Chasing Dreams

The first time Jack sees it is on the night he wakes in the pond. He sits perched in the top of the tallest tree next to the water, his back pressed against the tree trunk, hands clutching the staff lying across his lap.

His gaze hasn't left the lights of the tiny town since he fled, torn between wanting to get far away from the people who looked right through him, yet feeling as though he could never leave. He tries not to think too much about anything and watches the steady lights in the distance for hours, their glow both comforting and condemning.

As the lights slowly flicker out, hiding the town from view, Jack decides that he doesn't much like the dark and the emptiness it brings. He sits a while longer and almost decides to leave when he sees it: a shimmering gold strand twisting through the sky straight towards the little village. It splits as it gets closer, spreading into thin tendrils that wind their way through the darkness.

He's on his feet in an instant, crouched precariously on the branch, eyes wide and mouth open. It takes him a second to remember to breathe again, and when he does, it's with a small laugh of delight. He can't remember ever seeing anything so beautiful, and for the dozenth time since he awoke, he debates whether he's dead or dreaming.

He watches until the lights flicker out, the golden threads no longer fed by their unknown source, dissipating into the air. Once they’re gone and he is left alone in the darkness, Jack sits back against the tree trunk, tilts his face toward the stars and feels like maybe he's not quite so alone and afraid anymore.

 

 

It's just over a week later when he sees it again. He can't sleep and doesn't know how long he's spent wandering the town he still doesn't know the name of, peering in windows and trying again to get someone to simply glance his way.

The last light has gone out of the windows, and the streets are empty save for the single dog slinking through the shadows across the street. Jack is used to the darkness by now, but the emptiness and loneliness still hurt.

He looks up when the dark suddenly gets a bit lighter, and he sees familiar golden threads curling down out of the sky. Jack steps out of the way of an approaching strand, watching in wonder as it goes straight through a closed window of a nearby house.

Up close it seems to be made out of sand, millions of tiny particles all clustered together to form a solid stream. But unlike any sand that Jack's seen, every particle of this sand seems to glow with its own light. Such a thing should serve to make Jack cautious; there's no way to know if the shimmering sand could be harmful to him.

But he's too fascinated by the sand stream to keep away, and peeks through the window after it. The strand has located a young girl curled up under a faded quilt in her bed. It swirls around her head, small grains slowly falling to touch her forehead and disappear.

Jack watches this strange phenomenon and finds his innate curiosity overriding any remaining caution. He takes a small leap into the air and flies along the length of the sandy tendril. Under and over it, hands skimming just above the light, but never quite touching. The sand doesn't react to his examination until his fingertips accidentally brush against it.

The sand whirls and flows, shifting into a moving image of the little girl throwing snowballs with several others children. Jack jerks back several feet in surprise, hovering uncertainly, his staff pointed at the sandy mirage.

After a few moments the image fades, dissipating back into the stream. Jack's curiosity wins again, and he touches down lightly upon the ground, taking slow steps toward the sand. He carefully sticks a finger into the tendril and is rewarded with another image, this one of the same girl sitting by a fireplace and unwrapping a gift.

Jack laughs, fascinated by this strange kind of magic, and he suddenly wonders if all the strands are the same. He leaps into the air and flies around the village, touching every stream he can find. He leaves a trail of golden images in his wake, lighting the shadows and filling the emptiness with visions of wonder and joy.

He lands in the center of the town, the expression on his face threatening to outshine the sand's glow as he looks around him. It only lasts for a few minutes, the images collapsing back into their respective streams, and soon even that fades, the streams no longer drifting down from the sky, sending the town back into darkness.

Jack is swift as he leaps into the air. He scans the sky, searching for any sign of where the sand could have gone. For a moment he thinks that he glimpses something - a golden glow in the distance - but when he squints to see it better, it disappears.

He'll find it, he promises himself. He'll find the source of the golden dreams. The thought leaves him with something to look forward to other than another empty night.

 

 

It becomes a game, of sorts, and Jack loves it. Every night he waits for the golden sand to come out of the sky and pounces on it the moment he see it. Dipping his hand into the streams, he flies up and around the golden images his touch produces, playing with the shifting grains and always trying to follow it back to its source.

Sometimes he's close, streaking across the sky side by side with the sandy thread, and he'll catch a glimpse of what seems to be a large golden cloud in the distance. But however hard he tries, he can never quite reach it in time before the sand stream fades, the golden cloud moving with incredible speed to some other destination.

Sometimes he'll follow the sand only to have it disappear before he can even see the sand's source. If he's feeling especially stubborn, he continues to fly, searching for hours on end to no avail.

It's frustrating at times, but Jack's delight in the image-making sand is too big to be overshadowed by his failure. The sand appears every night, so he figures that as long as it continues its nighttime visits to the children of the world, he's bound to catch up with it at some point.

 

 

It's cold on the empty frontier, and the desolation matches Jack's mood.

He's lost count of the days since he awoke in the pond, but thinks it might be somewhere in the couple of hundreds. There's very little to help him keep track of the time, and often the days simply blur into one other.

Jack pulls his cloak a little tighter around him as he sits on the frozen ground, knees pulled up to his chest and arms folded on top of them. The cold doesn't really bother him, but it's nice to have the feeling of something wrapped around him; the physical contact with something makes him feel a bit less lonely.

He rests his chin on his arms as he stares up at the sky. The sky is cloudy tonight, blocking out even the moon and the stars, and the darkness is heavy enough that Jack considers catching the wind and flying to someplace more populated, just to see light. But light would mean people, and people mean disappointment and a whole bunch of other feelings Jack would rather not think about just now. He doesn't think that he could handle being invisible tonight. Better just to be alone than to be surrounded by people who can't see him.

A familiar golden light suddenly streaks across the sky, dipping down towards the earth less than a mile from where Jack's sitting. The temptation of the golden sand is too much to ignore, so Jack pushes himself to his feet and takes off after it.

The sand leads him to a solitary covered wagon stationed by the remains of a campfire, a dozing horse tied up beside it. Jack approaches cautiously, reaching out and pushing aside the heavy cloth that serves as a door.

The sand circles around the head of a little boy, no more than a few years old, nestled in between his mother and father on the wagon floor. He smiles in his sleep at the sand's touch and curls a bit closer to his mother when a cold breath of air enters the wagon with Jack.

Jack fights against the tightening in his chest, a reaction to the sorrow so habitual that he doesn't even have to think about it anymore. He carefully touches the sand above the child's head, wondering what magical images the sand is bringing the small boy.

He stands motionless as he watches the sand images of the boy being twirled around by his mother, then running gleefully as his father chases him in a game of tag. The images are painful and Jack has to turn away.

He walks carefully to the back of the wagon, glancing back over his shoulder for a last look at the happy family before leaping into the wind, shooting straight up into the sky, following the strand of sand with a new ferocity in his movements.

It's another useless endeavor, and Jack finds himself alone in the dark again. This time, he doesn't fight the tears that come and he screams at the moon and the sand and the far-away people who can't see him.

It's the last time that he chases the sand for a very long time.

 

 

It's a complete accident when he stumbles across the sand again. He's been avoiding it for a while, not wanting to see the happy images brought to children in their sleep, reminding him of everything that he doesn't have. For the most part, he's watched from a distance, taking care not to touch the glittering strands.

On this particular night, Jack has spent the greater part of the evening frosting the small village below him, sprinkling snow on the ground and spreading ice on the tree branches. He's so focused on admiring his handiwork that he doesn't see the sand until a strand drops out of the sky, missing him by just a few feet.

His first reaction is to jump back, clutching his staff in front of him like a shield. But he's missed playing with the sand and watching its entrancing images more than he wants to admit.

He spends several moments poised to fly away, but finally reaches out and dips his fingers into the sand. The sand reforms into snowflakes, swirling in a dizzying dance around the small sand child jumping joyfully beneath them.

Jack laughs for the first time in weeks and flies through the stream of sand, interrupting the snowflakes' dance and making gold flecks burst into the air around him. As he reaches out to let a single dream flake land on his palm, he pretends for a moment that the sand snow is for him and not the unknown child somewhere in the houses below.

He lets the sand trail through his fingers and looks up, tracing the stream back into the sky in an automatic search for its source.

The sight of the golden cloud makes his breath catch in his throat. It floats in the sky, larger and brighter than he's ever seen it, and he knows, just knows, that if he tries, he can catch up to it.

He's moving before he even realizes it, whispering to the wind to help him, begging the moon and the stars and whoever else might be listening to please, please let him have just one thing go right.

The wind seems to sense his desperation and pulls him through the sky, bringing him to an abrupt halt a few dozen feet above the cloud where he can look down and admire the thing that he's been trying to catch for so very long.

Jack's eyes widen as he stares. The cloud is roiling, constantly shifting and flowing as the sand swirls and glitters in the dark, just as beautiful as the strands that descend from it. But what shocks Jack the most is the small man standing on top of the cloud, his golden hair and sand-formed clothes making him look like a part of the sand himself. Jack watches in fascination as the stranger shapes the sand between his hands, pulling it from the cloud and directing it out into the night, completely unaware of Jack's presence above him.

Jack floats lower, and acting on a sheer impulse, alights on the sandy cloud several feet behind the little man.

The man whirls around, sensing Jack's presence on his cloud, and Jack freezes in place when the man looks right at him. The stranger wears an expression of shock that Jack imagines is identical to his own, and the two stare at each other in frozen silence.

The sand-clothed man is the first to move, tilting his head inquisitively and taking a step towards Jack. Jack's gasp is enough to stop him in his tracks, and he looks at Jack with puzzlement and concern.

"You can see me?" Jack's question comes out in a rasp, his voice having gone unused for so long.

The man nods, looking surprised that Jack would even ask such a question.

"Are you a dream?" is Jack's next question, and for some reason this amuses the little man, whose face lights up with silent laughter as he shakes his head no. Instead of speaking, sand appears above his head, forming glittering letters.

"Sandman?" Jack reads aloud, and before he has time to question, Sandman beams and gestures inquiringly at him. "Me?" Jack says hesitantly. "I'm Jack. Jack Frost."

He still can't believe this is happening. The creator of the beautiful dream sand can see him and is smiling at him as if Jack is his new best friend. Sandman sits on the golden cloud and pats the space beside him invitingly, giving Jack a welcoming smile.

Jack moves cautiously, as though everything around him will fade away if he moves too fast. As he sits besides the creator of the long-chased sand, he feels a familiar tightening in his chest and burning in his eyes, but for the first time since he woke in the darkness of the pond, it's caused by joy instead of sorrow.