The Dream-Sick Village

The village appeared through morning mist like a memory trying to remember itself. Too quiet for a place that should be waking—no merchants calling, no children laughing, no dogs announcing our approach. Just smoke rising from chimneys in perfect vertical lines, as if even the wind had learned to hold its breath.

"We need supplies," Dorian said, but his hand rested on his sword. The pragmatic words couldn't hide the tension in his shoulders.

I adjusted Ashara against my chest, her weight both comfort and warning. She'd been peaceful since we'd fled our last shelter, content to watch the world pass with those silver eyes that saw too much. But as we approached the village gate, she stirred. Not with discomfort—with recognition.

A young man emerged from the shadows of the entrance, moving with the careful gait of someone not quite awake. His smile was warm but wrong, stretched too wide for the early hour. His eyes—glassy, unfocused—kept drifting to Ashara.

"Travelers," he said, voice soft as moth wings. "We have food. Shelter. Whatever the child needs."

"That's kind of you," I replied, though every instinct screamed caution. "Have we met before?"

His smile never wavered. "Only when I'm asleep."

The words hit like ice water, but before I could respond, he'd turned and begun walking into the village. We followed because we needed to—low on provisions, Ashara needing proper shelter. But the wrongness pressed against my skin like humid air before a storm.

The village should have been normal. Market stalls stood ready, homes showed signs of life, gardens grew in neat rows. But the people moved like dancers following music only they could hear. They smiled at us—at Ashara specifically—with the reverence usually reserved for holy relics.

An old woman approached, her gnarled hands clutching herbs I didn't recognize. "For the little prophet," she said, pressing them into my palm. "She taught me how I died. But it wasn't how I'm supposed to."

"I don't understand—"

"In dreams." Her rheumy eyes cleared for a moment, showing depths of confusion and wonder. "Every night, she's there. Walking over oceans. Speaking names that rewrite bones. Sometimes she's grown, wearing silver robes in temples that taste like starlight. Sometimes she's old as mountains, young as dew." The clarity faded, replaced by that glassy contentment. "She says the dying doesn't hurt if you know the right words."

I pulled Ashara closer, but she just gurgled happily, reaching for the old woman with chubby fingers. The woman touched her hand and gasped—not in pain but in recognition of something I couldn't see.

As we made our way to the offered shelter, I noticed them everywhere. Symbols drawn in dust on windowsills. Patterns traced in spilled grain. A little girl followed us, sketching shapes in the dirt with focused intensity.

"What are you drawing?" Dorian asked, his voice forcedly light.

She looked up with eyes too knowing for her years. "She told me this would keep the moon from screaming. When it breaks again. When the names come looking."

The shelter was clean, comfortable, disturbingly welcoming. But as night fell, the true wrongness revealed itself. Through our window, I watched villagers emerge from their homes, moving with synchronized purpose. Above each door, they drew the same symbol—Ashara's birthmark, rendered in chalk with disturbing accuracy.

"They're worshipping her," Dorian said flatly. "Without meaning to. Without knowing why."

"She's just a baby," I insisted, though the words felt hollow. Ashara slept in my arms, but her lips moved constantly, shaping conversations with visitors only she could see.

"Is she?" His amber eyes held pain I'd never seen before. "I dream of her too, Aria. Every night since the mirror-child. But in my dreams, she's not ours. She's standing in the center of this village while it burns, and she's smiling. Not cruelly—just like she's completing something that was always meant to happen."

"You're tired. We're both—"

"I'm terrified." The admission broke something between us. "Not of her. Of what she's becoming without choosing to. Of what happens when she speaks her first real word."

I wanted to argue, to rage, to make him see our daughter instead of the vessel she might become. Instead, I held Ashara tighter, rocking her in the darkness, whispering her name like a prayer. As if repetition could anchor her to childhood, to us, to the simple life we'd fought so hard to claim.

A scream shattered the night.

We found him in the village square—an ordinary man I'd seen tending gardens earlier. But now he stood naked under the pregnant moon, carving words into his own flesh with a shard of pottery. Blood ran in patterns too deliberate to be madness, spelling names and symbols I recognized with sick dread.

My true name. Dorian's. But most prominently—the second name. The one I'd swallowed. The one that lived in the space between spoken and silent.

"Stop," I commanded, but he just laughed.

"Twenty years I didn't speak," he said, voice raw from disuse. "Twenty years of silence, waiting for the dream that would unlock my tongue. She gave it to me. Your daughter. Your echo. Your accident of love and cosmic oversight."

He grabbed my hand with bloody fingers, his eyes rolling white. "She's not a child. She's the echo of something unfinished. And your womb was the closest open door."

The words hit like physical blows. I wanted to deny them, but Ashara chose that moment to cry—not the sharp wail of infant need but something layered. Dozens of voices whispering through her tiny throat, each one speaking a different truth in a different tongue.

The prophet smiled even as life fled his self-made wounds. "I return her words to the wind. Let them find new mouths. Let them teach new deaths. Let them—"

He died mid-prophecy, that terrible smile fixed on his face like he'd done something holy.

I grabbed Ashara and ran. No supplies, no explanation, just the desperate need to be away from this place where dreams bled into daylight. Dorian followed, but the distance between us had grown. Not physical—something deeper. The space where trust used to live, now occupied by the fear that we'd birthed something beyond our ability to contain.

We fled through the forest, Ashara's cries slowly fading to normal infant sounds. But I could still feel it—the weight of a village's dreams, all focused on my daughter. All seeing her as something more than human, less than divine, trapped between states like a butterfly halfway out of its chrysalis.

"They'll spread it," Dorian said finally, his first words since we'd left. "Whatever they're dreaming. It'll spread to other villages. Other dreamers."

I didn't answer. Couldn't. Because I knew he was right.

My daughter was becoming without choosing. Growing into something that fit no prophecy because she was the space between them all. The echo of unfinished names, the collector of untold stories, the dream that dreamed itself into flesh.

And I was running out of ways to keep her human.

The moon watched our flight, full and accusing. In my arms, Ashara had fallen asleep again, but her shadow stretched wrong against the ground—not one shape but many, all reaching toward different futures.

We walked through the night in silence, two parents carrying a child who was teaching the world to dream her instead of itself.

And somewhere behind us, a village full of people who'd never met us continued to sketch her birthmark above their doors, waiting for the next dream to show them why.