Waiking nightmares
 
That night – I had a nightmare.
 
It might be more accurate to say that I had two.
 
The first one was a fragment. A picture painted by my mind of a thing I’ve longed to never have to experience again. A dream that filled me with such horrid loss and frightful sorrow that it’s only blessing being that the knives it drove into my heart made me wake away from it.
 
I found myself gasping at the pillows and sheets as I layed, cold and alone in the dead of night. I cursed the dreaded tome for putting such awful memories in my mind. And I cursed the separate bedrooms that Mivera had so generously let us share. For the greatness of the manor now only seemed so empty. The of loneliness these empty halls only reinforcing my drowsy mind the lacking warmth of my beloved.
 
I know the falsehood of dreams. But the pain of emptiness it left me with was far to real, and cut so deep that no sleep would return to me.  
Desperate to fill the emptiness with company, I got out of bed, grabbed a paraffin lamp, and headed out into the hallway.
 
Longing for the presence of my beloved Glyph. I journeyed to her chambers … only to find them empty.
 
The great halls grew even colder as I began to scan around. A growing chillness that made the hair on my neck stand up. A foreboding hunch was creeping up my spine as my instinct started telling me something was wrong. A feeling that only grew stronger as I found al the other rooms as empty, including the master bedroom, where Mivera should have layed.
 
As an outdoors-Zony. I know to be wide awake at the first hint of trouble. When you sleep under the sky you learn not to hesitate when the critters and scorpions start shifting the sand around you.  
I trust my instincts, and this wasn’t my first rodeo with kidnappings and disappearances.
 
I did not know how assailants had gotten into the manor. I did not know what they might want. What enemies Mivera might have on the homefront. Or why they had not taken me. All I knew was that the girls were missing. And I had to find them.
 
I focused my senses. Being met with nothing.not a sound was stirring the stale air being trapped inside the walls, not a creak from its floorboards or squeak from its doors many hinges. like its old thick walls swallowed all sound, screaming only at me in the echo that my hooves made as i began running through its defining corridors.
 
Had the great manor seemed empty before. Its stillness now became like an oppressive force, trying to dull my senses. As a bushranger I was out of my element, out of the shifting sands and shantytowns where tracks are left in mud and the wind whispers in your ear at night.
 
But my eyes found the tracks, pointing through the thick carpets, showing the way to the great library, pointing at the far wall of bookshelves, decorating the center hall of the mansion.
 
Though no door was visible.This was not my first rodeo with secrets and puzzles either. The mansion was old, and so was its tricks. It did not take me long to find the secret lever that revealed the secret passage.
 
A fake book – Pulley for a swinging bookshelf – How classic.
 
Beyond, I found a corridor heading into the fondation. Then downwards. I walked through narrow corridors, my senses telling me I was heading down through the bedrock, trough the pillar that the mannsion was resting on, perhaps even down lower then the lake it portruded from. I realized that the place had not been built, but excavated. The whole pillar felt as though it had been hollowed out. And the lower and the further down I got, the older the stonework around me seemed to get.
 
Contrary to any tunneling, it was as if the very bottom of this place had been built first. And that every age after that had adden on to the scrutcure above it, With the manor sitting on top of it all. Hiding the entrance to this ancient place. Making itself as a part of it. Greedily forcing itself into its history by making itself the first threshold to this ancient place. Like all the others had done before it. until what must have been a hole straight down had become like a labyrinth of corridors, counting down throug the ages, as if one was walking backwards through time as one decended into the darkness.
 
I had expected a cellar. Maybe a catacomb full of dead ancestors. Or some sort of simple escape route to the lake or to the mainland. Instead, the corridors revealed only strange markings, like a text engraved in the walls. A myriad of different languages that decorated these decedent halls of antiquity from floor to ceiling. A scripture aging with the structure as I descended.
 
My senses were telling me I had been walking for too long. That the proportions did not match the geography. That the lengths of these corridors should not fit inside the island. that I should have found myself in the open water outside.
 
I do not know what magic of illusion might be attempting to disway me from going further. What trick this place might try to play on my mind. And yet my senses guided me true. Following my nose I eventually came upon an gateway. A door where the corridor opened upp into a greater hall.
 
Some kind of subterranean luminescence flooded into the corridor. The light stung my eyes from the long walk throug the dim corridors  
Acting as a sheet as i passed from one area to the other
 
And as my eyes adjusted, I realized that I had walked into a nightmare I would not be able to wake from.