Catherine Winter suddenly realized she was tottering on the edge of a precipitous cliff. She peered down, anxiously and dizzyingly, into a lush, wooded green valley below. It was night, and the moon was full and huge behind her and she was overwhelmed by the sounds of a nocturnal woodland symphony filling her ears with cicada buzz and cricket song and coyote howls. Her head pounded and she staggered backwards, reeling a bit, unnerved and unsure of how, exactly, she had gotten there. She stumbled into a solid wall of stone behind her, and noticed, then, that the cliff was, in fact, just a step in a massive pyramid of red clay stone. She turned, surprised, and inched away from the wall.
Things had changed, suddenly. She wasn’t in the same place anymore, certainly not in the same time, and the moon was gone and so was the music of the forest night. It was bright and sunny and her eyes stung and watered as she fell onto her backside, still shaken and disoriented. Through the blur of protective tears, she made out shadows hovering over her. She scuttled backward, knocking her head on the pyramid wall, and struggled to her feet. There were two men in front of her. Day and night were spinning together as the figures spoke. The stars and sun and moon jostled in the sky, flipping through the heavens like a mad radio tuner.
First, the man on the left spoke. Catherine saw his face reflected in the sky, like a fiery comet streaking across the night sky (when it was night) and filling up the orb of the sun when it was daylight. He was older, not too old, and very tall. His face was pale, like hers, and his eyes were bright blue. There was a familiarity in his voice and his features, as if she knew him. But she didn’t know him. Not really. He had a cool presence, like his shadow created its own oasis, and that coolness became colder and colder as he spoke. His words, Catherine noticed, seemed, at first, like gibberish. They were old words, ancient words, words that hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years. She changed the way she was listening to him. She listened with her eyes, and suddenly images burst forth from the man’s mouth like animated hieroglyphs. There was a story told, but she didn’t know exactly what it was. The man was smiling as he spoke his picture story. Catherine could see him smiling in the comet and the sun.
Then, the man on the right spoke. But he wasn’t a man. Not quite. Not yet. He was still a boy. An impressive boy. A handsome boy. Catherine could see his face reflected in the moon during the night and in the clouds during the morning. He was young, as young as she was, and he was strong. His eyes were dark, almost black, and his skin was tan and smooth. He looked slightly different than anyone she’d ever seen, but in a way that she couldn’t articulate. He seemed, maybe, alien… but that wasn’t it. Just different. Different and beautiful. Catherine felt her thoughts sliding and dissolving into some sort of a love struck goo. She hated it. She hated feeling that way. She was too entranced by his face, though, to focus on her anger. She melted as he spoke, and not a word of what he was saying sunk in.
And then, almost as quickly as they had appeared, the shadow-men were gone and Catherine was no longer cowering on the step side of some massive pyramid. She was on the ground, on her feet, standing in a swaying field of long grass and wildflowers. The sky was blue and a warm breeze tousled her long, brown hair. She felt strangely at peace for one brief moment and then immediately and wholly ill-at-ease. As she felt a cold anxiety creep into her veins, she looked up to see the sky darken. The storm heads raced across the atmosphere and sparked with spikes of crackling lightning. Huge raindrops spattered against her face and she knew something ominous was approaching in the distance. She struggled to make it out on the horizon, and when she caught a glimpse, she was so terrified that she woke up, heart pounding, and soaked in cold sweat.
“I’m getting pretty sick of these dreams,” she growled to herself, now wide awake, angry, thirsty and unable to remember most of the nightmare that had stirred her from sleep.
