Did she die because of me? Am I responsible for her death? I
could hear her just fine, no matter what I said in the dream. Why didn’t I pull
her up? Why did I ignore her pleas to be pulled up? I know she went over the
side willingly to fight, but that doesn’t mean I had to send her to her death
needlessly. She never even swung her great axe, not that I’m sure they would
have been much help. The rest of the dangling crew doesn’t seem unnerved, and
the captain, excuse me, acting captain, the actual captain is in the city,
tells me that someone had to die. ‘Oh well, we’ll have to use someone else
instead.’ She was just a torn dangling rope at that point. Consumed whole by
the gaping shark maw that severed her line. I don’t know if we’ll win this
fight, but she shouldn’t have had to die that way. Why did she have to die?
Because it was a dream and my dreams have plot and someone needed to die? I could feel as I claimed to not hear her
screaming to be lifted up that it was a dream, and that awareness revealed my
claims of deafness as a lie because of my omniscient narrator status. I could
have pulled her up…and now she’s gone, it’s too late. I’m sorry.
I don’t even remember now why the captain was in the city,
only that an enemy has tracked his progress. The enemy’s allies freeze the
water of the bay and they ride orcas or sharks through what little water still
flows. The enemy swims off on his orca, telling a lackey that it’s time to
attack. Somehow our ship has had a slight forewarning of this attack, and that’s
why half the crew went over the side. The frozen bay would make short work of
our ship if we tried to move too much, so we have to defend it while
stationary. Our ship is wooden and we have simple rope to support our fighters.
Armed with great double sided axes, these members of the crew are lowered over
the side to swing at sharks and potential riders while the other half of the
crew holds them up.
I took my narrator camera and hovered within one of those holding
the warriors aloft. I watched as she got nervous. I watched as she sensed the
attack coming and begged to be pulled up. And I watched as the crewmember I
inhabited was unable to hear her. ‘What? I can’t hear you!’ Then the shark
breached, aimed right for her. No rider, but it knew what it was aiming for and
she disappeared in snap of jaws and a broken rope.
The cruelty was that I could not feel the remorse of this
broken line and my inability to do anything to save her until after she’d
already been killed. That was when I truly inhabited the soul of the crewman. I
felt horror that I’d just let that happen, even though logically I knew I could
hear her cries for help only because I was an observer of the dream, and if I’d
actually been the crewman I may have not heard her. If only the acting captain
hadn’t been so blasé about it, maybe if he’d taken it as the opening attack
like he should have, you know, acted like her death meant something, even if it
was just to warn us the enemy was upon us. But nothing, just, ‘Oh, we’ll have
to use someone else instead.’ That I should pull the rope up so we could tie
someone else in. Fuck. I didn’t know her. I never got a name or a backstory or
a proper appearance. I do know she was a deer-taur. And after the dream had
ended I knew that sharks slamming warriors against the outside of a ship’s hull
would end poorly, no matter how many swings it allowed of their axes to fight
them off.
Hopefully the real captain will finish things up soon and be
able to defend himself and us and whoever else needs it. Except for her. There’s
no saving her. I’m sorry.
