A Vision of an End

Already it fades.

Four unicorns: black and silver, gray and pale. A field. A sky made of lavender and a wall of leaves.

She speaks. Her voice shines platinum in the dark.

"I see. Trees."

There is a mountain of jet and hoarfrost, embalmed with icewinter clouds.

Four women, fair, skin as milk and moon. They sit in the marsh grass, bare feet in the chill water. A gentle wind caresses them like loving hands.

They bear memories of empire; of tall dark buildings soaked in black rain; of the shadows of tall men.

She sits in a parlor and dreams.

She sees a sky in motion. She sees Donnis, palest of them all, return to the sky through a portal of cloud. She is an angel, falling up.

The unicorns descend, and the four women must escape through the silver haze and marsh. They cannot move fast enough, cannot hide in the soft fingers of the trees.

Even as they pass into a door made of silver silk, she knows that they will not all make it, that Donnis is lost. The pale girl falls to the earth and is consumed by the unicorns' hunger, trampled beneath their black hooves. She sees the reflection of Donnis' screaming face in the unicorn's mirror-glass eyes, and she is left shaken and dizzy and alone, floating through these images, desperate to stay a part of them even as her senses return.

The crackling fire of the parlor holds her vision. When she looks back up through the fog, the sky is open and vast and filled with another memory that plays before her.

Marching men stand assembled before a grim edifice, a sliver of shadow under dark stars and a dark sky. Rain falls and punishes them on the steep steps that ascend from the heart of a black city. They march to an elevated field filled with swords and felled men that drink in the earth, a place of creeping shadows that bleed into the other place, the place she knows, the marsh of soft grass and trees laden with moisture, of silver haze and white dresses and girls with auburn hair.

She senses that the worst days have already passed, but all she can see is Donnis, falling, up into a sky of tears and leaves. A birdcall pulls her back to the parlor, and the flames into which she stares.

Of course none of this really happened, but it is the only memory she has of Donnis.

Once I woke from this dream, I stared at my wife as she slept, and thought of my children, and realized that this dream was a vision of an end. The last words I'd said to each of them the night before was "I Love You", so if the end I'd seen was my own, I decided I would be ready for it.


© 2007 Steven Montano