"Sometimes the shadow does not come to destroy us, but to reveal what still protects us."
I ran between immense columns of white marble, inside an imperial palace that seemed built from the echo of ancient gods. Dawn had barely begun to breathe behind the stained-glass windows, and a faint light—almost dying—descended upon the endless corridors like a veil of golden ash. Everything was beautiful and terrible at the same time.
Then I heard the roar. The beast appeared from the shadows as if it had been born from fear itself. Its green eyes burned with a savage, cruel intelligence, while its steps shook the polished floor of the hall. It was not chasing me out of hunger; it was chasing me out of existence. It wanted to tear me from the world, erase my name from the memory of the earth, and drink the last trace of my soul.
I ran. My breath struck the empty corridors as I hid between the columns, feeling behind me the deep growl of the beast, closer and closer, more alive with every moment. The tiger could smell my terror. I could hear it tearing through silence with its claws, stalking me like an inevitable sentence written before my birth. And yet, something strange was happening.
While fear tried to devour me, an invisible presence seemed to open small pathways within the darkness.
As if the dream itself had placed before me a silent force that prevented death from completing its work. There was an incomprehensible protection pulsing within the shadows of dawn.
When the beast finally leapt upon me, time broke. I felt the brutal impact of its body and a suffocating pressure, the hot breath of the creature upon my face and the edge of its claws tearing through my torso. In a desperate act, more instinct than bravery, I drove a large iron weapon through its throat. The tiger fell slowly, defeated, while an agonizing roar filled the palace like the collapse of an empire.
But before dying, unexpectedly, it delivered a final strike: that blow tore the skin from my face within a dream so strange that I tried to restore the shattered image of my face. I awoke violently.
True dawn was already rising behind my window, cold and silent, while a massive bird of prey remained motionless, watching me from outside, like a guardian of a boundary I could not understand. Its eyes seemed to know something I did not. Something ancient; something inevitable; something malevolent.
And yet… I felt no death; I felt warning. I understood then that the vision had not been created to destroy me, but to show me that even when evil roars from the shadows and claims our existence, invisible forces continue sustaining us at the edge of the abyss.
Because some battles do not end when we wake up. And some protections are only revealed after surviving the night.
By León Vechhio
Size: Horizontal fabric canvas, 0.75 m height x 1.00 m width, raw (unframed)
Technique: Oil painting
Condition: Private Collection
Code: LV-2013-001
Year of Creation: 2013
Author: Lucian Verona
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