The Embraces of Fear: A Nightmare (Vale)

This would be Vale two nights ago. I've a hard time with moving between dreams and reality in narrative sometimes, so if anything isn't clear, please let me know!

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'The Embraces of Fear'

Vale gasped for air, her lungs constricting as if she had been plunged into arctic waters. She tore at the layers imprisoning her, struggling to breathe, to rise...

And then slowly the soft darkness of her rooms at the Recluse moved into focus, and as her feet touched the rough-hewn floorboards, the heaving of her chest began to still. She lifted a hand to her breast, the thudding of her heart bringing her back to the present. She was safe. She was in her sanctuary, the rooms she had made her own; she knew the half-open shutter at the window, the draping tapestry behind the bed, the angular shadow of her dressing table.

With a shuddering sigh she leaned down to pull the coverlet from the disheveled heap into which she had flung it. But as she drew the cool folds of silk up over her thighs, a persistent finger of unease trailed its way down her spine, leaving a lingering knot in her belly. She had managed to keep away from the ashes of the village for weeks; she had filled herself with softer solitudes, the winds of the nightwashed harbour, brandy and distant laughter. And yet she had dreamed again, as she had dreamed when she had last collapsed among the burnt and acrid timbers of her childhood; she was haunted not only by the whispering of her thoughts or by her ties to the past, but by her blood...

She closed her eyes, gripping the edge of the gossamer sheet. This time it had been not Kaden but Vanith who had plagued her: Vanith, the tormentor of her youth who mere months ago she had seen writhing on the ground beneath the delicate touch of one of her curses, and whose throat Eothan Dawn had slit only a few days past. Vanith, the Caan most newly joined to the company of the damned.

*

'What're ye so afraid of?' His laughter swept and echoed around her, a raucous clanging in her ears as she ran.

The very branches of the close-knit forest reached out to lash across her face, clawing at the tattered silk that enshrouded her and reaching up to entangle her bare feet as she leapt over rock and root. Vale flattened herself against the trunk of a misshapen willow, the pounding of her heart as loud as the pursuing laughter. What was she so afraid of? She hadn't been that girl for ten years.

Sweeping out from behind the tree, she lifted her hands and, gasping, drew forth a shadowy flame from each palm. 'I ain' afraid o' ye, Vanith Caan!'

For a moment there was silence, and the mists of the deranged and death-haunted forest swept around Vale's knees, rippling through the loose cloth of her garment, winding a chill hand around her and rising to stir the hair at the back of her neck.

'Ye should be,' came a whisper from behind her.

And before she could whirl to unleash the ghost-pale fire from her hands, her moment came; her knife in the dark. Her back was rent asunder from kidney to shoulderblade like the crashing of a tide, and as she gasped, clutching at nothing, she could feel his hot breath on her neck, and more laughter... so much laughter.

She knew she was dying. Here, in the forest that had borne her, beneath the trees whose roots had over the years soaked up more of her blood than she ran at any one time in her veins. She opened her eyes, clawing for her last few breaths, and above her, Vanith's face twisted to form a smile.

'Na Ledgic t'save ye this time. I killed 'im.' The smile became a sneer as Vanith folded his arms, standing over her. 'Ye fancied a weak piece o' shi', Vale. Both o' ye, ye were ne'er proper Caans.'

The tide of unconsciousness that was washing over Vale crashed against the rocks of her thoughts, and she gasped again. Ledgic couldn't be dead... she understood her own death, somehow, but not his...

It was Vanith who was dead, who was supposed to be dead. Eothan had killed him, hadn't he? Eothan had killed him... She tried to shout the words but all she could do was mouth the name.

'Eothan? I killed 'im too. An' yer sister, an' tha' daft piece o' shi' Soap. Yer th' last.' Vanith knelt down, leaning over her, the sneer spreading through his eyes, through every muscle of his face.

'Th' shadow can't save ye, yer blood can't save ye. An' before I'm done wit' ye, yer gonna remember wha' s'like t'be afraid.' He drew a blade gently, almost lovingly from his sleeve, and brought it to the white skin of her throat...

And then the deluge rushed over her, her lungs were tearing themselves apart; Vale gasped for air.

*

As the tide of the nightmare slowly ebbed, Vale rose from her bed, drawing the sheet around her as she moved across to the window. Stars spattered the sky above the hushed and huddled buildings of the quarter, the product of a careless artist's paintbrush. This landscape was hers, the heavy summer-night breezes, the stray crickets murmuring in the alley below her window. And yet Vanith, the vivid and cruel Vanith of her dream, had been right: she had remembered what it was like to be afraid, the same unshakable fear of her childhood. She had long since ceased trying to run from pain, but she had thought she had managed to escape the embraces of fear.

Vale closed her eyes, allowing the night air to caress her, breathing in the myriad smells it brought with it: the day's refuse and the dirt of the street, but also hints of nightblooming gardens, and very distantly, the sea...

In one thing only, Vanith had been wrong. It was neither her own fear nor her own pain that had ravaged her in the dream, but despair. Despair in the knowledge that those who should have lived had died before her: Ledgic, Eothan, Kannah, Soap, her own unborn child.

She breathed in deeply, lifting a hand to the white skin of her throat. She hardly knew herself, now, but what she did know was that she suddenly cared too much about the lives of those with whom she was most closely entangled.

The dream-to-reality swap was pretty good. Its hard and all.
And the story itself was love. Somewhat frightening, and certainly kept the interest to keep reading go.

Masterpiece as always. :3

I'm glad you thought it interesting! I was going for dark, and it's always hard to strike a balance, make sure it doesn't come out like a cheesy horror film or something. Thank ye.