TBTT#23 The Game ~ 3/29/2013

TBTT#23 The Game ~ 3/29/2013

I dreamed last night that I was staying at the foot of a mountain at some sort of educational camp with an assortment of friends and family. Late one night I felt a call and began climbing the mountain. As the sun rose, I found myself in a winding, ice-filled cleft, all around me blanketed in snow, except the path beneath my feet, which was pebbled with lapis lazuli, aquamarine, and piercingly blue chunks of glacial ice. The path wound out of the cleft, up along the ice-draped shoulders of the highest peak, at times no more than a slender ribbon of loose blue scree edging out over sheer drops into frozen valleys hundreds of feet below. I slid and skittered down five feet for every ten that I climbed, but I kept going. 

I reached the summit at mid day and found an ancient altar, sheltered on one side by one last upthrown spar of granite just under twice my height. On the altar lay a sword of gleaming steel, shining bright as polished glass in the midday sun. As I grasped the hilt and raised the sword, a friend appeared over a ridge across from me, then another to my left, another and another until five of us stood in that high place, and each had faced their darkest fears in the climb, and each found their weapons of horn and iron and ebony, one a bow and arrows, another a long hafted axe. There was a dagger and a tall, barbed pike. 

An old man, bent and bearded, appeared behind the altar, telling us of the enemy we had been brought to face. It would appear to each of us, he said, once as our dearest friend, once as our darkest nightmare, until each of us had wounded it and thrown it down twice. Then it would arise one final time. 

The old man disappeared as we heard the scrabbling clatter of someone new climbing up the last slope. A woman appeared over the ridge, and the girl on my right choked back a gasping sob, ran to her, then dodged back to avoid raking claws, black and sharp as obsidian, as the woman's hands lashes out at her. The girl grabbed the outflung arm and raked it elbow to risk with her dagger, then flung the monster over a cliff. 

As we heard it clawing it's way back up, we arrayed ourselves around the altar, one atop the highest ledge, one beneath the altar itself. I found an open space on the other side of the outcrop, where I could see the monster coming and keep the rock at my back, it came to each of us twice, and we fought it off and threw it down. When it came the tenth time, for the man with the long pike, it wounded him, and he died even as it fell. 

The archer above me caught the pike as the dagger girl tossed it to him, then spun and hurled it at the enormous gray dragon that flapped up before me, with eyes like sapphire, spewing freezing flames the color of the walls of a glacial crevasse. I darted beneath it and grasped the pike, where it was lodged in the dragon's belly. Holding myself there beneath the beast, and twisting the pike deeper in, I hacked at it with my sword. 

As it began to crumple to the ground, I wrenched the pike loose with my left hand, then darted out from under it. I hooked the base of its head with the barb of the pike, drawing it down and stretching its neck. I raised the sword in my right hand and brought it smashing down again and again. I almost had its head off when it reared back with the last of its strength, its back full of black arrows. The pike jerked in my hand, but I clung to it, stumbling forward. Then, grasping the pike again more firmly and crossing my right arm over, I jerked the pike from its neck, and with a backhanded slash, finally severed its head. 

The five of us trudged back down the mountain, and helped the school janitor fix a broken toilet before washing up for dinner. Then I woke up.