The Dreams of a Budding Totem

[TwilightWolf 883]

 

     An oak tree stood still among the cold, endless fog… unmoving, statuesque. Nothing else was there. He'd seen this tree dozens of times before, and no matter how much he ran, or how much strength he forced his feet to carry, it remained ever far away. Never closer, never out of his line of sight… The elf lord was frustrated to no end. He awoke in a sweat, in the lonely comfort of his bed. These dreams did not cease to gnaw at his thoughts since he began his journey. Sometimes he wished for something else to haunt his nights, craving the warm embrace of his lady in the late hours or the steady roll of the tide. The elf-lord swept the sheets off of his bare form, his feet finding his boots as they had done every morning since the start of his long life. There, at least, something was consistent. Comforting. Tailed coat and trousers followed with their own faithful and obedient beckoning. Another day of questions, curious insight, probing into the Emerald unknown.

     That night, the fog was thinner and the oak tree was closer. He could circle around the trunk, who stood unmoving at the center of the empty clovered fields. There was no treeline, no mountains… just a consuming fog, and the green beneath his feet. He circled, and circled… a small victory sparked in his heart. Sweet progress, finally, in this maddening and recurring dream. Or so he thought, before he came face-to-face with the amber, somber gaze of a canine.It sat on its haunches, cloaked in a fiery mane of auburn and umber. The veterinarian's eyes knew exactly what this creature was as his twilit eyes follow the slender, cunning point of his maw. The coyote held a branch between his teeth, each end burning a brilliant flame that gave off no heat nor noise. It simply licked the air in wild curls and brilliant colors.

 

     "I don't… I don't understand." the Hawksong managed to utter, just as his eyes focused back onto the ceiling of his familiar home. The dream was gone, again. It tormented him like some unsolvable jigsaw, the pieces morphing into different shapes just as they began to seal together. His feet swing out of his bed, again, and into his routine.

 

     "I don't understand."

 

     Another day of questions. Some he could explain without obstacle, the others were impossible. Complex and malleable in his brain, no tongue of descendants could express exactly what he was seeing. He was warned of the strangeness of dedicancy, but nobody could truly prepare him for what plagued his nights and days. Another moon rises, her pale beams giving way to that same fog in his dreams. That same oak, that same coyote with the branch in his teeth… At his flanks, the statues of two great bears flank the coyote. They towered over the umber-furred creature, paws held before their waist at either end of the coyote’s branch as if they were nursing the flames themselves. The fires burned brighter, with unseen colors of an ethereal rainbow. The elf could almost hear the echoes of something, somebody… it sounded so familiar, it sounded like-

 

     He awoke again, staring at the ceiling that mocked his bewilderment. He threw his covers off and commanded his feet into his boots as they always did, the sunlight careening through the slats of his balcony onto his face as if to spur him on his way. One last druid, endless queries.

 

     The oak was ever still, again… but the fog gave away to snow. Lovely, dazzlingly white and powdery snow that danced like dainty gardenia petals down to a thin blanket of cold upon the field. The coyote waited as he always did, branch in teeth with the fires burning with nearly blinding brilliance. The statues of the bears had swiveled their head as he came to within this dream, watching… waiting for him to eventually reach the foot of the oak for answers as he always did. The crunch of the snow beneath his feet was nearly real enough to believe, if this dream hadn’t haunted every second of his mind, awake or asleep. He left no footprints as he trailed towards the coyote. To his shocked surprise, the creature finally moved as he came to a halt before him. The pads of his feet loped in a gentle canter around him, leaving a trail of dazzling embers from the fires of his branch. He could hear the voices clearly, now… it was his own.

     He saw visions of himself within the swirling firestorm, and what he dearly wished himself to be… The long locks of a flaxen elfess twirling in his fingers, his lance hoisted high in the sun amongst a line of Wardens, a clinic packed full of patients he had saved. Visions cracked across his conscious as fast as lightning, and their strange meaning rocked his soul like rolling thunder… Family, lover, duty, medicine… all things he wished to be a warrior for. Just as he reached out to take the last vision’s hand, the ivory skin of his beloved… she recoiled in fear, falling before him with bruises upon her flesh as he suddenly found himself with clenched fists. 

     “No...No!” he shouts, just as he is thrown into a wild, standing spin and seeing himself in another nightmare. A flash of his white cloak of Warden armor raked against his foe, his strikes were wild, furious, ruthless… blood poured upon the ground, as if a pack of wolves had torn through these souls. Just as he sprang forth to help them, or ask them anything… his hands were deep in the bloody, pulpy rib-cage of some long enemy of his. Their eyes were glassy, anemic, pleading as the surgeon tortured the man. All the awful things that he could be a warrior for...

 

     “....Help me.” The man says simply up to the surgeon, and the elf-lord emits a harrowing scream that shuns the visions of himself back to the fire, back to the coyote who sits at the base of the oak tree.

 

     “You have a choice ahead…” the animal spirit says, his maw unmoving as he carries his branch. His voice was ancient, old, and cunningly wise.

 

     “Awaken, Aerendyl, and forge your chosen path…”

 

     The elf does, rousing from his sleep as the dream fades away with the explosion of crow feathers.  He felt oddly calm as he decided to lay there for a while, turning his head to his loyal pair of boots. They didn’t find his feet that morning… instead, the elf walked out of his house that day with a pair of simple but elegant robes, off to find his teacher.

 

The eyes of his totem awoke that day, seeing clearly.