Dream World - Milo

“My real name isn’t Liz.” I heard her say as I opened my eyes.

Around me, the world began to blur until the world around me looked like a faded painting. Things grew out of focus more and more, eventually just looking like different patches of green in front of me and blue where the sky once was.

Then, it went in reverse. Fluffy white clouds sprouted from above me, blanketing the sky above me with sheets of snow-like layers. The green patches of color morphed and stretched into trees, bordering a giant grassland.

Then, I looked behind me.

By the time I turned around to see the rest of this world, it had already been repainted by Liz - or whatever her real name is. It was the kingdom I’d seen in my dreams and more: the same villages I’d seen and the same castles occasionally seen throughout the elevated patches. There was more, though, with a cavern that glowed of fire and patterned lamps, towers of colored glass (which I’m assuming has to do with magic) that glowed with the sunlight like lighthouses made of ice. It was… beautiful.

“Elizabeth Brown is the cute little blonde you see me as now,” I looked back at Liz, and she gestured to herself like it was something unfamiliar. “My real name is Elaine. Just Elaine. Most people don’t have last names in Aereth, it’s weird.” She looked behind me, and I turned around to see two kids…

One of them being me. Well, it looked like me. The boy I saw walking by was likely double my size, with the same caramel brown hair that I saw in myself. He had a small beard growing at the edges of his face, making me itch my own chin in curiosity. He smiled, but it seemed forced like Dad had looked the night before.

The person next to him - next to me - was the girl with the snowy white hair: Elaine. As I looked closer I could see her elfish features, with long and pointy ears and pale skin. I looked back at Liz and saw her eyeing the girl, like a friend she used to know.

“That’s what we used to look like,” Liz said, stepping aside as they walked by us.

“How did this happen? I don’t look that old... how is that me?”

“It’s hard to explain,” She started circling around, admiring the kingdom as I was a couple seconds ago. “Something you should know before I explain anything else is that I’m a mage.”

Remember when I said there would be words that I know, but never remember learning? Liz said “mage”, and it was like a light bulb turned on in my brain. A light bulb that hadn’t been touched for a while.

“In one of my dreams, you told me you were going to teach me magic. Is that what mages are? Magicians?”

She laughed. “To an extent, yes.”

“This world - a ‘dream world’, you called it - is something mages can do?”

“A small example, but yeah.” As she talked, I could see small drops of sweat form and roll down her face. “Well, when I was Elaine it would have been such. Being in this girl’s body, my magic isn’t as strong as it used to be.” She paused, catching her breath, “That said, let’s get the show on the road.”

She snapped her fingers, and the world spun around me. The colors blurred together once more, and I held my head with my hands as my brain started to pound at my skull. Screaming, the colors overwhelmed me in a terror of light.

“You can stop screaming now, Milo,” she eventually said.

I stopped.

“That also means you can open your eyes.”

I opened my eyes.

The scene had changed again, now dropping us in the farmhouse I’d seen in my dreams. With old wooden walls that looked close to rotting, and a roof cracked to the point where I questioned the safety of being under, it became easier to notice things that were harder to see in my dreams. I could feel when I saw it in this world.

“I’ve been here before,” I said, looking around at the piles of hay I recognized in the corner.

“This is the first place we brought you to when you came to our world.” Like the first spark to a flame, I saw a bright light appear in front of us the size of the farm’s door. As I backed up, I saw several people appear from the fire. One by one, a group of boys and girls came from the wall of light. They all had similar ‘elfish’ features, although some had dark gray skin while others were the same skin tone as I.

“Hey Cyph-Cyph, you really think this kid’s enough to fight Trem?” one of them said, who I didn’t recognize from any of my dreams. Out walked a tall, tan boy that I would guess to be in his late teens. He had short, foggy gray hair with a strand of hair braided together on the side that hid his elf ears, and wore a black coat that flowed all the way down to his ankles. “Why can’t the chosen one be - I don’t know - someone who actually knows how to fight already?”

“I know what I know, Dokyeom,” another voice said, “and the prophecy said that it had to be this boy. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”

From behind the handful of boys and girls that walked out of the light, there was me. The real me. Six-year-old scared looking shaking and quivering me, hiding behind the group in front of him as he took in everything around him.

“In our world, there was an evil,” I heard Liz say as I directed my attention back to her, “no one knew its name or face beside us ancient mages, but all we said was that it would try to destroy Aereth - Aereth being the country we’re in, if you hadn’t learned that yet. There are others, but the anonymous evil set his eyes there for a reason.

“From what I know of, I was the only ancient that remained after the evil destroyed our foundations from the inside. We needed to find a way to stop his rampage, so we put all of our powers together to form a prophecy. While I forget today exactly what it said, I do remember the summary I’d pieced together. It said there was another world we could contact, and there was one boy we had to find and train to become the ‘chosen one’,” She looked back at me, all emotion taken out of her face.

“You are that boy. At first, however, you were too young to learn how to fight, so we built up your strength in this farmhouse. You learned obedience, hard work, and to trust those who gave the orders. We kept you in this farmhouse for nearly two years to work, then we brought you to the castle.” She nudged her shoulder, and I looked behind and above her to see the castle in the distance I’d suspected to be the king’s.

“There, you were introduced to our world. We taught you our history, how Aereth came to be, brought you to the head knight to show you around,” when she mentioned a head knight, her eyes drifted to the floor.

“Did you keep me in this world for a long time?” I asked, worried of exactly how much time I’d missed in this world.

“Depends on who you ask,” she avoided eye contact, picking at some hay on the floor with your feet, “For me, the idea of ‘long’ is somewhere near a couple dozen-”

“How long?” I repeated.

After a few seconds of silence, she muttered “Twenty-two years.”

If I didn’t have a strange gift to recognize words unfamiliar to me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to count that far on my own. “What else happened?”

She smiled, and her story continued.

“After a couple of years resting in the castle, we taught you the basic stuff of knights: how to sword fight, respecting the royalty and all that. You ignored everything we taught you for a while, up until the first attack.”

I tilted my head, straining my brain as I tried to dig out the whole story. “The first attack?”

She looked back up at me. “Yes. The evil… has the power of a summoner.”

“And what might a summoner be able to do?”

“A summoner can create other living beings out of whatever substance they bound themselves to. For the evil, that substance was the black sand of his blood. In the first attack, we found our front gate to be broken down by the soldiers - who we started called the ‘Black Barrage’ - and began a run of chaos. They shot spears through wooden houses, cut through horse stables, and simply created havoc. Eventually, the knights of Aereth killed all of them, but not before the majority of the horses were set free and houses were brought to the ground.

“There wasn’t a reason they came to Aereth but to give a demonstration. Believe me, that demonstrate brought all the nerves out of you...” She trailed off, eyes drifting to outside the barn.

“Something wrong?” I asked. She stayed silent for a few moments.

“Stay here. I think we have company.”