I dreamt, last night, that I was on a snowy promontory, surrounded by men dressed in furs and patchwork armor. We are fending off something horrible that is lurking in the surrounding woods. There are horrid footprints with three toes all around the promontory and I see three of them dragging a sledge on which is the forward half of a bear, frozen intestines dragging behind it. We check its feet but the bear has four toes, not three.
I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.
When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.
So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.
We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.
It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.
My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.
As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.
My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.
