It’s a foggy morning; mist wreathes the dead trees around him, clinging to the forest floor. He can taste the wintry chill in the air as he wanders down the trail, hands in his pockets. Acoustic guitar music, slow and sad and sweet, filters through the fog from nowhere. The crunch of his feet through the leaves on the ground almost serves as percussion.

It’s so calm here, he thinks. It’s so peaceful. Just like I remember.

The forest goes on forever. Of course it would — when he was small, that’s how it felt: huge and eternal and unknowable. The sense of being someone so tiny in a place so vast always soothed him, he’d found. So it is here, where he walks with his eyes almost closed and no destination in mind besides the next interesting creek bed or fallen tree.

He’s so lost in the moment that he doesn’t immediately register what he’s seen, but his brain catches up to the sight eventually: a streak of vivid yellow, somewhere deeper into the woods. It’s gone now, but it looked as though some huge yellow thing had darted between the trees. 

The music stops.

“Hey, is anyone there?” he says, his voice somehow profane amid the sudden silence. “Hello?”

He didn’t bring any yellow things here. It didn’t belong here.

He must not have the hang of this yet, he thinks.

—

“So the nightmares have stopped?” asks the woman in the chair. She has her hands steepled in her lap, giving him a kind but scrutinizing look; he feels as though he’s being measured. 

“Yes,” he says, quietly. The memory of something yellow amid the cold forest still lingers in the back of his mind, but he doesn’t mention it. 

“How does it feel now, when you dream?”

“Peaceful,” he says. He turns onto his back so he can look at the ceiling. He doesn’t like making eye contact with people, and she seems determined to establish it. “Like I’m in control,” he adds, under the weight of her stare.

“In control of your dream?” 

“Yes.”

“So what do you create, when you’re controlling your dream?” she asks, finally looking down at her notepad, pen poised to begin scribbling.

“It’s mostly a place from when I was younger,” he says. “Some woods I spent a lot of time in.”

“Tell me about these woods.”

“There’s not much to tell,” he says. “They were behind my house when I was a kid. I used to go out by myself and hike back there. Probably shouldn’t have — I’m pretty sure it was someone’s property — but it just helped keep me calm.”

There’s a beat of silence.  He expects her to ask another question, but all he hears is the whisper of her pen across her notepad.

“It got me out of the house,” he says.

“Where your father was,” she says, staring at him again. He can feel it. 

“Where my dad was, yeah. It just got me away from the yelling for a while,” he says.

“I imagine that was of great relief,” she says, steepling her hands in her lap again and leaning back in her chair. 

“Yeah,” he says, quieter. Images of belts and fists flicker across the inside of his skull;  he hears the sound of a keening, defiant shout, somewhere between a shriek and a snarl.

—

When he comes home, he works his way through his nightly routine: dinner, reading, bed. Tonight’s book was a fantasy novel — he hopes to give himself some inspiration for the dreaming, and he finds himself reluctant to go back to the woods anyway. Maybe it was the talk about his father, he thinks.

He turns the lights out in his bedroom and lets down the blackout curtains, blocking off the glow from the streetlamp outside. The room is cool, and pitch dark, and he fumbles his way back to the bed while shedding his shirt. 

He has to be as comfortable as possible, he reminds himself. He has to be as calm as possible. 

“I will be in control,” he murmurs to the dark. “I will know that I am dreaming. I will be in control.”

The murmuring continues until it dissolves into sleepy mumbling, then the gentle breathing of sleep.

—

The music this time is a flute, high and lilting through the scene ahead of him: there are sweeping plains as far as he can see, verdant grasses swaying beneath a gentle wind. He can feel the sword at his side, and it makes him feel safer, he finds.

The cobbled road winds onward, by all appearances, forever — and he hums a jaunty tune to himself, reveling in the high adventure of it all. He knows what he wants to conjure up for a thrilling battle, of course, and soon it should come streaking over the mountains —

There it is. A great dragon, wings flapping almost lazily as it rises over the mountains like a sun. Its huge, yellow body swoops low, then high again, the sheer force of its ascent flattening the grass beneath. 

Wait, he thinks. Yellow? Why is it yellow? It should be green, emerald green.

It’s nearer now, near enough to see the way its scales fold over its body like gleaming yellow armor, near enough that he can see its black eyes like onyx stones inside its massive skull, staring directly at him as it plunges toward him.

He tries to pull his sword, but it’s too late. The dragon’s maw opens, and there amid the yawning cavern of its mouth, he can see a bright point of orange light, and then — 

—-

He jerks awake with a start, a scream halfway up his throat, emerging from his mouth as a choked sigh. His blankets are damp with sweat; his entire chest feels cold, and he throws back the covers and switches on the lamp next to his bed, half-convinced he’ll find horrific burns across his body.

There’s nothing. 

He lies back, breathing heavily. 

—-

“I don’t think I have this whole controlled dreaming thing down yet,” he mutters to his therapist, one arm draped over his face. It’s easier to ignore her staring this way. 

“It does take practice,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“I thought I’d let my imagination wander a little,” he says. He takes his arm away to open his eyes; he thought he saw the beginnings of an orange point of light, somewhere behind his eyelids.

“And?”

“And…”

Shame, for a moment, stills his tongue. This is going to sound ridiculous. He’s going to sound like a child, and she’s going to stare even harder and somehow, he knows he’ll have failed some inscrutable standard. 

But he remembers those onyx eyes, and those yellow scales.

“…and I dreamt of being an adventurer in, like, a fantasy world,” he finishes, affixing his gaze to the ceiling.

“A common fantasy, yes,” she says. He gets the impression that she’s trying to be soothing, but he still feels her eyes boring into him.

“I was on a road, just getting started, when I saw this…dragon,” he continues. “I knew it would be there, I wanted it there.”

“You were going to defeat it.”

“Yeah,” he says. “And I figured since I was controlling the dream, I could just…win.”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” he says. “The thing came over the horizon and just swooped toward me and then…”

“Then it won,” she says, and he just knows she’s peering at him over the top of her glasses. 

“All I remember is seeing it take a breath, and then this little light, and then I just felt this heat, and I woke up sweating.”

“Did the dragon represent your father?” 

“What?” he asks, and for a blessed moment his confusion is centered on something outside his own head. 

“The dragon — do you think he represented your father?” she asks again. 

The thought has stopped him in his tracks, leaving him with a strange amalgamation of frustrated terror and relieved comfort. 

Maybe that’s it, he tells himself. Maybe you never lost control. 

“Maybe,” he says, after a moment. 

“Then maybe the reason you couldn’t fight the dragon — couldn’t beat the dragon,” she continues, “is because you don’t believe you could defeat your father.”

“God, I tried,” he mutters; the comfort is gone, replaced by the dull anger that sits in his gut when he thinks about it. More images: a lamp beside the chair, knocked to the floor, hewing shadows into his father’s weathered face. The old man’s withered, wiry body nearly limp. The golf club by the dresser.

He hears that keening shout again.

Hit me, cries the old man. Hit me harder. 

—-

Getting to sleep is harder this time, as is focusing on the mantra. He finds he’s hesitant to put down the blackout curtains for reasons he couldn’t explain if he tried. 

But he manages. He slips back into bed, tugs the covers up around his chin, and begins the little chant. The repetition is soothing, in a way. 

Eventually, it works.

—-

This time he conjures a beach.

The air is pleasantly warm, and the water laps gently at his toes. In the distance, the sun sets the sky ablaze in purple and orange, the light glinting off of the crests of small waves. This is another place he has often felt relaxed; that sensation of immensity when he stares at the ocean feels familiar and calming — that same feeling of being so small regarding something so vast. 

Still, even with his toes curling in the wet sand, his eyes focused on the burning horizon, he doesn’t feel relaxed. He has to force himself to let his shoulders drop. 

“Come on,” he breathes to himself. “Come on. You’re in control. You’re in control. Don’t let it get to you.”

He sucks in a breath as chilly water splashes against his knees. When did he walk further into the water?

“Focus,” he tells himself. “He can’t get you here. You’re in control. You’re safe.”

The sun has almost gone down now; he can see stars winking in the purple sky, and a full moon beginning to take shape amid the gloom. The water seems more fitful now, and one of the waves nearly knocks him off his feet. The current feels as though it might tug him further out into the ocean — which suddenly looks endlessly, hopelessly dark.

“Come on, don’t lose control, get it back,” he murmurs. He can hear the pleading desperation in his voice. It unnerves him.

Further out, the surface of the churning water breaks. From beneath rises an impossibly huge, snapping, yellow fish: something you might find one of those nature shows about the horrors of the deep, all teeth and bulbous eyes on the front of a squat, thrashing body. 

“I know what you are,” he yells. Even to him, his voice is barely audible above the sounds of storming seas. The current beneath him grows stronger, and he struggles to stand straight as the water pulls at his waist. 

The giant yellow fish does not respond — it merely opens its huge mouth, and that fierce current pulls harder, dragging him toward it.

“I know who you are,” he shouts again, and he reaches his hand into the rising water, wrapping his fingers around — yes, he conjured it — a sword. The same sword as his previous dream, in fact. He is in control here, he reminds himself. He can do this. He can win. 

He steps into the flow of the current, keeping his balance as best as he can manage, the sword in one hand.

The fish grows closer. It shouldn’t be able to float there, he realizes. It should have beached itself. It’s too huge. It doesn’t matter. He can win. He can destroy it. 

The bulbous eyes focus hard on him, and it claps its huge mouth shut once, causing an awful snapping sound. He doesn’t slow down. He has to win this.

“I know who you are,” he mutters, mostly to himself. “You’re my father, and you’re not going to keep haunting me. I’m going to be free of you.”

I Am Not Your Father.

The voice sweeps in low and powerful, crashing against the insides of his skull — it’s almost all he can hear, drowning out the sound of the growing storm and the snapping fish. There’s a pressure to it that makes him clap his free hand to his forehead, as though something were pushing against the backs of his eyes. 

You Step Into My Kingdom And Declare Yourself King.

The pressure forces him off balance, and the sword slips from his hand into the hungry waves, disappearing beneath them. The fish opens its gaping mouth again, and even as he scrabbles to tear himself away from the current, he is pulled off of his feet and into the dark. He can feel those jagged teeth scrape against the bare skin of his back and chest as they close around him, and everything goes black.

Usurper. You Will Be Punished.

—

He surges upward, arms flailing, out from beneath the sheets. The whole bed feels damp, and cold, and the phantom sensations of cuts on his back and chest remain. How badly was he sweating?

“What the hell was that?” he breathes, sitting on the side of the bed. He has to say it out loud.

He wants to make sure nobody responds.

—

“A giant fish?” murmurs the therapist, scribbling in her notepad. He’s sitting up on the chair, staring at the floor, his elbows on his knees. 

“Yeah,” he breathes. He finds he doesn’t want to blink; every time he does he sees the image of that hideous mouth and all those teeth.

“And…it said…”

“It said it wasn’t my father,” he says, wretchedly. He’s wringing his hands, pressing his palms together as hard as he can manage.

“Hm.”

“I know what that sounds like,” he continues. He feels like he’s about to cry. He feels terrified. The pressure he felt behind his eyes when that voice came spilling into his mind has blossomed into a painful headache, and he finds he doesn’t want to look up into the flourescent lights of the therapist’s office.

“You do?”

“Yeah, it sounds — it sounds crazy, right? It’s just a dream, it shouldn’t mean anything, but it…it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real. Like it was…inches away from me.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy, it sounds like it may be something deeper than simply a fear of your father,” she says, kindly. For some reason, that completes the proverbial circuit and he feels tears welling in his eyes. He can’t bring himself to respond.

“It sounds like perhaps your fear of your father is the fear of something…greater,” the therapist says. “I think you’re terrified of a lack of control.”

Deep inside him, something mutters, no you’re not, but he stifles it. She has to be right. That’s all it is. A fear of a lack of control.

“Any situation in which you are not wholly in control frightens you,” she says. “With something so totally uncontrolled as your relationship with your father, that’s an embodiment of that fear. It’s the greatest expression of your terror.”

He continues to stare at the floor, tears streaming down his cheeks onto the plush carpet. 

“So I think we should start focusing on that — on letting go of control,” the therapist says. “On trusting your circumstances and those around you a little more. I think if you learn to do that, your issues with your family will seem more approachable.”

“Right,” he says, finally finding his voice. He looks up with a combination of relief and embarrassment — and his breath catches in his throat.

Was she wearing that yellow shirt before? He can’t remember. Did she put it on after he entered the office? Surely he would’ve noticed, after the dreams, if the therapist was wearing a yellow shirt. 

She catches his stare and cants her head to one side, eyebrow raised.

“Are you alright?” she asks, somewhere between curiosity and concern.

“F-fine,” he manages, shaking his head. It feels heavy, as though he’s sloshing around liquid. “I…I’d like to go now, if that’s alright.”

“Of course,” she says. “I have an afternoon slot open tomorrow if you’d like to continue this conversation.”

“Y-yes,” he returns. “I’ll see you then. Thank you.”

“Of course, usurper.”

He stops, halfway toward the door, and turns slowly on one heel, the word ringing in his head. He knows he heard it. She must have said it.

“W-what?”

“I said, ‘of course,’” the therapist says. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

He gives her a long stare, mutters “yes, sorry, see you,” and hurriedly walks out the door and into the street. He couldn’t have heard it. He isn’t sleeping well. That’s it. That can’t be helping things. He needs more sleep.

—

This time, he’s too tired to bother with the mantra, and he keeps the curtains up. He’d rather have the nightmares than see that yellow thing again. 

Despite the thudding anxiety, he’s nearly asleep before he hits the bed. Terror turns out to be no match for sheer exhaustion.

—

He wakes up in the woods. 

He’s lying on his back, staring up at the gray sky, when he feels the first chilly drops of a light rain hit his face. This should have relaxed him. This should have been pleasant. But he didn’t make these woods. He’s not controlling the dream — but he feels aware, just like the last few times he’s come here. The rain feels cold. The leaves beneath him crackle as he sits up. He can smell the wintry air. 

What?

He stands up in near-panic, whirling around to take in his surroundings, searching for the faintest trace of yellow. There’s nothing, as far as he can see, except the dead trees, the withered leaves on the forest floor, and…

…there. Walking amid the trees, almost so far away he couldn’t make it out. A figure wrapped in yellow cloth, coming toward him. He finds it hard to stare at the person, and as they draw nearer, he is repulsed: their proportions are all wrong, with arms and legs too long and the head, its features indiscernible behind the cloth, bulbous and swaying on thin shoulders.

He turns to run, but the moment the thing leaves his vision he feels a hand on his shoulder, its grip impossibly tight.

Usurper.

The voice flows into his ear just like before, and the pressure builds so quickly that he reels backward, kept on his feet only by the steely grasp of the figure behind him. Both of his hands clap to his forehead as though that might stem the tide of incredible pain. Why isn’t he waking up? The monster has him, the pain is here, why isn’t he waking up?

You will not flee from me this time. You will be punished. Here, where you first challenged my authority.

He writhes against the grasping hand, trying to pull himself free. It does not work. The hand digs deeper into his shoulder, and even more pain blooms in his arm as he hears something crack.

You thought yourself a king. You thought yourself capable of controlling this place, of bending my home to your whim.

He shouts in pain, thrashing at the creature’s hand — the fingers too long, too thin — with his good arm, trying to tear himself away from this awful thing and all this pain. 

Usurper. Usurper. Usurper.

The voice is growing louder, and he cannot fathom how his brain has not yet erupted from his skull. He’s going to die in here, he’s certain of it, he’s going to die in his dream and will he wake up then? Will it be over then? He doesn’t know and that only terrifies him more, twisting his stomach into painful knots.

Your mortal fear, your tiny, insignificant peril taints this place. You have stained my home.

“What are you talking about?” he snarls, so lost in the terrified hurt that his caution has abandoned him. “What do you mean your home? Who are you?”

A king, peasant.

“King of what,” he manages, through clenched teeth. 

The world beyond yours. My home. 

“I didn’t mean to…to taint it,” he ventures, uncertainly. Something defiant has ignited in the back of his mind. This thing thought to kill him here? To haunt him, when he has ghosts enough of his own? The terror is slowly morphing into fury, and he can feel his good hand twitch.

Yet taint it you did. Unsatisfied with your lot, you twisted my world to suit your selfish desires. Did you think yourself powerful? Did it soothe your weak mind to wield influence over my home? Did you feel significant?

“The opposite,” he breathes. Anger. Anger. He’s so angry. He’s angrier than he’s ever been. 

Why would an insignificant thing seek further irrelevance?

Through the cloth he can feel its stare, the bulbous head twisting horribly on its spindly neck as it leaned closer to inspect him. 

Come on. You can control this. You’ve done it before. Assume control. Get it back. Do something. You’re not weak here. This thing is not your father. You can defeat it. Get it back. Do something. Anything. Anything —

He closes his eyes, breathes in, and — there it is, his fingers wrapped around the hilt. The sword from the nights before. 

He hears the creature draw in a surprised gasp before he arcs the blade around and shears its hand off, freeing himself. The figure reels backward, gripping the wrist of its amputated hand, and the voice crashes down on him so loud it makes his knees tremble.

Even now you overstep your station!

Its remaining hand reaches for him, and he finds himself dancing backward, taking a swipe at the outstretched wrist. It doesn’t connect, but the monster withdraws, the hand disappearing under its yellow robe. He holds the sword out in front of him, waving it back and forth.

“Don’t come any closer,” he growls. “I’ll fight back. I know what you are. I know what’s going on here.”

The monster’s head sways again as it affixes its stare to him. 

You cannot glimpse my majesty, you tiny thing. The sight would break your mind.

“It’s like the therapist said, I’m afraid of losing control,” he mutters. His left arm hangs useless at his side, and the pain still radiates through his shoulder and upper body. It’s tough to concentrate, but he fights to keep his focus on the creature. 

You believe me to be some deeper part of you. You believe I am some manifestation. Some point to prove.

“Yes,” he returns. It’s distracted. It would just take one swipe to take its head off. The neck is so thin…

You are so small.

It’s nearly on top of him before the sword comes up, but in an awkward swing the blade finds the spindly throat and cuts right through, beheading the creature. It tilts forward, grasping at its neck as its head rolls away, and crashes to the ground.

Immediately, the world starts coming apart. Huge portions of the ground give way and fall into some unknowable abyss; trees shatter into millions of splinters and sweep upward. The wind whipping past him nearly knocks him to the crumbling ground.

Even with the havoc crashing around him, he finds himself staring at the head. It’s come to a stop amid a drift of leaves not yet disturbed by the dissolving world. The cloth has fallen away from the oversized skull; he stares at the many-eyed, alien face, its mouth twisted in an expression of pain, right up until everything goes black.

—

He wakes up again, drawing in huge, greedy gulps of air. The pain in his shoulder feels intense at first, but fades as he rolls over in his bed. A sense of relief washes over him — whatever that thing was, whatever it represented, was dead. 

In one small way, he feels he has reasserted control over himself. Even if he can’t control anything else, even if he has to come to terms with that, he has control over himself. 

That will be enough.

—

It’s too early to go to the therapist’s office, but he finds he can’t really fall back asleep; the adrenaline is taking some time to leave his system. He decides to work it off with a walk.

It’s early enough that the sun hasn’t fully risen. Dim orange-red light pours over buildings and peeks through alleyways; the air tastes cool, and feels pleasantly chilly on his cheeks.

The city is still asleep. It feels vast, and endless, and the sensation relaxes him.
It’s because of the early morning light that he initially doesn’t register what he sees: a streak of vivid yellow, as though some huge yellow thing had darted past the mouth of the alleyway.