Chapter 6 - Telltale Dreams

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A great guy.
Dust is a great guy.
He’s a bit of a trouble maker.
But I know he’s good.

He talks to me.
Unlike the others.

He talks a bit too much, maybe.
But I like his stories.
They make my heart race.

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                                                                                                                                 Swirling.

                    Churning.

                                                                              Deep down in my own memories.

                           There was a tree and a fire.

                                                                                              An orphan and a noble.

                              Then there was me.
                                                           Nothing but a kid.

Boy, did we have fun.

“Master Dust! Huff… wait… Y-you’re going too fast! Puff… I haven’t finished my milk!”
He was a boy my age. He was a noble.
Blue-blooded and all that. But he wasn’t like the rest.

“Come on noble-boy! Drop that glass, we’re almost there!”
There was a bratty girl too. She had no family and no friends.
Because she was different.

“Don’t call me noble-boy! I have a name you know?”
The boy was fat and frail. Milk drinker, to all was his name.
Sheltered he had grown in his mother’s shade.

“I know you do. But I won’t use it unless you use mine.”
The girl was crude and unrefined.
Thorny like the rose born of the wild.
All this life had offered her was vile.

“Sorry, Bell.”
“Eh. Come here, Nero.”

The girl helped the fat boy up the steep slope onto the windy cliff.
A giant tree awaited them there.
It awaited with the promise of tales and worlds unbound.

“Hohoho! The adventurers come back to mine lair, I see!”
And under the tree, eyes shining of the campfire’s blaze, awaited likewise another boy.

“Thou hath made me wait! No one makes a dragon wait! ROAAAAR!”
The children scattered and they played.

“Wohooo! You can’t catch me if I cut your head off with my GIANT AXE!”
Laughing in the fire’s shade.

“AAAGH! Then what say you? Feeble adventurer?”
The children trembled or they would quake.

“I-I’m not an adventurer, though.”
The children cried or they would flail.

“NONSENSE! I see it from your shining armour! You must be a VALIANT KNIGHT!”
The children followed all his trail.

“U-uh… t-then take this! Foul creature! ECLIPSE BLAAAADE!”
For all the griefs and troubles could but pale…

…compared to the simple grace of the teller of a tale.

“AHAHAH, what was that just now?!” Had said the girl, falling over the fresh grass of the windy cliff, exhausted.
“I-it’s the name of my most powerful blow… I… just invented it.”
The pudgy child had fallen not too far from her.

“That’s lame.” She had said.
“…but I like it.” She had continued. “Hey, Dust! What do you think?”

The third boy, sitting on the cliff’s edge, had begun to throw small rocks at the setting sun across the horizon, with a melancholic smile across his face.
“The world is a lot bigger than the orphanage, you know…”

Sensing the tone in his voice growing sour, the two small children rushed to the third boy’s side.

“…out there, people like the ones from my tales live adventures every day.”

“Wow, really?” Had asked the girl.
“Yeah, you can be one too. You just have to want to be one…”
“A what?” Had pressed him the boy

“A hero.” I had replied.

Ten… no, fifteen years from now! In the midsummer night!
If you can become a hero in that time, then let us meet again!

That’s what I had said.
Standing here, looking at this scene from god knows how many years away…
I felt the weight that a stupid promise between even stupider children could have.

Swimming in the endless sea of my memories, I had found what had obsessed me secretly all day.

I had found the creeping guilt behind those names, the shapes and faces I could never really put in place.

I really was dumber than I looked.
Guess I’ll have to apologize.

As soon as I wake.