Chapter 918 Nightmare

Trafalgar did not know where he was.

There was no Euclid around him, no mansion or usual mountains that he can always see from the window, nor road under his feet. Pale ground ran out in every direction, broken only by black stones jutting from the earth at odd angles.

The sky held no sun, and everything stayed visible under a dull grey light. He tried to remember how he had come here and found nothing before this moment, no journey and no battle that would explain it.

He set off toward one of the taller black formations in the distance. It looked near enough to reach in minutes, and after what felt like half an hour it stood exactly where it had been.

Trafalgar stopped and looked behind him.

His footprints ran back across the pale ground until they went out of sight, and when he turned again the formation was still waiting at the same impossible distance. 'What is this place?'

He went on faster, watching everything around him now

Sand turned to cracked earth under his boots and back to sand a few steps later, and a low ridge that had been on his left came up on his right without him changing course.

Another long stretch passed before he stopped again, with the unpleasant certainty that he had covered a great distance without leaving the spot he started from.

Something moved ahead of him at last, and Trafalgar narrowed his eyes. His whole body went still when the distant shape came clear. A small child sat alone on the ground, wrapped in clothes he knew at once.

"Aaron?"

There could not have been fifty metres between them. Aaron sat in the middle of a patch of white snow that had no business existing out here, and behind him Trafalgar could just make out part of the garden wall from Euclid.

Long shadows began moving behind the boy before he could take a step. They had no faces he could pick out, only tall silhouettes stretched across the snow as several of them came toward his son.

"Aaron!"

Trafalgar ran before the thought had finished forming, and the moment his foot struck the ground the world broke apart around him.

The pale desert split like shattered glass, sand dropping away into darkness while whole sections of the land slid sideways and distant structures rose where nothing had stood a moment before.

He threw mana into his legs and went. [Godstep] carried him several metres ahead, and when he came out of it Aaron was still fifty metres off and the shadows were nearer.

He used it again and landed on a broken stone platform that had not been there before. He should have been almost within reach of his son. Aaron sat exactly as far away as he had before.

"No."

He jumped off the platform and moved again. The desert vanished beneath him as huge roots spread across the earth and wound through old ruins, and a heartbeat later all of it was gone under black stone veined with glowing cracks.

Snow covered everything next, and then that landscape began to change as well.

Every time he moved the world became somewhere else, and Aaron never came any closer while the shadows kept coming on.

"Aaron! Look at me!"

His son started to cry, and the sound reached him clearly across all that distance.

Nothing else held any weight after that. He forced more mana through his body despite the burn building in his legs.

Another [Godstep] put him on a broken bridge above a black ravine. The next left him on the roof of a ruined building, and one after that threw him into a field littered with enormous bones.

He kept going until his legs were on fire, and nothing changed where it counted. Aaron stayed the same distance away while the shadows closed around him a little more each time.

One shadow reached the edge of Aaron's snow, and his chest went tight.

"No!"

He forced [Godstep] again, harder than before, and came out on another structure with the distance between them unchanged by a single step. He moved again and again, his breath tearing now, the world rearranging itself around him, and the fear turned to fury as every attempt left him exactly as far away.

"Move!"

Trafalgar forced it one more time.

The world folded around him, and for one impossible instant he saw all of it at once. The wasteland. Ruins he had never seen. Black ravines, and a city falling into sand.

Snow swept through it as the landscape twisted together, and then Aaron was gone. Trafalgar landed hard and looked ahead, and there was no child waiting for him.

The shadows had gone too, along with the burning buildings, and nothing was left around him but an endless field of snow. The ground was perfectly white at first.

Then he saw the first red stain, and another after it, and another, until blood ran through the snow in every direction.

He tried to move and his legs would not answer. His heart slammed against his ribs while he searched that empty white ground.

"Aaron?"

Nothing came back. He reached for [Godstep] and no mana answered him either, and the last of his control went with it.

"Aaron!"

Trafalgar woke on a violent breath. For several seconds he had no idea where he was. He was drenched in sweat despite the cold air off the window, his breathing came too fast, and his heart hammered hard enough to hurt.

Then his hands tightened on something warm, and he looked down. Aaron slept in his arms with one small hand curled against his bare chest, breathing slowly and perfectly evenly.

Memory came back piece by piece as he took in the room. He had stayed in the chair by the window after sending the maid off, Aaron had gone to sleep against him, and sometime after that he must have gone under as well.

His breathing eased as he drew his son a little closer. Trafalgar lowered his head and pressed a kiss to Aaron's hair, wanting the warmth of him to prove that what he had seen had never happened.

"Thank God it was only a nightmare..."

It came out louder than he meant it to, and a moment later the door opened. Mayla stood in the doorway, half asleep and already worried, her brown eyes going from his face to the boy in his arms.

"Trafalgar? What happened?"