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Owen dreams.
It was all that the wizard ever had, after all. Ever since he was a child, he dreamt, and dreamt, and dreamt. That was where his true freedom lies, not at the strip of the supposedly boundless sky that he could only briefly glimpsed when he craned his neck towards the small cell window, back then, not even at the wide, silvery world outside after he was out of that damp, cramped, hellish place that had been his entire world for nobody knows how long. No, he looked inside, deep into the place that most would say where his soul lies.
Owen dreams.
The first time he saw the outside world, after so many years - centuries - of being stashed away from it, tucked inside its shadows and the malice of the humans residing in it, limping into the distant light - like the body of a drowning victim slowly rising towards the surface - he fell into the ground. A scream rings out inside his head, distant, raw and heartfelt like the first peals of thunder before a large storm, although, soon enough, he was aware that it wasn’t only in his head.
He was screaming, and, this time, there were no walls to muffle and capture the sound of his scream, no voices to tell him to shut up , nothing, just the world itself, large and silvery and seemingly going on forever, remnants of a settlement - a village, a town, not that it matters, for it is a corpse now, all of it - surrounding him, and, beyond it, the wilderness.
Remains of houses, phantom dwellings of people that remained standing long after their occupants have moved or died, surrounded him in all directions. Snow begins to fall, the flakes dancing slowly as they fell, atop partially decaying rooftops, broken benches, dried-out fountains. In the brief summer months, long ago, the wizard imagined - as his limited imagination would allow, since he had been tucked away inside the darkness for so, so long - birds would come and perch on the now half-ruined fountain, chirping between themselves and sing cheerfully, the sound of their melodious song floating carelessly, yet softly, in the hot air, carried along by the warm breeze.
He wanted to sing with them, wanted to be so carefree, to float and fly along in that gentle, warm breeze, praising the infinitely beautiful world.
But as the sound of his screams gradually died out, petering out into the distance, receding back into the caverns of his ribcage, a silence settled, and there were no longer tears streaking his face, dried or otherwise. It wasn’t that sort of world.
Only the strong would survive, in this beautiful, silvery, cruel world, a perfect mirror of the moon, their Great Calamity, too, a lethal, terrible beauty. For the Northern country was no place for the faint-hearted - humans live and die on the whims of nature as much as they do on the whims of the country’s wizards and witches, known and hailed as the strongest, yet the most capricious, as well, in the entire world - and, if this was heaven, a place that the silver-haired wizard heard in snippets, here and there, from his captors’ conversations, then surely, it was an empty heaven.
For the streets are all empty, devoid of any life. Surely, surely, if this was heaven...then he was the devil itself. What was he, if not hated for what he was, imprisoned, tortured, starved, and then abandoned to die?
Owen dreams, and it was never a pleasant dream.
A snowflake alighted on his silver hair, itself the hue of dreams and the cruel world of the North, and the wizard looked up to the sky. This was the first time that he saw it, a behemoth looming above him, so close and yet so far, like an illusion, or a mirage. It, too, was achingly beautiful, and he immediately knew how the humans must have felt, when they looked up to it.
When he lowered his gaze, a large, white wolf was staring at him.
It felt like it was smiling at him - although whether this was due to the vivid dream state the pollens induced, or a misremembered, minor part of his memory, he cannot be sure, although he certainly doesn’t care - its fur the same shade as the snow, its wild, yellow eyes staring deeply into his own red ones.
He wasn’t scared. He was nothing but bones wrapped by a thin, papery excuse of a skin - corpselike, half-dead already, much like the remains of the settlement surrounding him, although somehow, his heart was still beating inside his chest - enveloped, barely so, by some stained, faded rags, but he was a product of this land as much as the wolf was, wild and free, magic singing in his veins, waiting to be let out.
He told the Sage that he couldn’t remember, precisely, when he learnt to speak to animals, but this, for him, was the moment - although he immediately forgot, whenever he regained consciousness - when he learnt who he was, although not yet what he is truly capable of.
The wolf opened its jaw, one that must have killed and devoured so many lesser creatures, teeth like sharp knives, and out came a growl that the wizard could understand as: Come. Come with me.
More snow began to fall, then, as the temperature began to plummet and night surely approaches on her dark steeds, and the wizard - pale and haggard, barely alive, a devil in this empty heaven - shivered, but he wasn’t scared. Not in the slightest.
He nods, and the wolf lowered its head, a slight, before turning towards the direction of the forest, outside the boundary of the abandoned, ruined town.
Owen followed. And he dreams, ceaselessly.
The outside world was more than he could ever think of or dream about, in his sleep back in his own cramped, forlorn excuse of a world - more snow, more sky, and even more stars. When evening touched the blurring canvas of the twilight sky and transformed it into a shade of a deep, yearning blue, that first night, after he followed the wolf, the wizard craned his head upwards towards the starry latices of the heaven for the first time, unrestricted by the tiny cell window, and unencumbered by iron shackles.
His eyes widened, for the sight was awe-inspiring.
It was a sight that he, too, remembered, although he kept it to himself, like how he kept the location of his hidden soul, later on.
The Calamity soon rose, a silvery beauty in all of her lethal glory, and, beside him, the white wolf howled, and in the distance, he heard the same song, albeit sung with different throats. He doesn’t understand what it means, that first night, but in a way, it makes everything more beautiful, more magnificent, more magical.
Owen dreams, and in the dream that is less than a memory but more than just a figment of a dreaming, soulless body, the great wolf became his first teacher. His legs, and, indeed, the rest of him, felt ragged more often than not in the days afterwards, from all the walking and running, and he was weak, at first, as they all started out, weaker than even a newborn wolf pup, but he was a wizard, and a child of the North. The elements yielded easily to his inexperienced commands, and soon, he, too, learnt the magic of charisma. Just as he learnt the language of the wolves, the music of the songbirds, and the sounds of the forest, soon, he, too, learnt how to use his budding magic to elicit and cajole, to incite and to threaten.
Then the great wolf taught him to hunt.
The first blood that he spilled, with his own hands, were that of a deer’s, muscles still taut and sinewy to the touch. This, too, was a sight that he remembered, but unlike the stars - high and uncaring in their far, Ouranian domain - the sight of red against the white of the snow, and the pale flesh of his own hands spurred him on from there onwards.
Cruelty was a word that the wizard did not have a name for, although he knew it intimately, deeper than the light of the moon, or a lover’s touch - which was just as alien to him - although it was starting to take root in him, like an affliction, or a parasitic worm burying itself in its host’s flesh. He told the Sage, implicitly, that he liked malice, but really, this was what he was truly referring to: the sight of the deer’s blood, and the nights that came afterwards.
He still remembered them, fondly, although he couldn’t seem to remember just how to correctly unlock the memories. Yet, the afterimages of them lingers, in the back of his mind, in the depths of his subconscious, like how a scent persistently clings in the air, even after the flowers have been taken away, withered and dead.
Owen dreams, and yet, although he couldn’t quite remember the distant, fragmented past...sometimes he did wonder, when he was dreaming, in this peaceful slumber that would soon be eternal to everyone else, if he was dreaming his dreams, or if it was, instead, the other way around. If he was, in truth, a product of his dreams, and if the past and its strange, violent landscape was all but a nightmare.
“...en. Owen. Owen, please, wake up.”
Vaguely, piercing through the thin veil that separated the waking world and this one, his dream world - as it was with life and death, as well - the wizard could hear a now-familiar voice, that of a young man. And a hand, on his arm - even if all his limbs felt distant, another effect of the potent poison from the trees - the strangest kind of touch, for it was not meant to hurt, but one of concern, a genuine one.
“Ah, Sir Sage...why did you interrupt my pleasant slumber?” He voiced, even without opening his mismatched eyes, in his usual flat, acerbic tone. “I was having such pleasant dreams, too…”
“I thought you were…”
He couldn’t even bring himself to say the word, Owen thought to himself, eyelids slowly fluttering open, and he rose to a sitting position.
Utterly strange, and perfectly weak.
“Dead? Haha. You would know if I am. At least, Mithra would. But, thanks to your interruption, I was merely sleeping, as you can see.”
“You look so peaceful…”
A perfectly naive remark, said with equally wide eyes. Eyes that reminded the wizard of puppies, those distant descendants of the wild wolves that had been his only family, back then. It surely stoked his own malice. The boy - although he was barely even that for him, just a baby who was still learning the ways of this world, a powerless weakling, a ridiculous human - touched his arm, again.
“...thank goodness you are still alive.”
He already opened his mouth, to give him an acidic remark about just how utterly ridiculous that is, but the Sage, the human from another world, to his surprise, bends down, and wraps his arms around him. He could certainly feel the genuine relief that the gesture was conveying, for their magic, in this world, stems from the heart, and even powerful Northern wizards are not immune to such a pure, overwhelming display of sincerity.
Something inside him did clench, even if only for a fleeting instance. When the boy - the Sage - pulled back, and Owen’s mismatched gaze met his dark ones, there were a thousand different things that he could - and wanted - to say to him.
Do you think of your past, Sir Sage? What would you do if you couldn’t remember it? What would you do if you could remember it? Have you ever been locked away, tucked in some godforsaken corner of the world, and experienced hell itself? If you haven’t, would you like to experience it for yourself? I can show you.
Would you change the past? What would you change, and what wouldn’t you change, then? Has your past been kind to you? Is there such a thing as ‘kindness’ in the world?
Could things go down differently?
What is ‘freedom’? Is this freedom?
“Is there something you would like to say? Are you okay?”
The boy continued, beating him to breaking the silence, and, again to the wizard’s surprise...he took his hand, and gave him a smile. One that he would say was encouraging, although he wasn’t good at giving emotions like that a name.
“...I’m fine. Haha, you really are quite something, Sir Sage. Yes, there are a lot of things I would like to say to you. But being with you, it was almost as if...as if I could truly forget...or truly remember.”
He felt the boy squeezing his hand lightly, and Owen smiled his mysterious smile, the dark forest lit by the trees’ luminosity was a landscape that suits him well. A place of remembering, and forgetting, one where life throws away its shackles, whether temporarily, or permanently.
In dreams, they are all free, and he has come to a realisation that memories are the one true chain that binds and constricts them all. Perhaps, in this respect, he is truly free, although his memories still bound him, in other forms.
“It could be your gift, or your curse. Who knows. Perhaps you’ll soon find out. You nearly made me a believer, too, of human kindness, but of course, I was merely joking.”
He released the Sage’s hand, but not unkindly so, although a part of him liked to pretend that it didn’t happen, and rose, straightening up himself.
“I’m getting bored of dreaming. Keep everything I have told you a secret. Or...something bad will happen. Haha, it’s so utterly ridiculous of you, to come all this way, for a devil like me.”
Once more, the Sage - Akira, his name was - took his hand, after he rose from his own seat, giving it another squeeze, and the smile on his lips was one that spoke of gentleness. Like the white clouds, that day, in the endless blue sky, the day where he finally found his way to the true world, outside.
“You’re not a devil, Owen. Now come on. Let’s go home.”
Simple words, but it filled some niche in his chest, a cavity that he didn’t even know was there in the first place, although it had always been there, ever since he was only a child.
He, too, was naive, once, like him. Yet...his own smile couldn’t exactly leave his own lips, for some reason, and he nodded, letting the other lead him back, towards the world of the living, outside the Forest of Dreams.
And he remembered.