There was a dream that haunted him. It was not a nightmare; it did not wake him up in a cold sweat or leave his heart racing all throughout the night. It was not a pleasnt dream either, an escapist’s safe place from existence. Instead, it showed itself to him whenever he started to forget about it and loomed over him from the back of his mind like a bad omen.
In the dream, he was standing at the edge of a cliff, a yawning chasm of evergreen forest stretching out below him. He would look down and gulp in fear at the distance between him and the ground, then look up reflexively to keep that fear at bay. There, in the middle of a storm-grey sky, was an angel.
Glowing ivory and gold, the angel was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid eyes upon, with long white hair that curled behind its ankle-length robes and wings of icy feathers that looked powerful enough to blow him away with one stroke. The angel stared at him, eyes harsh and unforgiving as molten gold, and he would feel dread pool in his stomach at being the subject of this gaze.
“Who are you?” he would ask. Instead of replying, the angel’s lips would curl at him in disgust before it flew away and ascended high into the sky, further than he could see.
The first time he had the dream was when he was about twelve years old. He had woken up confused and slightly disoriented, but most of all, he was intrigued. However, time passed; days and years went by, and the excitement wore off. By the time he was sixteen, he had almost forgotten about it. Until the dream returned to him.
The same ominous cliff, the same unnerving angel. The same humming feeling of anticipation and dread—of something big, of something important.
The dream continued to come to him every year or two, until he was twenty-two years old. The little boy grew into a loyal knight, and his dreams grew with him. He dreamed of becoming a general one day, of leading his army into war to serve the greater good of their land, or of being a close aide and knight of the king, to protect his master and lay his life for his cause. He dreamed of being part of something bigger than he is, bigger than his insignificant soul in this overwhelming expanse of a world. He dreamed of being someone that mattered.
And because he was competent and smart, because he was diligent and ached profusely, he quickly became the general he so much desired. At the ripe age of twenty-three, a few months after the angel visions had stopped, he became the youngest knight to ever ascend to a position so prestigious, and the entire country praised him for that. They praised his cunning and brute strength, his loyalty and dedication. They never praised his cruelty and brutality, but they were grateful for it too. They knew you could not win a war and awaken a primal fear in your enemies without becoming akin to something that crawled out of the depths of hell to plague the earth.
At every battlefield, though, he searched for a glimpse of ivory wings and golden eyes. He was not sure why.
He was taught how to kill, where to strike to hurt and where to aim to maim. It came to him easily, the viciousness, the savagery; so easily it was as if he had been born into the role of monster—that rather than build his body into a weapon to wield, he had been made to become one. There was satisfaction in that, too.
Sometimes he found himself in awe of the art of war. The sight of the life blinking out of a man’s eyes. The sound of a guttural scream of pain. The way a body bled so easily from his sword, as if the blood could not stand not to pool at his boots and paint his footsteps red for years to come. It was fascinating; how earnestly humans clung to life despite their bodies yearning for death.
And yet, sometimes he found himself disgusted by his own nature. His hands, calloused and hard, red and scarred. His repulsion at himself grew so strong he broke every mirror in his chambers just to avoid seeing his reflection. It made him want to cut himself open. It made him want to disappear.
Was this why the angel had stopped coming to see him?
The people, his people, applauded him. A hero, they said. A savior, they sang. A servant to their nation, they crowned him. A curse to their land, they bled.
He was twenty-six when he saw it again. At what he then knew to be his final battle, when he was alone after leaving his men to collect their dead and clean up the injured. The stench of blood and gore had become too much to bear, and he walked away into the forest to escape it. There, nestled within the grove of trees, was the thing he'd been waiting for since he was twelve years old.
The angel stood unsullied, even in the dirt. The ivory wings and molten-gold eyes were the same as he remembered them to be, its gaze as frightening as the first time. He was so relieved to be subject to it he almost wept.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
The angel laid a hand on his heart. “To save you,” it said, with a voice of song and honey.
“Why?”
The knight could not see that his feet had been lifted off the ground, that he was floating instead of walking. He could not see that beyond the trees, beyond the blood and the dead, was a cliff side, an evergreen forest hungry to greet him.
“You asked me to.”
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