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The thin, thread-barren sheets of the hotel bed were crumpled all around her feet when Fall finally managed to wake up from the nightmare. There was a brief moment where she was still caught in that half-asleep vertigo, ash and dust and darkness swirling around her and the knife still plunging towards her chest, before she snapped out of it with a start and reality reasserted itself completely.
Her breath came short and in desperate puffs but Fall forced herself to even them out, slowly unclenching her fingers from the bed linen while she was at it. Ever so slowly, a semblance of control returned to her, and once she was certain that she was back to normal, more or less, she sat up.
Vertigo hit again, but with less of that dream-like quality and more to do with plain exhaustion -- the dreary alarm clock on the nightstand helpfully telling her that it was just past three in the morning.
“Fuck this,” Fall breathed, and got out of bed.
Her search for the TV remote was as short as it was futile; apparently the damn thing had just disappeared from this world entirely. Just her luck that watching mind-numbing shows until she fell asleep again was out of the question; on the other hand, she supposed, it probably wasn’t going to do her that much good anyway.
She avoided having to go to bed, these days. Actual sleep itself, she’d found through a good few nights of terrible trial and error, wasn’t the issue – the dreams only ever found her when she was sleeping on a bed, or some other bed-like flat surface. As much as Fall wished differently, though, sleeping and leaning against a wall or in a chair or, on one memorable occasion, on top of her motorbike, wasn’t any kind of long-term option.
So, the motel bed.
So, yet another dream of a her that was not quite her, yet also not quite not her, either.
Fall was small in the dream, and her hands were thin and scarred from all the times she’d accidentally gotten herself splashed by the tanning mixture they soaked the cow hides in. Her clothes were just as flecked, and while her pants were thread-barren her shirt and the too-short jacket she’d thrown over it kept her warm enough.
She was hurrying down the empty night-time streets of a cold, cold town. Puddles in the street splashed as she heedlessly ran through them, frozen over only at the edges – when she briefly glanced down, she saw golden eyes glowing bright reflected back at her.
There were people running behind her, and she knew that they were pursuing her; she knew that they would kill her, should they catch her. And she also knew, with the surety that only came in dreams, that they would catch her.
The dream-her was slow, and it had no weapons.
When the men in their long coats finally caught up to her and held her pinned against one of the dirty brick walls, she’d screamed—only to be silenced by a golden knife plunging towards her heart, and when it cut through skin and scraped past bone she screamed again, and the world around the dream-her erupted into blazing fire.
For a while there Fall had played with the idea of keeping a sort of dream diary, to figure out whether there was anything the dreams had in common – but she’d quickly found that note-keeping like that was for people far more organized than her, and besides, she’d caught on to the dreams’ defining features quick enough.
In each dream, she was being pursued; in each dream, she was caught by men and women armed with golden knives; in each dream, they killed her.
And in each dream, even as her golden eyes grew dull, destruction began to rage around her.
Fall checked her eyes now, in the motel bathroom’s tiny, scratched little mirror. She half-expected them to have turned back to their normal brown – she always did, after these dreams – but, as ever, what greeted her was the golden glimmer of the Hierophant’s blessing.
Stupid, she chided herself, before splashing a bit of water on her face and flicking out the neon-yellow light.
Back in the motel bedroom proper, she eyed the bed with muted disdain before turning around and making for the suitcase containing the few meager belongings she’d bothered to drag along with her. Fall dug through the spare clothes until she found the scuffed-looking paperback she’d found in the last motel and taken with her for no real reason other than that it had looked lonely, stuck under the chair as it had been.
Try as she might, though, she couldn’t get into it even now, and when she finally gave up and looked at the clock again, barely half an hour had passed.
She went back into the bathroom and took a quick shower.
Fifteen minutes.
She found the remote for the TV beneath one of the towels and flicked through the handful of channels available before settling on a cartoon and watching the whole episode.
Twenty-three minutes.
A documentary about birds.
Twelve minutes.
And eventually, there was nothing else left for her to do but to lie back down on the bed and hope for the best.
She was in a garden, and someone was singing. The words came clearly to her in the dream but even there she knew that she wouldn’t be able to repeat them; and the tune, in all its multifold entirety, settled down deep into her bones while she slowly began to tap her fingers on her hip to its rhythm.
Sorrow permeated the song, and though he carried on without flaw, the singer’s voice was old and tired.
There was a small path winding its way through the garden, and Fall followed it without much reason except that it was a dream, and in dreams you went where the road led you. Here it led her ever onwards through the field of sunflowers – all of them swaying as if caught in some breeze, though Fall felt no hint of it on her skin – and eventually, before the dream-logic could run out, the even fields began to rise up into a hill.
The song swelled as she approached the hill, getting louder and louder until it was all Fall could do not to clamp her hands over her ears – but it would be bad, her dream-self knew, if she were to stop listening. Fall paused for a moment, breathing hard, and let her shoulders slump and her head fall forward as she tried – and failed – to block out the incessant noise.
And then boots too large for the feet wearing them appeared at the edge of her vision, and as Fall’s head snapped up she could feel the song begin to reverberate inside her head even stronger than before.
There was a little girl standing in her path. Barely any older than ten, Fall thought; slim, malnourished. She looked entirely out of place in the field of sunflowers, and though the sun beat down on the both of them from on high above, only Fall cast a shadow on the dusty path.
“I’d go back,” the little girl said, pointing behind Fall with hands flecked by drop-like scars. The wound on her chest didn’t bleed, not here, but nevertheless old blood stained the front of her rough-spun shirt and the edges of her jacket. “No good will come of climbing that hill. You’re not ready.”
“Later,” a second voice spoke up, just as young-sounding as the girl’s; and in between blinks the girl was joined by a boy dressed in an old-fashioned school uniform. There were cuts visible all over his skin, and every part of him was dripping wet – though the ground beneath him remained as dry as before. “There is still time, for now.”
Another girl beside the boy, even younger than the other two. Oil smeared her ragged shirt in almost the same color the blood from her various wounds did, and her fingers were tinged with the ashes of the fire that had followed her death. “Now is not the time to reap the harvest.”
Another girl—
“The road hasn’t ended yet—make the most of it.”
A boy—
“We’ll wait here for you, don’t worry.”
More, gathering all around her, reaching out for her with hands stained by their own blood—
“Go, Fall.”
And all of their eyes as golden as her own, flickering with that ethereal light she’d come to know so intimately.
Fall turned around.
When she woke again, the song lingered in her thoughts, and as she took a seat by the window, next to the empty cups and dirty plates, it was almost unconsciously that she began to hum along to its tune.
It was only when the sun began to rise across the horizon that she clapped her hands together and stood up—and though she lost the tune the moment her palms met, in that one breath of stark silence Fall felt calm for the first time in weeks.