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ACH!!! Ze Nein!!!

*smiles* Oo...I still have to write you about that one dream I had in the graveyard!


*sits back and ponders for a moment, trying to recapture the feel of the dream.*

*Sits forward and smiles.*

Picture this scean. It's night, and not night like around here. It's dark, and all around you are concrete squares about 4ftX 4 1/2ftX 8ft with rebar crosses on each of them. They all face the same direction, but they're not spaced evenly and by no means is the ground even. It's rather chopped up and there are little drop offs everywhere, shored up by concreat walls and cinderblock. Also spaced randomly are old trees, so big around you cannot place your arms around them even if there were 2 or 3 of you. Their branches hang low and wide, going as far as 30 feet from the trunk, and every now and then a dim lamp hangs from a branch some 8 feet off of the ground. Each grave is decorated by sorry streamers and tired looking silk flowers, as are the trees, and everything looks a mix of well intentions and going old. Spaced far away from eachother are large houselike structures made of stone with metal bars and gates. They are dark and locked, and old leaves have drifet through the bars to litter the marble tiled floors. The silk flowers on these mosoliums are undisterbed, but fadded with age, and the offerings of food before them have disintagrated to bones. Far away, past more broken gates and dried earthen footpaths through this place, there are large houses, their windows darkened, their doors closed, the air of private brooding hanging heavey over each one.

But lower, outside the relm of the graves are small homes with thatched rooves, where young children sing and dance, and the elders sit in places of honor together talking about what had transpired that day, and cheerful lamps burn as the young people cook their food and play their games, everyone happy and content in the cool of the night after the blazeing heat of the day. Their homes are open on the sides to allow the breeze to flow in, only their sleeping area where their hamocks swing silently is separated, bamboo walls covered in mud assuring the creatures of the night would not bother their slumber. All around, you can feel the comfortable knowlage that here, family reigns.

Small eyes watch all this happening from a croutched possition, hiding behind one of the graves. A small hand is curled around the cold corner as she peeks out at the world from behind wild hair and shadows. Her head turns as she hears the barking of the wild dogs, and she turns and makes her way twards them on the balls of her feet and the nuckles of her small hands. Finding her companion, a young female dog with a new litter of puppies, the girls smiles. She pets her friend on the neck and watches as the puppies roll and tumble in their little shelter between graves. Turning and wandering through the shadows of the graveyard, the little one greets the wild dogs as they find her, and they leave her be, knowing that she was there for the same reason they were. They were all there for the reason of gaurding the houses. Inside the large gated houses were important families, ancient families that were powerful and rich, and secretive. Rumors flew around the happy villages about them, that they were vampires, that they were undead, that they were wizards, that they twisted life itself for their own reasons. No-one knew for sure, only that it was because of those large houses that they could live in peace. Their lands were safe, their families healthy, and the bandits and rouges that roam the land takeing rarely came near them. Their crops grew, their cattle were fat, and their homes were safe. The payed their light taxxes, and lived in peace. Only the elders knew something about what happened at night, what went on, and they kept their peace about it.

The Girl knew. She knew because she was there because of them. She didn't have a name, and her home was the graveyard...not quite human, and not a dog, she was. Time had lost her age, and logic had lost her being. She wasn't really a child, but few would look at her and call her a woman....She simpley was. Her head turned to the side as she heard loud footsteps trying to be quiet on the earthen footpath twards the houses. A long and winding path, she knew every step of it, and every inch of the graves around it. With almost no effort at all, she was laying attop a grave looking down on the path, useing the shadows as her cover, watching as seven young men walked along the path. She knew the men of the village, and had watched them grow from boys. These were not from the village. She saw the wepons they carried at their sides and the empty bags at their sides. These men were there to rob and to kill. A small smile flickered accross the girl's face as she saw them jump at the howling of the dogs. They looked to eachother for reasurance and continued forward. She could easily kill them there....their wepons would not harm her, and even if they did cut her, the houses would take care of it. Silent as a shadown, she moved along the path with them, wrinkleing her nose at their greedy stink, until she was ahead of them. Leaping up into a tree, she silently called, and the men turned around in fear as the pack of wild dogs silently came up behind them. The two groups eyed eachother, the dogs simpley watching with cold eyes, the men sweating and trembling, the stories of the demon dogs of the graveyard yammering through their heads. Finally, the tension broke as the youngest, little more than a boy, turned to run up the path, away from the dogs, and twards the houses. He froze as a wave of terror took him. Standing in the center of the path in front of him, looking small and dark, holding only a small dagger in her hand, was the girl. His scream of the terror was the last thing any of them heard.

After the dogs had carried what was left of the murderouse theives to the houses for proper burial, the girl washed herself in a nearby basin of water. Clean and wearing a new shirt and skirt the Houses had given her for her work, she made her way through the graves to the lowlands, where the happy homes where. They took no notice of her as she slipped through the shaddows from home to home, makeing sure each was undisturbed. Her heart was filled with gladness as she saw each running child, each blushing maid, every young man of the village showing off in friendly contests with other young men, trying to catch the young women's eye.
Slipping out of a shaddow for a moment, she knelt behind an old mother watching the youngsters with happy eyes. The elderly woman had lived a long full life, and it was joy to see her children, and there had been many, grow, court, and have familes of their own. She was the oldest woman in the village, nearing her 100th year, and held the quiet place of honor at the families' table that night. Seven small flowers dropped silently onto the woman's lap, suprising her. Takeing them in her hand, the old woman breathed deep their fragrance and a small sigh excaped her lips.
"Seven this time, my child?"
Licking her lips the girl slipped from the shadows and sat at the womans feet, allowing the woman to see her for the first time in many nights. The woman placed her hand on the girls matted hair as the girl nodded and said in a quiet voice, softer than the wind, "They were for the houses....their hands smelled of blood..."
The elderly woman's eyes opened wide for a moment, and the girl was quick to add, "The homes are safe, the blood was not ours. The children will sleep peacefully."
The womans eyes smiled quietly down on the girl, grateful and secure that if the girl said so, it was so. "Come child...you've been gone for too long."
The girl obediantly came to the woman and sat quietly watching the families with her as the woman's old fingers and a wooden comb patiently straitened out her hair. Munching on a sweet bun, the girl felt at peace, and remembed what it might have been like to have lived with her family so long ago, before she'd come here...before she'd been changed, and before she'd been charged with the safty of the village, and the houses.
The people living their life that night in the village saw only the old woman holding an old wooden comb, talking quietly with herself in the night, a shadow with nothing to cast it at her side.

Hours later, as the music of the village died down into the late hours of the night, the Girl stepped from grave to grave, her newly braided hair feeling fresh and clean in the night breeze. Stopping briefly, she gave what was left of her sweet roll to the mother dog, and cuddled the puppies briefly. Nothing more would threaten them tonight, she knew. The houses kept their secrets, the morning rains would wash the blood from the paths, and in the morning, the village leaders would find seven pairs of sandles in the village square, their thongs sliced in half, and the soles sliced down their middles, never to be worn again. These sandles would be added to the house of warning, and they would pay the appropriate taxxes to the houses for their protection, and they would live their happy lives again, safely. The girl slipped under the gate's bars on her mosolium, and sighed quietly as she leaned back into the bare marble corner of the structure. She watched the pale silk flowers rifled by the breeze on the two graves that shared her home until she peacefully slipped into slumber, waiting for the next night, when she would run the graves again...but for now, she slept, holding the red flower the old woman had placed in her hair.

Hehehe...Erm, that was longer than I'd intended it to be...and I wrote it in the 3rd person....in the dream, I was the little girl. >.< It's just one of those dreams that hangs on you, and once you start telling it, every detail wants to come out, ya know? *shuffles feet* What did ya think?

Heineken???

VUNDERBAR!!!

alright.

Yeah, seriosly

MGD???

for spring break?