Sometimes, in the dead of night, I worry about things that exist nowhere but in my imagination. I don’t mean anxious thinking—the everyday paranoia that many people always seemed to be plagued with. “What if Father falls off his horse tomorrow and breaks his neck?”, or “What will I do if the price of a loaf of bread gets raised by a few Spelters?” I’ve never found myself worrying over such ordinary things.
No. What I worry about in the wee small hours is something that cannot be explained by logic. I myself know not even why I do it, yet nothing I do can ever seem to chase such unexplainable anxieties away. For why, on this planet, should I feel worry for people whom I have never even met—people who probably don’t even exist at all but in the confines of my imagination?
I sometimes see people in my mind—people of whom I have otherwise never laid eyes—and I see them go about their lives before witnessing their inevitable death. The death never goes unseen.
I usually see their faces when I close my eyes. I can see what these people are doing, I can hear what they are saying, and sometimes, if I listen very carefully, I can know what they are thinking. From time to time a new face might pop up in my mind—these figments of my imagination. Sometimes they stick around for mere hours, while others might stick around for months. Regardless of the time they spend lingering in my mind, they always end up dying in the end.
I have seen many of these imaginary people die in numerous creative—as well as uncreative—ways. In my mind, I once saw this aging man be beaten to death while walking home one night through the city. Another time, I saw a woman who died of disease. Yet another still was of a young child falling into a river and drowning.
For most of my life, I had never realized that these imaginary people I was seeing in my mind were actually real, as were the things that were happening to them.
I discovered this 4 months ago while walking through town, on my way to purchase some fresh eggs at the market for Mother. Amongst the townsfolk walking around, going about their business, I spotted a familiar face.
He was a rather tall, lanky Saldian man with a somewhat long, unkempt grey beard.
