The Dream

Kamari

As I ran through the dense, unknown forest, I moved as fast I could, everything blurring around me, but all in slow motion. It felt as if I could run at this speed for hours. The forest was unknown to me and yet familiar at the same time. I’ve had this dream many times in the past couple of months. It was night, but oddly, I could see as if it was the middle of the day. And just as before, I felt them on me before I saw them. The set of glowing, deep crimson eyes ran beside me in the forest.

The eyes weren’t human; they were animalistic with a predatory edge. I felt as if they could see right into the deepest parts of me. I wasn’t afraid though; somehow, I knew whatever held those eyes was not there to harm me. But just like every time I had this dream, as I ran closer to the predator beside me, dodging trees and jumping over rocks, right as I was about to see who or what held those eyes, I woke up.

Feeling a bump in the road knocked me out of my sleep, opening my eyes to the brightening light of day rising above the mountain next to us as we drove. My mom, Izabele Ostyn, looked through her rearview mirror at me lying in the backseat while she drove.

“There you are, sleepyhead. Finally awake, are we? You almost slept the whole way. We’ll be there within the hour.”

We were driving in our old blue Toyota four runner, towing a small U-haul behind us. Besides the big furniture we had sent in a POD a few days prior, everything we owned was in that small U-haul. We weren’t poor growing up but weren’t wealthy by any means. We kept a modest living, my mom as an ER nurse at a hospital on the outskirts of LA, and I had a job as a vet assistant, mostly so I could be around animals all day.

We drove from LA on a Saturday night to this small town in Washington state. Looking out the window, nothing I saw reminded me of home. It was a beautiful, foreign place to begin again for me. I was anxious and scared to start over in life, feeling a strange connectedness to this place that was vastly different from where I came from.

I had lived in LA all of my life and thought I’d stay there, finish college with my best friend Sera, and get a job doing background dancing for a famous singer or something. Sera and I had been best friends since our first day of dance class when we fell in the mud at the dance studio parking lot when we were eleven. We laughed at each other and ourselves, being attached at the hip ever since. She was the only part of moving that was hard to say goodbye to. Until last week, I thought I saw how my whole life would turn out, ending with Sera and me being those two old ladies in a rickety house with a hundred cats at 75.

My mom, however, seemed to have other plans. She said it was an omen that she got this new job out in the middle of nowhere, and she felt I needed to go, too. If she had asked me a month earlier, I would have declined and gotten a second job to live with friends. But, as it were, I was ready to leave LA and fast. Not to mention, when my mom talked like that, I knew it was serious.

Not many people know this, but my mom is a witch. It’s not the kind you see in movies like The Craft; it’s the true kind with healing spells and the gift of sight. There is no evil in what our family does. We're healers and use our power to help people in need, an elite clan of witches that roam secretly throughout the US. We are known for our strength, with the lineage passed down to a single female daughter. I, Kamari Ostyn, will be the one to inherit those powers. Well, if I am blessed by the Goddess enough to receive them.

The Goddess doesn’t grant all daughters with powers, and those powers had been diminishing through the years for some unexplained reason. There’s a theory that our deity, God or the Goddess, whichever gender seems to fit your need for him most, is the source of this diminishing power. There’s a thought that she is punishing us for the rift between us and our sister clan, the Ravens, who, rumor has it, have moved to the dark arts of the craft.

I’ve always felt closer to the masculine side, though, since I never had a strong male growing up in my life. It has always been just my mom and me. I still don’t know who my father is, nor would my mother even entertain telling me. She refused to tell me whenever I asked and said it was for my own good.

So when she mentioned where we were going, my recurring dream came to mind, and I realized it was calling to me, too. I hadn’t shown many signs of inheriting my mother’s gift except for my dream, which I hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Sera. It felt too personal and intimate in a way to share quite yet. I was being shown this dream for a reason, and I wanted to find out who those eyes belonged to before exposing them to anyone else.

She seemed worried about me not showing many signs at times. Still, she tried to hide it by reassuring me if I did inherit her powers, they wouldn't come into full effect till my 21st birthday in a couple of months when a witch gains her full powers. I'm hoping, since my birthday falls on the winter solstice and this year was supposed to be a Blue Cold Moon, it's an omen of me gaining at least a little bit of my mom’s heritage and powers. I would only be allowed to practice the arts once given the gift. My mom had shown me holistic herbs to use to fight sickness and cuts but held off on the more significant ceremonial spells for when I came of age.

So we packed our things, transferred to the college up here to finish my last year, found a house pretty quickly, and hit the road in the middle of the night. It seemed rushed to leave so swiftly, but Mom had told me her new job started soon, and we needed to go. It took over a day to reach it, and as we pulled up to the house we would now call our home, I suddenly felt homesick.

Instead of the new apartment look and feel we had back in LA with a pool and gym, we pulled up the gravel driveway to an older-looking house with a wooden porch that had seen better days. It had two stories with what looked like an attic up top with a window you couldn’t see through because of the dust covering it. No one seemed to have lived in this house for over a decade. I realized why we could find a house quickly; no one else wanted the old girl.

The old house sat on the outskirts of a forest, with a grassy front and backyard, before hitting a wall of trees. I grabbed my old dance team duffle bag and walked inside the big wooden door to find a dusty living room on my right with our couch already looking towards the fireplace with cobwebs in it. The main hallway greeted you as you walked in through the door leading into the kitchen, with a set of stairs on the left of the hallway leading up to the bedrooms.

I ran up the stairs and looked in all three rooms. Passing the master for my mom, I took the one with my bed already in it, the second biggest one. The third would become my mom’s office and healing room. She got a job at the local hospital as a nurse, but she always had extra things going on when she wasn’t on nurse duty.

Besides the mystery of my father, we have never kept secrets from each other; we were two peas in a pod even though we looked nothing alike. She had long blonde hair that was greying with warm brown eyes, while my long dark brown hair and grey eyes were a stark contrast to hers. Mom always said I carried storm clouds in my eyes by the color and contrast of textures when my mood changed. Personality-wise, however, We were both stubborn, strong-willed, and wild at heart. We had always had more of a close friend relationship than mother-daughter.

I started unpacking immediately to ensure I had all my clothes and toiletries ready because I had class early tomorrow morning. Since the semester had already begun, I would have to catch up on work to ensure I maintained my 3.0 average for my last year of college. I was relieved to find out all the classes I took in LA transferred over, so I wouldn’t have to do any repeats.

I was just grateful they had dance classes here, though their team was smaller than in LA. I hope this time turned out differently than what had happened a month earlier. I know I was still processing everything and how to cope, but dance is my haven, where I could lose myself in the movement and not have to think. What I didn't know then, however, was my dance class would end up altering my life forever.