The man dreams again of the raven.  

Within his dream, the raven also dreams. The raven’s dream is monochromatic and vast. All of the man’s world is spread out before the raven in a dark tapestry of houses, roads, towns, cities, oilfields, harbours and spaceports.

The next day, the man surveys his land and smiles in satisfaction.

That night, he dreams again of the raven.

Within his dream, the raven also dreams. The raven dreams itself to be a submarine-launched Trident D5 intercontinental ballistic missile. The Trident rises slowly but inexorably from the dead ocean into a monochrome sky brightly illuminated by an enormous black sun and embeds itself in a human chest cavity.

That night, the man dreams again of the raven. 

Within his dream, the raven also dreams. The raven’s dream is vibrant and vast. Its world is a multicoloured tapestry of trees, forests, rivers, ocean and a multitude of unkindnesses. But this is just a falsification, a memory within a dream. In the raven’s real dream as dreamed by the man, there are no trees, forests, rivers, ocean or a multitude of unkindnesses. Instead, there are endless grey fences encircling vast open grey fields, each field centrally impaled by an enormous grey metal structure.  

In a Tanguyean sky, a raven indifferently circles the farm.  Below, the man hears two simultaneously separate sounds: from above, the distinctive cronk of the raven; from behind, a great whooshing rattle. Both of these sounds momentarily precede an indescribable stench of decay that enters his nostrils as he spins around. The ground is rising rapidly around him, obscuring his view of the farm.  

Then, a fantastical flashing flurry of something, a whirling of shadows, glittering scimitars slashing through the soil, a spray of metallic crimson in a monochrome world.                     

The man is gone.

The raven drops from the grey sky and picks methodically at the bloodied earth.

The raven dreams as it flies and it flies as it dreams, and it continues to dream in monochrome, although it no longer dreams within the man’s dreams.

Meanwhile, far and wide, the dead grey land continues to rise.

Dan McNeil is a writer and artist from the UK.  His work has appeared in numerous places, including Alienist Manifesto, Antipodean SF, Bewildering Stories, Don’t Submit!, Fugitives & Futurists, Full House Literary, Hyper-Annotation #001, Interzone Digital, Misery Tourism, Plutonics Journal (vol. XV), RIC Journal and Sein und Werden.

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