COMATOSE

Chapter 3 -- Someone Else's Dream

Someone Else's Dream

Chapter 4

Blistering, burning hair, burning clothes, burning flesh. Fire licked her bare skin. With a jolt, she realized her clothes were gone, burnt to cinders. When she was little, she had dreamt of huge fires burning down her house, sealing her off from her parents, her brother, but in those dreams, the fire always surrounded her like a ring, slowly closing in, filling the air with thick, suffocating smoke. This is was different. The ring of fire had long since closed in on her sprawled body. She could see nothing but flames flickering, raging engulfing her entire body. She was part of the raging inferno. People said that time slowed down at the instant before one dies. This must be it then. She'd never known pain like this before. The skin on her feet was turning a dry, leathery shade of unpleasant red as the fire ate at her skin. Fire--destruction, pain, dying. No she thought, if she was going to die, her last thought would be a happy one.

     Easier said than done. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to think of her bother. Abby and Jason Brown, twins born on separate days of separate years, people said. She blinked away tears, which evaporated with a hiss. Jason in uniform, Jason shoving his badge in the face of a delinquent, Jason letting her live with him after the divorce, Jason complaining about his crappy car, Jason venting about his day at work, his incompetent colleagues sleeping on the job; Jason teaching her to fight, to shoot a gun, to knock an arrow, Jason letting her curl up with him and his fat calico cat on the green leather couch by the hearth while blizzards howled and shrieked outside. Fire—soothing warmth, comfort, family…sleep.

     The grimace on her face melted slowly into a smile. A sigh escaped her lips. The fire was ticklish now, its ferocity had died down, and with it the pain had vanished. Now, tamer flames flickered around her like soft butterfly wings, a mere warm brushing sensation.

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She kept having dreams, although she was pretty positive they weren't her dreams. The dreams weren't the worst part though. The worst part was that she couldn't wake up.

In the beginning, nothingness was interrupted by a singular random event as fyre bloomed into existence. Nowhere, drifting in a strange limbo, a single point of light hovered there, its reflection scintillating in the clear pool above which it floated. Abby awoke to a feeling of emptiness, into this dream that wasn't hers, as if she was simply passing through. Soft, rippling circles appeared where she stood ankle deep in clear liquid. All around her, twisting black columns curled up from the floor, stretching out to form the roof of the cavern, a dense, impenetrable tangle of branches from which arced graceful, soaring waterfalls frozen in time. At the heart of it all, a flickering flame murmured as it had since the beginning, flowing seamlessly over the water's surface.

A constant breeze flowed continuously through the cavern although she could see no opening. Abby frowned...convection currents? No, this was more than that. The breezes that swept through her had more substance. Rather than flowing around her they coursed through her as if mocking her attempts to confine herself within a physical body. Somehow she knew instinctively that these were the Ancients. These guardians kept the fyre going, guarded it and fed it like a child, for it was in fact their child.

Suddenly, rather than four breezes, there was one. The others had gone, she knew, to watch the fey. Only Keeper remained, restlessly stirring the flame, his breeze more erratic than the others. Abby grinned to herself, recognizing Keeper's restlessness as the all too familiar feeling of boredom. Keeper slowed, watching the flame. Abby's breath was whisked away as Keeper remembered, reaching back into the past, into a time before time, before light had entered the world, when all that existed were then Ancients, swirling languidly around together, plotting, imagining the world and all that would exist within it. Latching onto the darkness of the past, Keeper dragged it forward in time, fast-forwarding back to the present. The cavern assembled itself around them and the small fire flickered once again, but Keeper was angry, the fist-full of past now bubbling up inside him as he stared at the persistent little flame. He let the past burst out of him with a gust of breath. He blew on it gently, as if coaxing a dying ember back to life. The past flickered and became a little flame, casting shadows rather than light. It was transfixing, intriguing, an anomaly.