final breath in that life, save the crunching of my boots in the snow, was my long sword softly rubbing against the rings of my chain mail shirt. Certainly I am afraid. It is the fear though which drives me forward. It is also that fear which I can feel suffocating me slowly, burying me beneath a mountain of sand, stripping my flesh away even as I still breath, breaking my bones slowly, ever so slowly, yet still my heart beats. The darkness wraps itself around me, as a lover in the midnight frost; it embraces me, broken only by a barely perceptible flicker of red. Slowly, ever so slowly, I work my way into labyrinth of rock, that iridescent melody, still the soundtrack to my demise, dances amidst the crystal cavern’s walls. I begin to grow faint, sick with the fear racking my insides. A cold sweat breaks out across my body, wetting my clothes. The cold garments cling to my body freezing my skin, numbing it to all feeling. I feel I have aged an eternity, which indeed maybe so, as I am lost in the void which has taken my entirety save my very body. From the corner of my eye, I notice a flicker or red, and then another, and another. My hand clenches around the hilt of my long sword as they disappear into the blackness. The engraving of the hilt cuts into my hand, an ancient verse carving itself into my palm; At the mountains of madness may you find that which makes you human. The song has grown louder. What once was a whisper on the breeze is now a clear ringing amidst the caverns and tunnels. The pounding of my own heart, the patterns of my feet, the rustling of my mail shirt, that ghostly melody, have all melded together in an orchestra of pain. In my mind, the choruses of screams ring their bloody lullaby to the souls of the damned prisoners marching their way into the night, dragging their shackles of sin as they make their way to nowhere. Slowly, the underground world that has claimed my life for these past several days begins to lighten. My stomach churns, wrenching the food I have not eaten into my throat. I swallow, the acids of my body leaving a sickening, filmy residue on my tongue. As the light grows, the source of that evocative aria grows closer to the grasp of my fingers. Shadows rave into the darkness, lacing fingers with eternity as they bow into oblivion, waltzing away on those possessed notes. A curve appears, baiting me around the final barrier of this odyssey into the depths of earth. That melody, that iridescent, cursed, beautiful, haunting melody has brought me here. It has forced me against all ambitions and fears, doubts and anxieties. I gag, vomiting finally. Steam rises from the cold stone, framed by the luminescence of something beyond my grasp. My sweat-drenched hair hangs about my face and shoulders in a pitiful final shield from the source of my torture. Unable to rise from the ground, I stumble a few feet, and collapse again, my knees shattering under the weight of my exhausted body. My screams almost drown out that song, but in the end, they only seem to accompany that hellish ballet. I fall to my stomach, jarring my entire body into feeling for seconds, swells of pain racking my legs, burning my entire body. Not to be defeated by something so simple as that searing pain, I begin to drag myself forward, my fingers pulling the weight of my body across the cracked stone. Then, I stop. My fingers still clawing for the crevices in that floor, trying to drag my broken body forward, I can go no further. I glance behind me in a desperate plea to break whatever witchcraft holds me in place. A set of red dots gaze back at me, teeth clamped into the flesh of my calf. Slowly I begin to slide backwards, into the darkness, away from the light, away from the song. Still I dig, grasping for a handhold. I feel my fingers shatter, each digit a unique and sickening sound, each crack a laugh at my pitiful try. My fingernails tear, pulling from my shattered hands as I claw at the rocks. My screams drift away into that unholy blackness, and a tear, a single tear of blood, rolls down my cheek, splashing on the cold, unforgiving stone. Resigned to my fate, I drop my face to the cavern stone. I see specks; tiny splatters dot the cold granite. Blood. Hundreds of tiny bloody tears carpet the home of the lost. And then, I hear it. A phrase, an answer: “ That which makes you human, is what you have done.” And the song stops, it echoes amidst the cold crystal of this world which has consumed all that I am. I, like all those before, disappear into the night.

Then I awake, safe, warm, and alone in the silence of the night. So it happened, and so shall it end. That is the account the ethereal vision that haunts my mind. Those are the worlds to which I sail in the depths of the night as I lay breathing in the flickering candlelight while children dream of adulthood and adults of childhood. Heed the message of my pilgrimage into that world of limitless possibilities. That which makes us human is not the cages of chrome in which we hide ourselves, nor is it even in the pages of this account, but that which makes us human, is our ability to face the fears of the blackness when even death hangs in the balance. That is the essence of humanity. And now I shall sail. I make for worlds I have not yet visited in the early hours of the morning. Set your sails to the wind and your bow to the waves. As the waters of the deep break upon the hull of our imaginations, let the ocean breeze be an orchestra to the plunder of fantasy. So I sail into the sun. When the dawn breaks on distant shore, look for me there and maybe you shall see, a tattered flag floating in the breeze. And now I dream, I always dream…