The Living End
She spoke in whispers while we hid. “They’re all around us.” We would have to wait until the storm to get out. The blood running down my hands had gotten cold in the winter wind, and the smell could lead them to us. At least there was no snow. Red on white is easy to track.
He promised us everything we ever wanted. He made everything happen. He was the Devil. He took everything that mattered away from us, and left us huddling in the quiet dark, huddling for fear of being caught.
We wanted to stop him. He was that much smarter. He twisted everyone against us, and now it was us against the world. And soon it would be only her.
I knew that it was my fault. My dreams brought him here. He fed on every thought and emotion we ever had. He stole our stories and rewrote our history, made us believe things we knew were stale and old.
He made this happen because we let it happen. Really, we could have stopped him at any time. We knew what was going to happen, but we didn’t want to believe it. We held back when it came to thinking about what he was really doing. We got lazy, unimaginative. He just had to push a few buttons and everything went to hell. And we put his finger on the trigger.
But there was a way to stop him. At least we thought so. We knew we couldn’t kill him, we’ve just tried that and we’re all that’s left of that idea. But he could be hurt. He could be slowed, immobilized. He could be outmaneuvered.
He could be outdreamed.
I knew I wouldn’t last the night, but if I could push her into a state of mind where she couldn’t stop dreaming, at a high enough speed, we could overload him. There are only so many dreams he could feast on at once. The rest would burst him.
Here was the catch: once I got her into that state, there was no going back. She would be dreaming of entire universes until the day she died. She wouldn’t ever get out, and she’d never be able to interact with any of us ever again, not in the way we used to. Like a fluorescent mobius strip, she would become a mother to billions of worlds who would never know.
With the storm over our heads we ran from the hounds that chased us here. We reached a small cabin and put down a cot for her to rest on. I started writing the runes and words out of the only thing left to write with: my leaking blood.
Once the circle was set I started the pattern, started a story written in spilled blood. The life of my ancestors shined before me. All their memories compressed into instinct were now my instinct, and survival tool to pass along to her. The tale had started, and it would never end, not for me, for him, and not even for her.
Blood loss made me weak. Fainted twice already. Pushing for her.
I heard the footsteps at the door. They were here now. I was too weak to go on, and they had found us. Everything would end now.
She saw what I was doing, and in a blink she understood what it meant and her part in all of this. She dipped her fingernail in and wrote where I left off. As the magic words worked their way, the dreams changing everything around us and building new worlds, I let a smile cross my lips as my last breath left my lungs.
It all ended there and then. And then it started all over again. And everything was worth it, especially in the end.