Arthur found himself amidst a torrent of snowfall on a long mountain road. The path seemed to go on for miles beyond reckoning before and behind him. The gaunt features of his weary face mimicked the jagged cliff face to his left. He never was a handsome man, and here, as the snow performed its grand ballet across the sky, his features appeared ghostly.

  Arthur began a slow trudge up the mountain trail, pausing for a moment as he caught a glimpse of a familiar boy running on all fours through a forest trail. He shook his head then stared down the path lying straight as a rapier before him. Every step he took found the trail steeper than before. Soon he was forced to climb. What madness drove him forward or strange power induced his aching body to ascend he did not know, but, as he toiled, the earth itself seemed to tilt at an unnatural angle until he was no longer rising but clinging to a world inverted so as not to fall into the great chasm of the sky. All seemed as if the world were revolving around him. He was trapped in a wheel of immense stone, the whole of the earth wrapping around him as a center point, but he must follow the path. It called to him, a siren's song that he dared not resist. Arthur pressed forward hoping to reach the end of the endless road. He knew, in his hollowing core, that something was wrong. His soul shrilled that all had gone awry. Yet his mind was bent upon that road, and around him the earth spun and spun until nausea induced him to cease his toil for but a moment.

  Each time the earth revolved his hair grew greyer, his face more worn and haggard. Again and again, time hastened to take its toll upon his body and yet he surged forward, walking, crawling, often inching his way down the cliffside path that had no beginning and betrayed no end.

  "FATHER!" the sky screamed at him through the growing layers of frost. He was startled and stopped. When he paused so too did the earth pause beneath his weary feet. He stood erect as the world was righted, and he gazed at the moon.

  "Don't Go!" the moon blubbered in tones of fear laced with great sorrow.

  Then Arthur saw him, a being of surpassing beauty and strangeness. He appeared in a splendor of light that forced the moon to envy and the stars to fade for fear. He wore a cloak of pure, shimmering platinum clasped about his neck with an ethereal chain. His chest and arms were bare of clothing, yet tightly overlapping golden scales covered every inch of his flesh. About his waist he wore a wide belt of black leather and a kilt of crimson flames sewn at its seams with living shadow. It reached so low that the man's feet were shrouded in its shifting conflagration. His right hand grasped a scythe that towered above him with a shaft of obsidian and clear crystal spiraled together uniformly until they met the edge of a curved blade forged of solid light. He wore a radiant helm which sent forth streaks of kaleidoscopic colour like sunbeams through a prism. The helm bore a single vertical slit down its center, and only darkness could be seen within.

  Arthur fell on his face, every fiber of his being knotted and wracked with terror. The being spoke in a whisper so soft and smooth in its intonation that all calmness seemed to reside within him. "Timeborn, are you prepared?"

  The earth quaked at the words, as if it too feared this alien being. The moon's envy gave way to anxiety and she hid herself from view. The stars retreated with her leaving no light but the brilliance of the being. The entity reached out a golden-scaled hand, lifted Arthur's face, and breathed on him. Arthur felt strength rise in his limbs for the first time in what seemed like centuries.

  "Prepared for what, my lord?" Arthur coughed, still battling the foreboding of his soul.

  "Come, come, my dear Arthur. Bid time a fond farewell!" The winds wept at his whisper.

  Arthur's dread emptied like water from a spilt pitcher as relief overwhelmed his heart. No notion of sorrow or remembrance of pain crossed his mind then. One simple word escaped his lips, drenched in the dew of serenity, "Farewell..."

  #

  The whisper of his father came through faintly. Ariadne's mind was pulled out of Arthur's vision and into the hovel where sat the boy. Anger, terror, hatred, and sorrow made war in the young boy's chest. Ariadne saw as sorrow prevailed, banishing its deadlier foes, and he buried his face in Arthur's chest and wept bitterly.

  The morning found a young boy sleeping on the chest of a very old man who had passed out of time and into eternity. Rays of the sun pranced through the dirt sullied window slats and illuminated the dead face filling its eyes with a supernatural glow. The light crept its fingers across the rough wools and caressed the young boy's face, gently warming a tear-stained cheek and drying solemn eyes. The sun increased its brightness by degrees to wake the child, who sat up and put a thin paw to his face to rub away the slumber from his eyes.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The boy's hair was red as blood and very long. It shrouded his platinum eyes beneath its tussled locks. He was skeletal, his frame that of a beggared orphan. Around the room were tools and mechanisms for crafting of arms for war, but the old man looked too weak, even in life, to have made a hammer stroke in ages. Penury screamed its presence in this place, but the love between the boy and his father appeared strong to her eyes.

  That young boy sat alone in the rays of a spring morning – destitute. Silence grew and wrapped itself in an embrace around the boy. After a long time, his features stilled like mirrored glass. Such calm overcame him that one would think he had lived ages beyond ages and held immeasurable wisdom. He rose from his knees and stood upright in the sun's light. The tattered scraps of wool he wore did no justice to the immortal calm written on his face. His mien was of a king exalted not a ruddy orphan boy just shy of his ninth winter. Wordless, he turned and exited the hovel.

  As he gazed south over the Great Loch, he opened his mouth to comment on the glorious scene spread before him but stopped abruptly. In his child-like wonder and simplicity he realized what many wiser and more learned would never know, what Ariadne could now see burning brazen in his silvery eyes that seemed to bore a chasm through her dream-steeped mind: there is a deep well of strength only drawn by silence.

  #

  She opened her eyes. Still the boy's face was etched into the stone of her memories. Too real. Too terrifying. She remembered the creature too, the intense being to which the old man had been speaking, his otherness a kind of haunting melody playing in the great hall of her mind. Yet even now, the details of the dreamscape began to fade, their clarity melting away into viscous pools and evaporating entirely as if baked beneath a relentless sun. But the boy's eyes burned electric, hovering like knowing apparitions. My father's eyes.

  #

  The moonlight bathed the courtyard and Serenity's Kiss in an ethereal glow. The pond itself shone a stormy grey, the folds of its ripples mimicking a storm of confusion as Ariadne pondered those knowing eyes. Merely a dream.

  The Swordsman strode into the garden, his gait confident at first, but slower as he noticed the Princess standing sentry over the water, not in her typical place among the boughs of the tree.

  "Does something trouble you, Princess? Would you like I should depart?"

  Ariadne did not even turn, but rather continued to peer into the stormy liquid, caged in thought.

  "I will go, my lady. Do enjoy your rest when it comes." He turned to leave but was interrupted midstride.

  "There is no rest this night. My dreams weigh heavy."

  He turned back to face her "Dreams tell us truths we often do not wish to face."

  "Why should that be so, Swordsman?" still she faced away from him, her hands behind her back, wringing her fingers together but looking down at the pond.

  He hesitated, the pacific glow of the night's orb was dimmed by a passing cloud overhead which plunged the scene into a darker grey to match the stormy waters. "There is a belief among the wandering tribes of the Buthani that the Dreamscape is a vast plane of thought, Princess. It is shaped by and swarmed with the unconscious minds of all those who sleep, but those minds are not entirely separate. Dreams from one may bleed into another – if there is a connection."

  Still she faced away, though now she raised her head to look across the courtyard, "To share dreams... It would be folly to share with one I have never met. Have you ever had such an experience, Swordsman?"

  "I cannot be sure, in truth, my lady. But I have dreamed of being in another form, another body. I have dreamed of being my father, his lithe form becoming mine as well, scrambling up a stone wall, murder in his heart. I have dreamt of shadows, and blinding light, of a hollow forgetting a slow fade of all I ever knew. Who knows if they have any real meaning, Princess, but it is not wise to ignore."

  Still she stood, staring back into the mercurial forms in the liquid. "Does time hold sway in the Land of Dreams, Swordsman?"

  "I am no expert in that plane, my lady, merely a sojourner who travels there often. A simple dreamer, like the rest." He took a tentative step toward her, still keeping his distance, but desiring a more natural exchange.

  "Then you do not know."

  "Cannot, in fact. What troubles you, Princess?"

  "I think I saw my father as a boy, but it made no sense. He was not raised as an orphan. And I saw the death of an old man I never knew, the being to which he committed his spirit something of a visage unlike any I have heard describing Death."

  "Could it have been otherwise, Princess? What was the quality of the dream?"

  "As if I could convey the quality of such a thing... No, it must be little more than wild fancies." Ariadne turned at last, and forced a smile as she looked at the Swordsman who stood a handful of paces behind her and to her left. "It has been a strange time with your arrival, and your training with my Father, joining the council. You've even taken a bit of the solitude of my garden."

  "My sincerest apologies, Princess, if you wish me to..."

  She interrupted, "No, your company is soothing in a way. You needn't fret."

  "Understood, my lady. If you should change your mind, you need only ask."

  "Of course, Swordsman," she turned to look at the pond again, its colour shifting from a stormy grey into dark blue and finally turquoise as the passing cloud cleared the moon and rolled on to darken other regions of the sky.