Fear

Fear is a one-shot from The Works of Elysianus.

Summary
Loving him came with consequence too great to risk. Loving him was followed by death, swift and untimely, undeserved and undignified.

In his dreams, they fear him.

Characters

 * Niklaus Azera
 * Cara Aleksandr
 * Chiara Medani
 * Dakari LaRue
 * Israel Roman
 * Aeryn Rhodes
 * Erik Frost
 * Adairian Caledoni
 * James Drake

Work
Nik dreams in waves of color, with a soundtrack of screams lacing the edges. Everyone screams as they stand in his shadow; family, loved ones, strangers, even beasts of the woodlands. He’s doused in their blood as if they were all equals, all as deserving to have hearts and heads removed.

He stands in the center of the bloodbath, eyes void of life staring back at him from every angle. The room is filled with bodies, dead by his hand. Cara is the first. Maybe not the first he’d killed, but the first whom had mattered. The first he’d forgotten. Her lifeless face is familiar to him now, frozen in her last moment of fear, a blood-soaked doll of the first woman he’d loved, eternally afraid of the man she loved.

Loving him came with consequence too great to risk. Loving him was followed by death, swift and untimely, undeserved and undignified. Cara lies with a broken neck in a forest. Dakari lies face down in a river. Chiara lies wide-eyed with her heart ripped out. Israel lies as a forgotten pile of charred remnants. Women he’d loved. Women who’d once looked at him as a savior in the world of darkness; lovers, moments of purity in his illicit life. Forms of beauty that returned the innocence he’d lost to the Pit.

Family; it always came back to family. Adopted siblings, who make his blood boil, slaughtered around him. Erik’s heart hanging from his hand, Adairian’s dismembered body at his feet, and Drake’s crushed skull across the room because the boy raised his anger more than any of the others combined. Aeryn’s heart rested upon her chest because even in death he granted her more kindness than the others. His family wasn’t even safe from the bloodlust inside of him, the rage that had ignited within him.

Even while dreaming, the bodies of his savaged family at his own hand had their justifications. Adairian and his unnecessarily reckless attitude, the multitude of mutilated bodies that followed him, Erik, ever the hypocritical psychopath, Aeryn’s incessant desire to be loved, and Drake, who despite all his attempts, would never redeem himself from the centuries of suffering he’d inflicted on others. He dreams of their deaths at his own hands, and in the cursed nightmares, he enjoys it. He revels in the power that he wields as their lives flutter away into shadows and he consumes their souls. He takes the light from everyone he touches. Everyone who attaches their heart to his by any means had suffered immensely purely for the privilege to love him.

He dreams of black; of suits and leather boots too expensive for a common man’s tastes, of ravens at grave sites and the shadows that filled his heart with each death. He dreams of greys, of dying days where even the sky mourns the loss of life. Between, he dreams of coffee colored book pages, aged from when he first held them brand new. He dreams of blue dresses on women he’d loved, and the waters he’d crossed between England and America. He dreams of the green of the field where he’d become this abomination, the green of forest where he’d played, hunted and learned. He dreams of the white of the first snowflake caught in his hand when he was a boy, of the smiles of his mother.

But mostly, he dreams in red. There are screams with the red, with the blood that runs from wounds he’d inflicted. He dreams of what he’s done, what he’s become. Men who had taken the priceless gift of a woman’s trust and ripped out her heart, men who had slaughtered sheep herders, stable boys, noblemen and royalty, men who existed in the shadows and dragged others in unwillingly, men who’ve slaughtered entire villages, aren’t deserving of love, of life.

At the sides of his murderous family he was just as dangerous, just as deadly and there was no suit, no charming smile, or adoring eyes in the world which could ever hide the voracious need to kill, the need to maim, the need to feed the darkness inside him.

He is the red. He is the shadow. And after a thousand years and more, he is still burning with hunger. They fear him in his dreams. Everyone he loves runs from him as he chases them down and murders them without care, without remorse. That is who he is. He is a creature of darkness and he bore that shadow into a monster of the night. They run until he grabs at their screaming bodies and rips them limb from limb as they beg for their lives. They offer penance, plead for mercy, for restraint, for his sanity, but they receive nothing but an undignified death in a pool of their own blood.

They fear him in his dreams.

They will fear him even more when he wakes.