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The first february
“You have seven days. After that you won’t remember anything but those days. Each day you will be reborn into a new vessel. Each vessel will have remnants of the days past, and yet be something different. If you should die during any day, you will begin the next day as if you had finished the previous regularly. At the end of those seven days, should you fail, you will be reset, as if the loop never occurred. You will remember no details, only that the cycle will have repeated. If you continue to fail, your will inevitably drive yourself mad. Succeed, break the cycle, and you will move on. You won’t remember anything of those days, you will be free. Do not fail again. Your strain only increases as the loop repeats. You are getting closer and closer to madness each time you return here.
Break the loop. You have seven days.”
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The second february.
The caravan pulled to a halt, its pieces bounding along behind it, each piece coming still at last. The escort for the caravan was a fleet of blimps requisitioned out of Timfix. The procession was heading through the last mountain range and within a day’s travel, before nightfall if they were fortunate, the escorting blimps would see their home.
Aboard the second blimp, tending the middle and front of the caravan procession, Seline leaned on a railing, watching the halt below. The wind of the mountains whipped around her, her muffled hat trailing around her, the fur soft and warm wherever it touched. Against her leg, at her side, her crossbow rested. Her eyes had perked up and she scanned the space around her and then the space below, searching for airborne threats to her charges, before moving on to the ground based threats. There was movement, people wondering after the cause for the sudden halt, but no threat was revealing itself.
She was tense as her blimp circled about, rising high out between the mountains that shielded the path from the harsher winds. The trail cut through the mountains and made blimp escort tricky, but not impossible. Seline held tight to the hand rail and her crossbow as the blimp climbed for the early morning sunlight, to clear the tightest passage of the mountain pass. If there was to be an attack on the caravan, it would be after the pass, when the trail led through a small valley where the remnants of a town still stood desecrated and abandoned, home only to the thieves and bandits that hose it a poaching hideout.
Seline breathed in the sharp cold air. Her job became far more serious in a matter of minutes. This was when she earned her pay, when she protected her charges, still, she thought only of her home in the city, and her small house, stacked among so many others, which await her return home.
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The third february
She sits above me, her face remembered out of a dream. Was it a dream where I saw her? Where I became so enamoured by hr features? It passed by so quickly and now it’s gone. Perhaps it was a dream, and she was nothing more than a fleeting rush, grasped for in desperation, held tight in passion and then faded away to nothing but a memory moments later. I can’t look at her face. I can’t see the contour or outline of her body as she lay next to me, smiling quietly, her eyes half closed. I can’t smell the scent that filled the room I was keeping, whenever she came by. I can only remember her from a half forgotten dream.
I feel where she laid, the indent that should be filled next to me. The comfort and solace I try to remember escapes me. I keep asking myself it she was real. Was the time we had together real? It came and went so fast, and yet at the time it felt like years. It was years. We had so little else save the ritual. Our ritual. And then I didn’t do, didn’t play my part and the world folded upon itself. The walls crumbled and melted to grass and pavement, my bed rising through the ceiling to fall through another floor. The light blazed around me and then shrunk back into place.
I find myself lying in my bed, alone with a shape of what could have been a memory. I wish I could hold on to you for longer, but it so rarely happens. I can’t seem to get a good enough hold. Too often I hope to see you before I fall asleep. Were you my dream, or were you real, gone further than any half remembered dream could?
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