Mercygiver

I had another dream with the man in the gray suit. We were walking along a field. The ground was muddy and slick. I looked down and the field was strewn with bodies, the mud mixed with blood. Each body seemed to have a dozen arrows sticking out of it, like pins in a pincushion.

"Where are we?" I asked. "Another extinction?"

"Of sorts," he said. "It is the extinction of so-called civilized war, war with knights and fair battles. From now on, war shall be fought not with swords, but with arrows. With bullets."

"Where are we?"

"It is summer," he said. "August, 1346. This is the aftermath of a battle near the French town of Crecy. A small skirmish in the totality of history, but one with lasting consequences."

"Why are we here?"

"There had been wars before, but this was different. This war was not considered honorable, not considered noble. So many knights cut down by common men. So many knights cut down by small arrows. So many arrows."

"Why did you tell me to kill him?" I changed the subject of my questions. "How did I do it?"

"Look," he said and pointed to one of the bodies. I could see that even though he had been pierced by several arrows, he was still alive, still breathing under his armor.

And then a man approached him. He wore stitched clothes stained with dirt, his teeth rotting and yellow. He looked at the man in the ground and shook his head. Then he took out a thin dagger.

"It was a war without prisoners," the man in the gray suit said. "The English scoured the battlefield and when they found a knight still living, they took a special knife, thin enough to put though the slits of their helmet or in weak parts of their armor. Some thrust it under the armpit and into the heart. Death was always instantaneous. Much quicker than a slow and lingering death from infection."

The man thrust his thin knife under the arm of the wounded knight. The knight gave a gasp, an exhalation of dying breath, and then he was dead. His eyes were still open.

"The weapon was called a misericorde. Mercygiver."

"That's what you gave me," I said. "You left it on my doorstep. The Endmaker."

"You misunderstand." He turned to me and I averted my eyes from his again. "It is merely a weapon. It is useless on its own. It must be wielded."

He raised his hand and placed it on my shoulder. A shudder went through my body. "It is a Mercygiver," he said. "You are the Endmaker."

I killed a child today.

Perhaps he wasn't a child. That's what the man in the gray suit told me. But he looked like a child. He looked like a little boy. He looked to be around eight years old. And I killed him.

I was so cold. It was supposed to be getting warmer, but I was getting colder. My house was an icebox, my bed was a freezer. When I woke up, I could barely open my eyes, they had nearly frozen over in my sleep. I woke up in a winter wonderland. I woke up in a cold hell.

I remember what he told me in my dream. I brought the gun down from the closet and picked it up. There was that weight again, that heaviness. I took the cold bullet I had made in my dreams and I loaded it. I thought perhaps there would a click and the gun would glow blue or something, but that didn't happen. Nothing happened. The gun was just a gun.

I hurriedly put on warmer clothes, bundling up in snow pants and a thick jacket, wrapping my neck in a woolen scarf my mother gave me before she passed away. I thought that I would just wander around my house until I found the monster I needed to kill and I would kill it.

He never told me it was a child. When I saw him, I stopped. He was in the kitchen, coloring on a piece of butcher paper. He was making broad motions with his hands and I could see a childlike smile on his face, with a gap between the front two of his teeth.

He started to sing:

"Poor Liz a-weeping,
A-weeping, a-weeping,
Poor Liz a-weeping,
On a bright winter day.

Why are you weeping?
Weeping, weeping,
Why are you weeping
On a bright winter day?

I'm weeping for a loved one,
A loved one, a loved one,
I'm weeping for a loved one,
On a bright winter day."

The song filled my ears and a pain grew in my head. An ache swelled up inside my mind and I felt like when it burst it was going to kill me. I was in so much pain, I wept and my tears froze.

Instinctively, I raised the gun. The child stopped singing. The pain started to go down, but my finger was still on the trigger.

He looked at me and said, "Poor Liz."

Then I shot him.

The bullet twisted in midair. I could see it moving, I don't know how. Perhaps it was the adrenaline. It didn't move like a regular bullet. It twisted like a corkscrew. And then it disappeared.

The boy started to laugh and then stopped abruptly. He put his hand to his chest. There was a hole in his chest. "My heart," he said. The edges of the hole began to crack like ice. The boy looked up at me. He looked like his entire body was shaking.

He said something. I think it was either "Who will come for the cold now?" or "Who will comfort the cold now?" I couldn't tell.

He broke apart in front of me. His body was made of icy flesh or fleshy ice and as it broke apart, I could see the watery veins inside of him. I couldn't look any longer, so I turned and ran.

I stayed away for as long as I could. When I came back, there was only a watery residue on the floor as a reminder.

I don't feel cold anymore. I just feel...empty.

What do I do now?

Cryogenian

In the past few days, there have been moments when I've felt an intense and extreme coldness around me. I will be working and then suddenly my skin will break out in goose flesh and I'll start shivering.

And then yesterday, I had another dream with the man in the gray suit.

I stood in a snowy field. It was nearly blinding - the snow went on for as far as I could see. There was no end to it. I knew I should have been freezing, but instead I felt nothing.

The man in the gray suit was beside me. "Where are we now?" I asked him.

"Eight hundred and fifty million years ago," he said. "It is a period called the Cryogenian, when ice and snow covered nearly the entirety of the world."

"Another extinction?"

"A birth," he said. "That's what it means. Cryogenian, a cold birth."

I looked around and then back at him. "Is this a dream or have we actually gone into the past? It feels too dreamlike to be real."

"You refer to this as the past, but that indicates that time moves," he said. "Time does not move. Time stands still. It is you who moves."

"Why are we here?" I asked.

"You will be visited by the one who gave birth to the cold," he said. "Your actions in isolating yourself have resulted in you becoming a target."

"What do I do?"

"You must protect yourself. You must use the gun."

"But it doesn't even have any bullets."

The man turned to me and I averted by eyes from his, not wanting to look into them. "It is a singular gun. You must use singular bullets. You cannot buy them. You must make them."

He gestured to the fields of snow and suddenly I knew what to do. I started wading in the snow, moving it around, trying to find places where it was harder and colder. I took scoops of it and formed it into my hands. I packed the snow together more and more and it grew smaller and smaller, going from the size of my head to my hands to finally the size of a pebble. I didn't know how I did it, how I put so much mass into it, but I did. I shaped the piece of snow until it looked the way I thought it should look.

And then I held up the bullet.

It was not a bullet made of snow, not anymore. It had become as hard as crystal, as sharp as ice.

It was a bullet made of cold.

The man turned to me then and said, "Do not listen to his songs. Do not wait for him to stop. Do not hesitate."

He said something else, but I don't remember what it was. All I remember was that when I woke up, I held in my hand a bullet so cold it burned.

The Great Dying

I check on the gun every day now. For some reason, I keep thinking that it's not going to be there when I look, but it always is. I still don't know who sent it to me or why.

I had another dream.

I was standing on a beach looking out into the waves. It was dark, but it wasn't night. I looked up into the sky and saw ashes. They were falling like snowflakes.

I turned from the water and saw a volcano. Lava poured from it, erupting in leaps and bursts. I knew I should have been worried, but I wasn't.

The man in the gray suit was looking up at the volcano as well. "Where are we now?" I asked.

"Around two hundred and fifty million years ago," he said. "It's a period called the Great Dying. Over ninety percent of all life on this planet perished."

"Was it another asteroid?"

"Is that all you take away?" he asked. "Was it something outside that entered and destroyed nearly all things? Or was it what was within? The asteroid facilitated one extinction event, but not all. This planet is not as stable as you think. It is constantly shifting, constantly destroying and rebuilding itself."

"I'm dreaming, aren't I?"

He turned to look at me and as the volcano burst, he said, "A dream is something built from your memories, your experiences. Did you ever experience an extinction, Elizabeth?"

"Who are you?"

He placed his hat onto his head and said, "I have witnessed untold extinctions, but I do not dream. I have seen the birth and death of stars and the formation and dissipation of worlds. I have seen all those things and will see them again and again. I am in all places, at all times. Dreams are for those with memories, but I have none. Who needs to remember if you never leave?"

"Who are you?" I asked again.

He stepped forward. "When I told you the asteroid was a bullet, what did you think? Did you think about what that meant? Did you try to understand? Or, perhaps, did you ask yourself: who fired it?"

I looked into his eyes then and I saw a vast universe, and I started to cry. When I woke up, I was still crying, but I wiped the tears from my eyes and got up.

I realized that was stuff on my pillow. I wiped it away with my hand, wondering how it go so dusty, but then I took another look and saw that it wasn't dust at all.

It was ash.

Strange Dream

I feel so tired and scared all the time. This can't be normal, but the more I think about it, the more scared I become. It's like a Catch-22 or a perpetual motion machine. I can't stop it even if I tried.

I had a dream last night.

I was standing near a cliff. I was barefoot and my feet were damp from the wet grass. There was a man standing in front of me, his back to me. He was standing on the edge of the cliff. He wore a gray suit and hat.

"Where am I?" I asked.

"At the end," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Names are meaningless if there is nothing in them to refer to," the man said. "I could tell you a name but you wouldn't understand it. I could say that I have been called the Eternal Witness, but you would not understand that either. Needless to say, there is very little you would understand."

"Where am I?" I asked again.

"At the end," he said again. "Look." He pointed to the sky. There was something up there, something that was streaking down to Earth. It was turning the sky red. It was growing larger. "The end comes," the man said.

The sky began growing brighter, turning from red to white. "What's happening?" I asked.

"The fifth extinction is about to occur," the man said. "A planetary wide extinction event."

"Is that...the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?" I asked.

"Correct," the man said. "Although it might be more accurate to call it something other than an asteroid."

As the sky became brighter, I asked, "What?"

The man in gray turned to me and as the sky exploded behind him, he said, "A bullet."

And then I woke up.