A wall of smoke surrounded him. He stretched his hands forward but they merely disappeared in the dark colour that now embraced him fully. He wanted to scream her name, yet nothing but a cough came out of his lungs. The roaring sound of the flames and the cracking of the wood was deafening. As he stumbled forward a large beam came crashing down a few meters ahead. He could not see it fall, yet the noise and the flaring heat that came like a curtain of fire against his face made him fall on his knees.
The ground was black. Everything around him was one large darkness. He did not know where he was, whether he was standing or falling. Every feeling had left his body, as he desperately tried to breathe. Yet all that would enter his lung was the black smoke that now seemed to fill all the outside world, and his inside body. He knew he would die here.
Suddenly, in the distance of the sound of flames he heard voices. A man's voice. A sudden blow of air pushed away the smoke in front of him and he could see how a shade was moving in the flames. Like a demon from the ancient world it stood engulfed by the red and blue of the inferno. It was a large creature, and in the seconds that he was looking at it, it spread its wings large and wide, and grew further before it was entirely swallowed by the black again.
With his last strength, he turned and crawled towards the direction of where he thought he had come from. His body shivering as if in fever, and his breath nothing more but a rattling sound with no air reaching his body. There it was. Light. A beam of yellow surrounded by the black and red of what had been his inn. He knew he had to get out.
In an instant, he opened his eyes and the light had become reality. The warmth of the sun was crashing onto his face. It was beautiful as it was painful. He moved his hands towards his face to wipe away the pain. Yet as he looked at them, he realized that these were not his hands. His heart started racing. Where once had been his skin now was but a white slime, and below was a dark brown red mass of wrinkles and blur. A pain came crashing through his mind as he stared at his scarred and burnt arms.
'Sh sh, all is well. You will be fine again my love.'
The soothing voice of his wife came to his ears and he slowly moved his gaze from his hands towards where the sound had come from. Looking at the face of Sybri, he felt her hands softly touching his wrists and resting his arms back on the bed in which he was laying. She smiled at him warmly and his heart began to calm down, and his entire body relaxed in a last shiver before he fell back into a deep and exhausted sleep.
