Airel - Aaron Patterson [46]
I stood, and felt my little cage sway back and forth, bobbing up and down as I shifted my weight. I froze. I was hanging. I peered out through the bars to see that my cage was wedged between a couple of branches, balanced on them. Maybe if I got too jumpy it would topple over, causing me to plummet to my death.
I wondered then, if I died in this dream or in this world, would I be dead in the real world? Maybe I was in a hospital right now, with a nasty cut on my head, and the doctors were trying to revive me from a coma.
I made my way slowly to the center. The whole thing groaned with each step. Long fat floorboards spanned from one end of the room to the other. I counted twelve across. Each one was held in place with rusty nails.
Not wanting to fall to my death in some crazy dream world only to find out that was where I would spend eternity, I stopped and looked around for something—anything I might have missed that could help.
I figured if there was one rule for this situation, it was simply this: do whatever needed to be done. I really didn’t know what to do, though. Nothing came to mind other than one stupid, harebrained thought. Maybe death is the way out…in a dream…
I heard pages turning and that strange, seemingly friendly voice in the back of my brain whispering to me. Now I could pick it out from my other more normal thoughts. In other words, I could tell when something wasn’t Airel. It was like this tiny yet powerful voice that I couldn’t push to the background. I had to listen.
“Be careful, Airel, things are not what they seem.”
I ran toward the bars of my cage and slammed my shoulder into it, grunting as I did. It hurt. My little cage rocked, groaning in protest, and I felt my world turning horribly. I could feel the rhythm of the swinging I had created and decided to exploit it. I pushed hard, throwing my weight into the wall. The cage leaned crazily on its side and I looked straight down to the sharp daggers of rock below. I felt a lurch and heard the snap of dead branches as the huge old tree gave up its grip.
I was falling.
The cage tumbled, turning over and over, and flashes of black shards reached up for me from below. It was all happening too fast. I screamed, hoping but dreading that someone would hear me crying out for help. Deep down I knew there was no one that could help me.
The ancient tree had to be over two hundred feet tall; it took an eternity to hit the ground. The explosion of wood was deafening at impact and the clang of iron against stone ran right over my ears, drowning me out as I screamed.
Then there was pain. This couldn’t be a dream. The impact hurt badly, and to my surprise I was injured. I supposed that was a good thing because, if nothing else, it meant I was alive. I lifted my head, which was pounding like a church bell on Sunday, and surveyed the destruction.
The bird cage had left wooden shrapnel in a radius around me. Some of the bars lay at my feet, twisted and bent.
I checked myself for damage and found that I did have a problem. My left arm was broken, hanging, and ripped almost completely off at the elbow. Blood squirted out with each heartbeat and I could see the bone sticking out like a tooth. Blood ran down my arm and dripped off my dead fingers.
I was going to bleed to death.
The panic I thought would come never did, though the pain was so sharp and overpowering I could feel myself going into shock. This was it. I was dying, and in a matter of minutes I would be dead in this godforsaken place. I would die alone and confused, not knowing how or why I was here, or where here even was.
Then, I felt something cast a thin shadow over me. A thick wave of nausea washed through my stomach. I was sitting in the pile of debris I had made, holding my wrecked arm in place with my good one, my back turned to whatever was standing behind me.
I could smell the stench of rotten flesh and mold. It was so strong I could taste it in my mouth, making me want to spit it out. It