"While my body lay defenseless asleep, my soul fought so that death would not enter through the window."
I slept among white marble and dim golden lamps, in an impossible palace raised by fever and the exhaustion of my flesh, newly opened by science. Endless columns breathed silence, and the corridors seemed to extend like infinite veins within a kingdom made of dream and twilight.
I ran barefoot through those imperial galleries while a beast pursued me with an appetite for eternity; an immense creature, born of fear, roared behind me as if it wanted to tear away not only my life, but even the memory of my existence.
Its eyes burned within the shadows of that oneiric dawn. It slid between the white columns leaving an echo of death, and each of its claws made the ground of that empty empire tremble. I fled without understanding that the true enemy was not within the dream, but waiting outside of it.
Then the final moment arrived: cornered before an alabaster staircase, wounded and exhausted, I gathered the unknown strength that is born only when the soul understands it cannot yet die. And I killed the beast.
But before falling, in the ferocious agony of its defeat, the creature delivered a final strike that tore my face away in a flash of red and black. The pain was so real that it shattered the veil of the dream.
I opened my eyes in shock, breathing like someone rising from the depths of a dark ocean, still weakened by the surgery that had only just returned me to the world of the living.
And then I saw her.
Perched on my bedroom window, on that silent ledge suspended between night and dawn, was the raptor.
Immense.
Motionless.
Waiting.
Her orange eyes pierced the dimness with an ancient intention, as if she had descended from some invisible corner of the universe to claim what illness had not managed to take. The sky behind her was still dark, barely wounded by a thin line of emerging light, and the room remained still, vulnerable, defenseless… just like me.
I understood then that the dream had never been just a dream.
That imperial palace was not fantasy: it was a fortress raised by something greater within my sleeping mind. The beast that had pursued me had been preparation, a sacred warning, a symbolic battle meant to teach me how to defend myself before the true attack. While my body lay inert between bandages and scars, my spirit had been led into combat so it would not perish.
Because there are nights when the soul sees first what the eyes still do not perceive.
And that bird did not come from the darkness to observe me: it came for my life. But something infinitely greater than its shadow descended upon me and stopped its sentence; a silent, invisible, eternal force that returned me once more to a state of suspended existence among the living, while dawn still trembled behind the window that, behind its walls, held a vulnerable soul.
By León Vechhio
Size: Diptych on vertical fabric canvas. 1.60 m height x 1.20 m width each, raw (unframed)
Technique: Oil painting
Condition: Private Collection
Code: LV-2016-001
Year of Creation: 2016
Author: Lucian Verona
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