The Night Curse (Book one)
Chapter 34 The Hunter

Cool air hits my face, leaving me momentarily incapacitated. After stretches of solitary confinement, with perpetual night as my only friend, the freshness of light is a restorative high, a remedy for the soul.

My diaphragm relaxes, and I suck in what feels like the first intake of oxygen since my incarceration.

The rising sun casts a rosy hue across the land outside the prison, so heavenly that I can’t believe I once turned a blind eye to such beauty. I swear to never take such wonders for granted ever again.

Sirens and commotion sever me from my musings, reawakening the tightness of my muscles and the constriction of my breath.

“We need to go, now,” the guard shouts above the noise. His red jacket glows with vibrancy in the light of day. His broad hat is as regal as a lieutenant’s. Brass buttons gleam like newly forged shillings down his chest. “Follow me!”

The guard charges towards an alleyway, leading away from the prison, with me chasing after his heels. We run through the twists and turns of the tunnels with alarms screeching in the distance.

“This way,” he summons while taking a sharp turn left, leading us out of the labyrinth and into the open. He slows to a stride and takes my arm. Workmen look upon us with little more than curiosity. We venture across the road, avoiding carriages delivering early loads, to a graveyard.

The cemetery is yet to be engulfed by the sun. Trees shelter the abundance of erect marble and granite from the growing light, keeping them drenched in varying shades of black and grey.

Some indeed seem to weep with sorrow. Their facades streak with veins of decay. Some have freshly laid bouquets mounting their graves, while others are lost to time, their dried flowers withering with demise. Unlike Harling Manor, no scent of roses fills my nostrils. Instead, they are consumed with stone and day’s old rainfall.

I imagine the sounds of the cemetery during the day. The sobs, the wails, the hushed prayers, and the shifting of soil before the lowering of caskets. A cold shiver runs the length of my spine as I’m reminded of my brush with death.

“In here,” he demands.

He ventures towards a cordoned-off family burial plot with a grand mausoleum standing at its centre. Stone angels surround the temple, at each compass point. I catch up to him as he waits for me at the mausoleum’s entrance. The stone is chalky up close and decorated in a language more Greek than English.

Steps descend to lower ground. I expect darkness at the bottom, but flickering candles illuminate the crypt and reveal the tombs inside.

The guard turns to face me, and it is the first time that I get to really look at his face. Small wrinkles hint at his age, and I don’t know whether it is down to the dimness of the crypt, but I can’t decipher the blackness of his irises from his pupils.

“Thank you…” I motion for his name.

“Samuel,” he finally responds.

I nod my head. “Why did you save me, Samuel?”

Only now that my breath has resumed its normal pace has the question dawned on me.

“We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

Samuel removes his hat and bows his head.

“We’ve?”

Samuel approaches a tomb and heaves off its stone lid. I tentatively peer in to see not a dead body laid inside but a woman, intact, and breathing.

“People are sleeping in each one.” Samuel’s hand waves over to all twelve tombs that reside here. My Adam’s apple bobs with a strained swallow. A sense of doom chills my blood.

“Why are they here?”

Samuel strokes the woman’s hair as she sleeps, undisturbed by his touch. “My wife is a Dreamwalker, like yourself. She is also a See-er.”

I shake my head, and shrug my shoulders. “A See-er?”

“See-ers can foretell the future. They can see what is to come. My wife informed me that my path would cross with the Herald of Dreams. A Dreamwalker disguised as a human, and I would know how to help him when I met him. Today was that day, my Lord.”

My mind spins. I glance at Samuel’s wife and back at his devoted expression.

“I am no Lord. I don’t know what your wife thought that she saw, but I can assure you, I am but a farmer’s son. Your wife is mistaken.”

Samuel’s fingers leave his wife’s hair. He steps towards me, his gaze wide and unblinking. “You are the Dreamwalker without the mark, are you not?”

I shift with the scrutiny of his glare. “Yes.”

“Then you are the descendant of Morpheus, saviour of the Oneironautics.”

The name has no meaning to me. I fear I am speaking with a madman. A madman who saved me.

“I am eternally in your debt, Samuel, truly I am, but I need to get back to my beloved.”

Samuel’s black eyes drawer nearer. His mouth leans mere inches from mine. “Is she a Dreamwalker?” he murmurs.

I don’t reply.

“And what will you do when you see her? Where will you go? How will you live? You’ve escaped prison. When you are found, there will be no trial, only torture followed by an execution.”

“I…I”

What had I planned on doing?

Would Mia and I live happily ever after at Harling Manor?

Kennith has spies and is already sceptical of the place. The Queen will stop at nothing to see me hang for what I have done, along with anyone who helped me. My father, my brother, Mia’s family, and Mia herself. Just the idea of such things renders me speechless.

Samuel circles like a shark. “With your help, Dreamwalkers and humans can live in harmony. No longer would I need to see my wife in secret. We could live openly, as all of us could. You and only you have the power to not only influence dreams but a person’s waking conscience without any contact. You can take over their wicked thoughts and replace them. You can alter laws and change the opinions of the masses, so that we may live together, without judgement, forever.”

The vision he paints, so revolutionary and peaceful, sends my beating heart into overdrive. I don’t know if I am the Herald of Dreams or descendant of Morpheus, but I want to be. I want to be the saviour of the Oneironautics, if for no one else but Mia. “How can I help?”

“Join my wife in sleep and she will guide you.”

Samuel removes the lid to an empty tomb.

He helps me climb inside. I lie back against the cold stone and see Samuel push the lid back into place, entrapping me once more and rejoining me with my old friend, night.