Read Online Dreams That Burn In The Night by Craig Strete - Free Book Online

here."
    "I want to leave. I
am frightened. I don't want to stay with demons!"
    "Aomi eats
kindness. It cannot harm you. There is not a kind bone in your body. The beast demon will give
you all you need. Eat of Aomi's flesh for hunger, drink of its blood for thirst. All that you
love is here. For Aomi can be tormented a thousand ways and never die. Go. Aomi awaits the chase,
the feel of death snapping its jaws. Use your hate. Go. Aomi grows restless." The old one put his
hand on Blue Snow's shoulder and gently pushed him forward, toward Aomi waiting in the rocks.
"Give Aomi the pain it loves and hates. Hate is the love that is not a weak pain. Aomi waits for
you. Only the strong fight demons."
    And the old one
pointed to the flowing strength of Aomi gath­ering upon the ground. "Hurry. He waits."
    "How long will I
stay? How long will I do this, old one?" asked Blue Snow, his eyes on Aomi, feeling the fever
rising in him again, tearing him away from the questions that tumbled in his brain.
    "Until you become
gray-haired like me and dried out with the fever and the hating. Who can say how long that will
be?"
    "How will I know
when it is time to stop?" said Blue Snow, his body alive and trembling with the fever and the
wildness.
    "You will know
neither a hunger nor a thirst that Aomi will not fill. That is all you need to know. You will
live a long time, but when the hating stops you will stop. You will know when the' hating stops,
just as I knew when my time to stop had come. For you see, I was once the Aomi's
keeper."
    "Because you
hated?" asked Blue Snow, and then he was gone, forgetting the question, no longer seeing the old
one or living in the world he had once belonged to. Blue Snow saw only the quick coming and
flowing of the demon Aomi. And he killed and killed, and the old one was forgotten.
    "No," said the old
one, talking to himself as he watched with sad, knowing eyes. "No," said the old one, the
rustling leaf that blows gently and crumbles. "Because I could not love."

DANCING THE DEAD SAFE INTO THEIR BEADS
     
    There is a
mountain. The white people who came later had a name for it but the real people who came first
knew the moun­tain's true and everlasting name. They called it Old Woman Mountain. The mountain
was a woman and the Great Spirit was weary of her. All through the ages of the great hot, through the ages of the great leather skins,
in the ages of those who had walked like men, the eyes of the Great Spirit had looked upon Old
Woman Moun­tain.
    Hidden rivers ran
through Old Woman Mountain's stone heart and she stood against the sky, proud, facing each sunset
with the same fierce beautiful smile on her face.
    The Great Spirit
could remember when she had been young and he had loved her, had loved her even as he had shaped
her. Yes, the Great Spirit had loved her as his mighty hands painted her face and put her between
the great sea and the ocean of sand and wind.
    She was Young Woman
Mountain then. Her face had been fairer then, the centuries of living had not yet scratched her
proud face. The mountain rose above the land like the Great Mystery. And those fashioned upon the
plains below her were created that they might love her.
    But even then,
Young Woman Mountain had troubled the Great Spirit. It was as if her heart was too fierce and too
proud. Her beauty was too great, and as with all things past under­standing, she became a
creature of the nightland, a thing of se­crets and terrible passions.
    And so through the
ages, as the creatures of the plains gathered at her feet, she burned through the night of her
life with a strange and terrible beauty.
    Cities, humble and
great, rose on the plains beneath her. First came the cave dwellers that dwelt in her womb,
scouring her cav­ern walls with the birth flame of their cook fires. Then rude huts that dared
the wind and sun, until they gave way to dust or something greater, an ivory city soon to become
an echo on