Coin - Star

Answer to “when you dream where do you go?”

In her dreams, Ahlquist used to always go to her eldest daughter’s bedroom. But after spending two weeks transporting an odd, scorched book to a buyer, she started dreaming of building fires. After her first real close call in her hobby, in which she was almost caught by dockworkers while boarding a ship, she began to dream of that ship. Lately, she sometimes dreams that her arm is back on her shoulder, but slowly rotting away. She prefers the new dreams.

Dream of The Way

Your dreams are tumultuous. They come in fits and starts, images barely imprinting onto your consciousness before spiraling madly away. Boars looking up from a watering hole. A wind swept grassy path looking down on a bustling port, masts of clouds mingling. The night sky, stars twinkling. Unbelievably clear water in rock pools, rising, filling the room filling your lungs there is no door there is no way IT IS SHUT IT IS SHUT IT IS SHUT–and then you’re falling, rising, you cannot tell the lights swim around you above you. It is up, you’re sure then, emerging onto the deck of that ship you know so well, spluttering and coughing into cold night air. The dock workers are there but none help you, none even acknowledge you. The ship is sinking, the water rising up from the hold and spilling out from the hatch across the deck. It has hit something, you see, turning to the bow: a great arch of hewn stone rising from the still ocean surface. They all watch it, and as your heart beat calms from having breath once again, you can hear the chant rising:

It is begun. It is begun. It is begun.

And below that, within it, another voice:

It cannot be undone. It cannot be undone.

It is your voice, and it burns your throat and chaps your lips as the words tear free from your mouth. You wake up covered in sweat and thirsty.

Dream before the end

The time-keeper must chant their hymn to “make-right the time” and synchronize perturbations of time between the worlds.

You are walking along the empty rail tracks, endless ties and stone passing under your feet. Unbroken walls of trees pass in a blur, hours marked by nothing other than the slow crawl of the traveling moon. You do not hunger, nor thirst, nor tire. It becomes meditative, the inexorable march to the East. Without a noticeable transition your mind slips off into a waking dream:

You dream of a curio shop, the air dry and full of the scents of aging paper, leather, and wood. Dust motes dance in shafts of light pouring from windows through which nothing of the outside world can be seen. You’ve been here before. No, not quite… that counter, from Ineb’s back in The City, but these driftwood bookshelves… they were in a little harbor shop at Port Glory: you see the books you paged through, waiting for your chartered ship to finish loading. And there, that stack of carvings was at the trading post near the horn of the dark continent…

Then you hear the discordant crescendo: hundreds of clocks, tucked into corners of shelves, under linens and silks, stacked precariously on the corners of paintings. The shop is full of them. All different makes and models, their little mechanisms whirring, purring, chiming, clicking, gonging. None agree with another, and every spare moment is filled with another’s noise. You feel it as pressure, the cozy shop becoming oppressive and suffocating under the drowning wave of noise.

It becomes too much. You attempt to run from the shop, yanking open the door by the counter, its door’s welcoming bell inaudible under the cacophony. But to your despair the far side is another curio shop. The details are different, a higher roof, tidier organization, but still the clocks. They are louder now, hounding you, driving you. Another door, yet another shop, more clocks. A maze of percussive assault.

Something snaps in your mind, the cladding on a package cracking like dropped pottery. You recall The Gardener, its great serpent visage looming out from behind a odd collection of ship’s figureheads in a corner of the shop. The sibilant tones of its language echo in your mind:

You mussst make-right the time, Horocussstusss. You can ssspeak not only to men, to beastsss, but even to form. Play and lisssten. Lisssten to the ssshifts of The Ssseal, to their thunder and quake. Sssing back in itsss own voice. Conduct the threnody. Your ektara remembersss its reverberation. Trussst it, as an extensssion of yourssself. A ssskill I’m sssure you’ve masss…

… the dream collapses around you as a call rings out up ahead. The world comes rearing back at you, clacking pebbles under foot, dull echoes clanging through the track. Someone’s seen something up ahead, poking out above the forest. A moon-drenched stone arch, still very distant, hangs just in sight along the horizon.