The woman in flames was back.

In blazes. Burning up. Obviously dead. But still standing in the doorway of Blikrot's sleeping chamber.

Standing, as the flames engulfed her flesh, her hair, her face. The heat that emitted from her burning body made Blikrot sick.

Blikrot wanted to scream. He wanted to shout at the ghost from hell, tell her to leave him alone, but he couldn't. It was as if someone had torn away the tongue from his mouth.

The flesh of the burning woman loosened in the fire. The muscles of her arms seemed to drip to the floor. A strange popping sound came from her burning figure, and it made Blikrot want to retch. The woman grinned. Her gums had been blackened like soot.

"Please..." Blikrot managed to mumble. His voice sounded different to him. It was a young boy's voice. Definitely not the voice of the King of this world, the almighty emperor of Heart.

The ghost's grin widened. Now she raised her burning arms, as if in an inviting gesture, as if she meant to hug Blikrot, embrace him within her devouring flames. She began lurching towards him, grinning still. "Come to me..." Her voice sounded like rattling windowpanes in hailstorms.

"NO! DON'T COME NEAR ME! GO AWAY!" Blikrot screamed.

"Blikrot....come hug me....Blikrot..." The ghost whispered in her accursed voice.

"NO, MOTHER! GO AWAY!" Blikrot yelled, and rolled down to the floor from his bed. That woke him up, and finally the nightmare was over.

Blikrot struggled up with shaking feet. His bed-chamber was cast in soft shadows by the pleasant moonlight coming in through the window. He took a deep breath, calming his nerves and his rampaging heart.

Eventually, Blikrot walked to the balcony outside his bed-chamber. He was greeted by the sweet fragrance that only the night has, along with a gentle breeze. The moon shone on the well-toned muscles of his body, bared for the benifit of the night.

As Blikrot stood on the balcony, he tried to supress the memory that the nightmare had brought back. Again. He tried to push it away from his mind, and the more he tried, the clearer the memory became.

The memory of running across a green meadow, flying a kite. The memory of laughter. The memory of his elder sister, giggling and running beside him.

The memory of their burning home.

After they had played on the meadow for about an hour, he and his sister were happily walking towards their home, chatting and laughing, both anticipating the cookies their mother always had ready for them to eat in the evening.

All their laughing stopped together and forever when they saw that their house was burning. Blikrot saw the fire dragon, velvet red, hideous and gigantic, flying away from their house in fire, flying high and fast towards the eastern horizon. Yes, they had come back just in time to be able to see the dragon that had destroyed their home. Once and for all.

"Did mom get out?" Blikrot had asked his sister. He was only seven back then, and he had this belief that nothing bad would ever happen to their mother, simply because she was the best mother in the world. So he asked his sister this question, thinking she would certainly reply that their mother was okay.

"I hope so," his sister had replied. But her reply didn't conceal her fear, it did nothing to set his brother's mind at peace.

And then it had happened. Through the blazing flames that had taken hold of their home, came their mother, uttering "Blikrot..." through the burnt tissues of her throat. Her entire figure had been engulfed by red flames the colour of blood. It hadn't been long before her mercilessly burnt, crippled body crumbled down to the ground.

Blikrot never managed to forget about it. How could he? That event, that image was forever imprinted in his mind. And it resurfaced in the dead of the night to torment him.

It had not been unusual that on that day they didn't bother themselves about what might have happened to their father. Their father had been a bastard--always drunk, always in a bad mood, always ready to beat the crap out of them.

Sometimes he beat the crap out of their mother, too. Yeah, he had been a regular a-hole. Blikrot had heard, much later, that what happened to them had been the fault of their father. That he had defiled a holy dragon's shrine by urinating near it.

Who knew, right? Maybe it was the truth. Maybe it was just a rumour. But, after Blikrot's army wiped out all the dragons from the face of Heart, it would be easy to burn all their stupid shrines, too.

He had to do it. By any means. He couldn't allow some other dragon to harm someone else's family. For, unlike Alfaer, the previous king, he believed that all dragons were a great threat to civilization.

Alfaer. The previous king. Whose throat he had eventually slit open...

But Alfaer's name brought back another horrid memory. His mouth gagged, his arms and legs bound, and his eyes held open, forcibly, by someone.

He had been forced to watch the merciless destruction of all that he had left after the murder of his mother.

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