Someone else was here recently.

Stow the memory of what I am about to say somewhere safe, as it is desperately important that we recognise all the potential variations. Without cognition, we would become unmoored and be utterly at the mercy of that which moves the Dream. It is tragedy enough that we remain caught in its vicious undertow. So I am telling you again, with the middling certainty of a man who has almost surely not told you this before, that I was not entirely alone when it happened. Whenever it was that it happened. Recently, I think.

Granted, it's difficult to say without a shadow of a doubt that I did not dream them up. The figments of my imagination are more real to me now than anything I can recall from that other life. The one I had before. Even her face has lost its initial veracity, having changed and morphed so many times in the murk of dishonest remembrance that its true configuration may as well be my own. My eyes, my mouth, my trembling chin. Any image I can conjure of her ageing beauty, as remembered, stems from the depths of our questionably sound mind. We are the sum of that other world, the sole reason it continues to haunt me throughout this unending punishment of mine. Her face...

No, a distraction. I was talking about the others.

They looked, and I preface that with the forewarning not to believe anything is as it seems, like an old man and a woman. The woman was covered in vivid scales, a hue not unlike the green flame that flickers through the blanketing mists. I saw them clearly, though they did not see me, and nor did they appear to acknowledge each other after entering through the doors of impossibility.

Perhaps, though they stood not two feet apart from my perspective, they were actually in vastly different places at vastly different times, and only by their being here unannounced was I able to discern them both at once? Don't dismiss my theory! I know the Dream well by now, or as well as the vagaries of the changeable-unknowable can be known.

I know what it looks like hiding. What it looks like hunting. I know when it is looking back at me, peering through me, preparing to extricate its next torment in its purest, most distilled form, the one most likely to chip away at the last of my well-guarded sanity. I am familiar with its cruel phantasms and its predilection for illusion, but these others were new. They looked different. Had I created them from whole cloth? For them to be real, they would've had to have come from that other life on the other side of things, and we both know there is no credible way back. The path, once walked, will always terminate here. It winds back upon itself to snare the stumbling foot.

Doesn't it?

There is no life I don't eventually wake from to find myself back here again. At the beginning and end of it all. I believe that even now I must be captured in that moment, quill in hand, in the second when I discovered the first door and stupidly resolved to open it. Some version of me must still be there with her. I am pounding on the door, screaming. With all my heart, I will him to put down his quill and burn the scrolls, leave the study, and retire to bed to rest in the warm, quiet spot beside her. Our beloved wife, whose name I can no longer recall.

I would have warned them too, but they were gone before I could. The old man and the woman.

Gone, like everything else I've tried and failed to retain. Hmm.

...

What was it I had to tell you?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Summary: A lost soul contemplates his purgatory and the infrequent visitors of the Dreamrealm.

Penned by My hand on the 17th of Valnuary, in the year 955 AF.