The Dragon's Soulmate

A Life of Nightmares

Crinkling leaves dragging their fragile tips across the path that lies before her. An oddly warm breeze blows past her just barely staying that way before the cold sets in. Her brow furrows as she feels adrenaline course through her veins, voices whisper to her as the shadows take over the horizon rushing to her over this land. They come in the form of the damned with only one purpose, to snuff out her light.

——Present Day——

Raine doesn’t know why she sleeps anymore. It seems like a waste of time. Her nightmares echo in her mind making it hard to keep her eyes shut nowadays. Visions, as she calls them, have been constant where she can’t tell what’s real or fake, and the more she tries to sleep, the closer they get. Raine’s only seen their faces a handful of times. The shadows move like demons, and have never been close enough to touch her, but they always lunge forward as if they could.

Each time they do her subconscious startles her enough to wake her from even the deepest sleep. It’s as if she’s protecting herself.

It sounds ridiculous to her though, cursing at them as she moves to get up from her full-sized bed at this ungodly hour. During her nightmares she seemed to figure out a pattern. The leaves she’d hear in the beginning and end had a signature sound that seemed to call to her... and then cue the darkness.

Stress, she reminds herself... what she’s dealing with in life must be connected as stress in her dreams at night. Again she repeats herself, “It has to be stress.” 

There’s no way those dreams had anything to do with her life in any other way though. Her life has been a good one to a point. She has a family she belongs to, adoptive parents, grandparents and a brother she never thought she’d have. He even looked out for her and got into her world as their years together went on. By the time they were teenagers they started playing Dungeons and Dragons, too. And Peter loved  that she never questioned his interests, especially not with this game in particular. Why would she? If Peter could make her feel safe, why wouldn’t she do the same for him?

There really was no reason not to.

Peter was good. 

He would take up interest in the items she would make at night, often sitting in and watching until she’d pass out at her work bench. A few times before he started doing that, she would sleep there, complaining of stiffness and sometimes even the loss of hair she mistakenly burned off during the course of the night. As a thank you for the hardest nights, Raine would make him only the best props for his weekly campaigns putting even his friends who took the game exceptionally seriously to shame.

Peter, while all for the pretend scene, never once considered himself interested in going to a renaissance fair. When Raine suggested it, he carefully repeated things his friends have said and asking if they would also be sold an up-cycled couch which he immediately apologized for.

“It’s just, the guys haven’t been to one,” he started to explain only to be stopped by Raine’s pout. 

“If it’s bad, we can just get lunch and go, okay? I hear they have turkey legs there…” she added before being whirled around in a rush. The next place she found herself was his car with Peter at the ready for her quest reading and foregoing skills.

Raine smiles at the memory, being one of her favorites, of course. 

Food was always Raine’s way to get Peter to do everything. Need to get a diver to go a total of four hours or more to a concert? Food solved that problem. Need someone to chaperone a shitty date? Or cover for her when she snuck out? Or when she almost burned down the shed liquefying the metal she would purchase at the fairs she went to without him, he kept quiet because of the promise of food. 

Peter really was the best. 

Raine could cook or mustered up enough money to feed her brother whatever it was he wanted too. The twelve-dollar latte he never knew existed until six months ago, or the slices of triple chocolate cake she’d get from the bakery in town we’re good in their own right, but at the renaissance fair she recently got him to start participating in, had just the best turkey legs in the summer. It was almost as good as his mother’s recipe around the holidays and happened to explain it every time they went after that. Raine returns to the memory of the first time he agreed just for that specifically. He was absolutely delighted that such a thing was possible being that it wasn’t Thanksgiving and all.

Their family always bought two turkeys for that reason alone. Peter loved the dark meat over white, and it was his only his until Raine joined their family that he found he was not alone in this. She remembers how they slapped the haunches of meat together as if it was a regular high five that they were known to give wherever they went.

Again she can’t help but smile.

This is nice she thinks but then rolls her eyes.

Being awake in this reality is nice.

Except when she closes her eyes everything was different. It was almost as if she was stuck between two different worlds. Her nightmares remained the same. Her fear amplified. She could feel years of pain as if she caused it and absolutely nothing made sense.

Raine moves from her bed, fixing her loose-fitting white cotton pajama pants so they slid back down her ankle instead of hiked up her leg. Next to be adjusted was her yellow tank top, and finally her hair tie, which must have loosened while struggling in her sleep, as per the norm, she grumbles.

Raine then moves to her desk fiddling with her newly cast set of leaves. This design isn’t lost on her. They’re tiny curled bits of metals she collected from other jewelry she purchased at the fairs in the past. During the design phase she’d dream about how she wanted them to move and because of her nightmares specifically, she linked them together forming another dragon of all things. She knows it’s strange, but it calls to her. It’s almost like she’s not herself in her dreams. Several times she’s felt a shift, a buzz of electricity coursing through her veins when she had the nerve to face her fears and stare into darkness, but the element of the dragon still makes no sense to her.

 She hasn’t seen it.

The leaves are always there though, and she doesn’t know why, but because of it they become the accents. Once each piece is set, they are soldered to their hook and eye posts making sure they can move as if they were fluttering in the wind. And finally, the last step was to connect it to the chain.

Where was the chain? Raine scoured the desk and floor around her to find the item only to realize she’d been holding it along with her soldering iron. Again she grumbles about her exhaustion and the stupid mistakes she’s making but there’s no sense in it. 

She’s so focused on her work and remembering the nightmare from before she doesn’t notice her brother at all. He’s smart enough these days to know not to surprise her when she’s got her tools out so he just watches while he leans against the doorframe. 

While he watches her, he takes in how much better she’s gotten at making her trinkets. She’s so much more focused, starting less fires, causing less havoc, not burning herself or yelling at him about it. He huffs a laugh at that one but it isn’t anything loud enough to startle her. 

It was nice to see her change, and maybe these things were helping her with her nightmares as they were horrendous to deal with when she was just adopted. The girl would just scream. She’d scream at public events, at school, at home, she’d be a frightened little thing… and then someone turned her onto dragons being a source to channel and challenge those feelings as if one could truly be with her, aiding her in her fight.