Nightmares and Firelight

Jari woke with a shout, the sound torn from him like a wound ripped open. For a heartbeat he lay still in the dark, chest heaving, sweat cooling on his skin like winter rain. Then he let out a long, shaky breath.

A dream, he told himself. Only a dream.
Sapphire would never drag Raollin’s corpse to him, never spit venom into his face, never drive a sword through his chest. She was too good for that. Too loyal. Too damned brave.

Jari pressed the heel of his hand to his brow. His head throbbed. Old pain, old wounds—some to the flesh, most to the soul. They whispered to him in the nights. They always did.

Two years since he fled Veyorun like a dog with its tail tucked under its belly. Two years since the screams, the falling stone, the fire, the blood. Two years since he had run, and run, and kept running until the world grew empty enough that no one could see the coward he had become.

Between the wasteland of Veyorun and the harsh ridges leading toward Dravengarde he had built his little retreat. Rocks stacked into a shack, cactus spines lashed for a roof. Inside, only what a man needed: a firepit, a straw bed, a rack for his weapons, and a corner where he dressed. Outside, a few chickens scratched in the sand, unaware they were company to a man who had lost everything. Targets fashioned from driftwood and hide leaned against stone. A small well fed by a thin, stubborn river kept him alive.

It was enough.
Not comfort. Never comfort.
But enough.

He rose from his sweat-soaked bed and stepped outside, where dawn crept pale across the desert. The rabbits were running this season, and he'd snared one before sunrise. Now it roasted over his fire, fat spitting, the smell drifting like memory.

“At least I’m not wholly alone,” he muttered, eyeing the chickens as they strutted about his feet. He winced as he shifted; the wounds from two years ago still ached when the weather changed. They always would.

Then the voice came.

“Jari…”

It breathed out of the darkness behind him.
Cold. Wrong. Familiar.

He jerked up, heart thudding like a smith’s hammer.

And Sapphire stepped into the firelight, her hands red up to the wrists, and Raollin—poor Raollin—dangling limp in her grip like a slaughtered goat.

“Look what you did, Jari,” she said.

He shook his head, tears spilling hot. “No… no, please…”

“You ran,” Sapphire snarled, her face twisted with grief and fury. “You ran while we bled.”

“I’m sorry!” he cried, shame choking him. “I swear I am!”

“You must pay,” she hissed, drawing a sword that gleamed wickedly in the fire’s glow. “In blood.”

She thrust—

—and Jari screamed as the blade pierced him.

He woke again, gasping, clawing for breath, his chest unmarked but burning with phantom pain. The shack felt too small, the air too thin.

“Sapphire would never,” he muttered to steady himself. “She would never.”

But the guilt… that was his. That dagger was real, and the dream had simply driven it deeper.

He needed water. Cold water.

He strode through the dawn toward the river, shrugging off his clothes, letting the chill bite him. He knelt and scrubbed himself as though he could wash the memories out of his skull—Raollin falling, Sapphire screaming, his mother’s death rattling through the dust.

He slapped himself, hard. The sound cracked across the riverbank. His dagger slipped from his hand and splashed into the water. He cursed, reached down, and caught it by the hilt.

A face stared up at him from the trembling reflection—hair long, tangled, dirt-brown and wild, beard creeping across his jaw like bramble. A man gone half feral in his exile.

For a moment he almost laughed.

Then the guilt surged again, black and merciless.

He rose from the river, naked, dripping, dagger clenched like a promise.

“I understand,” he said to the morning air, to the ghosts that would not leave him. “I must go back.”

He nodded once, sharp as a sword stroke.

“I must rescue them.”

And for the first time in two years, Jari turned his gaze toward Veyorun—not with fear, but with purpose sharpening inside him like steel on a whetstone.