Seth knew he was dreaming. The dream was overly normal in a surreal way. He was sitting at Simone’s kitchen table. The whole room was very noir, in grey and black and white tones. An empty coffee cup sat in front of him on the table. The room was quiet. Too quiet. No sounds from neighboring apartments. No sounds from the street. No one in the apartment. There wasn’t even the mechanical humming from the refrigerator that generally filtered into background noise. The complete absence of noise was unsettling. He held the cold cup in his hands and wondered what he should be doing.

A little girl sat across from him. She hadn’t been there a moment before, and now she was. He jumped. She was not black and white like the rest of the room. Seth stared at her and she smiled at him, a big silly little girl grin. She was missing a top and bottom tooth. Her pajamas were baggy, a pink sleeping gown with a cartoon cat on the front. Her long brown hair hung around her face in limp greasy strands.

“You’re Raum’s ghost,” he said, recognizing her.

She smiled another cheerful grin. Her eyes were sunken and her pale skin sallow. “Yup,’’ she said, her voice the wind whistling through a cracked window.

Seth shivered. He hadn’t noticed before but it was cold here. His skin broke out in gooseflesh as he watched her. Weren’t things supposed to happen in dreams?

He sat with the ghost at the table for a few calm breaths, growing colder and colder. Frost spiderwebbed across the cup in his hands as he watched.

“Are you making it cold here?”

“No,” she breathed out.

“You’re as chatty as Raum,” he muttered.

“You ask and I answer,” she whispered, a sigh on the wind.

“Fine. Where are we? I know I’m dreaming.”

She looked at him, her head cocked to the side like a bird. Finally she said, “You dream in the spirit realm. You are dreaming, but I exist in both the human and the spirit realm.”

“Spirit realm?” he asked, his teeth chattering now. “Is that why it’s so cold? I don’t remember feeling temperature in dreams before.”

“You dream-walked here. To the spirit realm. I am here, where I am. Standing guard.” Her words danced and disappeared eerily, like soft music, but wrong.

“Dream-walked? What does that mean? Isn’t this a dream?” he huddled down, hugging his arms around him. He was so cold he could feel his fingers going numb.

“You are spirit blessed, dream-walker. You must leave. You have time for one more question from me.” She smiled again, her toothy little girl smile. Her childish behavior but adult language left him feeling more than unsettled.

“What’s going on?” he asked through clenched teeth.

She smiled at him with a big grin that showed off her missing teeth. “Turmoil. Change,” she whispered as wind through barren trees. Something knocked on the window and Seth looked over. As he turned his head, the whole room twisted around him.

He was standing in in a forest. The air was still cold, but not as cold as it’d been in Simone’s kitchen. He shivered, rubbing his fingers together before he thrust them under his armpits. Trees were all around him, still in black and white tones. The trees were dead, their trunks rising and twisting around him, the wood gnarled and broken. The trees were dead, yet they were also in pain. Seth could hear it as they creaked and sighed in the wind. They were dead and they were in pain. This was a bad place to be.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. Did Raum’s little ghost-girl send him here? This was a dream, right? None of it was real, if so. He just had to think about being somewhere else. Somewhere that didn’t make his skin crawl, and wasn’t filled with the painful cries of dead trees. The cold was sinking into him now, so he started jogging to warm up.

He tried thinking of other places he would rather be as he ran, his breath puffing out in small clouds. In his room with Anri. In his lab at school. At the little coffee shop on campus. Nothing worked. He closed his eyes and thought hard of waking up. Instead of waking up, he tripped over a raised root, falling hard to the ground. His palms and knees scraped along the ground, sharp rocks tearing at his skin.

Seth scrambled up, looking around, panting from exertion. He brushed off his hands and knees, pulling out small, sharp rocks. Blood welled up on his palms and he wiped it away on his black tee shirt. He had a very real sense that something was watching him. His head whipped around, but he saw nothing but tortured trees in the monochromatic vista.

Shivering, he started walking. Briskly. Looking around, he tried to find something different, something that stood out, but everything looked the same. Idly, he wondered if he would be able to tell if he were going in circles.

Eventually a small path trailed off to the left in front of him. He stopped at the mouth of the trail, uncertain if he should follow it. He didn’t trust this place, but what options did he have? Decision made, he took off down the trail, walking quickly and then running. The entire woods seemed to sigh. The cold was relentless, chilling him to the bone even as he began to sweat. It sheared right through his light clothing.

Seth ran for both forever and a moment in dream time. And then, it was warm, the abrupt shift stopping him in his tracks. He was cold, his body nearly frozen, but the air around him was warm. There was a clear circle before him with the largest tree he had ever seen at the center. It was difficult for him to guess at how wide it was, it was that big. The tree was black trunked, mottled with large white patches randomly spread around the bark. Branches shot out from the tree in intense and unnatural squared joints, finished with small brilliantly green, alternately pinnate, compound leaves and tiny blood-red clumps of berries.

This tree wasn’t screaming in pain. It was singing. He stepped forward, getting closer until he was underneath its outermost branches. He gazed up in awe, teeth chattering and shivering violently, listening to the treesong. It was haunting and soft. It sounded like living things, and he had never heard anything so beautiful. The song twined around him like wind, wrapping around the branches of the tree and then Seth knew this tree. The ground rolled and Seth realized the trees roots were tunnelling, digging paths, writhing under the soil. He felt the ground tremble around his feet. A word spelled out in roots in the ground before him. Rowan.

Seth didn’t know what it meant. The tree sang to him, the song melodious and otherworldly, and then it groaned as the wood twisted before his eyes. The trunk of the tree parted in the middle, blackness swirling in the depths. The ground shifted again under his feet and he looked down, trying not to fall. The word changed. Run.

Seth looked at trunk of the tree. The center of the trunk groaned and shifted with sharp splintering sounds. The tree shivered and the berry clumps twisted and shivered. The leaves turned silverish as the light shifted from midday to dusk in a moment’s time. The berries shook on the branches as the tree’s trunk swelled, and then they began to melt. Melting berries dripped to the ground, a drop here and a drop there at first. With the sound of a thousand insects, the drops of melted berries rained down red on the black and white ground around the tree, and onto Seth. He jumped back quickly, wiping the berry juice off where drops had landed on his arms and face.

A path opened before Seth and he ran. He ran from the warm circle around the tree back into the cold, dead forest. He ran and ran, and then the path forked. Two identical paths. He itched to keep running.

Seth was being watched. He could feel eyes on his back, breath on his neck. He ran on.

Seth ran right. He ran without stopping, coming to another fork in the path. He chose right again. Over and over until he lost count, and even then after, Seth ran to the right as the path continued to fork. Eventually he stopped, panting with exertion. He was freezing cold, almost as cold as he had been in Simone’s kitchen. He panted out small white clouds of breath, holding his sides. His extremities had gone painfully numb.

He looked back, then, behind him. Immediately he knew he shouldn’t have. He wished he hadn’t.

Behind him was an incomprehensible creature. It was impossible for him to understand, all odd angles and soft corners and colors he didn’t have the words to describe, but mostly black. And so many eyes and mouths and hands. So many.

All of those eyes. They saw him. Of course they did. They’d been watching him. This had come through the tree. This creature was what the tree told him to run from.

Seth bolted, only to trip on roots. The roots of the trees, which seemed doubled over in pain, were writhing through the dirt like worms, like the other tree’s roots had done. They wrapped around his feet as he tried to stand, knocking him to the ground. He had to go. He had to get away from the eyes and the mouths.

The creature was before him now. He knew it had moved but his mind couldn’t comprehend how. The mouths all spoke at once in a hundred different languages with a hundred different tones. Its eyes looked everywhere. They could see inside him.

Seth couldn’t breathe. Fear and panic paralysed him and the creature closed in on him, close enough to touch. He held his breath, his heart staccato percussion in his chest.

A black mote floated down between them. A small fuzzy black ball and Seth recognized it immediately. Joro. It danced in the air before him. The abomination was distracted, focusing on the small, black Joro-mote with a few of its too-many eyes. Other eyes fixed on Seth, and others looked elsewhere. He never wanted to know what it felt like to have the weight of all of the creature’s eyes upon him. Slowly, so slowly he backed up, but his legs were still tangled in the roots.

Joro’s arrival triggered a reaction in Seth, and his connection with Anri sparked inside his chest. He hadn’t noticed it was missing, but now that it was back, the cold seemed more bearable. Tendrils of heat filtered into Seth through their connection, returning feeling to his feet and hands. His lungs opened up and he breathed deep. He couldn’t feel Anri in the usual way he did, per say, but the connection coiled up until it filled some of the emptiness inside of him. Fog he didn’t realize was there lifted from his mind. He blinked his eyes and he could see things more clearly. The forest writhed around him. The air tasted of rot and decay. This place was toxic.

The creature moved again and Joro-mote pulsed once before the dead forest twisted painfully away from Seth. Before, the shift in his dreams had been disorienting, but it had not been painful. This time, the shift made Seth feel like he was being peeled away, a band-aid ripped away from the dream. He imagined he could hear himself tearing from the landscape. His body stretched, similar to when he traveled through his rifts, but this time he stretched too far.

The creature stretched behind him, part of it pulling after him like taffy. “No!” Seth screamed at it. He thrust his hands at the creature and it fell back, its appendage flattening out, eyes and mouths rippling like stones in a pond.

Another shift. It felt different, but he knew he was still dreaming. He was lying on his back surrounded by warm, mist kissed grass. Why couldn’t he wake up? At least it was warm here, even if he was a bit damp.

Seth turned his head to the side to find Lance was sitting under a gnarled oak tree not far from him. For some reason, he wasn’t completely surprised, as if part of him had anticipated his best friend’s presence. There was a pond down the hill from the tree, a silver mirror reflecting the moonlight. Seth sat up, then pushed his feet into the ground as he picked himself up. His feet sunk into lush grass. His feet were bare, his shoes had been lost to the roots of the dead trees. He wasn’t sure how he lost dream shoes and tried to summon new ones, but found he couldn’t.

Lance hadn’t noticed him yet. The damp grass felt soft and plush beneath his feet as he walked towards his best friend.

Lance looked up at him. He really looked like an elf here. His bleach blond hair was white here, and not the white of old age, but an incredible shimmery, opal color. It caught the moonlight in a way that made it seem to sparkle. The air here smelled so fresh and clean, the contrast with the toxic air in the dead forest nearly dropping Seth to his knees. Lance looked up as he approached.

“Seth?” Lance asked, confused.

“Lance?” Seth questioned, unsure about anything in the dream realm anymore.

“Jesus, Seth, what happened to you? Why are you here? No, better yet, how are you here?” Lance asked, concerned bordering on panicked.

“Where are we Lance?” he asked. Lance looked him over, his concern growing. He was getting uncomfortable with Lance’s growing worry.

“Seth, where’d you come from? Just now? What happened to you?” Lance asked. He got up, walking to him, touching his arm. Seth shivered despite the warmth in this new dreamscape.

“You’re freezing. You’ve been to the spirit realm. You were there a long time, too, weren’t you? Why, Seth?” Lance’s hands dropped, grabbing Seth’s. “You’re hurt.”

He ran his hands over Seth’s, making him cringed. Lance’s hands felt like hot coals on his half frozen fingers. “I fell,” he said numbly.

“Oh, Seth. Come here. I can heal these. And your knees. Where are your shoes?” Seth shivered harder. The warmth here didn’t seem to penetrate the cold in his limbs.

“Lance, what’s happening to me?” he  asked, teeth chattering, suddenly very afraid.

Lance looked at him with regret. “You’re dream-walking. I knew you might. It’s…I knew you had the potential. I’m sorry, Seth. I really am. I should have…well, I just wanted you to have a normal life. Meet a nice girl. Get married, have kids, all that normal human stuff. I was stupid. Should have taught you, at least this.” Lance shook his head as if to clear it. Seth was too cold to react. “Well, I can fix that part now. You need to know how to dream true. You can’t just go waltzing around the realms like this.”

Lance ran his hands over Seth’s body. His hot-coal hands. They burned him. He could see them glowing, a dull orangish color. As they rolled along his body he felt the ice inside him melt, as if the cold had crystallized his flesh, and as Lance moved his hands, those ice crystals burst painfully. He realized that the cold had numbed some of the pain, which was coming back full force. Lance traced his body, ignoring his obvious discomfort, his hands burning through his rhime-covered limbs.

“So, you’ve been dream-walking tonight. And you’ve had a rough time of it, from the looks of it. You’ve lost your shoes, too. You can’t go leaving parts of yourself all over, Seth, or eventually you won’t have anything left. We need to get your shoes back.” Lance’s hands were on his chest now, burning deep. Seth hadn’t realized his lungs were frozen until Lance’s hands rested over them. He coughed and Lance supported him, holding him up as he coughed and coughed as his lungs warmed up.

Seth noticed he avoided the spot on his chest that bore the mark of Anri’s connection.

“Shit, Lance, that hurts,” he growled, trying to swat away his hands. Lance took the brunt of his attack without flinching.

“Seth, I need to warm you up. You were there too long. Where were you? Tell me where you went tonight,” Lance said. He moved his hands down to Seth’s hips now, hands moving along the outside curves of his body.

“Simone’s kitchen. I talked to Raum’s ghost.”

“Raum’s ghost?” Lance asked as his coal-hot hands burned down Seth’s calves.

“Yeah, this ghost he left at Simone’s house. I dunno. She told me I had to get out of the spirit realm. Then the world twisted and I don’t know where I went. The world was black and white and all the trees were dead. They were all dead and twisty, and they were in pain. I could feel it. There was this tree in the center and it was beautiful. It talked to me with its roots, and sang a crazy-eerie song. It was haunting. It split open and told me to run before the berries started to bleed.” He stopped abruptly as a feeling of incredible wrongness spread through his chest. Lance jerked away from him, his head craned to see behind his body.

“Shit. You’ve been followed. What took your shoes, Seth?” Lanced asked. He was afraid.

“I can’t…” he tried to come up with words to explain it. Lance stiffened, his breath catching in his chest. He turned around to see what Lance had seen that had scared him so badly.

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Seth cried. “No, no, Lance, that. That. Go,” he exclaimed as he stumbled forward, pulling Lance behind him. The world behind the creature turned black and white, color draining in a diameter around it. Wind blew hard, cold air wrapping around them both as Seth ran through the grassy field.

“No, Seth! The water! Run to the water before the demon freezes it. Quick!” Lance stumbled and caught himself. They ran, Lance now dragging him by the hand to the edge of the pond.

Seth stopped at the edge, unsure what to do, and Lance pulled him into the water. It was warm and welcoming. Pond mud squished comfortingly between his cold toes as he splashed into the water.

He looked back at the creature, and for a second time he regretted doing so. It moved in stuttering skips that reminded him of girls climbing out of wells in Japanese horror movies. It was ten feet away, then a flicker and it was six feet away. Lance pulled on his arm and his feet slipped out from under him, his arms flailing as he fell backwards. Another flicker and the creature was at the edge of the pool. His shoes dangled from the laces, which were tied together. The laces were wrapped around too many fingers on a hand that stretched out impossibly long from inside of one of the creature’s mouths. He screamed as his head splashed underwater.

Seth woke, still screaming, sitting straight up, disoriented. It hurt to be awake. His body shook with panic and fear and physical cold. Groggy and disoriented, he fumbled for the light until he found it. One word came into his head, bold, as squinted in the brightness.

“Vephar.”

Anri was next to him in a heartbeat, concern and worry flooding into him through their connection. Relief washed over him as their connection was fully restored. He’d been completely cut off from Anri and hadn’t realized it. That thought sent another shiver through him. What did it mean?

Seth felt the change in pressure that signaled rift travel. Joro climbed through into his closet. Anri didn’t seem to notice the creature. It settled down onto the floor, tucking its legs under its body. It really looked like a normal cat when it sat like that. Comforting colors cascaded from the little black mote in his head and he knew that the englier would stick around and watch over him.

Somehow it was comforting. Joro closed its eyes and Seth looked away from it, worried that Anri would catch sight of it and freak out. He needed no more craziness tonight. He could barely process what had happened so far.

Anri was in bed with him. He wrapped himself around Seth’s body like an amazingly comforting blanket.

“Seth! What’s wrong? You wouldn’t wake up. I couldn’t feel you! You are freezing! What happened?” Anri said, wrapping his blanket around him. His teeth were chattering loudly. “How are you so cold? You are literally freezing.”

“Vephar,” he whispered again. His head was cloudy and thick. HIs tongue felt too big in his mouth. He was so cold, and Anri so warm. Their connection seemed to flood him with warmth. It swirled around inside of him, spreading tendrils of heat through his body.

“Raum!” Anri called. He was panicked. Did he do something wrong? What did he just say? Things around him were confusing. He was still so tired. His body felt heavy.

A flutter of bird wings and Raum appeared in the door. Seth startled. How did he get there so fast? What was wrong? His teeth had almost stopped chattering. He swallowed hard. His mouth was super dry and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

“He’s cold. He has frost on him. Raum, what’s wrong with him?”

Raum said something that Seth didn’t understand. The words sounded like a curse but were not in any language he recognized. Raum’s face was a mask of calm but his tone insinuated was nothing of the sort.

“What?” Anri nearly begged. “No more half-truths, Raum. What is happening?”

“Seth,” Raum said, ignoring Anri. He snapped his fingers in front of him and he struggled to focus on them. “Hey, hey, focus on me. You are awake now. Anri, wrap him in some more blankets and get him some water.” Anri jumped up and did what Raum asked without hesitation. Something was definitely wrong.

Once Anri left for the water, Raum sat on the edge of the bed, eyeing Seth warily. “You dream-walk?”

“I don’t know. Your ghost told me I did. I don’t know what I did.” he replied thickly. Was his tongue always this big?

“You went to the spirit realm? She talked to you?” Raum asked neutrally. “Who else did you meet? She would not have had this much effect on you. Who talked to you?”

“A tree, and Lance.” he tried to say. It came out thickly, but Raum nodded as if he understood.

As if on cue, his phone rang. He knew it was Lance, without even looking. Raum grabbed it off of the stand before he could make his body work right. His body was a scarecrow nailed to a post.

Raum frowned at the screen and shook the device. He pushed the green accept button, but it did nothing. Seth lifted his hand slowly and clumsily slid his finger over the green accept button.

“Seth!” he could hear Lance’s voice, tinny over the cell connection.

Raum coughed. “No, he is here, though.”

“What are you up to, demon?” Lance hissed. “What have you wrought?”

“What are you insinuating, Lancastor?” Raum asked gruffly.

“Ask Seth. Ask him who has his shoes,” Lance said, deadly serious over the connection. The seriousness of Lance’s tone versus the absurdity of his statement made him laugh even though it wasn’t funny.

Raum’s lack of amusement over his laughter was plain on the demon’s face. “What do you mean, has his shoes?” Raum’s forehead wrinkled in annoyance.

“My shoes!” he coughed, remembering. The inside of his head felt like a cotton swab, fuzzy and tight. His mouth opened again and one word slid out. “Vephar.” The word coated his mouth like slime.

Raum hissed. “What did you say?”

“Vephar. It has my shoes.”

Raum hesitated. “No, impossible. Why do you know that name?”

He shook his head, unable to answer. Lance’s voice projected tinnily out of the phone. “She was there. She has some of him. She took his shoes and she has them still, Raum. Do you know what that means? She has a piece of his soul. What have you done?”

“I did not…” Raum sounded uncertain. Anri returned with a glass of water, handing it to him. He took it and sipped it carefully, and even the room temperature water felt hot in his mouth. “He could not have met her. She would not have let him go.”

Lance snorted. Anri was beside him again, his arms a shield against the confusion and cold. “She didn’t. She has a piece of him.” Seth shivered at Lance’s words, even if he didn’t fully understand them. “He visited Rowan in the spirit realm. He had Rowan’s blessing. I could see it on him, in the Dells.”

“He went to the Feywilds?!” Raum nearly shouted. “He met Rowan?!”

“I think he came looking for me. Or Rowan sent him to me. I don’t know. Ask him.”

“He is disoriented and confused. He woke up hard,” Raum responded sharply.

“I had to push him out. It’s…not a pleasant feeling. Tell him I’m sorry. She was there, that demon. She followed him. She has a piece of him, Raum. You need to help him get it back. Why’s she looking for Seth? What’d you do, Raum, to get Vephar on your tail? This can’t be coincidence,” Lance insisted.

Raum said nothing, sitting so still that Seth wasn’t sure if he was breathing. “Don’t let her into this realm. She will rip him apart and climb from his chest into this world,” Lance warned through the phone. “And if Seth is hurt, or worse, you will both pay. I swear it.”

Raum’s face was a mask of calm. He ignored the threat. He was too calm. “It will not come to that. I have been…no, never mind. Tomorrow, elf. Come here tomorrow,”

“What is tomorrow, Sigaliansadine?” Lance asked skeptically.

“Tomorrow we plan for war.”

Demonbound Chapter 8: Confrontations

Demonbound Chapter 10: Over a cup of coffee