Dreamer

“Are you not scared to die like them?” the strange man asked her, his dagger at her throat.

The young woman smiled, soft and sad. “This is not when I die,” she replied.

“It is if I say so,” the stranger said, the blade pressing closer against her skin.

She did not move. “Even you cannot ignore someone’s destiny,” she said. “This is not when I will die.”

Curious now, the strange man lowered his blade. Around them on the ground were her traveling companions, slain and dead for their food and supplies. The strange man had crept among the four of them during the night, killed her brother first, who was on watch, and then the elderly couple they had been traveling with. The young woman had awoken to the elderly woman dying and stood up to face the strange man, fearless. “How do you know such a thing?” he asked of her now.

“I dreamed as a girl that I would not die until I was old and in love, with children grown and left,” she answered him plainly.

“And how do you know that this dream was true?” he demanded, scornful. “It was just some little girl’s fantasy.”

“No,” she replied. “I have dreamed when all those in my family will die.” She pointed to her brother, slumped over near the log he’d once sat on. “I dreamed long ago that he would die tonight and said good-bye to him before I lay down to sleep. I knew that my mother would die of sickness and my father from bandits years before her.”

“Truly?” the stranger asked, intrigued now. She saw a flash of greed in his eyes then and knew what he would ask. After all, the man who knew how he would die was forewarned and mayhap could cheat his death when the time came. He raised his dagger once more. “Tell me, witch, how will I die?”

“I am no witch,” she replied, “only a young woman, now traveling alone.”

“Tell me,” he said again, ignoring the rest.

She shook her head. “I cannot,” she said. “I can only dream the deaths of those who have a place in my heart. Why should I care when you, a stranger to me, will die?”

He considered this for a moment and then sheathed his dagger. “Then, you shall come back home with me and be my wife, and when you come to love me, you will dream of my death.”

“Yes, I will,” she agreed.

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What is the cost of a dream?

She dreams the deaths of those she loves. He wants that power. And so, their life together begins, but all knowledge has a price.

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