My house is a bona fide forest from the number of plants I keep.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Wilheilm Lauroyal
Race: Halfling – Elf (moon) / Human
Age: 45, physically about 24
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 724 words
 

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A month ago, that one weird dream that’s been finding its way to me once a week hit me full force. It would come every single night and kept me in its grasp all night. There seemed to be no escaping it until I woke up in the morning, feeling several shades of betrayed by an entity that I didn’t even know and completely exhausted.

To wear myself out even more before bed, in hopes of being able to sleep without that dream—though yes, I had brought up the dream at that point finally—I took it upon myself to renovate the one room in our house that we didn’t really do much with. It was the room where everything we didn’t really use ended up.

That’s to say, it wasn’t half as much of a mess as I had thought it would be but once I cleaned it up from top to bottom—something that took me about a day—we talked things over, and I figured that getting a few extra plants in the house wouldn’t do us any harm. Mind you, that has nothing to do with the fact that green is absolutely my favourite colour, nope.

So together we picked out a design that would work well in the room and I put it all together. Regular plant beds, raised plant beds, shelves, hanging areas. Just getting everything built—because that was part of the plan—took the better part of the week. I was happy for it. I was just so exhausted by the time it was time to sleep that I had no dreams at all that I could recall.

Once everything was built and placed just so, it was time for a lot of good plant food, soil, earth, and the rest, then the plants and that was a truly messy job, but I asked him to help me with it. By the time we were done, the place looked like a bona fide forest for how many plants there are. I love it.

The moment you just step into the room, there’s that scent of just nature that comes into your nose. It’s like you’ve stepped into a completely new world and we’ve kept the plants to non-tropical numbers, mostly. Most of them won’t flower but I don’t mind. I think I’ve pointed out that my favourite colour so happens to be green, so that’s a thing.

Not once during the process of building the room to what it is now, did I have any dreams. Once I was done and had nothing to wear myself out with anymore, I half expected them to come back but, thankfully, they didn’t. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the whole ordeal is finally done and over with. At times, I felt like someone’s soul from somewhere had latched onto me and was trying to pass a message through me. They weren’t going at it at the best of ways if you ask me. If I was supposed to help someone or pass a message along, I had no means to do any of it.

Now, parts of my days are spent just making sure the plants are healthy, that they have the water they need, that they have the good amount of sun they require, and I can’t even begin to tell how good it feels to settle into one of the little nooks we’ve picked as part of the design and just relax there for a little while. It just feels so right. I close my eyes and it’s like I’m out there in nature.

You know, in a way, I think that if I had to live my life out there in nature, living in a cabin with nothing but Connor with me, I think we’d manage. Sure, it’d take a fair bit of adapting considering the life we’ve lived up until now, but I think we’d do okay. We’ve been out there before on getaways and it always is just so right and perfect. I especially like that one cabin nestled partially up on the side of a small range of mountains with the lake out in the distance, too far to comfortably reach on foot but that’s not the point of the getaway. The nature that surrounds it all is the point of it.

You’ve made promises you knew you weren’t going to keep and you don’t regret them one bit. Why?

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Wilheilm Lauroyal
Race: Halfling – Elf (moon) / Human
Age: 45, physically about 24
Final Word Count: 719 words
 

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At times, I have dreams of what feels like a whole alternate life. The air tastes different, the place looks like nothing I’ve ever seen—I mean, what grass and ‘greenery’ I can see is tinged more towards pink than green, the sky seems to be yellower, all in all, it just is a strange sort of thing but it feels so real when I’m there. I can’t really tell what else there is. I mean, there might be a metropolis just over the bend, just like there might be some native village on the other side of me. I just don’t know. It’s the general details of things and the feeling of absolute betrayal that gets to me every time.

You see, these dreams, they’re just there. I’m seemingly alone but I’m clearly talking to someone else but no one ever answers and that just makes it weirder. I don’t even know if that’s really me in the dream, I can’t see myself, I can just hear my voice and it doesn’t even really sound like my voice but, on that same note, I know that we don’t always sound the way we think we do. So it could be me, I just have no way of really knowing whether or not that’s a fact or not.

All I really do know is that I always feel betrayed when I ‘wake’ in that dream. I feel betrayed by someone who is constantly making promises they can’t keep and they have no regret about any of it. That’s what the whole thing is about. I find myself asking that invisible someone ‘why’ they feel no regret on broken promises but, as I’m all on my own in that dream with nothing but rosy grass and yellow sky, I never get any answer.

I don’t understand the point of the dream. It leaves my stomach doing little flip-flops when I wake up. It’s uncomfortable but it never lasts long. I can shake it off pretty easily. The feeling remains for a short while more but not that much. I think I can only make out more details of it because I’ve had it at least once a week for several weeks at this point and it never seems to change.

It’s as though someone flipped on a strange, foreign movie in my head but it’s stuck in a pretty short loop and there’s no getting out of it. I always wake into the dream at the same strange moments, there never seems to be any cloud on the horizon or above my head, the grass is pink, the trees are pinkish with odd blue bark, the sky is yellow and all in all, it’s a bit of an eyesore. I’m not going to lie, I’m a bit of a green guy and that’s totally not being biased by the absolute love of my life, nope.

So I don’t know what to make of the whole thing. I haven’t brought it up yet because it isn’t really all that much a problem, just a weird, repetitive dream that leaves me wondering every time I wake up for a bit but that’s about it. Even putting the general feel of it into words is a bit weird because it feels surreal. Saying that the grass is pink and the sky is yellow doesn’t do it justice but, at that same time, I’m not really trying to do justice to a dream that makes no sense but still reaches out back to me every week or so, you know? I mean, what am I supposed to do, write a whole book about a dream that possibly feels like it’s no more than fifteen, maybe twenty minutes long?

I’m sure some people would potentially care to do that but I don’t really feel the need to. It wouldn’t really serve a purpose. I’ve even tried to ask the AI about other potential worlds and it has come up empty-handed. I don’t know if it’s because it can’t reach that far or because they just don’t exist but that’s what it is. So yeah, I’ve tried a few things but, at this point, I’m just going to have to keep on doing what I do best about it and that’s to ignore it.

I know you’re going to ask me what happened and how, but truth be told, I don’t have an answer.

 
Timeline/World: Atheria – 3rd Generation
Characters: Wilheilm Lauroyal
Race: Halfling – Elf (moon) / Human
Age: 44, physically about 24
Final Word Count: 660 words
 

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Life is full of mysteries.

The end.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I don’t think I could do that anyway. It’s been done to me a few times, by way of my own siblings, and I never liked it. I know it’s always been meant more as a tease than anything else but it did always leave me slightly frustrated that they’d ‘start’ telling me a story and then end it just a sentence later.

Let’s just backtrack to this morning and I can get this off my chest while I’m still trying to figure out the answer to life, the universe and everything. They say it’s 42, but 42 doesn’t explain why there are tomato stains up on the ceiling, on a lot of the cupboards and on my person.

It was more than just tomato stains about an hour ago but I scrubbed as best as I could and there must have been something in the recipe because the paint didn’t like it and yeah. On the cupboards, it doesn’t look half as bad as the ceiling but you can still see the bit of red stain on there and I just don’t know what it’s going to take to get it off. I’m probably going to have to ask for everything to be replaced. It wouldn’t take long but I can’t do it while Connor’s not home. The final result would be different from what it is now and I only want to have to explain why once and just, yeah, I’m waiting.

So yeah, I was preparing a pretty big batch of sauce because it’s tasty, it freezes up well and, well, I like to share. It’s, at the very beginning, a very tomato-based sauce but with the rest of the ingredients added in, it turns into this creamy and meaty sauce that’s to die for—maybe I’m biased.

I don’t know what happened. One minute I was stirring the sauce, preparing to add in the browned meat—I’d done it wrongside about, I know. I should have browned the meat in the big pot and then added in the tomatoes—when all of a sudden, boom. There’s sauce everywhere. It’s up on the ceiling, it’s on the cupboard, it’s on the floor, it’s on me and, pardon my French, but it fucking burned so my first instinct was to rush to the bathroom. I spent ten minutes under a lukewarm but still somewhat cold spray of water. I actually have mild first-degree burns on my face and my fingers.

Those ten minutes likely did the ceiling and cupboards in because, yeah, I’ve scrubbed but it hasn’t all come out. The mess is off but the stain is on. So that’s also where I’m at now. I’m just waiting for Connor to come home, I’m waiting for him to wonder why our ceiling has orange-ish spots on it and I’ll tell him that I have no answer to give him beyond the fact that somehow, today, the tomato sauce was feeling explosive.

Though, I figure he might ask about the burns first. Not that they’re terrible. At this point, they mostly just look like reddened patches of skin. I think I did well by getting in the shower at that point and, mind you, I got in the shower fully dressed. I didn’t even take the time to undress. I’m just glad that it was just the tomato sauce, though it was boiling. If it had been the browned meat that had gone up the way the sauce did, it would have hurt a lot more. No oil in the sauce at that point, versus all the fat from the meat, on the other hand. It would truly not have been a pleasant experience.

I wish I knew what happened, I do. I’m not going to keep myself from doing my sauce again, that would be counterproductive. I just have to be more careful.

Miracles come in all shapes and sizes. Just be patient.

Timeline/World: Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Wilheilm Lauroyal
Race: Halfling – Elf (moon) / Human
Age: 42, physically about 24
Final Word Count: 564 words

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A couple of years ago, I got so sick I thought I was going to die.

It was unpleasant, to say the least, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Just endure and wait until it was over. One of mom’s favourite sayings, when we were young, was that miracles came in all shapes and sizes; all we had to do was be patient. It kept all of us from trying to push too hard for things we dreamed might eventually come true. At least, it worked for her and I know it worked for me and I figure it worked for the others.

So I settled my thoughts mostly on that while I was trying not to wheeze my last breath because even just that was hard as could be to manage. I felt like I was expending more energy just trying to draw air into my lungs more than anything else. I do remember being on the breather for a while because I couldn’t manage so well by myself. Scariest moment of my life. Well, no, second scariest. Scariest was when we were getting bonded; I was half-terrified that we’d be told we weren’t compatible or something. Connor’s my one true match; I would be an absolute mess without him.

I know that a few people wondered about us, we’re almost opposite in looks but, to me, it’s what inside that counts the most and what’s inside of him is the best of everything I’ve ever needed. He completes me in ways I never thought I needed completing. I can’t help how I feel about him, even after all this time. We’ve been bonded for almost fourteen years, later bloomers as far as some others might be concerned but I think it was a case of just being comfortable together without feeling the need to be tied at the soul, as it was.

He’s my miracle. Mom told me we’d all get one big miracle each, when we were ready for it and my miracle is him, from head to toe, odd familial colouring, piercing and tattoos included. He’s perfect for me and no one’s going to change my mind on the subject.

That cold though, almost the flu more than a cold but the docs said it was just a really bad cold, I had none of the other flu symptoms. I was just congested to no end with a pretty bad fever, but no real aches that I could feel. I could function to a point, I just couldn’t breathe. I wanted to spend every waking moment with him, terrified it would be my last and I told him as much. His words of comfort soothed me to sleep every time and waking up to him near me when I could pull myself out of the fog next gave me hope that all was not completely lost.

It took me almost a full week to pull through. Between the brain-frying fever, the coughing, hacking, the shortness of breath, it was hellish, I had to take it easy for another two months after that, else I was always short of breath but I’m good now, some activities I have to be careful with but I haven’t had any desire to run a marathon in ages and I’m not about to start now. I’m careful and that’s that.