Prompt 256-Heard

When was the last time someone truly listened to you?

Raven couldn’t help the dreams. They came whether he wanted them to or not. Sometimes they were pleasant. Dreams of warmth and love, happiness and bright futures. Too often they were not. Despair and pain reigned supreme in those dreams, waking him in a cold sweat and tears streaming down his face. They were not just dreams.

He was a seer like his mother before him. No one had believed her either. They called her crazy and a witch. They accused her of killing people she had foretold would die and had her committed before she could harm anyone else.

His mother was many things, but she was not a killer. She wasn’t anywhere near the fields when Hank fell off his tractor. She hadn’t made him drink til he could barely stand, let alone operate a piece of heavy machinery. Even without her dreams, Hank’s bad habits would have led to that road one day. Lacelle had died in childbirth. Raven’s mother had been nowhere near the birthing site, and she certainly hadn’t had a hand in impregnating the poor woman. How could they have blamed her for these?

He used to visit her in the sanatorium. They kept her sedated so she wouldn’t try to hurt herself. The night they brought her in, she had tried to take as many of them with her as she could. She always had a vacant expression when he came to see her, often muttering foretellings under her breath, but her eyes sharpened when he began to tell her of his own dreams.

She was the only one who could understand. She had lucid moments as the meds began to wear off where she would impart knowledge to him, tips for understanding the elements of the dreams and warnings not to make the same mistakes she had. Her most fervent piece of advice had been to keep the dreams a secret. She did not want him to suffer the same fate.

One night, Raven dreamt of her disappearing, fading into mist and becoming nothing. Sirens jerked him out of the dream and he pressed his face disbelievingly against the glass of his bedroom window. An eerie glow in the direction of the sanatorium told him all he needed to know. There would be no survivors.

Notes: I spent too long doing adult things tonight that I never got around to thinking about what I wanted to write for this piece. In the end I decided to go a slight Cassandra route, a character who can foretell the future but who no one listens to. There had once been someone to listen though, and in this case it was another seer. There might be more to this story, but it is past my bedtime and I need sleep.

Have a great night! See you tomorrow!

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