Chapitre 14: The man in my dreams

—Lily

Ever since I could remember, my life has been a cage. It was gilded and golden and extravagant, but it was always a cage.

The most important rule was that I was never allowed to leave our mansion boundaries, and those were marked with posts and a fence. Of course, they included things like the pool and the gardens, and for the longest time, I didn't think there was anything strange at all about any of it.

That quickly changed when I turned old enough to understand things like movies and books, and I realized that characters depicted were never as isolated as I was, but even so, I never fought these strange laws.

I had the dreams, and those were things that made me never want to fight.

They started shortly after I brought up my desires to go to school, real school, with my father.

He stared down at me with a fond kind of dread and sorrow in his eyes, the same look that he generally got when he looked at me. And he sighed. "I'm sorry, Lily bug, but you can't. You stay in your classes here at the mansion. But what if I offered you something in return for it?"

"What kind of something?" I grinned up at him, easily distracted. My father had all kinds of strange trinkets around the house.

"What about magic?" His eyes twinkled, and my grin widened.

"Magic is kids' stuff, Father. There's no such thing."

"Oh, is that a fact? What if I proved you wrong?" He stood, still smiling at me, and I was enchanted. His library was a wild, sprawling place, and it had all kinds of mystical books that drew my fantasies.

I watched eagerly while he got down a bowl and chalice. He drew a symbol on his desk with a strange chalk and placed the bowl over top of it.

I couldn't hear what he said under his breath, but he whispered as he poured water out of the chalice into the bowl. He held his hands over top of it, still whispering.

For a while, nothing happened, but then, while I watched, the water turned to dirt in the bowl, and I squealed when a beautiful red lily grew there. "Druids adore the Earth," he finally said, touching my nose.

It worked. He had my attention. He showed me his other rooms, the ones with all of his strange artifacts, and I was instantly drawn to a specific glass case.

I don't know what it was about that case, except that it called to me, as if many voices swirled inside of it. I wandered over to it and stared into the case, feeling as if those voices were speaking with me.

It was as if they knew me, as if I belonged to them somehow.

"Lily!"

I turned, broken from a reverie, and my father was staring at me with a kind of terror. While I watched, he seemed to calm himself. "There are many dangerous types of magic. Anything in one of these cases is locked and sealed. I don't care how curious you are. You are never to touch these types, understood? If you do somehow open one and trespass, I will bar you out of these rooms for a long time. You have to be good, Lily."

I nodded, but my mind was on that terrible case. "Yes, Father. Show me more."

That was the night the dreams started.

___

I dreamed of a prince, a handsome prince, and he seemed a bit surprised to see me. Which struck me as odd. He was trespassing in my dream, right? Why should he be surprised? But then, as I watched, his brow smoothed, and he smiled. "Hello, little one."

This had to be one of those storybook saviors. If I was the princess locked in a tower, then this was the man who would slay the dragon.

My fantasies of him started that night, and I had an instant obsession for the creature in my dreams. He had sharp teeth, like a wolf's, and his hair was almost as black as his swirling eyes and cut short.

What was more, he was built like a savior would be. He was huge, like a tank. I don't know why, but I instantly trusted that man. As soon as I saw him, some magic took hold of me. "Are you here to save me?"

He chuckled. "I doubt that very much. Why do you need saving?"

I hesitated. The answer would make me sound very spoiled because I knew that my life was charmed. And yet... I wanted to speak the truth.

I frowned because my thoughts were these broken things. "I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me. I hear these voices, and I'm so confused, and I can't go anywhere to find any answers."

"Ah." Then he made a grimace, and his voice was strange. "For Christ's sake, D, I heard you the first time."

He rubbed his temple and then focused back on me, smiling gently. "You're not crazy, little one. You are merely torn at the moment. Let's see. How to explain best... You're different, little one, and that's true. You need to hide these differences from others because they will think you crazy, though I can attest that isn't the case. Do you know about butterflies?"

I crossed my arms and glared at him. "Everyone knows about butterflies."

He grinned. "Fair enough. So, let's liken your life to a butterfly's. You're in the cocoon, and it's disorienting. You were given away, and everything in you is changing to acclimate to the life that awaits you."

"I don't understand." He was making everything sound much more complicated, more terrifying.

"It's nothing to be scared of." His eyes turned concerned with my agitation, and a soft purring sound escaped him.

Strangely, it was soothing for me to hear. "There we go. There's nothing to fear. It's going to be confusing, but it will all make sense in the end, I promise."

Those words calmed me even more because I trusted that creature. Everything in me trusted him, even if I could have never said why. I nodded. "Okay. Okay, I'll be good."

He smiled in approval, and I warmed to it. "Don't tell anyone about these dreams or the voices, alright?"

Again, I nodded, knowing his words to be true. I had to keep my secrets.

But after that, I started to sneak into the artifact room so I could sit in front of that special black case with its strange books and even stranger pentagrams.

They whispered to me, and it made me feel closer to that creature from my dreams. My shoulder started to itch as I sat in front of that case night after night, until one morning I looked in my mirror and blinked.

There was a mark on the back of my shoulder, a strange mark. It formed a star of a sort and looked almost like a scar. My father's paranoia turned even more pronounced when he discovered it, and my mother started to fight with him.

She told him he was crazy, begged him to let me have some freedoms, but all of these arguments were met with no give on his part.

He kept me in my tower, and I stayed quiet, kept my secrets to myself. I settled for the company of the man in my dreams on those delightful nights when he appeared to me, and I kept my head down.

I was allowed to order anything at all I wished, allowed to go for walks and swims as I pleased. I studied everything given to me and all the magics I was allowed access to in the library.

I had nothing but time to learn these things, and I used it all to my heart's content. I didn't know why I was drawn to some topics and not others, but I never forgot what my dream prince told me.

I had been given to something and I didn't know what, but I was changing and growing to fit whatever end waited for me.

***