Where the Dream Ends

Dreamscape: The Eyes Beyond the Ridge

The dreams began years before Tom ever became a defector.

At first they were easy to dismiss.

Fragments.

Images without meaning.

A flash of black pines beneath a moonless sky.

The sound of distant howling.

Red fur vanishing between ancient trees.

Nothing that lingered long after waking.

He told himself they were stress dreams.

Combat did strange things to a man's head.

The military psychologists agreed.

Lack of sleep.

Trauma.

A mind attempting to organize things too large to process.

That explanation worked.

For a while.

Then the dreams started repeating.

Not similar.

Identical.

Every detail exactly the same.

Every tree.

Every shadow.

Every step.

Every night dragging him deeper into the same impossible place.

The forest never ended.

The path never changed.

And waiting beneath the split tree was always the fox.

Red.

Black.

One white ear.

Watching him.

Waiting.

The dreams followed him from state to state.

Base to base.

Deployment to deployment.

Years passed.

Nothing changed except one thing.

The fox kept getting closer.

At first it stood hundreds of yards away.

Then fifty.

Then twenty.

Then close enough that he could see the individual strands of crimson fur moving in the wind.

Close enough to recognize intelligence staring back at him.

Not animal intelligence.

Something older.

Something that already knew his name.

He stopped talking about the dreams after people started looking at him strangely.

Stopped mentioning them to doctors.

Stopped mentioning them to friends.

But he never stopped having them.

Then the woman appeared.

The dream changed overnight.

The forest vanished.

The fox led him around the split tree and into a desert he had never seen before.

A blinding white sky stretched endlessly overhead.

A canyon cut through the world.

And standing on the opposite ridge was a woman.

He could never see her face.

The image always blurred whenever he tried.

Her features dissolved like smoke.

But her eyes remained crystal clear.

One brown.

One split between ice-blue and emerald green.

The same eyes.

Every dream.

Watching him.

Waiting for him.

The first time he saw them, he woke up gasping for air.

The second time, he woke up crying and had no idea why.

The hundredth time was worse.

Because by then he understood something he desperately wished he didn't.

The dream wasn't changing.

It was progressing.

Like a memory moving closer to its conclusion.

Every night brought him one step nearer to the woman on the ridge.

One step nearer to whatever waited beyond her.

And every morning the certainty grew stronger.

The woman existed.

Somewhere.

Somehow.

She was real.

The conviction slowly poisoned the rest of his life.

Orders stopped making sense.

Promotions lost their value.

Relationships fell apart.

His commanding officers saw a declining sniper whose attention kept drifting somewhere they couldn't see.

Tom couldn't explain it.

How do you tell someone you've spent years dreaming about a woman you've never met?

How do you explain abandoning a perfectly good career because your bones are convinced a dream is real?

Eventually he stopped trying.

When intelligence reports crossing his desk started mentioning a remote insurgent network operating near the same region that appeared in his dreams, he made his choice.

Officially he became a traitor.

A defector.

A ghost.

Unofficially he was following a trail only he could see.

Everyone assumed he had switched sides.

Nobody understood that Tom wasn't running toward the insurgency.

He was chasing the dream.

For two years he searched.

Village after village.

Mountain after mountain.

Operation after operation.

Always convinced he was one ridge away from finding the answer.

Most days he felt like a fool.

Other days he felt insane.

Then, on the morning Foxgrave put a round through his chest, he had the dream again.

Only this time it was different.

The woman wasn't standing across the canyon.

She was walking toward him.

For the first time, the distance closed.

The first time in years she moved.

The fox walked beside her.

Red and black.

One white ear.

The woman's eyes shone impossibly bright.

The fox sat.

The woman stopped.

And both of them looked directly at him.

A voice he couldn't identify whispered from somewhere beyond the dream.

Not a warning.

Not a threat.

A promise.

Today.

Tom woke with his heart pounding.

By sunset he was bleeding out in the desert.

Staring up into the face of the woman he'd spent years chasing through his sleep.

And when her mismatched eye burned through the contact lens, he finally understood.

The dreams had never been showing him where to go.

They had been showing him where he would end.

Which was why, moments before darkness took him, all he could do was smile and whisper,

"I dreamt those eyes."