“A Most Beautiful Nightmare”

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”

The voice woke him from his slumber. He peeled his eyes open, taking a breath in the darkness.

“A common phrase, to say the least,” the raspy voice whispered. “Yet so very few of us understand the true meaning of the proclamation.”

He sat up, the silent tendrils of thought receding. His feet were beneath him soon enough.

The cracked ground was the object of his gaze seconds later.

“Only those who wield such pens can fully grasp what those words mean.” The voice was quiet. It was hoarse, and gravelly. It was haunted.

“Where am I?” he asked, calling out into the void. The voice hummed.

“How did I get here?” he breathed. 

The voice hummed again. The tune was familiar. 

He stepped forward, the rocky earth seeming to tremble at his touch. Unwrapping the shadows from his mind, he began to advance.

Windows of light lined the cave. Or was it a field? Or… a house? The panes faded into the inky abyss, leaving behind visions of the other side. In one, a girl held a dagger. She faced a beast of blue and white, wings of ice and snow beating down from above.

In another, a man fought. Creatures of evil wove circles in the air. The man swung a blade of light, cutting through the dark. Light filled the voids the soldier created, erasing the villainous beings from the world of perfection.

He looked away, taking another step forward. He listened to the humming beyond, each beat of the mysterious tones worming its way into the depths of his soul. His body ached, his mind straining to peer around the heavy sheet of ignorance. Looking down, he realized that he was holding a pen.

There was an end to the hallway. There was no sky. There was no light. Yet the closer he grew to the opposite side of the corridor, the darker the visions became. The next painted a world of blood and death, stenches of shredded bodies and burning flesh smothering his nostrils.

He turned away.

In the next he saw a man, kneeling in the dirt with a woman in his arms. Arrows and swords lay helplessly around him. Corpses wavered as the man cried for help. But it did not matter, for the woman was already dead.

He stepped back, trying to banish the scene from his mind. It slipped away like rain on stone. It was then that he realized he was at the end of the hallway.

“More so, the power of the pen lies not in the ink, but in the mind of the one who wields it,” the voice said, its humming ceasing. “In such minds, worlds can be both created and destroyed.”

An image struck him, one of a planet being pulled together by forces of both gravity and chance. Mountains climbed, seas rose, caves carved. Cities appeared, with people to populate them.

The thought turned, fire and ash raining from above as the skyscrapers burned. The streets flooded not with people, but with bodies. Then, the sun fell from the sky, annihilating reality itself.

He tried to shake the fantasy, but was unsuccessful.

“Difficult to erase from the mind, I know.” The voice slithered. “One often does not realize the power they possess.” It paused. “Oftentimes one doesn’t even know that such powers exist. Yet these thoughts, these images, you wield them as tools. You use them as curses or gifts—whichever you wish them to be—and cast them upon others.”

He took another step forward, feeling a sudden weight over his head.

 “One’s mind can create entire paradises,” the voice sighed, almost sounding hopeful.

Pictures of warm, sunny beaches washed over him. Waves slid upon a shore, tickling the toes of two lovers. Kindness wafted through the air, dancing through the trees and landing in the heart of mankind.

“Which is why it is so easy to forget…” The voice grew quiet. “...that nightmares are just as easy to forge.”

The sun vanished, replaced by a burning hearth. A head lay within, detached from its body and locked in an eternal scream.

Weeping filled his mind, images of a woman trailing them. The woman’s skin was separated from her muscles, and then her muscles from her bones, leaving her bare skeleton to drown in the remains of her own wretched corpse.

Maggots seeped from the hollowed-out eyes of a child, creeping along the white skin and crooked chin of the boy. Insects nibbled at the mangled remnants of his limbs, ripping the final traces of life from his young body.

“But that is not the extent of your abilities.” The voice echoed, the scenes vanishing just as quickly as they had arrived. “No, yours stretch much further.”

He took another step forward, finding himself at the end of the hallway. Here, there was one final window. Here, there was one final look into the world of the waking, where his true body resided.

“The greatest of a fertile mind’s powers lay not in the words that they write, but in the minds of the ones that read them.”

He peered through the window, and saw nothing at all. A vast emptiness lay before him.

Then, it began to fill.

Love, fear, pain, suffering, excitement, anticipation, joy, and anxiety began trickling into the void. Emotions and memories, fabricated by the thoughts and stories of others, built entire universes within the nothingness. And soon, what he was staring at was no longer simply nothing at all. It was everything.

The pen grew heavy in his hand. He looked down, the fleeting memories of the world around him tumbling away in a phantom wind.

Turning back to the empty window, he finally understood. In looking through the final pane, he was not staring into the world of his writing. No. He was staring into the world of the one who was reading it.