Beyond the black gate

In my youth I was troubled by horrid dreams. One so much re-occurring with great ferocity that still unnerves me.

The minor details always changing, wandering for days through a desert, a dense forest, or glacial tundra. Walking or sometimes running from an unknown terror. Every time, there's a moment where I turn around and behold a monolithic set of double doors made of pitched iron or some sort of strange dark bronze.

The design on the gate itself is strange, but always consisting of strange carving, protruding from the metal. Everything from vines, thrones, black tendrils, crashing waves, or ravenous fire, but always bodies frozen reaching for the sky, tormented by the agonies carved. When the gate opens, I'm compelled into traveling down its lightness tunnel.

Descending and descending for what feels like hours, my legs already weak from the previous exhaustion, i begin to see strips of crimson cloth, clinging to bits of jagged rock on the sides of the cave like walls. The tunnel, now appearing abandoned showed some signs of previous inhabitants, bits of blood and scrapped flesh can be seen along the rough walls, concluding me to believe the path I now travel was once densely packed. The path downward is a rocky and treacherous, only surpassed by careful footing and strange dim light. The strands of crimson growing in number as I reach further downward, culminating into warn and bloodied sheets, amounting into what can only be vaguely described as a toga of sorts. The now abandoned amaranth robes carpet the unsteady rocks softening my footsteps, until I arrive at a shimmering sea.

There is no dock, only a small dingy run ashore, containing a old wooden ore worn from many uses. As the sea rushes to shore, the rocks are covered by its obsidian blanket, like a patch of oil. My hands are shaky and clammy as I push the dingy out into the unknown, beginning to paddle.

As I paddle further out, it begins to storm. Waves rising and crashing into my vessel, raining so heavy I feel like Ive already capsized. The water above and below me become nearly indistinguishable from one another, before I feel something hit the bottom of my ship. Each time I pray it was a rock or some sort of sand bar. The boat is thrown from under me, knocking me into the water.

The moment I'm submerged, I feel a noise akin to the bellow of a large whale from bellow me. No words can describe it exactly, it is low, full of base, and deafening, but large like tectonic scraping. I struggle to swim upward with the water ever folding and crashing on top of me. Its impossible to see anything beyond the faint moonlight from above, yet I can feel the water shifting below and around me. Each bellow shaking my nearly empty lungs, panicking I try to claw out, pleading to gasp.

Finally- I look down.

Thick scales rush and stalk from the shadows, circling on all sides, before leviathan jaws wider than sight, enclose upon me.

I awake lurching upright in my bed, gasping for air, and covered in sweat... I mean, that is sweat, right?