Shannon ran as hard as she could down the dark corridor, the beast so close behind her that she could feel it's fowl, hot breath on her neck as it closed in for the kill. With a scream she lost her footing and suddenly realized why...she was falling. The floor had opened beneath her.
She screamed as she fell forever down a shaft blacker than night, her voice echoing off the walls of stone. And she somehow knew...she somehow knew that she was falling towards a floor covered with jagged iron spikes.
'But how could I know that?' her logic asked, piercing the horror of the fall. And with the question her answer came to her simultaneously...she was dreaming. And if she was dreaming, she could control what happened next...she could save herself!
An angel materialized beside her. He descended the shaft with her, although while she spun in circles, he was completely upright, his wings folded and allowing him to fall alongside her at the same rate.
The angel was gorgeous, a man of long gold hair and silver skin with a powerful physique, and Shannon wondered if she had seen him in a painting in the Church. But with this thought, the image of the church corridors in her mind reminded her of the nightmare waiting for her in reality.
And that reality included her parents on trial because of her failure to help them.
"Let me fall," she told the Angel. "Let my die on the spikes, I don't want to go back there."
Just before the pair reached the spikes the angel wrapped his arms around her form and quickly stopped their descent. They hovered a moment, just above what was to be her death, and then started to levitate back up the shaft. She cried at the defeat, her heart had wanted all of the pain to end on a spike.
His wings folded around her, and part of her wondered how he could continue to ascend without his wings, but she continued to cry. His embrace however, washed away her sadness, for it was warm, strong and loving. After a few more turns she couldn't cry any longer and raised her head from the crook of his neck to look about her, for the glow of light had made it through her eyelids. She squinted as she opened them against the full daylight.
She was above the clouds! What an incredible and vivid dream! Clouds floated below their feet as the angel, it's wings now open, soared high in the sky while she remained safe in his powerful embrace. The sun shone down on them adding to her warmth.
Looking around at the magnificence of the sky below she saw a wondrous craft to her right, a ship that was also flying above the clouds. Instead of sails, it had a ring of fire around it's mid-section, this seemed to be propelling the ship through the sky.
In an instant she was flying to a balcony at the rear of the ship and flown through an arched doorway inside it. The angel quickly slowed his flight and turned his body in mid-air so as to be holding her like a baby in a mother's arms. As he continued to hover, he gently laid her down in a large bed covered with white satins sheets and gold pillows.
Somehow, despite the adventure, her eyes became instantly heavy with sleep at the touch of the soft bed.
"Be at peace my child, for you do have a guardian angel," he said to her as he stroked the hair from her face. The soothing beauty of his voice summoned more tears from her eyes, but before they could escape, Shannon closed them and fell into ignorant bliss.
* * *
Shannon woke up in the bedroom's canopy bed. The feel of the bed's satin enveloping her in warm bliss. The dream's images much less vivid now, but the warmth and love from them still very much with her. She smiled as she began to stretch.
Then consciousness and all the reality came back to her yet again, slapping her harder than if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over her.
She quickly sat up and looked around. The desk she knew she had fallen asleep against had been re-organized and cleaned. Her artwork put respectfully onto the room's dining table. Her clothes had been folded and put an adjacent chair. Upon seeing them her eyes went wide in shock and embarassment, for as she looked down at the satin pajama's she now wore in the bed, she wondered how she had gotten them on.
The room and the Church was quiet. The closed curtains blocking the sunlight from the open windows slowing endulating from the summer breeze.