Your dreams are tumultuous. They come in fits and starts, images barely imprinting onto your consciousness before spiraling madly away. A great multicolored tent, stars and moons and planets sewn into its canvas. Cobbled paths through a grassy yard, old trees shading throngs of faceless bodies pushing and flowing around you. Your hand, nails sloughing off and falling away, followed by fingers, then wrist and forearm. The noises of the jungle at night, loud strange calls of insects and birds and under it something darker more insistent… calling to you seeking you hunting you.

You crash through a thicket of vines and begin tumbling down a muddy slope, colliding and bouncing off rocks and roots until finally coming to rest against a cool flat rock. Rising above you is an enormous hewn stone arch, incongruous with the damp river bed around it.

Dream before the end

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:

The stars wheel, entrancing and grandiose on a scale you haven’t seen before. Constellations brimming with extra points, the colorful hue of nebulas more crisp and defined than you’ve thought possible, the vast of night shines like day. Tearing your eyes away after a time, you find yourself perched upon a vast organic chitinous spar rising out of a glassy plane of perfectly still water. More spars rise up around you, like the spines of an enormous urchin. The sky entrances again, reproduced in dazzling reflection. You notice you are silently crying as tears slip off your chin. The falling spheres further reflect the sky, each droplet birthing thousands of stars anew on its surface.

Finally, your tears reach the water’s surface, finding paths through the maze of towering spires. They start a cascade of ripples, a wave of new form spreading across the infinite horizonless expanse. Above, the stars in the sky follow suit. You stand in a kaleidoscopic painting of light. The points begin to blur, streaking across the sky, leaving a wake of color. The ceiling of the world, an impossibly vast wall of blue-white rippling light.

Something inside you shifts, awakens. You recognize the bundle of knowledge that buried itself in your soul when you stepped back through the portal with the Cosmolabe. You recognize the clouds in the mirror, the dimmed reflection of that star-streaked sky. It all comes into sudden focus. When you search these reflections you are following the perturbations of The Wake, the filtering as dreams ripple through its surface.

Your role in the coming rite comes to you: you must calm the ripples when they form, you must see the sky again. Remember the stars, remember your tears, remember…

… 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.