His cherrywood crossbow leaned against the wardrobe. The bed was invitingly soft, firm, sturdy, safe-feeling.
After the day, the good, good day sleep found him so easily that he was hardly tortured by the possibility.
---
Scent of alcohol, wings of a moth's back, pain. Naebum can see a mother looking through her window in a country home. In the front lawn of it in the leaves a child plays, and in the distance of this nice place, on the treeline smoke rises. He can see a town, it's architecture lovingly crafted but nobody lives there it seems. Cows roam the town, a herd that nobody prevents. Naebum wanders this place too, the sand there was cold, dry, loose between his toes.
A man and a boy dig a hole in the woods, it's not a very big hole, roughly the size of a pumpkin. They only stop when it's a foot deep, their hands fill their pockets, pulling out countless copper coins. They stuff them into a rag, binding it closed with a knot. The rag of coins goes into the hole, and the boy and man frantically cover it.
When he walks past the forest, the man has vanished and now there is only the boy. He wanders the town, and returns a spade, he sits at the thresholds of houses, waiting for something Naebum doesn't know. Eventually he heads home, the elf follows him still. The boy leads him to his home, and in the front garden he kneels to peel something from the grass. A sweater, and jacket that are often worn together. He holds them to his chest, burying his face, and cries.
Naebum became painfully aware of the anguish he was watching, he had looked away for only a second, but it was then that the boy had left. Clutching the bundle of fatherly garbs against his chest, he looked as though he were sleepwalking, all the energy gone out of him. And soon found his way down into the darker passages of the village. It was in a long stone corridor made from painstakingly cut, smooth stone of a kind he didn't know that he felt it-- a wire-thin hand gripping his ankle, sending him down to the ground.
His face impacted the stone with a grisly crack, and he laid there, feeling his face, crying, while being filled with a strange dread that seemed to have nothing to do with the occurrence at hand. He looked up, for a pale flushed ankle and hand-knit socks. Instead there was only a granite wall, dark and wet. A sound, of wet flesh lapping the surface of wet skin, pained breath, congested, sharp inhalation.
He awoke screaming.