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Nightmares
Kessa was jolted by a piercing cry as a young man stumbled and fell at her feet, his body bloodied and torn, his life slipping away. She knelt down to tend to him, vainly attempting to repair his flesh but his soul had already departed. She looked around her only to see the dank walls of an ancient crypt, the stone was riddled with strange symbols and unnaturally cold to the touch. The passageway she was in was littered with those that were either dead or dying, their cries echoed through the tomb only to be caught in her mind to haunt her.
She knew these poor souls that lay at her feet, they were her friends from years past, those that she had played with as a child, until the shadowed man came for her. He was here again, in the tomb next to her. He leaned close; his breath ambled through her hair as his words broke through the echo of pained screams. He spoke of the darkness, of the eclipsed sun and how it could rest these visions that confronted her.
Kessa looked down to her hands, bloodied from the life that had been destroyed in this tomb, from the innocence that had been shattered by the evil they faced. Her heart cried from witnessing the torment, it cried for reprieve from the horrors she had seen and felt. She recited the shadowed man’s inky words as he spoke them, she felt his power flow through her. The pained screams faded as the fallen began to rise. Departed souls we torn from their plane of rest and twisted into their broken vessels and Kessa watched as these vessels readied their weapons once again, shambling forth to continue the fight. She felt the blackness gnaw at her soul like a hungry rat. The shadowed man was gone, leaving her suddenly alone, and the screams that had echoed through the hall were replaced with the shuffle of armoured feet as a low malevolent laughter reverberated through the passage from someplace far off.
Kessa startled awake with a scream, covered in cold sweats and gasping for breath. She quickly lit every lamp in her small room with shaky hands until all the shadows were banished. Hugging her knees, Kessa sunk to the floor in the corner and wept prayers to Ilmater. She prayed for him to keep the darkness at bay until the sun peaked over the mountain peaks. She wept until her exhausted body could not keep awake anymore and as she slipped back into the depths of sleep, the inky blackness once again reached out for her.