The Dog Days Will Never End

”I feel so bad for their parents.”

The kingdom has been terrorized by a vicious heat wave for years now— Warrior, please save us! You’re the only one who can defeat the menace that is Sirius, the Great Big Black Dog of the Night Sky!

“I know right, I guess that’s what they call a freeloader. How shameful, does that kid not feel any remorse?”

Fear not, I am on it!

The same cut scenes and dialogues I’ve remember beat by beat flash dully on the small screen. I’ve been stuck at this one boss fight about around 3 years now, though it could be more, could be less, I’ve lost count. 

“I’d rather die than live like that.”

The neighborhood ladies continue their gossip, greatly underestimating how thin these walls are— or perhaps this is a new method meant to anger me and lure me out. I don’t mind their words though, after all they speak the truth. These seemingly cutting words merely bounce around my mind like some DVD logo, and once in a while they hit a corner and I feel a pang of pain. But that is all. 

3 years ago I started getting into this strange game. I’m a slave to this game. I absolutely hate it but i’m forced to play it everyday, and the strange thing is, the people around me keep saying that this game doesn’t exist or that it’s all in my head and so, even though I’m confronted by such a monstrosity everyday, I still sometimes doubt my own eyes. 

Whenever I play the game, it feels like I’ve been sucked into it and forced to battle the monsters myself. I may have several issues but I swear I’m not making it up, though, you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to not believe me. 

Today’s another day in the heat wave. I get sucked into a black hole and I once again get transported to Sirius’s domain. 

It’s a big, empty field with borders of forests that serve as bars of this huge cage. There’s supposed to be vast starry night sky above, but everything is swallowed by an overwhelming darkness. That darkness being Sirius. 

Its ‘body’ was akin to a pitch black forest fire with ever-moving soot and smoke. Its black mass seems to stretch and cover every nook and cranny of the sky, not matter how many steps back I take I am not able to see past its body of darkness. Although it is supposed to be fur, the colour was so black it seemed to lack depth altogether, and if you made the mistake of trying to find direction within that mass, you’d be plunged into an abyss with no end.

When I first started getting sucked into the game, I could still see Sirius in its entirety. But day by day he seems to keep growing bigger, though it might just be me growing smaller. Now, all I can make out is his stiff smile from the sky above, looking down like witnessing an amusing game. Either way, I know I only have so much time until I will never be able to put up a fight. 

It’s a suffocating emptiness. A claustrophobia in the expanse of the universe. Sirius has no drooling fangs and no malicious eyes, it simply sits there and swallow you up with its smile. Sirius rarely attacks you directly, it waits for you to die on your own. In this ungodly silence you can hear your own heart palpitations, your own breathing, your own beads of sweat drop into the unseeable ground. 

I don’t have time to calm myself down though, because immediately— the darkness exploded, swallowing up any remaining light and room left in the field, me included. I wish I could say I’ve grown numb to its attacks but it, it scares me so god damn much. It’s fruitless but every time this happens I try to grasp for anything that let me out of this hell. In its presence I become a child afraid of the dark again, except I know nobody’s going to save me. 

My palms are so sweaty the blade in my hands felt like it would jump out any moment. As I breathed in the dense air, the weight drops onto my lungs, filling my body with a ghastly heaviness. 

But I’m determined to put up a fight today. Today will be the day I end this eternal heat wave and defeat Sirius! I simply have to. 

I clench my fists around my eroded blade and blindly lunge into battle, my legs feeling like they’ve been shackled down by the damp grass.

Unclear of even where to start stabbing or even where my target was— I keep at it— whacking and endless sea of weeds that I couldn’t see. The blade I wielded, my only way of getting out of here, slowly grows heavier and heavier on my throbbing arms. Its weight seems to slowly grow, first like a stone, then a corpse on my back, and after a little while— the small iron rod carried the entire weight of the world, crushing my bones one at a time. 

Every time I swung my blade the dark smoke would move, but it would never move to reveal light. It was a rainy day whose skies never cleared up. I keep going. Sirius continues to make no cries, nor does it ever fight back. It stays there, letting you feel the futility of your best efforts.

I continue to repeat this motion to the unchanged darkness, all depending on the blind hope that it will make a difference. My body’s weak, I can only fight for so long until my stamina depletes— I know I can only fight for such a short time, yet every fight feels like an eternity. 

But, just as I prepared to surrender myself— a streak of light flashed past my eyes. For the first time ever, I heard Sirius’s cries. It was an angry one but it contained no fear of defeat, it was that of a parent who was reprimanding their child for disobeying them. As hopeless as it seemed, I suddenly felt empowered by this change.I keep going. 

For the first time in a while I felt my body grow lighter, my vision grow past the murky clouds— maybe I really will emerge victorious today, yes— the dogs days will always come to an end right? Right?

And exactly like a black hole sucking out the light of even the brightest star in the sky, whenever a glimmer of hope shines through this shrouded body, it is immediately extinguished. I am once again reminded of this creature’s immeasurable size and strength. My efforts were akin to hacking at a star with my own bare hands. And I really thought I was making progress, but I’m light years from ever being to fly away from this place. 

The vague limbs I can barely make out grabs ahold of me. And it crushes me. 

This ever so familiar hopelessness and pure anguish stabs at every molecule in my body— and before I knew it, my sword slips out of my trembling hands, or perhaps I was the one who dropped it myself. In this place, I have never had a shout of victory or progress, my cries of pain merely echo into a vast emptiness that reaches no one. It’s so pathetic but whenever I reach this stage, I lose all power to fight. It only suffocates you more and more to fight back— it felt comforting to just accept defeat. Comforting to rest. 

And then its paws drop me onto the ground. 

I bleed to death for the 1095th day in a row while the neighborhood ladies continue to gossip in the living room. 

Today I’ve lost again. 

Today’s just another day in a heat wave.