[CYM] 20 – Just A Nightmare

Her mother had told her not to stir up trouble and to live quietly. To keep her head down, to avoid drawing attention; if that was the life left to them, she should not seek love or bear children.

If one could die without being torn limb from limb, that was a life well-lived, her mother had said. Would she want to see her own children dragged away as well? She had lived with these words ringing in her ears.

Yet she had not given up hope. When the middle-aged man asked her today what she wanted to do with her life, she had no answer, having had the life of a shaman taken from her. Even the kids who had gathered to learn the sword, a fate not written for them, seemed to know their path. Her heart had already started to waver from that point.

Even if she went to the temple, she would live off the leftover fruits, accommodating the nobles, living and dying as a servant, just as the children born and buried in Muritmaegol. As a descendant of a high traitor, she would die unable to escape the fate of a fugitive, left abandoned in this land.

More than anger, sadness came at the predictable ending. The middle-aged man who had mocked the children’s dreams would scoff at her hopes just the same.

“Do you have someone you miss, young master?”

“Miss?”

“Yes. Someone you yearn for even though you’ve never seen their face?”

He stroked her ankle as if it were his own flesh and spoke,

“Say what you want to say.”

She tried to relieve herself of the emotions inside, as she usually would, but strangely, she found herself at a loss for words. Her throat constricted, shrinking her voice.

The young master sat close to the wall, patiently waiting as she trembled. Then, at some point, a song could be heard, and the heart that had taken more of a beating than her body softened like a ripe peach. The young master’s touch, tending to her ankle even without thought, felt boundlessly tender.

She used the warm sunlight as a blanket and the young master’s voice as a lullaby, closing her eyes for a while. The young master did not wake her as she slept.

During her sleep, she dreamed. She was laughing with people she had never met, whose faces still invoked longing, and her mother was laughing too. The laughter was something she had forgotten for so long that she wished to remain in that dream forever.

She greeted her father. She roamed fields in bloom with the brother she had only imagined. Her mother stroked her hair, and surrounded by them, she felt an unsurpassed happiness...

‘But what is that?’

Something ominous fluttered in the void.

Again, the bright red thread she had seen when she was ill. Was she seeing things again because she was sick for a moment?

At the edge of the field, the young master’s pavilion, which hadn’t been there before, stood prominently. Her mother and brother had disappeared, and black figures were milling around the pavilion.

‘So noisy... What are they saying?’

She covered her ears as the sound grew louder. It was a formless ringing that pierced through her head, not just her ears. As the terrible screaming became indistinguishable between dream and reality,

Creak—

A pair of piercing eyes appeared through the opened door slit. Those eyes, staring as if to devour her, were filled with a chilling malice.

“Wake up now.”

Startled awake by someone shaking her lapels violently, she found her forehead drenched in sweat.

The sun had been out before she fell asleep. Startled by the sudden darkness, she stumbled off the steppingstone and ran. Then, noticing her skirt had fallen to her thighs, she carefully picked it up.

“I didn’t expect you to care.”

“Was I to leave you curled up, sweating and trembling? Go, quickly.”

“But, young master. Have you ever seen anything strange in this room?”

She couldn’t quite remember, but her dream had been unsettling. Those black, mist-like figures were slithering near the young master’s room, not a pleasant sight to behold.

“No one’s been here but me.”

So it was just a nightmare, after all. Suddenly, she felt a chill, fearing she might fall sick again and face scolding from her mother. She hurried home, without even putting on her shoes properly.