To Dream is to See Death

No sooner had Amelia fallen asleep that she found herself in the dark recesses of her memories. They were always jumbled, always disconnected and out of sequence. Not only that, some of them weren’t even real. Every night, her conscience had the arduous task of separating fact from fiction in her traumatic past.

Amelia’s heart was racing. Even more so when she saw his face. He had an ethereal glow about him and he was slightly translucent. His face was stern. It had been far too long since he last had a genuine smile. He was determined to succeed and terrified but resolute to not to show it. He was in military dress. Sharp and intelligent but also reserved around certain people. That’s how she wanted to remember him. His quiet strength was comforting. Unfortunately, he took the quiet part too far and that’s also what she hated about him. He withheld information from her. Barred her from important knowledge and acted as an impassable gatekeeper. She was furious. Her angry tears frequently rose up in rebellion against his stoic secretive nature. Her throat was often sore and burned from the times she yelled at his actions. But she couldn’t yell at him directly because Jonathan was no longer with her.

That graceful ethereal glow was replaced with the most haunting look anyone could ever give. His eyes darted back and forth from the Dark Lord to Amelia to the door. He was shouting at her to leave, to get out to save herself! The world’s fate depended on it. Amelia knew it but she couldn’t fathom how it got to this point. Jonathan had planned from the beginning to trade his freedom and his life for hers. He purposely agreed to endure years of deranged torture at the hands of evil so that Amelia could one day do what she was born to do.

That was months ago. She would almost kill to only see that haunting look in his eyes once more. Those eyes had fight in them and signs of life! What she saw now in her nightmarish visions were screams of agony as he was being tortured. Beatings, lashings, burnings, you name it and he was most certainly going through it without an end in sight. No, far worse than just executing him, was torturing and trying to break him. The Dark Lord who had captured Commander Storm wasn’t allowed to kill him, but even if he was allowed to, he most likely wouldn’t. Sadistically torturing a prisoner was more fun anyway and that’s what Amelia saw on a broken record loop. Her visions would start with that last look in his eyes and progress through multiple stages of the cruel torture he was enduring. An ice-cold chill surrounded her nearly every night during these visions. The kind that caught your breath and would sting your face in subzero temps. Her adoptive parents tried to keep blankets on her throughout the night and would desperately try to wake her during the worst parts, but no amount of shaking or their alarming voices could break her out of it till morning. The visions gripped her in totality.

For the last few years Amelia had been blessed and gifted with guiding visions from another realm. Snippets of crucial information given to her in the midst of difficult situations sparking brilliant pathways leading her safely out of those perilous scenarios. All that was needed was a moment of peace and calm and a willingness to follow through with whatever she saw. Previously, her heart could always create that eye of the storm feeling so that she could wait for the vision, but not since that night when Jonathan sacrificed his freedom. Why wasn’t she getting that help anymore? Why was she stuck in this endless loop of suffering? Why wasn’t she seeing a way forward into the future?

Then, one night the visions of Jonathan’s calamity stopped and she was sucker punched by a different terrifying event in her life. The night her uncle tried to kill her and she killed him instead. Uncle Elijah had taken her memories from her and then replaced them with a false narrative of the Dark Lord’s design. Memories that didn’t happen, beliefs she didn’t have, stories of her actual parents erased and replaced, making them look like cowardly hypocrites, of which they most definitely were not. The man she trusted most and the one who held all of the truth in her life and was the only one who could impart it to her poisoned her, turned on her, and almost finished her. Every time she thought of her uncle, the visions of Jonathan’s pain were not far behind because if Eli had not betrayed her, Jonathan would not have had to make a deal to sacrifice his freedom in order to save Amelia.

Over and over again she witnessed the scene of the blade getting plunged into his abdomen. His red irises, corrupted by great and powerful darkness turned from that scarlet hue into baby blue once more. As he let out a grievous moan and the simple words of ‘thank you’ before his world went dark. Then something miraculous had happened. Amelia had instantly realized what she had lost and started fighting to get it back! Of course, Amelia would argue that she was a different girl back then. She had not yet met Jonathan and therefore did not realize the depth of the consequences Eli had caused by his betrayal. If Amelia could go back in time to the night she brought her uncle back from the dead, would she do it? It might not change Jonathan’s fate, but it would give him justice if the man responsible had stayed dead.

Amelia could envision the reproachful look that Gaylen would be giving her if she was in the Angel guardian’s presence right now. The guardian’s words echoed firmly but softly in her mind. It was a brief but much needed reprieve from the incessant visions. Gaylen had preached forgiveness to her about her uncle. That if she wanted to move forward and receive any sort of true healing from the damage Eli had caused, it would require the greatest amount of sincere forgiveness from Amelia’s heart. She didn’t quite know what ‘healing’ he was talking about. Gaylen had also told her that most of her memories except for some fragmented ones that she managed to cling to would be gone forever.

After months of suffering from the visions that seemed to hold her captive most nights and even during unexpected times in the day, her parents urged her to consider going to see her uncle in the hopes that it would bring her some peace. The suggestion seemed ludicrous at first, and she was even surprised that they were okay with that, all things considered. Then again, what else could she lose anyway? She had already lost her memories of the stories she had been told about her parents that had connected her to them, she lost her friend Jonathan who did everything he could to protect her, and of course, she had already lost her parents. The more she pondered it, the more she realized she would do anything to get any of those things back if given the chance, even forgive a traitor. The night that she had made up her mind was the first night in many that her mind wasn’t digging up her past. Although she had made up her mind to try forgiveness, only time would tell if she could be truly reconciled with her uncle, but perhaps a small part of her did desire that outcome.