Once a month, without fail, I would have the same dream. It was vivid as a memory upon awakening, but faded the next time I slept as if the following dream erased the first. This happened with every dream, but none held sway over me like that one, like that nightmare.
I awoke, my body feeling half frozen as I huddled for warmth in the fur pelts that lay atop the snow. The tent billowed, wind creeping in from below; the bodies around me stirred awake and arose, and so I joined them. We got up, grabbed our things, adorned our armour, our swords and set forth one last time. We left our tent and our sleeping pelts; we knew we didn't need to move them that day.
The Captain of the expedition briefed us that this was the last day of the ascent, that no matter what may come, we stand firm in the Emperor's name and fulfil our duty to the death.
And so we climbed.
Upon leaving the tent, the wind chill began its assault on our faces, causing the thin air to make us move slowly and sluggishly as we climbed.
Nearing the summit, we passed the furthest point our forward scouts had reached and found, half-buried in snow, a tent that we took refuge in. In the tent was a corpse, frozen solid.
This was not the first we had found, but it would be the last. As the men of the expedition sat and caught their breath, I spotted an open book in the corpse's clutches and decided to try to take it. It was frozen to the body, and pulling on it with even a modicum of force caused frozen fingers to snap; with a crack, it came free, but the pages were also frozen together; the page it was open to, however, appeared to be the last in this frozen man's journal.
The book told of how this man seemed to be the first person alive to summit the mountain, about how the higher he accented the redder the sky became, a fact that we soldiers kept quiet about from each-other amusing the others couldn't see it, it talked about the shape of the structure atop the mountain, a great archway of black stone and a dreadful feeling that came from it. There was nothing more in the book, and it held nothing of value, so it was discarded, but we did know we were nearly there.
We left the tent after a few minutes had passed and resumed the climb. Once ascending over the next ridge that hung overhead, we had made it, the summit of the world's tallest mountain.
High above the clouds, we stood in a sea of whiteness, the flattened mountaintop an island and before us was the archway, our objective.
We stood in front of it in a wedge formation; the archway was unsettling, so this was our natural reaction as a unit. The Captain at the front stepped forward and removed his backpack, placing it in the snow in front of him. I was at the back left of the wedge, so I could not see, but he rummaged through a backpack and produced what looked like a small wooden box.
He stood, held it up high and opened it, and from that tiny box a black mist spewed forth. The other soldiers drew their blades and raised their shields, ready to turn on the captain. They shouted in confusion, "What are you doing?" "What is this magic?" "Heretic", "Traitor", they yelled. He turned his head and stated, "This was the plan" as the black mist billowed towards the archway, filling it with the blackest of blacks till it resembled an arched door...a gate.
From this gate, something stirred, eyes, red eyes. Monstrous and towering, higher than man or man's creations, whatever this thing was, it was a giant. Its eyes peered at us from the dark, and the darkness itself then began to shift and swirl as if it were alive.
Elongated claws of abyssal night reached out and clasped around the edges of the archway, and the eyes followed. The giant before us was made of pure darkness, making it hard to make out its shape. We only knew it was getting closer, we only knew that it had emerged from the gate, we only knew that all of us were doomed...Then I woke up.
It's strange, not exactly like a dream but not exactly like a memory; it's vivid and strange. I understand the where, the when, and the why while in the dream, but upon waking, it makes no sense to me. Who were those men? Why were we atop a mountain? What was that thing? Questions that will haunt me for the remainder of the day till my next dream comes and erases the memory of this dream.
I have asked my mother about this, my ability to only remember one dream at a time, she tells me she has no such issue and can remember nightmares she had months or years ago. Though I do not tell her about my dreams, I keep my dreams to myself. Realising this dream will bother me for the rest of the day. I weigh the idea of sleeping again for a few minutes more in an attempt to erase this dream.
"Shinya, wake up. We're heading to town today."
I raised my head to look across my room, and my mother was standing at the entryway, looking at me. I groaned and sat up.
"I'm up", I muttered as she walked down the hall.
I stumbled out of my room and into the main room where Mother was cooking the last of our salted meat along with some eggs atop the fire.
"Fetch water", she commanded without even looking back towards me. Not that I minded, when she focused on something, she quite literally couldn't look away from it. I glanced at her as I moved towards the door, her long blonde hair was combed, good. So she won't accidentally have it catch fire like that one time.
"Tie your hair", I recalled as I left the house, circled round to the back and drew water from the well. Our farm was small, and the smell of crops was overshadowed by the smell of chicken faeces as their pen was right next to our house, as well as the lingering odour of other fertilisers. I looked over as I passed on my way to the well to see how many eggs they had for harvest. There were several nests full of eggs, but counting them would take me too long from just passing by.
We ate breakfast in silence. Not a word was spoken, but why was there a need to speak? We've done this same routine every week, we've known each other now for almost fourteen years, though, of course, I barely remember the first six or so. We've talked to the point where there was little left to talk about in our small, unchanging lives. Except, of course, for the one thing we never talked about. The one thing I wanted to know the most about.