The Dreamscape

Chapter I: Zasha’s Dream
The Memory of Home


A man fell from the sky.

He fell, twirling like a speck of ash, towards the grand city of stone, sails and shrieking seagulls at the edge of the sea. It was a city he’d never seen, from a world he’d never walked on, but he didn’t know. The distant crash of the waves merged with the rush of air past his ears. His loose clothes and his limbs were pulled around by unseen currents, but he floated down gently past the tallest tower of the cathedral, past the garden roof of another building, where a girl in a flowery dress watched him intently, miniature teacup in hand, barely missing the shell-encrusted white stone walls and colorful clotheslines stretched across the street, past the window sign for a bakery, and the sweet-smelling basket being lowered towards a customer on the sidewalk. The man landed lightly on his feet, but he looked so exhausted that he immediately fell to one knee.

He stood out, somehow. Almost as if he was painted with another brush, or cut from different cloth than the passers-by curiously watching him. A dark grey cloak covered him almost completely from shoulders down and, underneath, he wore a foreign, folded-over tunic and loose trousers in muted colors. His hair had the white of dirty snow, and it was caught in a loose ponytail. His skin was pale. He seemed to be anywhere from twenty to fifty years old, and his eyes, when he pointed them around, were of a near-translucent, lifeless blue.

Yet there was something sharp about him. Maybe it was his features. Maybe it was the large, two-handed sword that he was wearing on his back. Maybe it was the intensity he seemed to radiate despite having little to no expression. Even the wagon-driver, annoyed by the road now being blocked, kept his protests decent. The white-haired man raised a hand, and the wagon-driver went silent. With soundless steps, the man with the soot-colored cloak stepped onto the sidewalk, and touched the stone wall. He looked up at the cathedral’s bell-tower, and a shudder went through him. Behind him, the passers-by lost interest and went on their way. They seemed to be oddly blurry, the man curiously noticed. Even when he looked directly at them, it was as if he was watching from the corners of his eyes.

Unless anything happened to draw his attention, he would soon disappear into the crowd.

His steps followed barely-formed sensations. A row of cobblestones looked more well-defined on his right-hand side, and so he crossed the street. An iron trellis grew buds and leaves around the corner of an intersection, and he turned, cloak swishing around his legs. The clear flicker of a scarf in the distance. The cry of a seagull. The dark-clothed man followed these little clues of reality, through crowds of faceless people and shifting hats. Sometimes he judged wrongly, and had to take the next parallel street back. He was used to hunting people and, within a dream, his confidence and reality became nearly one and the same.

For a moment the white-haired man turned around, and wondered what would happen if he forced himself to walk the other way, into the watercolor blur. Into alleyways which began fading from his mind the moment they were out of sight, and re-appeared in other places when he looked again. Into oblivion. There was a siren’s draw to it. But oblivion held in it, for him, the awesome (awe in the ancient way, of adulation and terror) ticking of a clock. It felt like he had held the ticking inside his veins for so long that, now, its ghost remained as a bruise. It ached when his thoughts brushed too closely to it. It was enough for the man to keep moving towards the heart of this place. Which was, in itself, moving.

“I am not your friend.” The white-haired man told the heart.

“No offense meant. I simply don’t feel like the sort of person who would have those.” He continued, softly.

There was no threat in his voice. There was no emotion at all. The heart was a woman, and that made as much sense as anything that had happened to him recently. He remembered a broken, twirling sky, that he watched without being able to move, he remembered hot blood trickling from his hand stuck between two gears and he remembered the existence of pain, so much pain artfully, hungrily torn from him by the teeth of the clock. As soon as she’d turned towards him, the world behind her grew less defined. For a moment, it was frozen.

The intruder in Zasha’s dream remarked that she was unusually tall and muscular for a woman, and wondered if he’d known her. Perhaps one of his apprentices? He’d know that soon enough by seeing how quickly the ruler of this world tried to kill him.

“But then, I’ve forgotten so much. I’m lost.” He whispered, with the emotional weight of ordering a sack of potatoes. He finally broke his gaze, an unsettling, unblinking stare.

“May I accompany you for a while?” He asked.

‘Yes, I, too, carry hidden weapons.’

The snarky thought would have normally been just that, a thought, an aside on the evolution of the handshake from a man in a culture who avoided physical contact, and who was disconnected from his culture in turn, but in the dreamworld it grew into almost a whisper. His lips weren’t moving.

He moved ahead, and felt an immediate sense of wrongness. The quiet crowd, their aimless paths, the fact that he’d seen the same ridiculous fruit-basket hat twice in a row, that was almost normal. So was the fact that the leather gloves faded as soon as he finished the handshake. There was something else. He reached into his pocket, not wanting to rely on a stranger’s generosity, and found coins of red glass. On one side, they had the portrait of a young man with cruel eyes. They melted between his fingers.

‘Blood money,’ he thought-whispered.

Wiping his hand on his cloak, he turned to the side and disappeared between a stand selling linens and scarves, and one selling grilled polenta. His cloak was the darkest thing in sight, yet he was somehow gone without a trace.

“Say…do you have any enemies?” He whispered in the woman’s ear, from behind. Below her ear. “Anyone who might wish you harm?”

He sensed that that the quiet around them was unnatural, but that didn’t prevent him from taking advantage of it. It had felt disturbing to have someone following him, the man realized. Almost as if the earth and the sky had changed places. He’d had to- His eyes were fixed on the azure door. Escape, that was the word.

There was something about that word that nagged him.

The tides of the crowd, this time, brought him back in front of the woman. He opened the door, and was surprised to find a room shimmering with the colors of the sea, blues and greens rippling from beautiful stained glass windows depicting nautical myths. There were solid tables, and a background chatter of voices that lost meaning the more you tried to focus on it. The man looked outside again. There were no signs of the windows. 

“I think I was meant to kill someone.” He said as he held the door open. “Or perhaps I was heading to my execution. Is there any difference, do you think?”

She was so full of life. Gesticulating, not only with her hands, but through her entire posture. Confidence. Warmth. Not one of his apprentices, the man decided. Her ponytail fluttered in front of him like a haze of stars. What had brought him here? He opened the blue door, and the echo of yesteryear’s chatter pulsed above the empty tables for a moment. Silence fell. He slipped soundlessly between slants of dusty-blue light.

“I’ll look for clues.” He said. It was unclear whether he was referring to the ransacked cafeteria, or to the upturned fragments of his own mind.

He walked behind the counter, and started opening drawers. Occasionally he opened them twice, and the second time the door folded downwards, like that of a cupboard, but he found nothing of interest in there apart from a mouse which he gently picked up, and then let go. Occasionally he used a lockpick.

“They are missing a part of their soul. Not in an epic way, mind you.” He continued though the clinking of drawers. He thought he’d seen the woman’s muscles tense, ever so slightly. She might turn against him at any moment, and he didn’t find it in him to care. Yet somehow, her very presence fought the exhaustion locked deep in his bones. Her question pulled out answers from him that he hadn’t known before they were spoken. “Not a lich hiding their phylactery. More like a painter who put their heart into their masterpiece. That…is important.” Unconsciously, the man clawed at his own chest. “The masterpiece is a person. No, that’s wrong.” He shook his head, yet was unable to find the right words. “My target…They are bound to always speak the truth. They pretend to be the Master of the Clocktower, but are in fact a traitor. I was thinking maybe I should tie up some books with thread and string them up randomly in a web, as a trap,” he mused, “for books and the need for order are some of their few vices.”

He found a secret drawer by lifting a fake bottom, but all that was in it was a recipe for hot chocolate. He shared it with his acquaintance.

“And…they are…running away.” He said, shaking his head as if to rattle an idea in place.

He walked out from behind the counter, and his steps kicked up the dust and flour that had trickled down from the drawers. Motes of what he assumed to be sugar glistened in it. It swirled around their ankles like tendrils of mist. He looked down, and his lips tensed.

“Most concerning, however. There is indeed no halva.” He stated.

Did he even know what halva was? No. It still bothered him.

He rested against the counter.

“Why here, in particular, remains a mystery.” He said. “Could we be related?” He eyed her hair. She was one of the very few young people he’d met with hair like his, who also didn’t have the tell-tale red eyes. He was nowhere near as tall, but he’d stood out among the people of the Archipelago, so he suspected it might be something from his father’s side. “But that would be superficial at best. A closer connection, maybe.” Something that related to the way he usually entered people’s minds, although in a more metaphorical manner. “I have killed many people.” He mused.

“I wonder if I have already killed you.”

‘It’s all in the mind.’

That’s what Gray would often say. It was a means of pushing himself further, of encouraging a change of perspective in anyone from his most part-time eyes-and-ears, to his prisoners, to his Lord (What is loyalty, what is mercy? In the end, aren’t they structures we define for ourselves?), of admitting defeat when his dark spells kept him bedbound for days. The mind was powerful, whether he wanted it to or not.

Self-suggestion was something that he had worked immensely on. He’d had to, given the lifelong game he’d played with the Clocktower. He could picture accurately scenes he’d only seen once, and walk among them. Perhaps it was those games of the mind that had prepared him for this. Yet, he couldn’t see it for what it really was.

“Never knew my father. Sailed away; it was that kind of a relationship.” The man smiled. “But you are right. Even if we were half-siblings, there would be no way of knowing, and it would be safer if we were not.”

His work as spymaster, and perhaps a facet of his character even deeper than that, had trained him to look for patterns. Nobles exchanging glances at a shrine celebration; repeated numbers in a silk merchant’s account book; a face in the crowd. It was what had kept him alive. It was what had made life worth living in the first place. For him, to admit that there was no sense to darting through an unknown person’s dream was to betray all that he stood for. Yet when he tried to deny the absurdity, his lips wouldn’t move. He was bound to the truth.

“…A dream, you say?” He pressed long, sinewy fingers against his face. “Then I must have found my target.” 

He lazily turned to the side, following the woman’s hands. Would she pick a weapon? He saw his reflection on the surface of a plate that he didn’t remember, and shuddered. Memories trickled in, and he realized that the amnesia was trying to shield him. That he would have to go back. Back, and be erased. He reached for the nape of his neck, knowing it would touch a cogwheel-shaped scar. ‘My head, on a plate.’ His resolve didn’t waver, but the randomness of his current situation nagged at him. It meant losing control. Control he had fought so long to gain.

“I’ve been fighting for a long time.” He mused. Then he bowed. “I am Gray, Official Torturer of the Archipelago, Assassin of the Azure Dynasty and Executioner for those important enough to waste my time.” The re-found identity lit up his eyes. “What I haven’t had…A holiday. Yes, I think I should like a holiday.” He said, with the blank look of a person trying to convince himself. He must find a way to leave this dream. Yet, did it truly matter if he waited until the dreamer woke up, or slipped into another stage of sleep? This was the end of the line. “Let us talk.” Almost imperceptibly, his thin lips curled in a grin. His gaze flickered to her hand. “Unless you believe that a brick would be an appropriate weapon against me, in which case, please kill me before I get an embolism from rolling my eyes too far back.”

He strode forward, cloak billowing, and found two mismatched chairs that he placed near a mostly-stable table, and brushed all objects involved with a white linen kerchief that he slipped out from a pocket inside his tunic. He gestured an invitation.

“What do you miss most about Pannoa?” He asked.

The eerie physics of dreams broke something inside him. He sat down across from the woman, pulling down the scabbard from across his back and against the table edge, with practiced ease. A little semblance of control.

“Change can be painful.” Gray acknowledged. He would know. Usually he caused it. When he spoke, it was as softly as his emotionless voice would allow.

“The parts of you that you’re missing.” He gestured around them. “They are here, Champion. Not gone, but sleeping…waiting for the right time to sprout again. You may still enjoy them, once the raging storm outside quiets down. And here-“

He, too, had been changed. Although in his case, it had been early enough in his life that he couldn’t imagine being anyway else. At times, the only place he had been able to maintain a shard of his self had been inside his mind. Who knows? His interlocutor might find some benefit in that. She already seemed to be aware of lucid dreaming.

Gray folded his fingers, then turned around and parted his palms in an all-encompassing gesture.

“This is your realm, all of this. Everything here begins and ends with you. Apart from me, you are the only thing there is.” His fingertips trailed over the table. “And then surely, it means that…” He sketched a smile. “By definition, you must matter.”

His eyes met the woman’s.

“…The most.”

Little games of the mind. Not harmful ones.

The torturer excused himself, and took out a throwing knife from one of his sleeves. He cut through the halva as one would through butter. An eyebrow rose in a faint frown, as he tilted a slice of what looked like a mudbrick from his knife-blade onto a piece of admittedly very nice bread.

In his hand, as if sensing a chill deep inside of him, it didn’t melt fully as it did for his acquaintance. He bit into it. His eyes went wide, and he went silent. He continued eating. A shudder went down his spine, as if he’d been listening to a piece of music that particularly struck him.

“So this is what people feel…” He spoke, as the sticky sweetness forced his jaw muscles to contract to the point he couldn’t help but smile. These were another’s senses. Which is not to say that Gray wouldn’t find joy in simple things, but it was just more difficult for him to. Always on guard, always relying on reason over emotion. To be gifted this window into someone’s unrestrained delight, was precious. He bowed his head. “Thank you.”

Aware of the woman’s tears, and choosing to politely ignore them, Gray instead turned to her question. As he spoke, crumbs of halva fell of his bread. The crumbs shaped themselves into a map, then again into tiny moving figurines.

““The Archipelago was a gate.” He explained. A tiny history unfolded, with a figurine kicked from a distant place and coming into the largest island as an exile. “A similar trading port, between the world and an empire that had locked itself from it. Traditionalist mainland nobles, with secrets stashed between their twelve-layered sleeves…warrior caste elites, a hundred years too late for their war…” One figurine, barely the size of a bean, flicked his sword up a hair’s width from its scabbard, while looking down at…“a budding merchant underclass, as mercenary as the rest and twice as motivated. To play all of them against each other took art.” He looked down on the scene. The three archetypes walked around in a circle, each carefully watching the other. Gray snapped his fingers, and they reversed direction.

“Some say I was the true ruler of the Archipelago. I only obeyed Duke, and the Duke is a teenager.” He tapped his finger near the figurines, as if to call them to attention. The deep emotion he held at his Lord’s potential demise showed little as he spoke. “They misjudged him. But if the Archipelago was mine in any way, it was as a responsibility.”

How often, Gray wondered, did he have the opportunity to speak as freely?

“I miss the Archipelago as my place of work. As a creation I helped carve. Not as a home.” He shook his head, and the miniatures too, scattered into dust. “Not that it isn’t beautiful. Many would tell you of the hauntingly beautiful sound of its bamboo forests, its pristine seas, the elegance of its embroidered fabrics.”

He brushed a finger over his temples, thoughtfully. A home requires safety. He’d had to be broken, in order to become who he needed to be.

Or, at least, that was the excuse.

“I had to be someone who put my work foremost. Now, that my purpose was taken from me, I feel somewhat…off-balance.” Gray admitted.

“Did you have a purpose too, Champion? Or a dream you hoped to achieve?”

“You know, if it doesn’t work out,” He added, in an attempt to lighten up what could have been too serious of a conversation, “you could always join the circus. See the world.” He gestured. “Train your back muscles a bit more, and you’d be of the right physique for trapeze.” He tilted his head. “Was it popular here, running away with the circus? I did it.” He shrugged.

Just moments before he was lying on the cold floor of the Tower. Vines had crept over the stone around the man, taking up root in motes of dirt and spiralling up shelves to the spiderweb of metal and glass that encased the sky. Moonlight flowed from the ceiling along swirls of dust.

In the building surrounded by waves, the floor was always cold. Nina had brought Gray blankets, which he'd refused to use. He couldn't tell her the true reason. He took solace in the fact that discomfort would only turn to hypothermia later in the year.

The next moment, he was falling. His mind had fractured, and nothing beyond this moment existed.

Cold. Hollow. Damp. Wisps of cloud flew past him, too thick to see through. To thin to breathe. He couldn't tell time apart from space. His own body felt disconnected, numb. A brutal wind threw him around.

It felt familiar, in a longing way. He didn't know whether longing towards or away from. He saw deeper darkness, and textured darkness, and then once more the chaotic swirl of the clouds, the colour of the inside of one's eyelids when thinking of something else. Darkness, then nothing.

As he fell, the velvety darkness grew depth; the textured darkness grew thorns. Between them, was a thread-thin line.

He felt hollow, and the wind picked him up like paper. He felt weary, and the ground looked a bit closer. His shoulders were sore. On his back he carried the large executioner's sword, the blade he had renamed 'Everything ends here.' It felt more real than him. A sudden gust of wind twisted one of his arms against the sheath, and he remembered-

-pain.

A pain that had been grown from him, inch by bloody inch, until it had blossomed into a thing too beautiful to bear, deeper and more complex than what was left of him. The dream-form of Gray blinked out, and for a moment he glimpsed the cold light of the moon caught in his eyelashes. Then darkness enveloped him, and he kept falling.

He knew that this was just a respite, a moment when his soul had been too weak to endure what could not be endured. That no matter what he did, he would be back in that room with the clock and its monstrous tick-tock. It wasn't true, part of him struggled to surface. It was true no longer. But dream-logic ran on depth, and each of his previous inquiries into the Dreamscape had ended the same way.

He embraced the inevitability, and his uncontrollable swirl became a sharp plunge towards the ground. He embraced the numbness, and his form grew near-weightless, his cloak catching the sharp winds like a black wing. With exquisite control he switched between the two, at once a victim of the hurricane and challenging it to guide him where he wanted. The thin line between the garden of thorns and the grave darkness had resolved into a wall, whose impossibly faraway roots were lost to fog; on it, a moving dot had become a person. A woman in dark clothes, sketched with a sharp brush. A familiar figure.

The wind slammed him against the wall, just high enough to catch its edge with his fingers. With difficulty he struggled to pull himself up.

“I will accompany you for a while.” The man of soot and ash told the dreamer, as his chin raised above the edge. His lips were tinted with blood-dust.

It had not occurred Gray to give her a choice.