Ashlyn said she has no dreams anymore, that should not be a lie. A financially stable future in a nice office must be laid out for her after her last year in college. There should be no room for doubt if not when she thinks of Marion telling her she’s still young. It would not be surprising for him to tempt her to consider a precarious, free and wild future.

“Have you ever thought of becoming an artist?” Marion asked.

She glanced at the sketch for their group project. Her sketches are not bad but not good enough to perhaps make money. One must be exceptional to succeed in the arts. Wanting to do something is never reason enough, she was always told. She would have said no, but he would then say things like “Who controls your will?”

The man went outside for a smoke break. These instances remind her of their gap in age and experience. His apartment unit she’s sitting in is bare. Is this what being an adult is like? Keeping yourself a closed book for onlookers? When he went inside to discuss details of the project, she can’t help but notice his lips, his melancholic eyes, and his close distance.

“I’ll be buying some materials we need. Wanna come?”

Ashlyn flushed. What to make of being alone with him? Focus. This is a kind of guy her Father warned her about. Besides, everyone has been telling her she is too obvious with her staring at him in class.

“I’d stay here.”

After he left, Ashlyn cupped her face in glee. Does he trust her enough now to let her guard his house? No, he has always been the I’m-not-tethered-to-this-world type. A shadow hovered outside the window so Ashlyn went out to check if he forgot something. The moment she stepped outside the door, a harsh gust of wind rushed across peeling off the exterior of the apartment rendering everything a maroon, velvet hallway stretching from left to her right. The door remained unchanged. As another wind gushed through, a tome by Ashlyn’s feet had its pages flown open, dancing along with the frantic opening and closing of the door.

It finally stopped. Ashlyn gingerly opened the page of a tome. The door opened too. Just behind it stood a man in a vermillion long coat with his golden, thigh-length braided hair fluttering in the wind.

“Marion?”

The tome slammed close. Ashlyn turned behind her to see a picturesque lavender field whose beauty was marred by the black hooded figure hovering from afar. A pit formed in Ashlyn’s stomach along with a shortness of breath. The shadow hovered close, turning everything in its path black. A small voice screamed at her, “Run!” She ran until she fell. Awake.

Ashlyn awoke in the apartment unit. Marion was on the sofa, not breathing, half-dead it seemed except for a strange light in his chest. His heart was beating faintly. She glanced at her own to see her own heart gleaming too. As if pulled in, she kissed him.

She awoke inside a small tent where a tortoiseshell cat sat in front of her. “Your father’s gonna kill you.” It licked its paws. “If I were you, I wouldn’t have done that. It’s dangerous here.”

Ashlyn pressed down embarrassment to ask the question “What happened to Marion?”

“You are technically intruding, and I suggest you leave because Dalumdum has seen you. It’ll eat your dreams, and you’ll wake essentially a living shell.”

She leaned down. The cat resembled the one at school. It was nice to see it worried for her, although this one’s too straightforward and hurtful for her liking. She petted the cat. “It’s okay. That creature will not get anything from me.”

Out of the tent was the velvet hallway. She figured a page of the tome in front of her equates to opening a door. Following the bluish light she’d seen earlier from Marion, she walked inside a room. It felt like hours as she fell through the deep well of each room, all filled with bright paintings or melodious musical pieces if not with smiling families. All blissful, happy things were guarded by a prancing, faceless, feature-less glowing sprite.

But the lower she went, there was always a window plastered on the walls. From outside the window, a person in an office glanced back at her with dead, soulless eyes as they went around stuck in the same loop of numb routine.

It felt like hours what was essentially a few minutes of turning the pages to scour the two twenty-four rooms for any trace of Marion’s light. Each trip seemed to wear down on her, to see the happy faces and rooms side by side with adults like that. Is this what that cat had mentioned about being dead but alive? But which one is foolishness? The dead, soulless creatures outside the window, or the gullible, naive sprites?

Finally, she turned to the two hundred twenty-fifth page where the light was strongest. Inside was a different room, mundane even. A sprawling, golden rice field was dotted by a single nipa hut. From the hut, she saw a woman that looked like Marion’s mother hugging him goodbye. Another is a woman she’d seen in the Marriage booth before with Marion, greeting him away too with a kiss. Ashlyn’s heart sank, remembering the unwarranted jealousy, but she pressed on especially when Marion approached.

“Why are you here?” Marion did not seem the least bit happy. “I’m sorry but you should go before he sees you.”

“Dalumdum?”She stared straight at him for she expected him to be surprised.

He turned back. “You knew the danger. As an adult, you make your own decisions now. What happens is up to you.”

This man, he does not want to leave, does he? Will he stay like that, a vegetable when she wakes up? But he’s happier here. He never smiled and cried like that before. Will it be better to leave him be?

Murmurs enveloped the place and grew into a deafening, glitchy static as the sky turned deep purple. That shadow hovered close peeling away the land he walked on, absorbed into his void. Before Ashlyn had any time to think, she found herself pushed from the dirt road. She landed on the mud below. Drowning.

She woke up gasping in Marion’s apartment still feeling the sticky mud in her skin. The man looks like he is asleep. If she waited long enough, will he wake up on his own? Dark dancing smoke emerged from the walls circling them both, suffocating Marion. Out of desperation, she grabbed him.

And she awoke. Sitting at a desk inside an elementary schoolroom, she scrawled on a yellow paper, “My dream is to graduate from college.” She saw this before, back when she used to be the smart one representing the school in contests. She had written what she thought was acceptable and noble. She sat down to write, but found herself lacking.

The proctor looked at her disapprovingly. “You have no dreams?” It must be a shame that possessed her to walk away. She walked out only to bump into a short child who brandished her drawing of a fairy with butterfly wings to her as she bounced up and down like any other excited toddler. It was herself.

“You should be exceptional to succeed in the arts. We have to give up our dreams because you have to live. Feed yourself first. Dreams are secondary, learn to disregard them.”

It was her father’s words. Ashlyn looked at herself then, a child of eight not fully understanding everything until a lifetime of hearing that hammered down to her that reality. She looked at herself, now naked from head to toe. As people gathered outside the house to peek, she escaped by jumping into the floodwaters behind their lawn.

Black water swallowed her whole. Her feet weighed down as she gasped for breath but rendered unable to speak or scream. Weightless but heavy. Seeing everything but not being able to do anything. Is this how it would feel like in the future as an adult? Maybe it is. Ashlyn let her hands float as she stared at the bluish light she’d seen from Marion. She wanted to touch it, but it just seemed so far away.

A hand reached out to her from the water, taking it she awoke in the velvet hallway where Marion stood princely in his long coat and braided hair. Yet, the hopeless dread stuck to Ashlyn.

“I didn’t save you, but I am responsible to prepare you for the inevitable,” Marion said. “Dalumdum’s actions are to keep civilizations alive. Our dreams die so we can survive. You can’t keep running forever.”

Ashlyn called out to him, hoping to ease the emptiness that latched onto her from the pit. “You were shining.” She searched for the light in him, but it glimmered. Gone.

“I don’t save people, Dalumdum uses me to lure people to him.” Marion gripped Ashlyn’s hand directing them to touch his cold, placid chest. “It’s empty, you see.” The princely countenance melted to reveal a tired young man with soulless eyes.

So this is where everyone ends up. Empty vessels. Was her Father right all along? She, a prey to lead a numb existence? Whose light was it she was chasing if not his? Marion would fly if he jumped. He was free. He was her inspiration. She stretched her arms as if to fly. Suddenly, it hit her. The quiet screams for freedom she saw in him, she recognized in her own.

She gripped her hand to her own chest. “The light was mine all along?” Ashyln struggled even more to stand as the light she held in her chest turned out a heavy burden to bear. At the sight of the shadow, Dalumdum, draining all colors into its own black hole, Ashlyn had even more the burden to escape as the light pulled her away, naturally repelling the void Dalumdum emitted. Her puny legs cannot take her far. Before Dalumdum’s claws got to her, she found herself pushed towards the door. Marion smiled at her as Dalumdum wrecked the two hundred twenty-fifth page in the tome.

Ah, she almost forgot what she came here for. She darted towards Marion’s direction and dragged him by the arm as the door grew farther and farther away as it dropped towards a pit. As Dalumdum closed in, Ashlyn knew there was only one way to reach the door.

She jumped. And suddenly the light was not heavy anymore. Lightness, like flying. Ashlyn and Marion fell further and further reaching the pit. As the smoke and claws of Dalumdum reached in, Ashlyn closed her eyes, wrapped in warmth and freedom that was there for the first and last time.

***

Alone in the office at night, Ashlyn napped her tears to sleep, scolding herself and cursing coworkers in her mind. Her days for the past few years alternated between numbness and sadness. A notif popped on her phone. It was Marion’s birthday today, huh? She dropped by to give him a message but their last conversation was also her birthday greeting a year ago. She clicked on his profile instead. His mother greeted him on his wall. She smiled to herself as she vaguely remembered the conversation she eavesdropped on before.

Knocking over a notebook, a piece of paper fell on the floor. It was a sketch of a child flying. A flicker of familiar, nostalgic warmth tugged at her chest. She will have to make another one tomorrow. She will make another and another until they pile up and they become wings. And the child will fly.

THE END