ooc :: first dream
A boy keeps screaming somewhere. High-pitched and wailing and full of panic. Screaming as though the world is ending or already gone.
Rain drips slow and lazy from branches over head, seeping past his collar down his neck. He can still hear it beyond the relative shelter of the tree, fast and hard and driving into the shifting earth as though to wash the remains of that screaming child’s shattered world away. He pushes away and takes slow steps forward. Somebody has to help that kid, right? A tree behind him and rain overhead and the world shimmers beyond those two boundaries with only that screaming child to keep it connected.
Kid and a monster.
A boy, short and stocky, shaking and trembling, rooted to the spot. Screaming like that is the only thing keeping him breathing. A woman, small and slender, face a blank death mask, dragging something behind her. She moves with the grace of a doll, precise and mechanical. She stops and stares at the kid and drops whatever it was she dragged in the dirt behind her. She says something and the boy goes silent at just a word.
He watches them both and he can hear the chattering of the boy’s teeth and the low cadence of that small woman’s voice as smooth and nonsensical as the rain drumming into the ground around them. Words that shape the boy’s voice into a single word, over and over.
“ANIKI!”
It shifts before he could decide if the boy is calling for him or someone else. Rain twisting into spirals in the sky, catching fire and burning away the clouds and stars and blossoming into light. The ground falls beneath him and he falls with it, stone into sand into darkness.