Dreamstrider

by Lindsay Smith

  Lady Twyne stares down at me, a low laugh emerging from her. The constellation of shards pulse, illuminating her face with a sickly glow. I claw my way back into the Commandant. If I can just get close enough to my body in the real world, maybe I can force Marez out of it within Oneiros …

  The soldiers drag me to where my body stands with its silent companions just beneath the void of Nightmare’s heart. Within the dreamworld, the Commandant’s breeze turns harsh, ferocious. It fights against me, chattering with wordless anger.

  “The blood of each nation to stoke the fires,” my voice chants into the falling night. “The blood of each to fill dreamland veins and give new life to the master of this world and those beyond.”

  My body’s hands grasp a silver knife. Marez rakes it across the Emperor’s palm, and then holds the Emperor’s bleeding hand up to the oily void. “The Dreamer’s priests would tell you that the Dreamer slew Nightmare, but it was a lie,” Marez continues. “It was the ancestral leaders of the Central Realms who stood against him long ago, using their own power to slay him. They shed their blood to bind him in death. Now their blood will give him new life.”

  The truth of the binding ritual—the truth he hinted at about Nightmare’s death. The truth even Hesse acknowledged was too dangerous to let loose. The truth he died to protect—that people slew Nightmare, not the Dreamer, and that people can return him as well.

  The dark sphere that glows in the center of Nightmare’s ribs laps greedily at the blood; it sucks and sucks until the Emperor’s face turns the color of old snow. The Emperor falls to his knees and then slumps backward into the rocks.

  I choke back a scream. His chest still rises and falls, but for how much longer? There is no time for me to wonder. The Farthing general is next. I hate the blackened glint in my body’s eyes, on my face, as Marez uses it to carry out this vile deed. The general, too, crumples, drained and dried, next to His Imperial Majesty.

  Marez reaches for me; my body’s lips curl back like an animal. “Come, Commandant,” it hisses, flecking spittle across the Commandant’s chest. “We have an arrangement.” My body grips the Commandant by the arms and tugs him forward.

  I take a deep breath, filling the Commandant’s lungs, leaning into Marez’s grip.

  “Vera, now!” I shout.

  Vera twists her wrist back to break free of her captor at the same moment as I throw all the Commandant’s weight to the ground, sending his body and mine both crashing down. Marez briefly loses his grip; as he does so, I dive toward my body, aiming for the pocket with the Lullaby. But Marez is too quick. With a speed I’ve never been able to demonstrate, he uses my body to block my attack while my feet shove away Vera. She stumbles backward into the snow. My body leaps back up to standing and presses its heel into my—the Commandant’s—throat, pinning us to the ground.

  “I should have known that was you in there,” my body says, tone dripping with Marez’s venom. “Sorry to spoil your fun, but I’ve got a binding ritual to complete.”

  Marez snaps my fingers. I never was good at snapping, whistling, any of those things—but now I know my body is capable, and the fault is mine alone. Is the power within me to be a better dreamstrider too? Is failure just inside my head? A soldier shuffles forward with a handkerchief. But it’s not mothwood—at least, not mothwood alone. Something sweet, sticky, cloying that sticks in your teeth and seeps into your gums. Lullaby.

  Marez smears the resin against the Commandant’s lips, and his body shudders as the Lullaby works through his blood. I straddle both worlds for a second, hovering over that ravine—and then I’m falling.

  The Commandant’s breeze dissipates like a halted melody, note by note, and then all at once it’s silent. I’ve completely left the Commandant’s body. I crash to the cold temple floor, if it can still be called a temple. Deep fissures snake up the walls, spreading even as I watch them, and the entire building heaves like a diseased lung. It robs the air from me and makes each pounding of my heart feel like cannon fire under my ribs. I will drown in here. I will drown, or be consumed by the Wastes.

  But there isn’t even a distinction between the Wastes and the dreamworld now. The Nightmare Wastes have flooded our safe haven and consumed it like a parasite devouring its host.

  I need to find a new body to inhabit fast if I want to keep from being devoured myself. I run for the archway of the temple, sliding on mud as I go, crashing into thick sinuous trees and leathery stalks of reeds that snake around my ankles and wrists. I reach the arch and skid to a halt just in time—the cobblestone streets are gone. There is nothing below me but a yawning canyon.

  Dreamer. I want to curl into a ball and weep; the Nightmare air is crushing me like the depths of the sea, and through the poisonous haze, I want to let it. Please, Dreamer. I need the strength to serve your people, your worlds. Please, please help me.

  The only sound I hear is my blood singing through my veins and the distant collapse of the priests’ monuments.

  I bite down on my fist to keep from crying out. Where is my Dreamer? Where are his golden arms, plunging down from the heavens to snap Nightmare’s neck and shatter its heart? But if his priests couldn’t summon him, then who am I to think myself worth his time? I’m clearly not as faithful as I ought to be. I only use his world for petty human tasks.

  Maybe this is why he doesn’t help me. It’s people like me—dreamstriders, Professor Hesse, and Marez—who have brought this upon his world. We must pay for our heresy.

  The tower quivers; its core expands like massive bellows to draw in a deep breath. The stone of the spire begins to crumble, columns and archways turning into bone—the skeletal dragon form of Nightmare. The binding ritual is complete. Nightmare is Marez’s to command. I grip the archway—it’s become Nightmare’s bones, now—with weary fingers as wings, ragged and torn, unfurl from around the monster’s sinuous ribs.

  Nightmare’s wings stretch wide, and we take flight.

  Chapter Thirty

  I scream, but the poison air robs the sound from me. The temple and spire have finished transforming into Nightmare; his wings beat out their grim dirge. We soar across Oneiros as it disintegrates beneath us. The earth bucks and ruptures wherever Nightmare’s shadow falls; Shapers’ homes crumble into the yawning chasms that open up beneath them. With each surge of wings, the stone tower yields into mottled, scaly flesh that drips away, as if from a rotting plague. Three heartbeats thunder through the hallways of the nearly decayed spire—the passages are hollow bones now: one for each nation’s leader, subjugated within this demon’s veins. Nightmare’s head, growing out of the golden prongs, whips around to spy me on its flank—me, the intruder, the bodiless soul. A grinning rictus glimmers around the golden disc, and Nightmare’s laughter threatens to shake me free.

  A lost soul, still clinging to overripe hope. Nightmare’s words rumble inside my head. Still screaming into the Dreamer’s deaf ears.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and flatten myself against Nightmare’s flank. My hands sink into the flesh that’s growing over Nightmare’s bones; I try to pry them out, but I’m sinking, sinking.

  Brandt once warned me about quicksand. Be quick, and you will rush to death’s open arms; walk slowly and death cannot meet you.

  My muscles unclench, but it’s hard not to panic as the Nightmare Wastes consume me. Each prickle of the tar shoots another failure through me: Minister Durst’s disappointed stare; Professor Hesse’s body a limp doll, tumbling to the ground; Brandt’s hand slipping from mine. My nightmares. Here, my mother’s dead dishwater eyes, as my siblings eat the meat from my bones. Here, the tumbler wolf from Lady Twyne’s party, removing its mask to reveal Marez.

  Here, the executioner’s block; as the winking blade falls, Lady Twyne seizes my severed head up by the hair for all to see.

  And there: Brandt. Lifeless and smelling stale. Brandt: his skin like worn velvet as his insides rot away. Brandt in his wedding suit, a Stargazer knife jutting from his ribs. Tunnelers swarm his b
ody like carrion birds, plucking away every last scrap of value.

  This is my eternity, hard-earned through my failure. If only I had never left the tunnels. If only I had never dared to dreamstride. If only I had been a better operative for the Ministry. If only I had never dared to fall in love.

  But the Dreamer dares us. This is what Hesse meant, I think, when he said his works were inspired by the Dreamer and not an affront to him. We’re meant to chase such impossible dreams; we’re meant to bring our nighttime longing to reality through our actions and deeds. The Dreamer fills our heads at night with dreams of what we could become in the day. He does not shape our world. Perhaps what he does is better—he shows us, instead, that the world is ours to shape.

  I cringe as another painful memory lances me through, but the blow is lessened, somehow, by my thoughts. This knowledge may bring me pain, but at least I dared.

  I dreamed.

  The dreamworld is already mine. Nightmare’s words smother me, thicker and even more insistent than the Nightmare Wastes. With your blood, I shall devour your nations and cough up the bones as scraps for those who freed me. Surrender, lost soul. Suffer what you’ve wrought.

  “No,” I whisper. But I’m lost deep within Nightmare’s body as he flies across Oneiros, rot and misery sloughing off him like dead skin. I have no body and no path back to the real world. I am trapped in these nightmares, in the brambles of my failure. Still, I whisper it. “No. No.”

  The last I see of Oneiros are the oozing black monsters consuming every scrap of land. The sky shimmers before us—instead of the brilliant hues of Oneiros, I see Barstadt’s muted gray tones through a tear in the atmosphere. The towers of Banhopf University, the sprawling palace grounds, the Dreamer’s Bay.

  And then we punch through the veil separating Oneiros from the real world. Oneiros’s bloody sky bleeds into a star-spattered night as Barstadt City shimmers before my eyes.

  Nightmare tosses back his lizard-like head and snaps up a handful of guards in his mossy teeth. I see from within him now, a prisoner behind his eyes as the blood offering of the three nations’ leaders swirls around us. Red sprays across the craggy mountain face. My body looks up at us, laughing, unafraid. And why should Marez be afraid? It’s not his body that’ll be lost if Nightmare betrays him.

  You shut me away; you sink your fears and your doubt into the Nightmare Wastes. I’ve feasted on your dead, those who failed to dream, but I can hold no more. Agony needs a new home, and this world suits me just fine.

  “It’s yours, Nightmare,” I hear my voice shout. Marez. “A gift from the Farthing Confederacy.”

  So the Wastes is replete with miserable souls who lost their way, who never claimed the dreams that were theirs, granted by the Dreamer. No wonder they smell of despair and crave the taste of suffering, like an urchin salivating at the thought of steak.

  And Nightmare hungers most of all. Will I become another lost soul who failed to dream? Will he gobble my soul up, too? Can I resist? Already I feel his thoughts mingling with mine, his flesh seeping into me; my lungs fill with chilled air that longs for others’ demise. I crave and crave to suck the happiness and will from every last being, like marrow from the bone.

  I am one with Nightmare as we soar. Our claws tear a rift through merchants’ shops. Tunnelers pour from a nearby grate, makeshift weapons brandished. Down another street, Farthing soldiers cower behind their cart as our shadow swallows them up.

  Our skin drips across the streets of Barstadt, smoldering and smoking, like acid etching Nightmare’s brand into the stone. But out of each brand erupts a new shadowy fiend. They flood the Palace Square in Barstadt City and rake through a clump of constables, drinking up their dreams and hopes. For every soul the monsters absorb, our heart beats louder; our roar swells across the valley, spewing out the stench of hopelessness.

  This is all there is, and all there shall be. Feast on the prison bars that slam shut before the eyes of every soul.

  But I won’t.

  I know what it is to crawl the tunnels all day and night, dragging a question behind me like a ball and chain: Why bother? Why fight? Why not curl into that corner and let the gang’s favored scrape their hands upon me and seize my every last tithe and crumb?

  Because someday I will slip out of the grates and never come back.

  Why dreamstride for the Ministry when Minister Durst shrugs his shoulders at my victories, and Vera and Edina bicker, and Brandt questions my every step?

  Because someday I will do my country right.

  Why long for a boy who lives in a different world, whose life of privilege I can never compare to? Why kiss a boy whose lips have been signed away to another?

  Because love is worth more to me than rules.

  Why pray to a faceless Dreamer, a set of golden arms on a monolith stone? Why scream louder when he doesn’t answer? Why walk his empty lands, night after night, knowing that you will never be faithful enough to earn his greatest gift?

  Because maybe my dreams are enough.

  Maybe it’s not for the Dreamer to make them come true.

  Maybe—just maybe—they’re for me to turn into reality.

  It starts as a humming in my soul, like a summertime insect choir. A warmth unfolds inside me like feathers. Nightmare senses it; his flight falters, and he clips the Banhopf tower, piercing the webbing that keeps him aloft. But he doesn’t hear those desperate words quaking through me. It’s not the Dreamer’s voice. It’s not anyone’s voice I’ve ever known.

  Except for mine.

  Dreamer, I whisper, but it is not a prayer. Dreamer. I am a dreamer, the one who can make all my dreams and hopes and wishes real. We are each our own dreamers. The golden arms reaching down, the faceless figure of mercy.

  It’s me.

  Nightmare screeches. The minions stop falling from him; his skin is evaporating on the furnace of his bones. The monsters look up from their feast, eyes glistening with an eerie reflection.

  “We are all dreamers,” I whisper. “Your greatest gift, Dreamer, is the gift of hope—and you planted that seed in every last one of us.”

  Nightmare’s mouth is a jagged scar, zigzagging through his siege-engine face. It opens wide to scream, but he can produce no noise. Like in so many of my own nightmares, his throat fails him. His body moves against his will. I plunge my hands through his quicksand skin and into his festering, ill-fitting heart.

  And squeeze.

  Golden light rushes through me. My arms are engulfed in the Dreamer’s resplendence. My resplendence. I burn away the suffering and hate that crusts Nightmare’s core like barnacles. I cauterize the rotting flesh so it can drip no more misery onto our world. I am a dreamer, a dreamstrider, and I will keep the embers of hope alive with my glowing embrace.

  I squeeze Nightmare’s heart and he wails; his monsters cower under the painful cry, their human prey abandoned. His flight wobbles and we dip lower, tossing hulking shadows over the mass of tunnelers who have flooded into the streets. Some wield weapons, sticks, chains—beating back the Farthingers. But we swoop away before I can get a closer look.

  Every beat of Nightmare’s heart forces my grip tighter. I embrace my own strength that was waiting inside me for me to accept it. I embrace the Dreamer’s teachings and every unanswered prayer that forced me to fight on my own.

  Because I am the Dreamer—not because I was born with a gift, or because he blessed me with dreamstriding, or anything else. I am the Dreamer because I choose to be, forging my place from my own strange mix of talent and pure luck. Only doubt could stop me—did stop me, for a time.

  I squeeze the oily, cold, shriveling heart.

  The Dreamer didn’t choose me for anything.

  I chose to dream.

  You cannot stop us. The Nightmare Wastes will fill to bursting with misery and despair. It is your failing as human beings. We will always be ready to drink it up and thrive.

  I press my eyes shut and twist my grip on the failing heart. “Then I’ll j
ust have to give them hope.”

  Nightmare crashes against the mountainside, a few leagues north of his first resting place. Every last sinew evaporates under the watchful stars. His heart bursts into a thousand flaming chunks, flinging themselves to the far corners of the world as his body withers away, back to a pile of bones.

  But as each element of Nightmare is sucked back into the Wastes, I lose my grip on the real world. I have no body to grasp.

  I fade. And fade.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I hover on a column of earth inside Oneiros, the land around it collapsed into the nothingness far below. Even in their diminished state, the Wastes call to me. I am a bodiless dreamer, a wanderer, and Oneiros is not inclined to kindness right now. The minions have eroded so much of the dreamshapers’ work, and even though I cast them back into the Wastes when I slew Nightmare, the damage has already been done.

  My soul aches. Its incorporeal limbs and muscles cry out for rest. I want to cry; I need to purge this exhaustion from me. I’m overwhelmed from the Dreamer’s powers rushing through me and the echoes of Nightmare’s poisonous thoughts. But I cannot let myself slip into the Wastes forever. I have to carry on.

  I don’t know what I’m looking for—my own body’s manifestation in Oneiros?—but I have to trust that I’ll know it when I find it.

  I dive from the pillar of earth and soar up instead of down. I feather through the clouds, no longer gorged with blood, and let the mountaintops of Oneiros act like cobblestone streets to lead me home, wherever it may be. My heart sings out as I draw closer—a magnetic reverberation steers me toward my soul.

  I have awakened the dreams within me.

  My throat catches as I approach an unassuming grove of trees. In their midst lies a cleansing pool, like in the Dreamer’s temples. There’s no gilded and carved monolith, and no censers to spew out sharp, wintry smells. No priests in white gowns wait to brush my hair and offer up platitudes about my dreams. Only the promise of purification. I’ve never seen my sleeping form inside Oneiros before, but I feel a familiar tug pulling me toward the pool. It’s me. I can cleanse myself, if I only have faith.