Japheth moved down the wall, scanning faces and forms. A gaunt woman with mottled yellow skin and an uplifted nose stared from the ice, her expression frozen in surprise. Farther back, an eyeless fellow with black skin and black hair cringed. A woman with no eyes, except for those on her palms, bent forward as if caught in the act of weeping. And … a mind flayer! But its tentacles were flaccid, and its terrible orbs did not track Japheth’s passage. It was caught, just as all the others were, dreamers whose nightmares had propelled them too far.
He found Anusha.
The girl was only partially frozen. Like a drowning victim, she reached from the ice, her hands seeking some purchase. Her face was a mask of desperation, caught in the moment of her entrapment.
“I’m here!” Japheth lunged for Anusha’s hand. His fingers passed through her palm and plunged into the ice face.
He and she were both mental phantoms, of course, of different origins and abilities, but neither was real. Perhaps it would be more difficult than just grabbing and pulling.
Then he discovered his own hand was now stuck in the ice slab. “Oh, for the love of Bane!” he swore. Worry clutched at him, even through his dust-given serenity.
It took all his discipline not to brace himself against the slab with his other hand.
Whether ice or a stranger substance, the slab was acting as some sort of dream catcher. And Japheth’s presence was something like a dream.
He had a sudden image of inn staff finding him slumped over Anusha’s inert form, both she and he forever insensate, their minds trapped together in that nightmare tomb. Not the romantic reunion he’d hoped for.
That sad image reminded him his physical body was still engaged in a ritual, however far away. The jade rod, in particular, was so costly specifically because of its insulating qualities. His mind should be safe as long as the ritual continued and he didn’t lose his grasp on the rod.
Japheth concentrated on ignoring the frigid pain in his phantom hand. Instead, he imagined himself back in the vault of his suite, one hand on Anusha’s forehead, the other gripping the jade rod whose tip lightly grazed the Dreamheart.
The image of his room in the Lorious refused to solidify. The dream-catching ice failed to release him from its cold embrace.
He persisted, attempting to fix every detail of his suite at the inn into his mind’s eye. Faintly at first, then more strongly, he heard a dog barking.
He suddenly perceived two realities, one superimposed over the other. In the fainter scene, he was indeed still locked in the ritual. A black dog had jumped up so its paws rested on his chest. It was Lucky, barking and wagging his tail furiously.
“Good boy,” Japheth said, his voice a whisper.
He couldn’t feel his body in the Lorious image, even though it was his true self. He was numb. He tried to release his grip on the jade rod. Nothing.
“By the Twin Princes!” he swore. He tried again, imagining his arm holding the rod and his vision arm in the ice as one and the same. This time, his real arm and his vision arm moved in synchrony.
The rod’s tip snapped off with a crack of purple lightning. Jade shards whistled through the vault.
The ghostly image of his chambers at the inn solidified even as his perception of the ice slab and the entombed dreamers washed away. Before it completely faded, Japheth grabbed again for Anusha’s outstretched arm. This time, his palm slapped into hers. He grasped her hand and pulled for all he was worth.
The collapsing ritual yanked him away from the ice face, and so he pulled Anusha in turn. An explosive crack splintered across the freezing expanse, and she was free.
He blinked.
Smoke hazed the vault, and Lucky ran around the chamber in glad circles. He stepped to the travel chest and rested his hands on the side. “Are you there?”
Anusha’s dark eyes opened. She stared uncomprehendingly up at him. “What …? I dreamed I was far away …”
Moisture welled in Japheth’s eyes. “You’re back, Anusha. That’s the only thing that matters. You’re back.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Veltalar, Aglarond
She was so cold. Desolate winds whispered around her, jealous of the tiny spark of heat she retained. Yet a moment earlier, she’d been colder still, a horrified scream frozen in ice.
Her eyes flipped open. Light stung them, but the illumination was sweet despite the pain. It had been too long since she’d seen anything but chill darkness.
A shape moved in the light. A man she’d known once.
She said, “What …? I dreamed I was far away …”
The man bent down. He wore a cloak black as coal, an ominous counterpoint to his concerned expression. He said, “You’re back, Anusha. That’s the only thing that matters. You’re back.”
“Japheth?” she asked.
The warlock nodded and took her hand. His palm was warm. His eyes were watery … and red with a recent dose of traveler’s dust. He said, “I’m here. And so are you!”
She sat up. Fragments of what had happened since she followed him through the streets of New Sarshel began to assemble.
A black dog jumped up and rested its paws on the opposite side of the travel chest. It stretched out its head, trying to lick her face. She remembered the mutt and smiled, turning her head from Lucky’s joyful attentions.
Anusha’s gaze wandered, but her attention focused inward as her memory wove itself from past to present.
She’d been dreamwalking in a dark place half drowned with seawater, beneath an island. A tentacled monster had attacked her with a relic like a disembodied eye—an eye whose gaze caught her. She’d tried to flee, to return to the safety of her physical body …
But something had prevented her.
Her gaze snapped back to Japheth. “Your elixir of sleep trapped me in dream form. I couldn’t get away. It almost caught me because of you!”
The man’s eyes widened and his grip slackened. He nodded and said, “I am so sorry, Anusha. I never meant—”
Heat blossomed in her chest, dispelling the chill. It was the same feeling she felt when she thought of her half brother, Behroun. Spiteful words danced in her throat, eager for escape. “These drugs of yours … you’re on the dust right now—I can tell by your eyes! What is it with you?”
The warlock looked away.
She wondered how she could be attracted to him. How could she even think of him like that when he was a drug-addled, Hells-bound scoundrel? A roguishly handsome, sweet, and determined scoundrel, but a scoundrel all the same. Was she the stupidest woman in all Toril? Anyone with any sense would flee and never think of him again.
She would do just that …
Which would be easier if the mere sight of him didn’t make her heart expand.
Japheth said, “You’re right, Anusha. The dust’s in me right now. But I had no recourse. You didn’t get away. It caught you.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked back at her, swallowed. “I mean that gods-damned relic sucked your mind into its heart and pulled you down to a city of torment. I’ve been trying to rescue you for tendays. I needed a pinch of traveler’s dust to find and see your dream form. You were one of hundreds caught. It was … the only way I knew to save you.”
The heat in her chest cooled but did not burn out. She asked, “If I could have woken up, you wouldn’t have had to spend tendays trying to rescue me!”
Then the full import of his words breached her anger. “Wait. You mean I’ve been … sleeping? For tendays? And you couldn’t wake me up, even when the elixir you gave me ran its course?”
Her skin prickled. Memory crashed upon her—an ice cocoon stifling her body and psyche, a void of motionless thought speckled with dreamers trapped like flies in a web. She gasped in dawning revulsion.
“Your mind was ensnared,” Japheth said. “But I pulled you free.”
The frozen image seemed to solidify around Anusha. Lassitude craw
led down her limbs, tying them with strands of returning sleep. She said, “Did you? I don’t think so …”
The Dreamheart’s eye stared straight into her soul.
Anusha heard Lucky’s frantic barks as if from the bottom of a well, then nothing.
Anusha saw a woman standing in a place shrouded by mist and slicked with luminescent slime. Pillars whose size she couldn’t begin to guess faded off into the fogged distance.
The woman was familiar. It took her a moment to recognize herself.
She realized she was dreaming. It was odd to see herself at such a remove, though dreams were often strange like that.
Her image seemed distraught. It beckoned and spoke, but not the least sound emerged. Was she mute? Anusha strained but heard nothing. She tried to sound out the words her lips made. Something about a … Key of Stars? And a Citadel. Plus something else she couldn’t quite decipher.
Horror closed over her head as if she were being pulled beneath a pool of ice water. She tried to scream, to move, to warn the image. But no feeling of flailing limbs, or even breath in her chest, rewarded her effort. She was like a bug under glass, slowly smothering.
Searing pain shattered the dream into jagged shards that exploded outward.
Anusha lurched and fell forward. Several small, hard objects clattered on her back. Silence followed. She coughed.
Cold shards dug into her cheek and prone body. She lay facedown in a scatter of … broken glass? No, too cold. The shards were chips of ice. She levered herself up and stood.
A rough wall of ice, like a glacier’s face, stretched away left, right, and up many tens of feet. It shed wan, bluish light. Even standing only a couple of paces from it, she saw a subtle receding curve to the chill face, as if instead of a wall, the ice were a massive dome. Or perhaps a sphere set in the dark stone floor. Murky blots lay just below the surface, oddly symmetrical.
A rough crater marred the ice in front of her. Anusha reached for the edges of the pit, but paused before her finger touched. The cavity, while broken and jagged, traced a humanoid outline. Something had broken free of the ice.
Had it been her? Probably yes. She shuddered.
A memory jolted her. Anusha recalled Japheth’s relieved face, telling her he’d rescued her.
“Some rescue!” she exclaimed, remembering the coiling force that snatched her back down into unconsciousness.
She clenched her fists, hoping to feel a renewed surge of anger, enough to banish the first unwelcome hints of fear. Japheth’s mysterious patron and unfathomable powers, his quests and his potions—they all added up to her being here, wherever here was.
But her anger seemed spent. If she was fully honest with herself, it was her initial act of stowing away on Green Siren that set her course and finally landed her here.
And Japheth’s ritual had accomplished something good, she mused. He’d pried her loose from the wintry sphere, even if he’d ultimately failed to merge her dream with her sleeping body.
Hold on. Was she in her dream form? Anusha studied her hand. It looked and felt normal. She imagined she wore a glove. A gauntlet of golden, articulated metal shimmered and enclosed her hand.
Yes, she was dreaming.
She tried to wake up.
A flicker of blackness, and then … nothing changed. The great globe of ice remained obstinately front and center. She tried again, failed again. Then again. Another failure. She was locked out of her body! And this time it wasn’t because of the elixir of sleep.
Hints of the smothering dream she’d just escaped enclosed her.
Where was she? Anxiety made her thoughts come fast. Japheth said something about her being pulled down to a city of … terror? Torment? She couldn’t remember. Was she in the place she’d imagined, where her image tried to talk but no words emerged? She didn’t see any mist or columns.
Fear seeped in beneath her reason and pawed at her self-control.
“What am I going to do?” she whispered, her eyes darting away from the ice into the wider darkness that enclosed it. Awful scenarios twirled her around in a full circle. Dire prospects half solidified like a spider’s web. Every possibility ended in her grisly death.
Her mind was trapped outside her body in a place that would shame most nightmares. Japheth had tried to free her, but failed. She would die here. The only question was whether she would fail slowly over time or suddenly when some soul-eating creature caught sight of her.
She could hardly breathe.
The thought was like the sun rising on a dreary plain. She was in her dream form. Breathing was an illusion! She was formless—and invisible to most things.
Anusha’s panic fell off, becoming a more manageable ache of worry. Fear she could handle. Panic would propel her to a quick end; she’d heard enough stories to know giving in to arm-flailing terror rarely worked out—
The sound of something cracking drew a shrill yelp from her.
Her eyes fastened on the great dome. It was riddled with shadows beneath the surface. Not air pockets … She realized the symmetrical shadows were the outlines of people! People trapped in the ice, as she had been.
She walked in measured paces along the frozen boundary, controlling her phantom breathing. Anusha gazed into the blurred surface. All were preserved motionless, as if dead. It was probably how she’d looked.
There were so many! She saw a short woman—a dwarf; a human man in lavender robes; a creature whose lower face had tentacles hanging off it; another woman, either a comely human or an eladrin—her loose hair hid the most telltale feature. And there was a fellow whose hair was composed of glowing crystal—
Another crack. It was from back the other way. She hurried around the periphery until she returned to the crater where she had emerged. One of its rough edges had spawned a fissure nearly two feet wide that zigzagged across the crystalline face for several feet.
Even as she watched, another retort like glass breaking issued from the crevice. A body slipped from the fissure and dropped to the floor only a pace from Anusha.
“By Imbrar!” she gasped.
The figure moaned. It was a woman! But not human—her skin was the color of desert sand with darker mottling. Her hair was brown and long, layered into braids. Her features were sharp and her ears were as elongated as an elf’s. But the woman’s severe features and coloration, and her silvery plate armor, didn’t seem particularly fey.
The woman shivered. She stared at the icy tomb from which she’d emerged, and croaked several rough syllables. Whether ritual or language, the sounds were crude and slippery and assaulted Anusha’s ears. She retreated a step.
The woman broke off her litany and turned to regard Anusha. Though she continued to shake with cold, the woman’s filmy translucency argued she was as immaterial as Anusha.
“Who are you?” Anusha ventured.
The woman’s face seemed expressionless. She said in oddly accented Common, “I am … Yeva. I am dreaming.”
“You’re not dreaming,” Anusha said without thinking.
The woman nodded and bent her head into her hands. Silent sobs shook her shoulders. Tears trickled between her fingers. Her form began to waver and thin like fog before the rising sun.
“Hey!” Anusha exclaimed and dashed forward. She touched the woman’s shoulder, but her form continued to unravel and fade.
“Don’t leave me alone here!” Anusha said. She hugged the woman, trying to hold her fraying presence together. The woman’s body was filmy strands of gauze in her arms.
“Stay!” Anusha pleaded, wishing the woman’s presence to endure just as she willed her own shape and clothing.
Yeva’s body gradually came back into focus. It returned to being only slightly translucent to Anusha’s eyes and solid and warm to her touch.
The yellow-skinned woman drew in a deep breath. She looked into Anusha’s eyes and whispered, “You have power here? Who are you who can command the captured dreams of Xxiphu?”
Anusha released the embr
ace. The woman’s form remained constant. “I am Anusha Marhana. I’m no one, really.”
“You are a human, of Faerün, if I’m not mistaken. A great sorceress you must be, though I admit I am not familiar with your name, and I made some study of such things before I was trapped. I wonder how long …” Lines of worry creased her face.
Anusha shook her head. “I’m no sorceress. I just got caught up in events I didn’t understand. I don’t even know where I am, really. But I do have some control over my own dreams …”
“And the dreams of others, it is clear,” Yeva said, her voice louder and more assured. “Your touch anchored me. I was shriveling, dispersing. If you hadn’t intervened, my soul would have become gruel for the Eldest.” The woman shuddered.
“The Eldest?”
The woman gestured to the expanse of cold white. She pronounced in her lilting accent, “The Eldest broods over this city. It is an entity whose age surpasses most gods.”
“And this … Eldest, it eats souls?”
Yeva nodded. “The Eldest sleeps. Its mind moves so slowly its thoughts hardened millennia ago. The chambers where the creature’s attention flowed through Xxiphu in ancient days are choked with its petrified thoughts. People whose dreams veer too near are caught here forever while their bodies waste until they perish. As likely happened to my body centuries ago …” The strangely hued woman cast down her eyes.
Anusha didn’t have a ready reply. If what Yeva said was true, that her body was dead even though her dream remained—did that make her a ghost?
Ghost or not, Anusha wondered about Yeva’s strange coloration and features. The woman was a member of no race she’d ever seen or even heard about.
She decided not to pursue either question. Instead, she asked, “Xxiphu—what is that? Is it where we stand?”
The woman gave a curt nod. “Xxiphu is a city of primeval aboleths. So I have learned, to my despair. I did not seek it, but those I hunted tricked me and lured me here. Where my mind was caught.” The woman’s fists clenched. “And now I am nothing but a figment.” Her eyes slicked with a new surge of moisture.
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