The road in front of me bent and went down through the small grove of trees toward the river, and I slowed down to a walk because with my younger body, I would injure myself on the uneven ground ahead.
I walked through the trees, and I could already hear the water, and I smiled, the small steady sound of the river that ran past the edge of our town was soothing to my senses.
Beyond the trees, I came out into the open ground above the riverbank, and from there, I would see my father working at the tanning frames in the distance.
At ten years old, I should not have been able to see him clearly, but my soul was inside a memory, and the rules did not work the same. I just ignored this part of me and took a step forward, and my eyes fell to the mountain on my left.
I had not been thinking about the mountain as it was a feature of the landscape of my village.
It was a small mountain, perhaps eight hundred meters at its peak, that sat to the north of the town and that everyone in the town used as a reference point when giving directions.
Past the mountain, toward the river.
North of the mountain, west of the road.
I had grown up with the mountain in my visual field every day for sixteen years, and it had been ordinary every one of those days.
I looked at it now because the path I was on gave me a clear sightline to it through a gap in the trees.
Instantly, I knew it.
Have you seen the face of a person you don’t know in a painting, but the moment you see that person in real life, you are able to identify them?
The shape of the mountain, its slopes, and all the gullies where rain gathered.
Then there was the cave I had never been to but had heard older boys talk about, the small one set high in the rock face where the local stories said something had once lived but no longer did.
This was the mountain from my dream, the dream that had come to me on the last day of every month for as long as I could remember.
In that dream, I saw a beach filled with bones, and the water in it was boiling, and past it was a cave where a pulsing red light emerged from.
The thing about this dream is that I always forgot it when I woke up, but anytime I dreamt, I remembered it.
I guess because I was in a memory, the thin lines that separated the world of dreams and of reality became blurred, and I was able to connect both together.
I have had this dream so many times, and yet I had never connected the dream-cave to the actual cave on the actual mountain that had been visible from my bedroom window every morning of my entire life because the dream had always slipped out of my mind by the time the day broke and because no one in my town had ever connected the local stories about the mountain to anything serious.
The source of my nightmares had always been this mountain behind my house, and I was just discovering it.
I stood on the path and looked at the mountain, as I tried to remember what that red light from the cave was about that scared me so much when the mountain exploded.
"Crack!!!"
A shockwave erupted from the mountain that crushed the forest and the entire village, leaving a crater for miles, but all of this devastation passed through me like mist.
My mind froze in shock and horror, but then the analytical part of me that reminded me that this was a dream took hold of me, and my fear that I just saw the most precious people in my life crushed to death was eased.
I will not be able to describe what happened next in a way that is fully accurate, but I will try.
While the explosion had seemed so powerful, it was the shockwave that had devastated the world around me for miles, but the mountain did not collapse; it broke along lines that had not been visible until the moment they broke.
The entire mass of stone split outward as if the entire mountain had been a door, and the shockwave that erupted was the pressure that it had contained for countless eons.
The massive fragments of the mountain hung in the air for a moment, then they continued outward, in slow, precise lines, and I shuddered in fear as hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock floated past me in a weird formation, and what was inside the mountain was revealed.
It was an inverted pyramid and the point was buried in the earth with the broad base facing the sky, but unlike the black surface of the pyramid I knew six years from now, this one was golden, and its surface was not smooth but etched with various runes that burned the eyes.
Despite knowing that this was a dream, I froze in horror because I could understand that my home, my real home, was not safe, and then the demons came.
The shockwave that erupted when the mountain opened up had not just flattened the ground; it had created long cracks that penetrated deep into the earth, and from these cracks came demons in numbers no one could have counted.
They poured from the base of the inverted pyramid in a flood that filled the bowl of the valley below the mountain and did not stop filling it, the iron-dark hides, and the six-limbed shapes of the first wave merging into a single moving mass that was no longer individual demons but a tide of demons, and beyond them I could see the larger demons, that were ten times the size of the average demons, and beyond them the upright demons with the red skin goat horns, with four eyes the colour of fire, and beyond them...
Here, my mind began to break down, because beyond them were things that did not make sense to my mind or soul.