The Weight of Legacy

The dream came to him as he asked, and not for the first time. It was a sensation he had yet to grow accustomed to—and perhaps, he never would.

Anselm pushed the instinct to squirm aside as a dizzying tingle spread through his limbs until all he felt was cold, far too cold for anyone alive. As his body grew distant—soon entirely absent to his senses—the dream grew sharper.

It would have been indistinguishable from reality had it not been for the silence. That was always the eeriest part, something present in all his attempts so far. Anselm could hear nothing—not even the beating of his own heart.

This room—if it could even be called a room—was the same one he saw, some two years earlier. It was little more than a space within rocks, though the haphazard placement of those pointed to this being something other than an inconveniently small cave.

It was as though the world itself had collapsed on whatever this had once been. Between the cracks, Anselm could even make out that dreadful glow he was uncomfortably familiar with, shifting in blue-green lights.

A place that was not always under the waves?

He'd read about those, and Old Martin claimed to know people who hailed from such places. It was still an odd sight.

Though the ground beneath him felt like slick, firm stone as he walked, there was a sense of instability about the ‘room’. It's current state also prevented Anselm from forming any theories as to what type of place it might have been, before it felt the sea's wrath. Perhaps Bernadette would have known—he almost wished he could speak to her about this.

Instead, each time she pushed or tried to steer the conversation in any direction that might lead to the topic of what was happening to him, a fierce—almost primal—resistance would bloom within Anselm. He could not have shared this with anyone even if it had been what he wanted the most in his life.

The question of what this place might have been felt secondary to the matter of it being a recurring location in his dreams from the start. Anselm could not make out the aperture's location in the dark, but this was it.

The sequence was easy enough to recall. That woman—her eyes a warm brown that almost glowed, her hair whipping around her face as violent winds all but overwhelmed her—and the sea that took her. Always the sea. A pang of disappointment rose in him—he should have made the connection sooner.

Then again, Anselm had not been doing his intellect any favors as of late.

On every occasion he had found himself relieving that scene, he saw it through the eyes of a child. Someone with tiny arms, to whom the woman looked like a giant. There were no other details, no other clues as to whose eyes it was that he had seen through.

All he knew was that the woman pushed them as the waves struck, and the fall into this place would begin. Everything about that was bizarre.

In the end, it had not been the repetitiveness of that specific scene that had convinced Anselm there may be some grain of truth to that dream—no, that honor felt to how well the entire thing… expanded.

Anselm still hadn't the faintest clue as to what in any Devil's name was happening, but he was also beyond caring by now.

Once he had stopped trying to pretend it didn't exist, the dream started to bend to his will—in small ways, at first.

He could hold it in place at times, still the desperate woman's shape until he could make out most details, even if he was unlikely to ever learn her identity. She was neither young nor middle-aged, but that timeless stage in between that people beyond the Mortal Esse displayed.

Her dress was nothing if not utilitarian—perhaps of scholarly make given the many pouches that seemed to hang directly from it—and a burgundy scarf warmed her neck, tied with a knot at the front.

While the dream had grown somewhat suspiciously cooperative, Anselm could not push its timeline any further back than the moment in which this mystery woman sagged, unsteady on her feet. The look in her eyes was not one he could fully interpret, but the scene always started in the moment she seemed to conclude they could not both make it.

She would all but shove the other person just as the sea took her.

Anselm found he could not follow the other beyond their fall, either. At best, he could keep the scene suspended there, which achieved little.

He'd realized he could simply step into its setting weeks later and almost entirely by accident. That frustration at not being able to progress the scene—now that he had admittedly gotten a bit too invested—had him asking whether he could simply see for himself. Whether he had been asking himself, the menace who blessed him, or who knew what else, Anselm knew not.

Still, the dream had changed. Solidified. He'd only dared take little steps then, rather than diving right in, but from that moment on, the scene—now devoid of life—became a place he could sort of step into.

And this place, within the dream, felt alien to Anselm.

No, it felt like the past. Like he was standing in the past. For some Devilsdamned reason.

He'd examined it, little by little. The only true limit he had encountered so far had been the duration of the dream once he entered it like this. Sooner or later he had to wake up, as if coming up for breath after a long swim—and that alone brought to mind some parallels that he currently refused to address.

So for now, Anselm walked. How much further could he go this time?

Beyond the ‘room’, there was a tunnel. It consisted of a simple archway, one made of dirt that was packed so tightly it was conspicuous in its own right.

Anselm raised a hand and pushed against it. There was moisture to it, and light-colored specs rested within it. The dirt crumbled under his touch—the tunnel would be untouched next time he sought the dream, anyway.

With the next step, Anselm couldn't help but be surprised. As dark as it was here, keeping track of where he was came with some difficulties, but he was quite certain he had walked further than ever before.

As with that preternatural silence, Anselm found he could somewhat tell where he was, relative to that starting point. Maybe that was why it could feel so grueling at times—remaining here for much longer and seeing much more were almost an exercise in endurance.

The ground under him grew softer with each step, squelching silently under his boots. The tunnel was also growing taller—soon enough, the top of the archway was no longer within reach.

That was when the whispers started. The change was so abrupt that it almost made Anselm stumble.

Not once in his weeks of experimenting with this new state of mind had Anselm heard anything within a dream, and it was horrendous. A cacophony of disjointed whispers, all clawing atop each other to be the one sound to be heard. They felt alive in a way whispers had no right to be, concerning enough that he took a step back.

It didn't help.

“I love you.”

It was a pained feminine voice that spoke, or more accurately, perhaps lingered as an echo. It faded like a candle, abruptly extinguished by a breeze, and suddenly, Anselm understood it was still possible to feel even colder than he already did.

His lips grew thin as he hesitated—his time here was coming to an end. Anselm could feel it in his bones, despite his body's absence. A part of him wanted to push forward, yet he somehow understood they would only get louder.

The indecision cost him, as his surroundings began to melt and scatter like wet sand. A deep, mesmerizing blue served as backdrop as everything fell apart, the smallest of lights peppering it.

“Katrina.”

That last whisper—in that same decedent voice—shuddered through the faltering dream in a way that might as well have sent shivers down his spine.

And in that moment, Anselm saw her. Not the mother he remembered, but someone who stood, battered and promising vengeance. If this was a new dream, it had come unbidden.

Katrina's form was shrouded by blades, her features framed by a halo of metal that looked alive. Between one blink and the next, her eyes shone a vivid purple-blue, and so the scene shifted.

She was in the water. Still, harmless water, tinged with salt and bitter in taste. Her body was limp, unequivocally stilled—Anselm could feel himself in her place, just as he had in the scene of that unknown person's fall.

Katrina was dead—as dead as he'd felt so many times, before the blessing sent flames through his veins and forced his heart to keep beating. Unlike his unwilling brushes with death, his mother had met hers in truth.

Sparks danced around her, a flurry of light and unbearable wrongness. Her face was underwater, though her dead lungs mercifully drew nothing in. Anselm found himself too preoccupied with the feeling of dissolution to be grateful about not having to experience another drowning. His mother's body was unraveling like a ball of yarn, slowly pulled towards the loom that wove an obit into existence.

Anselm wished he could have screamed. He was still furious as her—at how she doomed them all to mortality for reasons unknown—but he begged, begged, that in true death, she had not felt this. That for her, things were simply over before she hit the water. That the dead did not actually feel this as they went. Please.

With the changes to his body—and perhaps beyond—pain had become a foreign concept to Anselm. He could feel it to a degree, but it had become irrelevant. Even then, the threshold for him to notice it at all was absurdly high now.

Perhaps that was why this caught him off-guard. Those changes would do nothing to spare him from something that didn't even hurt—no, this was wrongness to the utmost degree.

Anselm writhed in place, retching before he'd even noticed he had awoken. He hurled and spat out water, a veritable stream of it. Waking up from these dreams indeed often felt like he had been drowning, but rarely did that manifest so literally. The scent of brine burned within his nostrils, and glimpses he caught of the water had it shimmering with that ethereal spark of the sea.

The whole of it grew dull and lifeless the moment it hit the ground.

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Anselm choked and coughed until he thought he'd regained some semblance of a capacity to breathe. He would have thought of how abnormal this was, had that line not been crossed several hundred incidents ago. Summoning a handkerchief from his inventory, he wiped his lips, still tempted to keep heaving from the lingering taste.

It wasn't even disturbing anymore, no—constantly drowning was downright annoying.

Have I really become that desensitized already?

No, that… whatever it had been. Whatever he had just experienced in Katrina's stead. Between the blessing's ubiquitous grip on his nascent core and the sea's droplets in his veins, Anselm had grown convinced little could disturb him anymore.

He had clearly been wrong.

As he settled, a few additional coughs escaped him. He straightened slowly, raising his head as he gasped for air. As if that would help.

Eventually, he felt functional again. Not well. Just functional.

A notification awaited him—it had been sitting there for a while.