Chapter 9: Chapter 9: A World of Lucid Dreams

When the night aged and darkness came, it found Seth in his bed staring at his door. Normally, his parents balked at the privacy granted by a locked door but Seth found he had a spine for disobedience. Complain as much as he wanted of certain things, he was no fool. He knew he got away with most things than Derek and Jonathan ever did. The broken son was the forgivable son.

He laid in bed fully aware of the orb beneath him. In truth, it was what kept him awake. He kept his door locked with a bolt and hinge supported by a turning key in the handle. It was his preferred choice instead of the rune lock inscribed into his door. As easy as the rune lock was to use, it was family friendly which gave his father and mother easy access to unlocking it. At gold he had little doubt Jonathan could open it if he put his mind to it. Thus, the rune inscribed for the purpose of keeping his door locked had served a different purpose over the years.

He’d studied it as much as he could, which was not much since he had questions no one in the house could answer and he bore no natural talents for deciphering its curves and twirls or lengths and breadths. Neither his father nor mother kept much books of runes nor parchments nor inscriptions. It was as though records of soul magic of any kind were anathema in the house. Not in their study nor in their rooms. Not secreted away in one counter or cupboard or the other. Seth knew because he’d spent a significant portion of his life searching, the cure for his headache as much a personal endeavor as it was a family one.

Lord Darnesh had already stated he would carry nothing with him on the trip, claiming the academy would handle everything from the clothes on his back to whatever little entertainment or medication he would need. It left the stack of clothes in his closet, most of which were purchased by his mother, seemingly useless now. Though he knew they would serve a purpose each time he returned for the holidays, it was difficult to look to the future when the present was so heavy upon his awareness. He did not fear going to the academy, no matter how early, but there was a certain sense of wariness in leaving the house so soon. After all, besides the forest behind them which he hadn’t ventured into ever since his run in with snaffles, the house was all he’d known.

He’d gone to school as a child, there he’d learned his alphabets and numbers, his basic manners and social etiquettes. He’d made a few friends, none important nor particularly close, and he’d learned some of the rules governing the territories as well as the name of both the Baron and the government’s president. However, most of the knowledge was lost in the annals of time, and the friends were unimportant enough that while he remembered faces, names were a tasking ordeal.

Perhaps it won’t be so bad, he told himself, hoping it wasn’t one of his lies.

At least he would meet new people and get to start afresh. There would be boys and girls and he would have a chance at friends again. He didn’t delude himself into the possibility of making a friend as close as Natalie, but he let himself bask in the possibility of making friends of any kind.

The thought of Natalie brought a certain lackluster to his mind. Regardless, a touch of hope crawled to mind as he considered the possibility of maturing a little more in the academy. Maybe he would grow and leave behind her actions with Derek. Maybe, if he puts his mind to it, he could stop it from its continued erosion of their friendship.

Maybe.

His thoughts of the next day and the ones that would follow veiled his mind like a thick blanket on a cold winter night. It kept his thoughts occupied with wonders of what could be and what should. He pondered on the possibility of friends and acquaintances, allies and love interests. He pondered on the wanderlust of a new life.

It was only a moment after that he realized he would likely not have any friends for the next two years. And if he did, they would be significantly older than him by at least two years. Any friend he made would not take him seriously and there would be no interests to be found in love.

The dawn of the truth of how lonely he would be in the academy for the next two years was another blanket over his mind, this one wet with winter snow and not allowed to dry. It dampened his mood and choked his mind.

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Worse was the knowledge that Natalie had a two-year head start on him. She would begin the practice of soul magic, gaining at least theoretical knowledge even before she gained a soul fragment, and would be schooled in the deadliest of its forms long before him. Whatever happened, she was guaranteed to be stronger.

It made him wonder just how strong.

His mind rattled in this way, thinking thoughts he hated as much as he disliked his brother and even worse. He found himself beginning to dread his journey to the academy and the perceived loneliness it would bring. He thought of taking out the orb hidden in his wall and attempting to absorb it, knowing it would end in failure just as it always had each time he’d tried in the last week.

He’d asked everyone he could about what it felt like to absorb a fragment just to know what he was doing wrong. Each and every one of them had told him the same thing: nothing. Jonathan had gone the extra mile to tell him why.

“Absorbing a fragment before one is of age is dangerous,” Jonathan had said. “I could tell you the feeling and how to go about it knowing you wouldn’t need it till you are older, but there are those who’ve come across, against all odds, soul fragments before they were ready. Absorbing it before age, as impossible as it seems, is not unheard of. But what makes it heard of are the deaths that it causes.”

It had been a sustainable dissuasion from the idea; sustainable for a day only. He’d returned to the task the next day and had continued to fail with the expertise of a fish in the sky.

All these plagued Seth’s mind as he drifted into sleep. Dread and fear were companions, like a stuffed toy to an infant. However, when sleep took him, they did not serve as company in his dreams. For that, he was left alone to the terror of a never ending war and words whispered in the silence of smoke and wisps in colors the night would envy. But like most of his dreams, he would not remember much it of when he woke.

In it there was the concept of the dying, souls lost to the claws of one soul beast or the other, one flying blade or broken axe. There was an idea of a man with a bow and an arrow sticking from an injury in his neck. Seth’s dreams never put a face to anyone. Neither size nor details were carried. There were deaths but he understood nothing of them. There was suffering and there were struggles. There were victors and vanquished.

The vanquished took their defeat with as much pride as there was fear, every bit relayed as concepts rather than emotions or facts. The victors, however, were nothing short of savages and they drank their victory to stupor till they choked on it. Appalling, for lack of a better word, was an understatement.

Seth took solace in the fact that in this he was nothing more than an observer in a world of lucid dreams.