2019-09-29 - Childe Roen to the Dark Tower Came

The Dream comes upon August Roen without warning.

It is late at night and something wakes him - perhaps one of his fever-induced coughs, or the brush of unseen fingers through his hair, strands that no one but Eleanor Lake is allowed to touch, coaxing him to open his eyes and take in the darkness of his room. His houseguest is somewhere asleep in the cabin, none-the-wiser.

But there is the sense of something, or someone, prowling at his periphery. It makes no sense.

He might want to drink some water. He might want to go to the bathroom. Either way, the moment he attempts to open a single door, it comes upon him in a rush. The hallway warps and twists into labyrinthine corridors made out of cracked plaster, rock and cement, a strange amalgamation of modern and medieval. The sound of water drips from nowhere, echoing in the silent, deserted thoroughfares that look like familiar substances, but sound like stone.

Should he turn around, the door is no longer there, leaving nothing but an empty wall.

The further he trudges along, he would hear it, distant but distinct; of mortar shells finding the sides of buildings, explosions rocking the atmosphere like thunder. But these are faded - persistent, yes, but mere echoes at best, reflective of faraway memories. There are windows made of glass, shattered and fragmented and should he stare outside, he'd find formless, timeless skies. There is no sun, there is no moon, and while there is some light, there is darkness, too, making it difficult to determine what hour it is.

There are trees outside, silent sentinels standing along the building's perimeter and leading into forests cloaked with night. Always trees. Thick, gigantic boles so lined by age and abuse that they look like boulders hammered into fantastic shapes. Their empty branches rattle against winds he cannot feel, not while he's inside, and wherever he is, it is a very long way down to the ground, when he's clearly situated several stories up.

There are rooms in this hallway. There's a buzzing sound, also - unseen generators in the half-dark of this strange place. The first one he passes is an operating room, its diagnostic equipment dead, surgeon's instruments scattered carelessly on the floor and table. There is a basin filled with water, stained with blood, its bottom cluttered with spent bullets caked with bits of human sinew.

Further down the corridor are stairs, one set winding upwards, and one going down.

The stairs have no railing, curling upwards, his footsteps echoing on stone though underneath his feet, they feel like cement. He occasionally passes broken windows that look out into the landscape that he had glimpsed in the floor that he had just left, each break made by a blunt object or a shower of bullets. As his silhouette moves past them, he'd catch moving glimpses at the corner of his eye - familiar things, familiar faces; a younger man in uniform, a small hand feebly clutching a stuffed toy, the rest of the body buried under rubble. The higher he ascends, the shells continue to persist, cratering into walls he can't see. But he can hear them, faintly.

This is not Sarajevo, but its reminders are everywhere the more he climbs. Gunpowder and cordite, the leavings of freshly-exploded incendiaries, sting his nose.

The stairs go further up, but he does reach a landing and there are more rooms here, the light-and-shadow effect playing over the shape of cracked doorframes. Somewhere down the hall, in the furthest room, there is suddenly an earsplitting scream, followed by the roar of something...inhuman.

The voice sounds familiar.

It is different than the others.

This is different than the others.

The thought pounds along his feet, rushing on the ground as each panicked step echoes in the hallway. Each room he passes is another operating room, though the way each has been used is different from the one he had passed in the floor below; there is a bone saw in one, the calcified and desiccated remains of something's limb left lying near it, another room where shadows - are they shadows? - move over an unmoving shape sprawled on a gurney, unrecognizable and featureless. Most are thankfully empty aside from that fleeting glimpse, though he is moving so fast that last image might just be a trick of the light. Something toying with his imagination.

The dark mirror of his moving shape blazes across the walls. Somewhere behind him, other darknesses move, skeletal fingers stretching for his shadow, as if begging for him to stay. There are words, barely formed, but soft and sibilant, brushing against his ear.

wELcOMe hOMe...

The entire building shakes. He does not hear an explosion, but he can practically sense it in his mind. Stone and cement crumbles around him, shakes out the dust from unseen corners and leaving fragments skittering across the floor by his feet.

And when he reaches that final room, there is the sound of something ripping. Something wet.

In an abandoned and ruined recovery room, Isabella Reede whirls to face him, eyes wide and wild with fright and fury. The thing lying by her feet looks human, but not, a pastiche of limbs from different bodies stitched together. He wouldn't find a head, the stump replaced by a hand, instead. Someone's hand, the proud logo of the U.S. Army tattooed on the back of its knuckles. She is shaking, clutching a large shard of broken glass in her grip, cutting deeply in her palm. Blood has spattered on the side of her face, her throat, staining her clothes - a tanktop, pajama bottoms. She has no shoes, her long, dark brown hair clouding over her face. Her skin is humid and slick with perspiration.

She looks like death.

Green-gold eyes burning with fever fix on him.

"It tried to kill me," she whispers, her voice low and threadbare. But the question lingers in the air.

Are you going to try and kill me, too?

He doesn't let her touch him, but when he catches that wrist, there is no resistance. Emerald and gold eyes glow like embers as she looks up his taller form. Isabella is still smiling.

"You give such good advice," she says quietly. "How do you do that? I'm so jealous. I wish I could do that."

She doesn't let go of the glass - it might save them, or it might doom them. Doom him, in particular, but he seems willing to chance it. That's only when she looks over her shoulder, and sees what is waiting for them in the room. What little light remains flickers, the generator sound buzzing even more loudly. More mortar shells explode in the distance.

But she follows. The stairs are at the end of the hall.

The things inside of the room might be incorporeal, but like the infection they're both fighting, they continue to spread, and wail, and shriek. The sound follows after them and the young woman with him is unable to help it. She runs, because the overwhelming feeling that they must takes over her senses. And as she starts moving faster, the shadows do also. They will chase him, chase them both, the hallway suddenly coming alive with the vague shapes of their fears, sharpening and given definition the closer they come to their bodies.

Despite all this frantic activity, the scraping sound continues, echoing from somewhere below the stairwell. The flight seems to extend into forever and there are other floors, other landings. But which will he choose? To stop again, or move to the very top?

This isn't Sarajevo, but it starts to feel more and more like it, the longer he stays here. The air starts to smell familiar, and should he look down on his shoes, he'll see his old uniform boots. A blink, and they're gone again, replaced by the clothes he's currently wearing. The acrid sting of smoke burns in his nose.

This place is affecting his companion, also, but he won't see how. Isabella stops on occasion, eyes looking into the rooms they pass, growing ashen but she keeps moving. Up, he says, so up they go. When the young woman attempts to try another landing, its ceiling suddenly caves in, blocking her from that path, as if blown out from above, dangerously close to her body, perilously close to his. Her surprised cry shatters through the booming of mortar shells in the back of August's mind. When did they get closer? They sound like they're just right outside. Can mortars even reach this high?

Higher still. Higher, and when they hit the top of the steps and there's nowhere else to go, the moment August's shoe steps into it, his surroundings warp again.

And the walls collapse around him. They block his view of Isabella and for a moment, there's nothing but pitch black.

When he opens his eyes again, the marble floor is cold and white against his cheek, and once he straightens up he'll find his reflection staring back at him, mirroring his sickness in sharp relief. The framed mirror stands in front of him, carrying his image.

And it's not the only one.

There are dozens of them, easily glimpsed from where he lies, broken up in avenues, split in multiple directions. Any one of them can lead anywhere, but now is not the time for exploration, because he can still hear it, sense that foreboding presence slowly working up the stairs and trying to find him, following the shrieking directives of whatever horrors live here.

The metal continues to scrape. It keeps scraping. It sounds distant, at least, not like before. He's made it to the top, somehow.

But he is alone, and that might be dangerous, too.

He's able to grab her, in that instinctive gesture, saving them both from a cave in that would have left them in greasy tomato smears on concrete and stone. For a moment, Isabella keeps clutching onto him, eyes wide and staring past his shoulder and for a moment, just a moment, she seems herself again.

But she's gone when he wakes, though he can sense her once he tries to force the embers of his dying power to some semblance of life. It resists him. It doesn't want to be used, but his will is downright herculean and the Gift agrees to his whims. She seems like a world away, with this little brush, he'd take a first sip of her mental essence, just the surface impression - he does not have the strength to go further or deeper than that. But it is enough to tell him that she is in this room, but lost somewhere in the maze of mirrors and unmoving and silent. He can follow this tiny speck of her, if he chooses.

She tastes like wildfires and hurricanes.

But to get to her, he would have to walk through the mirrors and unlike the vague, peripheral images he had seen in the windows of this tower, these reflective surfaces are merciless in their clarity. The same images, over and over, but with variations - of a war-torn battlefield, the air thick with smoke. Of destroyed buildings and bodies buried under the rubble, and as he walks past each one, his reflection gets younger, and younger, and younger, passing through the stages of his life in reverse - until he's in his old U.S. Army uniform again.

The faces within each vision change, past memories blurring with the most recent. Itzhak Rosencrantz, standing in the middle of the battle-ravaged plane, armed with the violin that he loves and serenading the sweltering air, expression evocative of the way most serious musicians lose themselves in their craft...before an entire building collapses on his body, breaking his skull open and splashing his blood on the dirt. Finch Celaeno and Ignacio de Santos, shouting in horror from nearby and scrambling for the remains of their fallen friend, only for a mortar shell to come screaming from the sky and land in between them, tearing their bodies apart. The familiar sign of his business, Branch & Bole, clatters to a stop near Ignacio's severed arm, dripping with the scarlet vestiges of Itzhak's life.

The tableau bleeds together, defying the boundaries of the mirrors' frames, and should he look forward, he'd find another. Eleanor Lake standing in his kitchen, her image so vivid that he can't be blamed for believing that he has been thrown back in time, low light gleaming from her radiant, red-haired head and clad in nothing but his flannel, flashing him a look that is less seductive and more nerdy, eyes glittering with anticipation and the laughing self-awareness that she's bad at this. Her lips part to say something to him.

But his kitchen collapses, too, ruthlessly and suddenly, taking her with it and the chamber filling with her screams, her fingers reaching for him, but unable to hang on.