Renato

“People are meant to have dreams… but no dreams last forever,” murmured Father Ignacio Renato Lim.

In the darkened vestry, he focused on a peculiar object on the table before him. It looked like a mirror, but the glass was opaque. Soon enough a vision of the future danced into life before his eyes. Three people ran through the streets. The slight figure of the front runner stayed just ahead of two others and just away from the soft border of black cloud swirling around all three.

Renato had unearthed the skrying mirror four months earlier from the church storeroom and after giving it a good clean, found he was able to invoke images and even voices from the object – though of who or what he could not always say. During skrying, a stream of strange thoughts would flood his mind, in visions and languages both familiar and unfamiliar. At first these had terrified him but he had learned to observe the current while staying calm, and at times even to allow himself to be the medium for it, writing things down in confused handwriting or dictating it into a tape recorder. He could not yet face playing back the tapes or even reading what he’d scribbled down. These things he kept locked in the bottom drawer of his desk.

On this morning Renato found himself remembering all the dreams he’d ever had. And out of this prescient, dark stream, a terrible certainty began to form, like an ulcer on his tongue. He’d dreamed the same dream for over 5000 years – the dream, or nightmare, of her…