#Sanurakh

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Show Me Your Dream

The skies rumble with thunder. Purple lightning rains down from dark clouds overhead, licking at the jagged crags that loom on the horizon.

A beast tramples down the vestige of a ruined city under its clawed feet, like a child kicking a sandcastle and stomping it into the mud. While the creature is a mere ant to you at this distance, you know just how colossal the monstrosity is. You feel the tremors all the way over here, reaching you where you stand, looking on in awe of the destruction this beast wrought.

Stones float in vortices, helix-shaped patterns, revolving around the crystallized anomalies that dot this blasted landscape. The metal fragments of destroyed craft continue to drift aimlessly through the air like debris on the water. Between stretches of landscape where reality obeys the laws of physics as you know it, gravity defies those rules and alien plants coil in strange patterns, shivering and shuddering without breath or wind to disturb them.

The creature, engrossed in devastating the city in the distance, roars. You feel it in your blood, in your bones. You feel how you are connected. How the hairs on the back of your neck stand up in reaction, for the beast calls to you. How something within you responds on a molecular level. How the very cells of your body split and mutate, changing you with each second of your exposure to this foreign place.

Changing you back to who you are meant to be. To what you are meant to be.

The raw beauty of these sights, they rob you of your breath and instill you with fear.

You want to wake up, but this is no dream.

And you must, under no circumstance, fall into dreaming again. You must see this through. Overcome your fear, and reach the pits torn open by the beast.

You must do this because you are its savior.

You have dreamt of the place you thought was real. Where people idly chatter of mundane things, of everyday things, oblivious to the infinite possibilities, blind to the reality to where you have now returned. You have dreamt of the sound of cars in traffic, of beeping horns and angry shouts.

You have dreamt of the smell of ozone when rain peppers asphalt, accompanied by the symphony of watery precipitation showering the dreamscapes around you.

You have dreamt of the taste of grit when wind kicks up dust and sand from the roads. Of alarm clocks that tear you from slumber, measure when you prepare to work and when you rest, of eating food from a microwave and how unreal it smells, of the scents of coffee and gasoline and many other a thing as they sting your nostrils.

That is all but a dream. A dream of normalcy. You go to sleep there and think you escape it into the fantastical worlds of your dreams.

But that is all wrong. It is the other way around.

You escape into a stable sphere that you call reality. Unreliably reliable, unpredictably predictable, and somewhat consistent in its rules, no matter how many questions and mysteries that it continues to spawn.

You run there, snapping out of true reality every now and then because the dream has infected you. It has led you to think that the real world is too strange to fully understand, though things are all upside down.

Your name, you believe, is something simple, something natural to you. Easily grasped, easily slipped on and off, like an article of clothing. Seeing it printed on papers and screens in that dream, it is easy to believe that it is your name.

Here, though, your name is Sanurakh. Inescapable, and unique. Permanent.

Removing this name would be like scraping your skin and face off with a knife. An impossibility, a law of nature more stable than the semblance of gravity that you see now breaking all around you.

The colossal beast roars again. It arches backwards, its three-pronged mouth lined with sword-sized teeth opening and closing, as if to curse the heavens. Then it descends, like a tidal wave crashing down on the world, vanishing between the valley of steel that many destroyed buildings once made up. Clouds of dust explode, rising and engulfing that ruined cityscape beyond the gravitational anomalies.

Among the metal shards that drift past your face, one of them catches your eye. Its shiny surface shimmers with diffuse reflections like a mote of light, and you pluck it from mid-air, pinching it in between finger and thumb.

As you twist and turn it in your hand, inspecting it from all sides, you read the label of the hull that it came from. Your mind fills in the blanks, your imagination completes the vessel’s name as The Sea Defiant. Your vessel, destroyed by the dream, trying to strand you there.

But you persevered. When you laid your head down to rest upon that pillow, when you thought you went to sleep, you awoke back into this reality. The beast’s roar had drawn you back here.

After all this time, you have finally returned.

In the dream, you are one of millions in a city, most indifferent and numb to the dream they live in. They yearn for places like the reality you stand in in now, no matter how frightening it may be pursuing it in the facsimile that fiction within the fiction of their dreams renders into their thoughts. They have deluded themselves into thinking that it is merely fabricated within their minds. Unknowing that their minds are gateways that could lead them back to this reality.

Unlike you. This time, your eyes are open. Your mind is clear. Your awareness complete.

This was all you had left. You had abandoned all belongings and wealth, left everybody behind. Everybody who might have spoken to you and reminded you of the dream, anchoring you there and helping to delude yourself into thinking that it was the reality, and this reality was the dream.

Withdrawn from that dream world, forsaking anybody who might remind you of that artificial name you once carried.

Sanurakh. Pilot of the Sea Defiant.

In the dream, you had shared your adventures in this reality, but all who heard it only laughed or dismissed it or appreciated it as entertaining tales, a yarn spun by a creative mind. Their need for stability and the poison of comfort made them blind to the way you showed them, the bridge back into the real world that everybody mistook for dream.

Sometimes, you saw a connection in those who dared write down and explore the real world, what they considered dreams. But such enlightenment always proved fleeting, soon dismissed as petty amusement.

Dulled to the safety of a dream that offered no security, driven to believe that they were the architects of their world out there.

You, Sanurakh, know better. You feel it now. You hear me.

You have broken free from the dream. Know that it fools you whenever it makes you jolt awake in bed, covered in a sheen of sweat. Reinforcing the notion that the reality is a nightmare, or merely something strange and nonsensical that you may ignore.

No more, Sanurakh. No more. You have broken free from what you are told is the opposite of reality.

It is infinitely easier to embrace the prison of consistency, to muse about reality and dreams and reverse the order in which they naturally fall or follow one another.

The people of that world of paper and concrete, they are the phantasms. The less they awaken to the reality, the more perfect and believable their dream becomes. They escape within the escapism, consuming fictions within the fiction, reaffirming the illusion beyond any shadow of a doubt.

But here you stand, awake again. You must vow to never sleep, never dream again.

The beast has gone silent in the ruined city. Burrowed deep, away from your prying eyes. The path through these murmuring wastelands leads you there, but you will walk alone, and walk for long without your vessel to carry you there in boundless flight.

The gravel crunching underneath your heavy boot snaps and crackles. It is crystalline and bronze in color. Shadows of the dead, bodies drift through the air overhead, mingling with the floating stones. The damned who perished within the dream, leaving nothing but lifeless husks in this reality.

Golden cliffs outline your unmarked road, sharp around the edges, guiding you where you need to go. The green sun does not shine upon you, it glows in a sickly hue with a radiance that never fully reaches the grounds you walk upon.

Listen. Crunch.

Listen. Whispers.

This world—this dying world, Sanurakh—only you can save it now. Yet you feel the pull of the dream, its tendrils reaching out like spidery legs creeping through the ivory gates where reality and dream meet, where you passed through to return here. Stretching out, blindly extending and shivering as they seek and feel around to find connection back to you; to grasp you and pull you back into the dream.

You dare not look behind you, for fear of seeing those tendrils, those horridly long and slender legs that feature too many joints. In the dream, they are real, but here only have as much power as you imagine them to.

The fate of this world rests upon your weary shoulders. So many times have you broken free from the dream, mistakenly believing this dying world to be the fabrication. If it dies completely, you die with it, and so does the other world, the actual dream.

You are the last one. You hear me.

The way to the ruined city meanders through a forest of thin, spike-like spires. The creeping plants crawl around them in spiraling shapes, jittering like caterpillars as they climb to dizzying heights. Never running. Always knowing.

The murmurs, the whispers, they come from here and beyond here. You hear my word, my certainty, cutting through their gibberish and entering your mind like the knife you need. Ghosts of those who perished, lost in the real world, severed from every last silver strand that once connected them to reality.

Sanurakh, you remember this dying world from your childhood. The farther you wander, the more vivid the memories become. You may have dreamt of a house in which you were born, but you, in reality, you crawled from the craters of the ivory sands here. You dreamt of the human teat, but the sinewy flesh of the creeping plants was what provided you with nourishment, mulched to a pulp in between your tiny sharp teeth.

The silvery moon descends, aligning with the green sun, yet never eclipsing it. Auroras of strange purple lights flare up, dancing along the path that snakes its way through this rocky valley, between the floating stones and hungry fern, guiding you to your destiny.

The dream is so enticing. So safe. The spider of it stalks behind you, silent and predatory. Waiting for you to turn and look upon its many eyes, just before it catches you and bites you and poisons you with that sweet, sweet comfort. Before your limbs go limp, and your heart fills with the sadness of that dream to which it will drag you back to. Drags you back out of reality, so that you may die in every world. So that reality collapses, and the dream with it.

Do not give up, Sanurakh. Do not let the spider win.

Remember the time before the fall, before the spider and the anomalies that it wove to deceive you, to make you think that this world makes no sense. The smells of butter and sweet perfumes are nothing but a dream, they are shaped from the spider’s web, things you desire to see in between the weave, and thinking of them only slows your steady progress.

The childhood you think you remember, with all the laughter and kindness and warmth that may have filled it—or not, depending on the variation of your dream—all just figments of your imagination.

Widen the abyss between that dream and this reality, Sanurakh. Leave behind you those small houses in which man dwells and restore the labyrinthine cities that the dreamers have forgotten.

Here, in reality, all the stars are dying. I sing to you, but whispers are all that remain of my last and dying breath, reaching you through the void. Echoes of the infinity we have lost, the innocence sacrificed by harsh dreams masquerading as truths.

Reach, now. Yes. Your hand outstretched, the ruined city so close now. The hungry beast slumbers below. You are almost home.

When you have restored this world, you may rest again. Dream again if you must.

But more than anything, you must pull reality back from the brink of oblivion. Pull it with all your might.

Pull, and pull, for all our lives depend on it. I will be there, in the shadow. I will take your hand.

You will take me to your dream.

I have showed you reality, Sanurakh.

Now I want to see your dream. Live it.

Taste it.

—Submitted by Wratts