Every night, without fail, Cikel has a dream. The first night, he was sitting alone beneath the shadow of a great redwood in the forests of Narra. The forest spoke to him, but it was unintelligible. A language lost even before the time of man. He could not even fathom describing the sound, he just listened. He feels a rumbling and then he wakes up.
Night after night he would have the dream, the song of the forest resonating in his body, the rumbling under his feet. And each night the song would grow more frantic, more shriek than lullaby, and the rumbling would drown out its call.
For a while the nightmares stopped, and Cikel was grateful, for they had taken a heavy toll on the mind of the young neckbeard. And then they started again, but this time he was no longer in the lush forests of Narra. He sat in the shadow of a rotting redwood, there was no life to be seen in this desert that stretched for miles. He put his ear to the tree and heard not even the faintest whisper. The rumbling was all around him now, and he fixed his gaze on the procession before him. Thousands of decomposed soldiers clad in heavy yawshawns marched forth, fire spewing forth from their helms. Their skins boiled beneath their armor and left behind trails of sizzling flesh in their wake. Cikel screamed.
He woke up. His phone lay lifeless to his right surrounded by empty tea mugs. On the floor next to him lay a plate once filled with oreos. Cikel turned on this computer....
