Page 1 of Precipitous Nightmare's Valentine Dream

Chapter 1

Rumors in the Nightmare Realm

Precipitous Nightmare

“There is a legend in this land,” pronounced a gnarled creature of rag and bone from the Stage of Dread Puppets, “that should a Nightmare find its way to a Dream, the world shall shift upon its axis to make room for their love.”

“What in the Fiery Cauldron does that even mean?” shouted an onlooker, razor-thin antennae jutting from blood-filled eyes like sharp silver shards. “The Dual Realms gonna give us a shimmy and knock us all on our asses if we fuck a Dream?”

The creature shook its rear stinger to demonstrate and opened its sucker-like mouth in faux shock.

Precipitous Nightmare sighed and shook his ponderous head as laughter rose up from the crowd surrounding him. Across the square, two others of his kind walked away from this farce of a performance, disgust evident on their shaded faces. While many denizens of the Nightmare Realm found amusement in the ribald creature’s antics, none of Precipitous’ ilk laughed. There was little of such joy to be found in their particular existence.

Onstage, the speaker tried to regain control of the crowd’s attention, but the audience had devolved to crude jests and harsh whispers. Far above, the moon hung like a pale pearl in a starless obsidian sky.

“It means…” The creature’s voice caught in its tattered patchwork throat, stuttering there before finally pushing through to emerge from lips of cracked glass. “That to pair a Nightmare and Dream makes both into something real. Makes them human. Mortal. Monsters no more.”

Mortal?

That caught his attention.

To be Real… but no, that was nothing but a ridiculous fancy. No one in the Nightmare Realm could afford such things.

There was no path to a Nightmare becoming Real, and the peddling of such fanciful dreams was nigh criminal in the land where he and his kind dwelled. This was a place of shattered hopes and macabre secrets. Not a place where love might flourish. Some instinct incited Precipitous to argue with the silly rag-bone creation, to prove its words false.

“How?” Precipitous raised his voice above the crowd, compelled by a desire he could not properly name.

Those near him immediately fell to silence.

He pushed his ponderous form forward to address the speaker. Each footfall left a deep imprint in the star-strewn dirt of the Realm’s market square, and lesser Nightmares scattered from his path.

“Presuming you speak true, how does that even work?” He directed his glowing crimson gaze at the cowering rag-bone creature. “How would one such as you or I find a Dream to love? Dreams do not come slumming down here in the Nightmare Realm. And we are most certainly not welcome to come searching for lovers in theirs.”

That garnered more laughter from the crowd, though Precipitous hadn’t meant it as a joke.

The realms of Dream and Nightmare had been at war for ages. Or perhaps a few hours.

Time ran differently here.

But the realms warred. That remained true no matter the time or place.

And a lovely, pristine Dream would never slip over to their side of the Dual Realms for a romantic fling even if the battles ended tomorrow.

On stage, a Crone pushed aside the trembling orator. Her gray hair rose to the orange-red sky, a tornado swirl of cloudy strands, as her ever-shifting visage showed glimpses of a million mortals’ terror-filled final moments.

“The same way anyone does,” she said, leaning down to pin Precipitous in place with a glare. “They open their heart to the possibility.”

At that, the crowd laughed once more. The idea that any in the Nightmare Realm had a heart was, indeed, laughable.

The Crone’s face settled into a single form for a moment, the wide-eyed stare of someone who sees the inevitable but cannot halt it in time.

“They open their heart,“ she emphasized, sizing up Precipitous in a way that made him think she knew more than she let on. A slight shrug of her shoulders dismissed him as irrelevant, and she addressed the crowd at large. “Then they let nothing stop them until they have won the heart of their Dream.”

This time Precipitous laughed along with the audience.

The whole idea was preposterous.

A Nightmare and a Dream.

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