He must have been three or four years old, standing barefoot in an open field, and he could tell that a storm was brewing.
The clouds overhead were dark, in a way he had seen often enough that he was sure that they were going to burst violently soon. His mother had warned him about clouds like that--had told him that he should find shelter when he saw such things. Where was shelter? The toddler looked around, searching for a cave or a building or at least his mother.
Oh, here she was, scooping him up in her strong arms and carrying him off. He buried his face in her shoulder, and when he looked up again, they were inside the little home where they lived. The familiar surroundings should have calmed him, should have offset the rumbles of distant thunder that he could hear beginning outside, but his fear only grew.
"Calm down, Bird," his mother murmured, holding him close. "We're safe. It's only another storm..."
He could hear the storm coming, but he was unaccountably certain that it wasn't only a storm. "There are monsters coming for us," he insisted, convinced that he was telling the truth, that he could hear their deadly footsteps as a different series of rumbles entirely apart from the thunder. "We're not safe, there are monsters on their way!"
And then, with a terrible splintering sound, the door and the wall around it were smashed in, and soldiers poured through, and the one in front looked awfully young and had a terribly familiar face. His mother screamed and held him tightly, but the soldiers attacked and tore him away from her, and he found himself face to face with the young soldier's familiar, enraged face.
"NO!" his mother screamed behind him. "Don't hur--" But then there was a horrible sound and she fell suddenly silent. He couldn't see what happened to her, and he was afraid to find out, but nonetheless he fought to turn and see her. It was useless: the soldiers had him trapped.
"Please, let me see her," he whimpered. The soldier, the boy in front of him only looked even more infuriated by his pleading, and suddenly there was another terrible noise and everything went bright red--and then black.
Astrit jerked awake, breathing hard and disoriented, and looked around. He was sitting in an office; the clock on the wall said it was past nine, and the windows looked black, but there was a lamp on in front of him, illuminating the papers on the desk that he had apparently fallen asleep on. Dry statistics, if you didn't understand the reality behind the numbers. All they showed (for some kind of value of all) was that the demographics of the region he represented had changed gradually over the past few years.
Rubbing his eyes to clear the sleep-blurs from them, Astrit wished that he could clear that dream out of his mind's eye that easily. The face of that one soldier, especially: that was his own face, the way he saw it in the mirror all the time now, aside from the part where he usually didn't snarl at himself in the mirror. (Usually. Admittedly, he tried it every now and again, just to see how it looked.) He had been a child in that dream, a child killed by an invading force, only the killer was... himself.
His mind wasn't going to stop punishing him for what these papers really meant, was it?
