The Dreamer and the God (Chapter One)

          He lay in bed and watched from across the room as Sarah leaned against the window. Morning light made a shadow of her body, a halo of her head. His wife turned to him.
          "Well, the bus just took off," Sarah said.
          "Oh."
          "Oh?"
          He tried again: "Will you get into trouble?"
          There was something of the wolf in the way she looked at him: lips curled in a smile all teeth, no warmth.
          "Now there's an idea." She walked over to the phone and dialed while he turned onto his side, away from her, and went back to sleep.
          When next he woke it was to see her standing above him. "We need to talk."
          "What about?"
          That did it: "Don't," she said softly. "Don't you dare."
          He made as if to turn away from her and she grabbed his shoulder.
          "I said we need to talk. Wake up."
          He didn't answer, looked out the window instead at a world that by rights should be as chaotic and broken as his life currently was.
          "You're not avoiding this, alright? Don't go back to sleep. Wake up."
          It was obscene, really, the way the world outside plodded along, willfully ignorant of the mess inside the cramped apartment. Completely unfair.
          "Wake up," Sarah repeated, shaking him, hard. "Wake up, you stupid idiot. I said—"

          "—wake up!"
          Someone slapped him across the face, ending the dream. He decided it'd be a good idea to do what the voice said. He opened his eyes and stared into a round, perplexed face looking down at him.
          While he rubbed his cheek a thought came to him suddenly: something is wrong.
          He let his hand fall and sat up. "That hurt."
          "Sorry," said the fat man, "But I did tell you to wake up."
          "I was asleep."
          "Hence the slap." They stared at each other for a moment.
          "Fine." He paused. "Do I know you?"
          A beat of silence. He watched the fat man's face spasm hard, as if battling something unseen.
          "I'm Nathan," the other man said finally. He rose to his feet, frowning. And then: "So who the hell are you?"
          That's a really good question. The answer popped into his head shortly: "Adam."
          Somewhere behind them and off to their right, a little girl started to cry.
          The fat man – no, Nathan, his name is Nathan – looked in the direction of the noise and then back. His frown deepened. "Okay, Adam. I've got a question for you."
          "Shoot," Adam said. (Again, the thought stepped cat-quick through his mind: something is wrong here.) The little girl's sobs had turned to shrieks and other voices were raised in worry.
          "Do you have any idea where the hell we are?"
          Finally Adam realized what was wrong.
          He wasn't in his bed but sitting in a grassy clearing, with a stand of trees off to his right. A bunch of people had gathered by the trees, looking scared. This was not the apartment. Where was Sarah? (And who is Sarah? he thought, confused, as he stood up; the dream spun into fragments and then faded away). Not morning, but night; a full red moon hung in a cloudless sky.
          Adam looked up again. Red moon?
          (A small but cold voice from some pit in his mind spoke: you need to start running.)
          So he did, towards the group of strangers. Nathan hurriedly followed suit.
          "Adam."
          "Yeah?"
          "I asked you a question. Do you know—"
          "No clue, sorry."
          Someone had moved to try and comfort the shrieking girl (who'd now been joined by other terrified kids; a chorus of high-pitched banshees). Adam reached out, grabbed someone. "Hey."
          The man turned around, and the look of irritation on his face crumbled into horror. "Red God, save us."
          "Excuse me?"
          "What are you doing here?" the man said, pulling away.
          "I don't know. Do you know me?" Adam glanced at Nathan, who shrugged.
          The stranger's mouth worked soundlessly—and just like that the horror vanished (but something in Adam's mind took note, filing it away for scrutiny when it was safe to do so; and why isn't it safe now? he thought, and he knew the answer had to do with the red moon.)
          "No," the stranger said, slowly. "No idea who you are."
          "Right," Nathan said before Adam could reply. "Do you know where we are? What's happening?"
          "Blood moon," the other man said.
          "Meaning?"
          Adam turned to the group of milling people. Confusion and fear. He knew, without question, that every single one of them had forgotten their name. And standing behind the babble and tears, leafless trees cloaked in gloom.
          He thought he saw something move in those shadows.
          He spoke without realizing it: "We need to get away from here. Right now." He raised his voice, addressing everyone – but his gaze never left the stand of darkened trees. "Listen up, people. I think we need to be as far away as possible from here or we're going to be in trouble."
          "Trouble? What trouble?" a voice shouted.
          "Where are we?"
          "Where is my daughter. I--I can't remember--honey, sweetie, where are you?"
          More questions, more anger (and more precious time being wasted).
          "Something's coming." Adam shouted back. Without waiting he grabbed a kid, shouted at the other adults to do the same—he pushed a woman towards the other children. "Now. People, get the kids. We need to leave right now."
          They started to move, slowly at first but picking up speed, following the authority in his voice even though they didn't understand. People made obedient by their fear, like sheep.
          Behind him, Nathan asked: "Where the hell are we?"
          And the man whose face had distorted with fear when he saw Adam replied: "Terraria."
          Nathan blinked, a slight wheeze entering his voice as he tried to keep up with the others. "Terraria isn't in Canada, though." He shook his head. "I mean, right?"
          "Canada?" the other man asked. They stared at each other for a moment before Nathan started yelling. Adam looked over.
          "Yes, Canada, North America—you know, the land of perpetual ice and snow, you idiot! So what the fuck do you mean by this Terraria nonsense?" Nathan made a swipe at the startled man—
          —and disappeared.
          "No!" Adam shouted at the others who had slowed when Nathan fell, "do not stop, keep moving. And you," he said, speaking to the boy in his arms, "you need to stop that hollering, alright? It's not doing a damned thing to help either of us." (The boy recoiled, as if he'd been slapped, and then began to cry even more.)
          Disobeying his own command Adam slowed down enough to turn around and see what had happened: Nathan, half his face missing from some monstrous blow, blubbering for them to wait, please wait; the things atop him, tearing at his clothes which had once been so fine, tearing at the flesh beneath and feasting; the trees and their shadows giving up further horrors as more of the creatures appeared, staggering as if drunk, led on by the scent of blood. Human shaped, but only just so: as if their design was one vaguely based on what might have been called a person if you really wanted to stretch the definition.
          One of the creatures looked up from the kill.
          Adam decided he'd seen enough, turned around and resumed running. (And how swiftly he moved, even with the hysterical kid in his arms; flitting past and through the shambling and stunned fellow strangers to overtake a lead position at the head of the pack.)
          The strangers moved as one across the night plain. A soft red glow filtered down from the moon above, offering enough light to reveal ditches and furrows in the ground. A gust of cold wind snatched the cries from their mouths and threw them away.
          Someone drew up alongside Adam. He looked left and saw the tense face of the man Nathan had been screaming at just before dying.
          "Your people are too slow," the man said.
          And it was true: a quick look back showed people falling in ones and twos, those either too slow or infirm or elderly (or stupid, he thought), falling to the ground screaming until their voices were abruptly silenced by the creatures that caught them. He looked away. No time to stop and help. Stop and help and he'd die too. Besides, he had a kid in his care; needless bravery now would be the end of both of them. Adam looked back at the other man. "So, what do we do?"
          "You all just need to make it to the road up ahead."
          "What road?" But there it was, nonetheless. How he could have missed it he didn't know—wait, yes, he did, it was the sudden slaughter that had made anything other than blind escape irrelevant. (Dangerous to act like that, he thought. No excuse to be sloppy.) Torches lined the road in even breaks; maybe, just maybe safety could be found in the flickering rings of light. He shifted the kid in his arms again, and wondered what use the road would be to them. He said as much to the other man.
          "If we can make it over to that cluster of torches—yeah, that bunch over to your left—we'll find something we can use to fight them off."
          "Like what?"
          "A sword."
          Adam stumbled, causing the little boy to scream right into his ear. "Excuse me?" he shouted, momentarily deafened.
          "I said there's a sword." The man turned his head around and relayed his instructions to the rest. As one they veered off to the left, taking their lead now from this man who raced ahead with no visible sign of effort (who hasn't broken a sweat throughout all of this, Adam noted, beginning to tire). Another glance over the shoulder, just in time to see a floating red—
          (eye)
          —sphere blast through the air and slam into a woman.
          She went down, hard, and didn't move.
          Adam looked up and what he saw made him want to howl.
          The sky, darkened by a swarm of red shapes moving in furious synchronicity. And peeking through the shifting mass, the light of the blood moon.
          Surprising himself, he tapped into a reserve of stamina he hadn't believed was in him and charged ahead the last few meters up to the road. Desperation could be a fine motivator at times.
          The clearing rose steeply to meet the torch lined road, and on the opposite shoulder were a thicket of trees, stretching right and left as far as he could spare the quick jerk of his head to see. He tried to slow down, judged the timing wrong, and contrived to fall headlong across the ground. He kept his wits about him enough to twist at the last moment so the kid in his arms didn't take the brunt of the fall. His right shoulder was another story, a painful counterpoint to the burning in his lungs.
          The others staggered into the torchlight, turning to look back the way they'd come. They were worse off than him to judge by their wide-eyed stares and flapping mouths but alive nonetheless. But for how much longer? Shambling shadows before them, swirling darkness above. And what'll your choice of poison be, good sir?
          Making sure the kid was fine, he stood up and looked around. "Swords," he called out, "Where are they?"
          "Over here." The man who had raced ahead was digging furiously, pausing only long enough to snap at others to help him. They balked, but the man won out in the end, managing to persuade them by powerful argumentation such as "the damned swords are in this chest so if you want to live get up and get over here!" and "how daft are you people? I'm trying to help."
          Adam drew closer, his adrenalin turned to anger at the precious seconds wasted trying to convince people too slow to understand just how untenable their situation was. How many swords were there? More importantly, who among them could even use one? They needed guns, not blades.
          "Heads up."
          Adam heard a scream and looked up to see a sword sailing blade-over-hilt at him.
          In one smooth movement he stepped to his left and snatched the spinning steel out of the air with his right hand.
          Everyone fell silent. Whether out of shock that the weapon had been thrown at one of their own or that he'd managed to catch it, or both.
          Adam looked at the other man. Etched his blue eyes and freckled face into memory. And was that a nervous twitch of the jaw muscle, or a trick of the firelight? Later he would find out. Now was the time to survive. Nothing else mattered.
          He had enough time to wonder how, exactly, he was supposed to use the sword when the creatures were on them.
          Flesh petrified and where it hadn't, rotting to pieces. Jellied eyes dripping liquid down pitted cheeks. The stink of decay obliterating all else. Hands reaching up to rend and tear.
          And as if their intrusion into the flickering circle of light was a cue, Adam's sword hand rose to meet them.
          He carved death with every thrust and cut. A diagonal downwards swipe dispatched an eyeless horror before instantly becoming a horizontal strike to another creature as Adam spun to his left, pushing off his right foot. His movements were brutal and final.
          Five undead bodies now made certifiably dead by cold steel lay at his feet.
          A wave of dizziness threatened to drown him. How was this possible? Correction: how was any of this nightmare possible?
          Even as he reeled in disbelief his arm moved the sword again, tracing intimate denials into more grey and worm-eaten flesh. The steel was a natural extension of his body, even if his mind rebelled.
          The other adults, mostly the men, had joined him, making clumsy, too forceful swipes at the enemy—
          —while Adam danced around them all, his body moving of its own accord, parrying and cleaving with the utmost precision and economy of effort—
          —and the flying orbs, the red eyes, came swirling down.
          At the corner of his vision Adam saw the floating eyes flatten adult skulls and toss children into the air. (Too late to save them. Concentrate on saving those you can, yourself foremost. Don't let them get past the sword. Kill anything that opposes. Move, move, move.)
          And then it was over.
          Without warning Adam's perfectly balanced upwards stroke met no resistance, and he just managed to recover his balance.
          The creatures melted away, back across the clearing and into the woods and high into the sky. What made it all so confusing, and all the more chilling, was that the shambling dead and floating eyes made no sound as they retreated—no, as they were pulled away by something.
          He looked up, and a part of him wasn't surprised to see that the red moon was gone.

          In a sense, the easy part was over.
          Adam turned to the others and witnessed: the mutilated dead, grown men and women and children like so much sacks of meat; the survivors, haggard and injured and muttering and uncomprehending; the swords, slick with blood and flashing as dawn broke overhead.
          The blood. Adam looked down and saw his left hand holding a tuft of grass and running it up and down the length of the blade, sopping up the sticky redness. His body was still working of its own volition—and with that thought his arms stopped moving and hung at his side, as if they'd been caught doing something wrong. He flexed his hands and was surprised when they responded. Fine, so he was in control again. However long that lasted.
          What next? He answered himself: "We should keep moving."
          Those not too stunned looked over at his voice. Adam's would-be killer stood off to the side, waiting. His long-sleeved grey shirt was pristine. And where's your sword?
          The other man must have taken his stare as a sign to speak: "Well, where do you think we should go?"
          "You tell me."
          That earned him a small smile. "How should I know?"
          A woman who'd been kneeling stood up. "You knew the swords would be here," she said. Adam offered a silent thank you.
          "Yeah, thanks for that," someone else piped up. Adam couldn't identify the speaker in time to smash the stupid face in. The woman who'd spoken looked similarly irritated.
          "So," she continued, "who are you?"
          "That's debatable."
          Silence, and then: "No, it's not." Her voice had gone cold. A man stood up and joined her, and after a moment another two did the same. This wasn't lost on the other man, who stopped smiling.
          "I just saved your lives," he said, raising his hands in protest. They were free of the dirt from digging, the sort of effort only achieved if he'd been meticulously cleaning them. During the fight, perhaps.
          Adam hefted the sword. Doing so felt awkward now. "What's your name?" he asked.
          The response was instant: "Steven." No hesitation, no visible struggle to remember. They all saw this; they were all paying attention now. Memory loss had, if only briefly, united them against the hint of a new threat, someone who remembered.
          "Steven, if you know something that could help, you'll tell us." Not a question. Now the others burst into chatter.
          "Why were we attacked?"
          "How did I get here? You know, don't you, you lyi—"
          "Are they coming back? Are they—"
          "I heard you say this place is Terraria. I've never heard of it. Where—"
          "Why can't I remember anything?"
          A cloud drifted in front of the sun, throwing them all into shadow.
          "It's best if you don't remember," Steven said quietly.
          "Like hell it is." The woman who'd spoken earlier stepped forward and shoved him. And again, harder. "Like hell it is."
          "You don't understand, what I—hey, stop it!" Steven snapped, "Let me explain."
          The cloud passed overhead. Light returned to the strange land and the silent dead.
          Suddenly, Adam didn't want to hear Steven talk anymore. He had an idea what was coming next.
          Steven said: "I knew where the swords were because I live here. Not here, but around. I'm a guide. My job is to, well, guide people around. Help them. Help you.
          "I am not the enemy. If you remember nothing else, remember that: I am not the enemy." He glanced at Adam.
          "You all have to keep moving," he continued, "Yes, yes, you do: forget about the bodies. You don't even know who they are—
          (don't say it, Adam thought, and then he asked himself, don't say what?)
          "—and you'll never know who they are because you won't remember." He paused, shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry, but your memories aren't coming back. Whatever you were before you got here doesn't matter. And a week or two from now all you'll remember is having lived on Terraria for years."
          Adam looked up at the sun. It gazed back. A full circle, symbol of fury and a promise of pain.