This is a dream, but everything in it feels real. He sees it from outside himself, but it’s happening to him. He is his great-grandfather, and he knows he’s heard this story, but right now it’s real. He’s hurrying somewhere carrying a child and a wooden box in his arms. The child is not his own, but the box is. The box contains a gun when he looks inside, but in real life the box was empty. He knows that what’s happening was going to happen. He could have stopped it, but he didn’t. Now he’s running, really feeling like he should have done something.

Draig wakes up in the high alarm of adrenaline rush. He hovered in liminality as he lay in his bed. He fell into and out of time-stretched scenes of panic, flames, and infuriation. Instead of subsiding, they increased in volume. There was a sudden feeling of something ripping open between his eyes, like a knife through canvas. With his eyes squeezed shut, he felt the tear open audibly further until he thought his eyes were open again, but he was looking at something he’d never seen before. He could hear people. They weren’t near and they weren’t far, they were either, along an interwoven organic lattice of dark-against-dark lines, so dark they were almost bright.