A boy sleeps, and he dreams: He dreams of fear and he dreams of hell and he dreams of where he lives now and shall forevermore, and he dreams of the faces of his family burning in these long nights of his days, and he dreams, too, of past worlds, the faces of men; the faces of the sons of men, covered in furs and skins and painted in the death of others, their hollowed eyes of broken glory coming hard on wild mounts from hell, devil hooves pounding the earth in the name of all those who have come before them.

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He wakes and he screams and his father tells him, it’ll be okay, and the boy, in his mind, backs away like some crab-like cave creature, his hands and feet scrambling amongst the scattered dreams of past plagues until backed against a weeping wall of fear and desolation. He looks away, the blue of a dead screen flickering, covering him, and he closes his eyes, and he says to himself, don’t dream.

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Next to the boy, in the dark of that same night, his younger sister, fearful in her time and lost to it, knows she too will dream, her father with her, holding her—trying to, and she cries, tears she knows, tears she can’t feel in her never-ending dreams of an echoing silence lost to an unforgiving vastness of a darkness everywhere. She wakes, a noise in the night, and she looks to the window and her reflection there falling—falling once again, into her fear and desperation.

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The father covers her, his hand to her forehead, and he says, there there now—now now, her fallen tears and the rattling of her fear chewing bones and soft tissue coming to him and settling heavily upon him. He leans forward and he whispers, it’ll be okay, and she squeezes his hand and she closes her eyes and she waits again to flee, a little girl on the back of duskywings.

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And now the father, sitting upright next to his children, sleeps, and he too dreams; these dreams that are always dreams of dark and empty streets. Stopping, his heart pounding, resounding in his head, he watches thin pools of water gathered upon the road beginning to ripple. He looks behind him, an immeasurable distance back to the birthplace of darkness itself. He turns to run and a two-headed dog with massive jaws that foam and drip sink both sets of jaws deep into his face. He falls to the cobblestone surface of the road, his faceless head lolling forward, the dog’s jaws taking it, fighting to enter his red dark hole. They hollow him out. They rip and consume the skin from his bones and they eat the bones, so all that remains of him is a skull dripping in blood from a scalp that is nothing more than a few splotches of dark hair.

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The man wakes, covered in sweat, his children sleeping, and in the dark of that night, he whispers to himself, it’ll be okay.