by Aaron Pogue
“And you blame Ephitel?”
“I blame order. I blame reason. I blame schools and science. The traitor Ephitel will open those floodgates just to fill his cup, and everything I’ve made will wash away.”
“Does it have to be so grim as that?”
Oberon sighed. “I had a dream. But now this world, like every world, awakes to sad reality.”
“Because of Ephitel! We can stop Ephitel.”
“I wish that were enough.”
“That is enough. If the thing you fear is guns, we can take away his guns. If the thing you fear is challenge, we can answer his challenge. Swiftly and absolutely. Even if some of your soldiers die, is it not worth that sacrifice to save a world?”
“Would you sacrifice the members of your crew to save your ship?”
“Aye. I have. I could name you half a dozen worthy men who gave their lives to the roaring waves. That is the nature of the game we play.”
“And nothing in that answer surprises me. But would you sacrifice Iryana for the sake of your ship?”
Corin hesitated, jaw hanging open. “I…”
“That is what you’re suggesting. I would fight my brothers to save this land. I would lead soldiers into battle for a greater good. But how many of my children, how many of my loyal subjects can I risk just to protect my dream?”
“Stop calling it a dream!” Corin said. “Even if that’s where it began—”
“It is a dream.”
“It is my world,” Corin said. “This is reality to me. I have never known a yesterworld. This—” He waved around him. “This is my real life.”
“Not this,” Oberon said. “Surely you don’t mean your time here in Gesoelig.”
“I do. I mean my other life, too—the fate of Iryana and my crew burns bright and real inside my heart—but since I’ve come here, I have met real people. I have come to know Maurelle and Kellen, Avery and Ephitel. All of this is real, and I would fight for it!”
Oberon smiled despite his tears. “You soothe my aching spirit, Corin Hugh. But it serves you not to think of this as real. As I said before, this time is neither past nor future. It is a dream within a dream.”
“What does that mean?”
“It isn’t real. It’s even less real than the life you left behind. It is just a sliver of my memory, trapped in time and saved to share with you—”
“With me? A pirate out of Aepoli? I scarce believe it.”
Oberon hesitated. Corin watched while the king considered sticking to the flattering lie, but Oberon shrugged and answered, “No. Not so specifically. It was preserved for anyone who might come later. This, just as the Isle of Mists, has long been part of my plan.”
“So you remember what comes next? You remember how these things will go?”
“Not…entirely. There already have been changes. Your presence shifts the narrative, and every little act has ripples.”
“Ripples?”
“Who will die and who will live. You’ve saved a normal city’s worth of souls by discovering Ephitel’s plans for the piazza. You’ve changed the fates of all my regiments who might have been rescuing the fallen in the hours to come. I cannot predict how much will shift from that—”
“But I have changed the future? Or…the past? I have changed how the story goes? If I can save a hundred thousand lives, then I can finish one.”
“Do not spend your energy on that. Killing Ephitel would gain you nothing.”
“Why are you so determined to give up? Killing Ephitel would save the world.”
Oberon shook his head. “That would do no good.”
“It would make him dead.”
“Please, Corin, that is not how this story goes. There are more profitable ways to spend our time.”
“More profitable than saving your kingdom?”
“From this threat, in this dream, yes.”
“How? How can that possibly be true?”
“Because it’s all become too much. When the world was yet young, I had no trouble keeping it alive. But the years weigh heavy on me now. Even without Ephitel, I would be weak. Even without the threat of gunpowder and blood, my time would be limited.”
Corin shrugged. “We all grow old. That is no reason to despair. You may find a better successor than Ephitel. Delaen or Aemilia. Or…oh.” He swallowed hard. “Is that why you’ve chosen me? Is that why you brought me here?”
“A pirate out of Aepoli?” He chuckled. “I could do worse. But no. There is no succession for me. For who but I could dream my dreams? When I die, the dream dies with me.”
Corin gaped. “The…the dream? The world?”
“The world and everything in it.”
Corin forced a smile. “Then I suppose we should be glad this is a memory. We should be glad to know that you survived—”
“I didn’t.”
Corin shook his head. “You did. You must have.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t know, last time, but I remember now. It took everything I had to move the city.”
“Then don’t—”
“I have no choice. This is my memory, and I remember how it happened. Those who survived the fire slipped off to the Isle of Mists, but I was trapped within the city. I never left this throne again. I died with Gesoelig beneath the mountain.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“How?” Corin asked. “If you died, how are you here to answer me? You see? It is impossible.”
Oberon smiled sadly. “Aeraculanon died, but his memory lives on, even in your age. Is it so strange that my memory does the same? I am the world’s creator, after all.”
“But…how? Aeraculanon’s shade has never spoken with me.”
“As I said, I am the world’s creator. I play by other rules. Perhaps the universe gave me some extra reach from a sense of self-preservation.”
“Or perhaps I have gone mad. Likely sometime long ago.”
Oberon tapped his temple and gave Corin a wink. “I have thought the same. Quite often, really. But I ever reached the same conclusion.”
“Yes?”
“If I am mad, no choice I make can matter in the least. If I am not, then it is the world that’s mad, and I must address that madness with whatever resources I have.”
“But I’m so tired.”
“I have thought this also,” the king said.
“Yes?”
“Yes. And it only gets worse.”
Corin groaned.
“Please,” the king said softly. “We come at last to the point of everything. Give me ten minutes more, and all will be made clear.”
“All?”
“As much as I can grant.”
Corin sighed. “Very well. Go on.”
Oberon nodded. “As I said before, all Hurope is my dream, and if I die—”
“The dream ends.”
“Indeed. And in the end, in the days after this day, even as my spirit faded, I saw that more than I feared the nothing, I grieved the billion pretty little lives that I had created. I ached to know that everything I’d made would be undone—”
“Then let me ease your heart. It was not. The world without you is no paradise, but it is not undone.”
“That is the story I brought you here to tell. You see, as I lingered, waning, in Gesoelig’s magnificent tomb—”
“It was magnificent.”
He smiled. “Thank you. Before I slipped away completely, I devised a plan to keep the dream alive. There was one, among all my subjects, who would not leave me for the Isle of Mists. I demanded it of her, for her own sake. I begged it of her. But she would not leave my side.”
“Delaen?”
Tears shone in the king’s eyes. “A well-thought guess, but no. My druids’ craft in trade is logic, and though it broke her heart, sweet Delaen saw reason and went off with the others to keep the kingdom of my refugees in order.”
“Then who?”
“Maurelle. The loveliest of Violets. She blossomed while Gesoelig burned and coordin
ated our response, but when the survivors left to found New Soelig, she stayed with me. And when my memory began to fade, when I felt my fire burning out, she spent a thousand years in darkness, in silence, imprisoned on a wild, foolish errand to preserve the dream.”
Corin swallowed hard and told a lie. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“She wrote it down. She caught my dream and pinned it to a page. She wrote down the fifteen million lives that made Gesoelig. She captured everything I could recall of these last days.”
Corin said, “The books.” And in his heart, he thought, Please, fortune, no.
But Oberon nodded. “The books. They are my legacy. They are my memory writ down, the dream preserved.”
For a while, Corin marveled at the immensity of it. Then he frowned. “But…where’d she find the paper? Or is that the wrong sort of question?”
Oberon laughed. “It is. You have an unromantic soul. But there was paper in the city. You have seen Aemilia’s shop. Even Gesoelig had its documents and forms. She used those at first.”
“At first?”
“She filled them up—every empty page within the cave, though it did not tell half the memory. Still, I begged her once again to leave, to take her memory and return to the world of living men. She would not leave me. She devised instead a way to scrape the pages of old books, erasing what was there to record my dream.”
“Cunning.”
“Indeed. When she had filled all the books, she tore bits of linen to write lives upon. She sought other fabrics, but the refugees had stripped the city bare to supply their journey. In the end…but no. You would not be grateful for that news.”
Corin rolled his eyes. “Do you imagine I enjoy any of it?”
“No, but this—”
“Tell the tale.”
Still the king hesitated for a heartbeat, but he relented with a sigh. “Very well. In the end, using books and sheets of linen and all manner of other things, she caught those other lives and most of the chronicle of what happened on this day. I thought at last her task was done. We said a sad good-bye—though I was more a shadow than a man by then—and she was to the city gate before she stopped. When she came back to the throne, I pretended I was not there. I spoke no word, but she felt my presence. She was crying. She sobbed her apologies.”
“For what?”
“In all the years she had toiled, we had both forgotten the one life that most needed recording.”
“Yours.”
“Mine. And there were no more books. No more paper in all the cavern. We brought lore of paper with us from yesterworld, but that world also knew an older means of making pages.”
“Vellum?” Corin asked, with a gruesome sense where this was headed.
“You know of it?”
Corin swallowed hard. “There are places in the world where it is used. A lamb’s skin or a deer’s, scraped smooth and flat, then dried…”
“Indeed,” the king said, grim.
“But there were no lambs or deer within the cavern,” Corin said.
“Indeed. There was only Maurelle.”
The silence stretched out for far too long. At last, the king cleared his throat. “She wove threads of her lovely hair to tie the binding. She made ink of her blood. She spent her life to write the sad story of mine, and we died together there beside this throne.”
“Why didn’t she just leave? Surely she could have purchased paper in the Khera markets.”
“She feared that if she left, she might lead someone to the cave.”
“Why fear that? Surely she was writing these books for someone to read.”
“In a last resort,” Oberon said. “But no. It was our hope that the books would be enough—that the written story would be enough to preserve the dream—and discovery seemed more likely to destroy the memory than to preserve it.”
Corin swallowed hard. “You were right in that.”
“How so?”
“The fire,” Corin said. “I told you earlier. Ethan Blake burned the city. That is how I came here.”
“No…” Oberon said slowly. “That was part of your parable. That stood for Ephitel’s attack against the city.”
Corin shook his head. “That really happened.”
Oberon sprang forward to shake Corin’s shoulders. “It can’t have! Without those books…without those books…”
“Yes?”
“The world should be undone.”
“You keep saying that. Perhaps it takes some time. Or…perhaps the books aren’t necessary at all. Perhaps the world can live on—”
“Can a dream continue after you wake up?”
“You are perhaps beginning to stretch the metaphor too thin.”
Oberon narrowed his eyes. “There is no metaphor.”
“Your dream,” Corin said. “You mean it like an idea, a grand plan. You dreamed about someday building this world, and then you did it. Perhaps you built it well enough to go on without you.”
Oberon shook his head. “You do not understand the ways of fairy. I build this world within a dream. My dream.”
“All the world’s a dream?”
“And everything in it.”
“Impossible. I know how dreams work. If this were a dream, I would not have had to spend hours slogging back and forth across your city! I could have just turned around and been somewhere else.”
Oberon shrugged. “Have you tried?”
“No! Because I know reality from dream! If this world was your dream, why were there ever heathen gods? Why would anyone have died at Old Maedred? Why have your enemies in your own dreams?”
“You’ve never had a nightmare?”
“Aye, but—”
“The dream is real for you. That’s why I brought the druids. They have some power, though they may not know it. They tame the dreaminess somewhat, but with that rationality comes consequences, cause and effect. We found a careful balance for a while, but now it’s gone.”
“It’s not! We are still here.”
“I have guessed an explanation,” Oberon said. “The books are gone, but you somehow stepped into the memory itself. The books are gone, but now the dream lives on in you.”
Corin shook his head. “I do not want that burden.”
“Nonetheless, it falls to you—”
“I won’t accept it!”
“It is not a choice,” Oberon said. “You alone in all the world now hold the dream within your head.”
“Not I alone! There is still you!”
Oberon patted Corin’s shoulder. “My time is nearly done. We know that much already.”
“But…but that was in another dream. In this one, you’re still alive.”
“And I still must move the city. The consequence will be the same.”
“Then don’t move it! Now you know the cost, so make a better choice.”
“And watch how many of my people slain? No. I cannot bear that.”
“Perhaps they won’t be slain. Perhaps they’ll win!”
“Against Ephitel’s guns? Against an immortal god?”
“He can be hurt. Ogden’s pistol slowed him for a while. And if we recover Aeraculanon’s sword…that can kill him, right?”
“It should. It should. I suspect he’s bathed himself in the waters at Aubrocia, just as the heathen Memnon did. Aeraculanon quenched his sword in those same waters, and so slew Memnon.”
“And so will I slay Ephitel!”
“It doesn’t matter! Nothing really changes. This is just a memory.”
“I don’t know what that means!”
“It is…a brief time. Limited. Delaen would call it a parallel time stream, or something of the like. The things you do in this world will not carry through to yours. You do not change your past, only the things that I remember.”
“Be that as it may, you say my past was just a dream. And this is just a memory. I see no difference between the two! Let that one burn, and save this one instead. You have a chance.”
; Oberon considered Corin for a while. “Let that one burn? A whole universe would die. Your reality. Are you prepared for that?”
“If I could kill Ephitel?”
“Even if you could, is that worth losing Iryana?”
“I don’t…” Corin couldn’t finish the sentence. “What are my other options?”
“Leave this place. Go back to your world, rescue your pretty slave girl, and remember me. Remember the dream and keep it alive. You alone, in all the world, will have that power.”
“But if I choose this world?”
“You cannot choose this world. That is not an option.”
“But—”
“I know how much it aches, but there is the difference between memory and dream: I cannot change what really happened.”
“Things here have changed. You said yourself—”
“You changed them. You were not here before, so you are not bound by history. But I must act out my own doom.”
“But things can change.” Corin sprang to his feet. “I can change them. I can kill Ephitel and then go home.”
“He would remain unscathed within your world. Nothing in this dream will change the future as you know it. The friends you’ve made here will not know you, even if you find them—”
“But I could change your future,” Corin said. “Even if it’s just a memory, I could change it. I could leave you a world with no fear of Ephitel’s guns. Maurelle would not have to give her life in darkness. Avery and Kellen…what became of them?”
“As you heard, Kellen became my new lord protector. He trained the resistance to fight and to survive. And Avery was mayor of New Soelig, though I believe he left the post when Maurelle never arrived. He wasted years in an attempt to find the cave again, but it was well hidden.”
“It was well hidden,” Corin said. “I suppose that was when he brought the Nimble Fingers to the lands of men, while he was wandering in search of you.”
Corin shook his head. “There. That is another tragedy I could avert. Avery could have his sister, and she could live her life. Kellen wouldn’t have to raise some secret army. You give me every reason to see Ephitel dead before I go.”
