It is difficult to make sense of my dream this afternoon. Sometimes, my mind forms a coherent narrative, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. I blame being an English major for those days. But, more often it's more typical, with my dreams being more variations on a theme than simply one story. There are points to be made, however.

I was a magical practitioner in a holy order, one dedicated to the eradication of an undead menace that was so far winning. Zombies would probably a good enough analogue, but I called them ghouls. There were several things we knew about the ghouls: 1, that they were not a natural occurrence but the result of a magical curse set about by a demon; 2, that once the curse fully took hold the ghoul was a literal extension of the demon's will, to the point that the body could work some of the demon's own magic; 3, that this taking over could be prolonged, defied, but never had we managed to cure someone. I myself was extremely skilled at containing the curse within the infected's body, for all that we rarely bothered with such techniques. Once someone had been bitten by another ghoul, claimed we called it, that was it. It was often better just to kill them.

All that was nice and pretty up until the point my son was infected.

In every variation, my son was infected. There were different reasons, all boiled down to being all my fault. There was a man in the hospital that I refused to allow my son to see. In some cases I merely thought it better he not see the man brought down so low. In one case, the man was my son's lover, and the there was no way in hell I was putting up with that. Another, where the boy was not my son but my younger brother, the man was my lover, and my brother thought of him as a surrogate father. Yet another, there was no man, and my son merely had an argument and simply wandered off into the night. In all cases, we quarreled, and the boy stalked off into the night. He was neither mage nor divine as I was, and could not hope to protect himself from ghouls as I could. So of course, we was infected. He had some weapon skill, so he survived, but he was infected.

As adamantly as I had denied my son to go off on his own, so I denied my holy superiors the right to kill him. "He will be cured!" I shouted, pouring my strongest magics into containing the curse within his body, and taking further precautions of setting him into a holy circle, protected by warders of my own order. Such protections did not work forever, but they worked. As did my daily pruning back the efforts the curse had made in my son's body while I was out researching or fighting. It wasn't possible to rip the curse out by magic, or rather it was, but that would just kill him. You can be sure I checked this fact, on the very man my son had defied me by seeing. I think seeing me kill someone so casually, and ostensibly for him, shocked my son. This was a side of me hed never seen before.

And would get to know all to well.

For in every variation, I failed. And I killed him myself. The first time through, the ghoul occupying his body killed a dozen or so other children, residents of the order's orphanage that I'd stashed my son inside. They were innocent I'd deliberately risked by letting my son live, and their blood was on my hands. That was what I kept thinking as I held the ghoul down by magic and cut it in half with my sword. Thankfully, the rest of the time, I managed to get back before he'd munched on anyone besides my own holy order members, who'd volunteered for the duty. The demon usually tried to trick me, using my son's voice to plead for just a bit longer to live, using magics to confuse and hobble me. But as strong as the demon would have been face to face, he was limited with a puppet. As for the other trickery, my mundane eyes might have seen my son's face, but in mage-sight, all I could see was a body filled tip to toe with the curse. I would wonder later if I could have reclaimed his mind at least, perhaps gotten the opportunity to say goodbye, and sorry, but I never in the moment tried.

My life's work was to kill ghouls. So every time, I killed him.