I
For seven days in a row, Wixelor the Dreamer had been vomiting a smooth black stone the moment he awakened. It was odd, and not a little painful, but Wixelor, like any Linner, was no stranger to odd things. And so he merely kept the stones in the drawer of his nightstand, intending to examine them at some point and perhaps find out an explanation for their existence. But after a couple of weeks, living from one dream to the next, he’d forgotten all about them.
And then one night he came to from a particularly horrible nightmare – an antelope dreaming of being devoured alive by a pack of hyenas – and sought the comfort of a candle. And as he rifled through the contents of the drawer looking for a match, he came upon the smooth black stones, which he then set, one next to the other, on his bed.
Now Wixelor had turned them over in his hand for a while when he had first disgorged them, but because of his profession and also due to the peculiar nature of his homeworld, Wixelor had extremely poor eyesight.
But now, observing them through his magnifying glass in the candle’s amber light, he noticed that each stone had a letter carved on it, the shallow grooves sparkling with something like gold dust. Growing more and more curious, Wixelor started moving them around, and soon he found the word the seven letters spelled – though it was no less perplexing than the provenance of the stones.
The word was NOWHERE.
The Runes of Norien Page 28
