Red's CD Project Story 2: Part 12 – A Nightmare

Note: I started writing this one and didn't like it were it was going, so I had to start again. This would be a good lesson on the writing process from where it started to where it ended. I am pretty sure I've blown the scope of this thing beyond the number of parts I have left. That's scary considering there are still a lot of songs left on the CD. I also am pretty close to getting a glossary caught up for a nice little reference tool. Don't miss part 11 below, or you'll be lost here.

Disc 1

Track 12: Tribute – Tenacious D

“All of a sudden, there shined a shiny demon…”

The desert floor was hard, the sand matted down as if a thousand horses had spent a thousand years pacing across it. Spotting it, here and there, were the strangled out greens of weeds left too long without water even for plants used to the dry desert air. Ewam awoke, face planted in the hot turf, nostrils full of sand. Before him was a cactus, wilted brown, nay the plant seemed more black. Impossible, he thought.

Once his father had taken both he and Eden to Nocnil and the outskirts of the Sorna. He recognized the barren land at once. Above the sun beat down on his pale skin, no doubt turning it a bright red. He stood up, thinking he heard a song on the wind. The sky was blue, then purple, then red, then blue again.

He was dreaming. It was a thought that floated through his mind and disappeared without the slightest hint of residue. He stood upon a ridge looking down upon the great waste. Below, the sand was full and rolled in great dunes. Soon, he thought, the desert would rise up and crash like waves upon the shore over the rest of the earth, swallowing it in scorching death.

That idea was lost when a figure, wrapped in shadow topped a dune in the desert. Striding beside the figure were a woman and a girl. Kendra and Evandra! Their shapes, their faces and their smiles shaping into form according to his mind’s recognition. He reached for his sword, but he had none. Looking up, the three figures were closer, just below him. Kendra and Evandra were nude. The dark man was of no shape, no form that he recognized. The woman and her daughter lay upon the desert floor as the dark figure turned its head up to him, opening it mouth revealing a fire inside. Ewam could not move a muscle, as the figure seemed to speak and at the same time encompass his brother’s wife and his niece.

“Come,” It was Eden’s voice spoke in their secret language. It came first from the demon below and then from a voice beside him. Ewam was startled to find his brother, Eden, wearing a crown with a green jewel in its center and a breastplate with a green and black dragon’s face painted across it. The dragon was the ancient insignia of Isa. Ewam gasped. That image, that history, had been locked away, forgotten in some dark chamber well below the palace.

“Come,” Eden spoke again, a long forked tongue escaped for a moment from his brother’s mouth. Eden’s eyes turned color then from brown, to purple, to red, to black. This was a dream. Ewam could not hold onto that thought.

“Come brother,” a bolt of anger turned Eden’s eyes red again. “Come deceiver!”

All the words in their secret code, the last spoke with a slither at the end and a thrust forward. Ewam looked down at his stomach, a sword’s hilt with a dragon engraved around it sank into him, blood spilled out below. Ewam swore he could see the steel dragon breathing. He dropped to his knees looking away from Eden and the sword, down to where Kendra and Evandra lay upon the sand. They were sinking into, nay rather the desert floor was consuming them, burning away their flesh, draining their blood and eroding their bone till they were nothing more than sand.

Ewam bolted upright in his bed, a film of sweat weighing down his silk top. His stomach turned and he flushed with shame. Earlier he had questioned his brother about Evandra being a little too old to be disturbed by bad dreams, now it was his turn to fear closing his eyes.

Pouring water from a pitcher upon his nightstand into a silver goblet, Ewam rose, put on a robe, and drifted over to the large double doors that led to a balcony. Outside the city known as Omet was silent. It’s residents in bed. The palace was in the center of the great stone metropolis. In the distance, he could see the great outer wall that was guarded every hour of every day. The palace rose high above the rest of the city save for the four towers placed equidistant from each other forming a square around the palace that once served as prisons for three men and one woman after the Perde family took control nearly a thousand years earlier. No one went in those towers to this day and little is known as to what those four person’s crimes were. Ewam remembered wondering as a boy if they were still locked away in those towers, forced to live out eternity in the solitude way above the city. There were rumors of seeing lights of candles and faces in the open windows at the top, but they were just stories. The doors at the bottom were solid steel that were locked and sealed shut. The keys for the doors were held somewhere in the palace, but the location of the keys was lost long ago.

Ewam huddled down into a wood chair he kept out on the balcony and sipped at his water. He tried not to think about the dream, but it was impossible. The vision of Kendra and Evandra being devoured by the sand was horrifying, but perhaps even more disturbing was the vision of his brother decked out in the attire of the King of Isa. No one named those old kingdoms in Satar. There were ancient bloodlines still alive from both Isa and Besa and it was best just to leave those bloodlines dormant then awake old rivals and bitter lovers.

As an heir to the throne, he was taught more than the common man on the history of the two kingdoms. The way they would embrace each other with one arm and stab with a poisoned knife with the other. For an age, they waged war, reached peace only to return to war a few years later. There was no one innocent or right. It was simple bloodletting. In fact, he remembered his teacher, Victor, once raising the question if it was possible that the Kings of both kingdoms agreed to the wars in part to keep their own subjects occupied. The answer was impossible to know. Almost all of Besa, except for the city of Morgandy, was under water. Morgandy had never been a stronghold for Besa, more of a post near the border to keep an eye on Isa. As for Isa, much of its history was lost in the chaos following the flooding of Besa. There were tombs under the palace that housed many lost things, but they were not safe to inventory and most kings, he and Eden included, felt the past was better buried.

Yet, Eden had been dressed in the Isa armor. What a peculiar thing to dream. Ewam didn’t even take time to consider the dark figure with Kendra and Evandra. He dismissed that as some demon or monster of dreams, but he spent the rest of night sipping water on the balcony. Soon he was thinking about his sister’s disappearance and all the other missing women and all the other duties of his position. By daybreak, the dream was near the back of his mind.

Later, the dream was faded from his mind altogether. For even then, as he sat out the dark hours of the morning, there was someone outside the great wall of the city. The man was trying to convince the guards to let him. He carried an urgent message for the Kings of Satar. He also carried ancient history of another great kingdom in a bundle on his back.

When that man was let in, there would be no more time to worry about dreams.