He had had this dream several times before, or one like it, but it was not really often enough for Ian to think of it like a recurring dream. Usually, by the time he had it again, he had nearly forgotten the last time. Maybe some details were different each time, too, but things like that tended to fade quickly from his memory. Dreams were just like that.

Ian was in a place that looked a lot like Destiny City, but with the color saturation turned down. The sky was not blue but dark light night time, however there was still enough light at ground level that it did not appear to be night from where he walked. He followed a sidewalk that ran with a street to his left and a low iron fence to his right; the Destiny City park was just on the other side of the fence, and Ian could smell the carefully-trimmed boxwoods. Spaced intermittently along the walk were lamps, in various colors, though only the brightness, not the color, seemed to reach the environment. As a result, everything was bathed in a dull sort of twilight.

There were no cars along the road, but instead lots of people. The city was filled with noise regardless, though - it sounded like hundreds of thousands of voices all speaking at once. Ian could not pick out what any individual one was saying, though. And, strangely, nothing else seemed to make a sound; his footfalls were silent on the pavement.

And so were the footsteps of the person walking with him. Ian was human enough, if shorter, like he remembered seeing the world when he was five or six years old, and around his neck was a collar. Another person, an adult, walked several paces behind him, and held the other end of the leash.

Ian was being taken for his daily walk.

He admired the scenery, his attention held primarily by the people milling about the park. There were others like him there, being walked, and occasionally the red-haired boy made eye contact with one of them and they traded a shy wave. As he walked ahead of his master into the park, he noticed a man with long red hair playing chess by himself at a table up ahead by the side of the path. Ian felt he should wave to him, to communicate with him, somehow, too, but could not catch his eye.

As he got closer, he went out towards the table, realizing that the length of his leash would allow him to reach it when they were close enough. The red-haired man remained focused on the layout of pieces: his opponent who was not actually present at the table was in check, and had an easy way out that would make it easy for the man to trap his pieces again. Or, he could sacrifice his queen to the red-haired man, and give himself a shot at winning through cunning. It had to have been the absent player's turn - Ian knew by looking, somehow.

He was barely tall enough to reach the table (had it grown taller as he approached it?), but he reached out to move the queen to interpose. In spite of the lack of other sounds over the white noise of countless voices, the felt bottom on the chess piece whispered across the checkered board with deafening profundity, and the man with the long red hair raised his eyes to look at Ian, and smiled.

There was a tugging at Ian's throat as his master tried to jerk him away from the chess game, but Ian had to see if his newfound opponent would take the queen. The boy followed the motion of the man's hand down to the board - he picked up the bishop as Ian had hoped - but as soon as he lifted the piece, the one holding Ian's leash gave it a sharp tug that forced the boy's breath to catch in his throat as he staggered back from the table.

Ordinarily, he thought, this was where he woke up. Now, or a moment later when he fell to the ground.

But he was still there, in the town, staring up at the star-filled sky from where he now lay on his back half on the paved path and half on the grass. Would the man with the long red hair pick him up? Would his master come back to him first? Ian's limbs felt leaden and he could barely move them. Perhaps the feeling would fade in a moment and he could pick himself up.

But suddenly, it was as though Ian moved in slow motion as a ball of brilliant light blue light shot towards him. At first he thought it one of the lamps, but they did not move anywhere, certainly not on their own. And this light engulfed him, and filled his body with searing pain. It burned away his skin on his impossibly slow-moving hands as he tried to sit up, stand up, roll away, get away, anything, but as Ian looked away and then back, his flesh was renewed only to crumple to flames and then dust again.

Or, there would have been pain, but he was asleep - instead, there was a strange electrical feeling over his body that seemed even more unsettling. Ian cried out and tried again to move, but now something was holding him to the spot, as well. The grass and pavement, barely visible around him in the painful attacking light, seemed too close for him to be lying on the ground - had he sunk in halfway? The ground itself was holding him prisoner?

His arms became freer, at least, able to move, but it did little good as the light burned his skin away again and again. Ian struggled against it, now feeling weight from the insubstantial light pressing him down more into the ground, as though the pavement was now wet concrete and it was trying to embed him there forever as it tortured him.

"I don't know!" he shouted, his voice sudden and painful in his throat, as though he was not supposed to be able to speak but was managing to anyway. "I DON'T KNOW! LET ME GO!" Whatever the assailant wanted, he could not provide it. Ian tried to fight it off, his fists clenched. Was he still dreaming?

Then there was something in his hand. Or the awareness of something small, like a chess piece, pressed into his palm reached his mind. Trying to turn away, to shield himself from the unrelenting light, Ian slowly uncurled his fingers, to see what he had grabbed. Or what had been given to him.

It was a chess queen.

And then it was a figurine of the man with the long red hair, carved out of the same wood as a chess piece, in such intricate detail that Ian could see each individual strand of his hair, the tiredness in his eyes, every grain in the wood itself--

Finally, his heart pounding, Ian jerked awake, pushing himself up as he studied his sweaty palms.

His hands held nothing here.