Fever Dreams

Arbiter Voah Sansuur’s state upon returning from the Hogue was worrisome. The apothecary Nicholaus had tended her injuries over the sea voyage and he was relieved and amazed to see that they were healing well but the fever had not abated.

Friar Balvaris remembered how poor her condition upon arrival to Arcadia but this was something else. The man worried for her and the rumors of what the party had experienced on Sentinel Island.

For days the disheveled woman suffered fits. Many times she came to consciousness but she was not herself. Her hands would shake and her eyes remained glazed over. On one occasion she woke at night in a fevered panic. The acolytes woke to horrific screams and rushed to attend her. When they found Voah, she had shaken off her bedspread and cowered against her headboard, her naked body covered in sweat; blood on the linens and between her legs. The acolytes were relieved to find it was only her moonblood and not an exacerbated injury, however, to their horror, the Arbiter began pointing in primal wide eyed horror at the corner ceiling of her rectory quarters. She writhed and squirmed away from some unseen evil. Her bloodshot eyes, unblinking, flooded with tears then went dead as her body began to tense, her frame arched and she seized as if possessed. When the weeping attendants (who hadn’t fled in fear) eased her back into a better sleeping position she lay babbling and whispering curses to enemies and invoking nonsensical parts of holy rituals.

Meanwhile in her dreams…

A skinny blonde girl fled down a dark road from a crowd of ash-skinned devils who breathed smoke that billowed with crackles of fire. Their red eyes blazed with menace as they stalked her. Her little legs felt sluggish as if slowed by some heavy invisible morass. The silver sword in her hand was nothing but a broken stick.

“Maja!? Dah!?” she cried for her parents in rural Mizaran dialect.

When the young child Voah looked back to see where she was going, the road had abruptly ended, blocked by a cliff of jagged stone and wet earth. She knew that the devils were on her tail and when she turned around to see them she saw nothing but darkness, more stony cliff that rose up and over in an earthy dome. A beam of white light poured in from high above as if through hole of a well. Sun or moon she couldn’t tell but the giant leaves of a canopy of trees cut the light like a knife as they shifted in a silent breeze.

She was suddenly aware of being wet and warm and as she glanced down she stood waist deep in a dark pool of viscous liquid that smelled of iron. The devil men skittered up the walls of the dome now, though she could see only their red eyes and the sheen on their naked skin as they lowered unnaturally long arms holding hooked blades that dangled down toward her. Her mother and father hung from two of the hooks, gored like pigs after slaughter. Looking away from her parents made things worse as she found the bodies of Till, Wim Riese, Cagliostro, Blackwolf, Tarmen, Hunter, Alexis, a red haired woman, a strange dark haired man and several others she did not recognize hanging from hooks of their own.

That’s when a boar approached her through the darkness, looming ever larger over her with each splash forward. It morphed grotesquely into a fat, giant of a man rising out of the cesspool then it reached down to pick her up in its meaty, man-pig hand. It pulled her from the bloody bog, fist dripping with filth as it raised her to its mouth. When it’s teeth closed around her, the little girl’s head popped off like a daisy and tumbled down a moist, fleshy tunnel of darkness before landing painfully on the wooden deck of a ship looking upward, her golden hair splayed in a perfect arc. The ship was being tossed and battered upon an angry sea, its sails ablaze. The rain poured from a dark sky into her eyes until it drowned out everything.

Days later…

Voah’s eyes opened softly to the view of a wooden ceiling. She blinked, expecting to see her companions on the beach, which was the last thing she remembered, for she had no recollection of the dreams that had vexed her over the past week. No beach… It was the ceiling of her quarters in the Misty Ward rectory; warm and quiet.

How long had she been out? She tried to sit up but a great pain welled up from her neck to the sides of her temples causing her to wince and gasp audibly. So… the fever remained. The intense pressure made her dizzy so she let out a heavy sigh and remained prone. For now, she could do little more than glance around the room hungry and weak. The hunger was nothing compared to the desire to return to sleep. So she relinquished her body to a hopefully healing slumber.