Blood Remembered

Rastaban remembered blood. He saw it in his dreams, the same dreams where he heard his mother’s screaming. Soldiers had overrun their camp in the middle of the night, and he’d done as his mother ordered, squirmed under a pile of furs and did his best not to breathe until the noise stopped. But the noise didn’t stop. It got quieter, and there was less screaming, and so he poked his head out from under the furs. Mother was covered with blood and hadn’t screamed in a while, so Rastaban crawled over to her and tried to wake her up.