The Dread Lords Rising by J. David Phillips
*
Niam stood somewhere dark. His palms stung furiously. Before him a girl stood with her back to him. Long dark hair spilled around her shoulders in tangled and dripping wet knots. Her frame, sapling thin, stood out easily beneath the wet traveling cloak she wore. In front of her stood the doorway and the trap he had just sprung. It’s pale light, deadly as bone cancer, slowly turned from white to angry red. At least he no longer felt sick. Instead, he sensed contempt and an overweening desire to dominate pouring out of it.
He knew that what he saw was not the door, but the person responsible for it. Around him, indistinct and vague shapes acted out horrible scenes of lust, brutality, and death. They flickered from one event to another.
The blurred lines of a man carefully wound the ends of a rope round and round into a noose, which he slipped over his neck and then leapt into darkness . . .
Flicker.
A shape holding an axe aloft brought it down over a misty form on a bed. Niam winced. He knew what lay within the bed. A woman and a child wept uncontrollably . . .
Flicker.
Two men stood facing one another, their arms outstretched as terrible forces unleashed between them snaked out toward one another and met. A blinding eruption followed . . .
Flicker.
The wavy, ephemeral form of a boy sat in an empty room, laughing as he suffocated a cat writhing helplessly where it had been bound . . .
Flicker.
Something fell through the night sky, tumbling, twisting, and burning, in the throes of fatal agony. The heat and radiance ignited the surrounding forest as it came, a contrail of smoke glowing ember-red stretched behind it for miles. As the thing fell over the horizon, a blinding light split the night in half . . .
Flicker.
A broken and misshapen form shambled through the charred mass of blackened tree trunks. Its furtive movement reminded Niam of the way a dying bug hitched and jerked. It was searching for something as it died. At last, the creature found an open fissure in the ground. With one last spasm, it slipped into the darkness and dissolved, as if pouring itself into the earth . . .
Flicker
The girl still stood in the darkness before Niam. His throat constricted painfully when he opened his mouth, but he asked the question he knew he had to ask—the one that mattered the most to him, despite everything that had happened and everything he had seen. “Sarah. Is it really you I see in these dreams?” His sister turned to face him. Not even death had removed her beauty, though she looked wan and drained. Tear tracks streaked down her face. She looked as if she wanted to say something to him, but when she opened her mouth, Maerillus’s worried voice came out instead.