The Dream Walker

It's been a long week back at work and I am admittedly out of my usual clever and witty ideas for writing. So for your enjoyment I thought it would be fun if I reproduce a supplemental story I wrote for a role-playing campaign I am running for my friends. Enjoy.

Dreams are born,
Dreams are bred,
Dreams are thorns,
Dreams to dread.

The scent is like fire in my nostrils. It is not smell in the sense most mortals or men understand it, but something deeper. It comes to me through the world of dreams, the world of my reality. The place where the heavens bear themselves open to me, unbound by the mortal flesh, where I rule, where I walk, and where I hunt.

The trail is fresh and I have been following it for leagues now. It had eluded me for a time, but there is no limit to the dream. Distance is but an insignificant speck among the vastness of eternity to one such as me, but even so, I knew I was now close, in both body and soul. The cursed one believes himself safe from me, shielded by his monstrous master and her deceptions. No one is safe, for I hunt on the most dangerous field of all.

Only one of ten men pay me any mind as I pass through the massive stone gates and with a touch they soon forget what they saw. They always forget, or they die screaming in their sleep. Either way they do not trouble me further.

Most people abhor my methods, but they have not seen what I have seen. My own kin and kind banished me from their borders for the words I spoke, the actions I have taken, the distances I am willing to go. Evil is a word bound in the dreamless world, just a bit of wind carried by the voice of a mortal. It has no distinction in my holy mission. There is only one who guides my actions and she has granted me this quest. There is a beast that will consume us all and it is my sacred duty to put it to rest. I do not have the luxury of bending to the moral judgments of the lesser.

This dreamless world is a strange place to me, full of anger and hatred, men in suits of metal, and men in suits of delusion. I walk by them all, a ghost on the wind, a shade at the tip of remembering and dismissed the next moment as if never existing. Only did I find one who could stand up to me.

He tried to lock me away in a collar of metal and mechanics. I consumed his dreams, I stole his nightmares, and I devoured his soul. Now he lives in me, a small part, but enough. I added him to my collection of voices and now he whispers to me, telling me things I would not normally know, a useful voice in this world devoid of dreams and magic. Strange words like “steam,” “shroud,” and “Ministry” swim up through the void to fill my mind.

The forest around me is sweet. It smells clean and pure with a hint of the sea. I allow myself to drift from the path, unmissed by the steady river of travelers who move down the road around me. I am a whisper, blown away by the breeze. I put my hand to the tree and feel its life below my skin. A tree does not dream as a mortal, but it dreams its own dreams, it exists in both the dreamless world and on the great plains of vision and mind. It is a comforting anchor, a creature not unlike myself, who walks in both. I am reminded of home and its tall wide trees, a place of paradise where the dream and the dreamer could truly be one.

Mortals and men are blind to what lays around them, consumed by their dreamless worries. They cannot walk in both as I can. When I gaze upon them, mulling past me on the road, like ants marching in their lines, I see what they cannot. I see their flesh and their faces with my own mortal sense, but I also see their spirits, the worlds that spin around them like the hands on a clock, worlds they can only glimpse as they lay in their beds.

An ugly farmer, with a boil for a noise, swims in a world where he is beautiful. A small boy of no more than nine summers walks in a suit of armor, the small dog beside him a mighty warsteed. Another woman, fat with child, has dreams of her son. In them she sees him growing up strong and doing great deeds, while the child in her womb dreams only of warmth and comfort and a soft voice without face. Behind her a man, her husband, with a straight spine, but a crooked bent in his soul dreams of her death. His mind is full of women, wine, coin, and the one murder he has already committed. It was self-defense, but he liked the taste of it on his lips and hands. He craves more and desires less family.

I peer harder and see their future. I see her broken body, and the cry of an abandoned child. I see the sorrow that will consume them all and for a moment I want to reach out and stop it. It would only take a touch and the man would fall screaming, his blood thirst cut short before the dream can come to pass, and the road before them all would be sweeter for it. Yet I stop myself. It is not my mission, not my place. The lives of mortals are their own in this dreamless world. So I let them pass down the road, the path to their futures set.

Uncertainty is not the right word, but it is hard for me to express emotions to those that do not fully experience the places I walk. Words are dry husks of something more. They are dead leaves carried about by whim, giving only the most passing impression of the true world. Still, I feel the need to reaffirm my quest, to reach out and find the nightmare I have been chasing.

The beast is so close I can almost taste his foulness. It repulses me to touch him, but I must. I calm myself, reaching both inward and outward. I cannot falter in my holy mission, not when I am so close to witnessing its completion. Soon I will face my fate as all must.

The first mind I find is basic yet brave and loyal. I know the sensation well: a wolf, still a babe as it bends its will to his master. The master is also a youth, but just as brave and of keen mind. There is barely a hair on his chin, but he swirls with secrets and half-glimpsed futures. There are paths to destiny on his road, if he does not fall among the brambles.

Another mind reaches out to grab me, like some giant fish jumping at a fly skittering across the stream. It is not a conscious effort on the part of this man, only a reflex he has long forgotten. He is a man of my own kin, the people of the forest, and in a way we are all bound together in dream and spirit. He is old, much older than the last, and his mind is littered with squalor. There are dark corners to his nightmares, those he has suffered, and even worse those he has inflicted upon himself. He has a buried heart, but even among the dark swamp of his mind it still beats, softly, but steadily.

The next man’s mind is like a fire. It burns to touch, yet I cannot seem to pull myself away, for there is warmth there. Words like responsibility and strength echo the halls of the castles he builds in his dreams. He is resolute in his convictions, straight as elven steel and twice as strong. Yet, it is a sword that cuts both ways in both victory and failure. It is a mind that can break bonds or break bones.

Simple, is not the proper word to use for the next mind I find. He is far from simple. Perhaps, uncomplicated or earnest are more precise. There is a stoicism there that lights every dream, and even his wrath and anger feel somehow clean. It is rare to find a creature without duplicity or malice, but even rarer to find one who has suffered as he has. I watch his pain among a cauldron of broiling memories, and yet they never bubble over.

These are the allies of the demon I seek, the men I must surely cut through to reach him, like a surgeon cutting away skin and bone to reach an infected organ. They are bound to the beast as he is bound to them in strange links of fidelity and shared experience. They are killers all, but not wicked. They are both good and bad, but I am beyond such distinctions. They protect the greatest evil, the beast which will lay siege to the lands. Their lack of foreknowledge is no excuse, in fact it will make them all the more dangerous.

Finally, my dreams reach out and I find the great evil. It is so close that I almost feel myself wither before it, but I cannot yield, nor do I dare touch its mind fully. I will not alert it to what is to come. The creature's mind is a vault, sealed off with locks of twisted magic and utter vileness. To even approach the door would be to close it forever and lose my chance to end the coming horror before it is unleashed.

I stand up, but I have no memory of ever sitting. The body has a mind of its own, and it is not a mind even I can control. Still my legs are sore and the dreamless part of me wonders if I have been still for moments or moon-turns. It is always such when I go seeking in the plains of dreams and visions. Yet the power that my great goddess has granted me is not without limits, for I only know the generalities of my target’s location. I will need to hunt him in more mundane ways if I truly wish to succeed, but he will not be able to conceal himself forever.

Finally, I turn my weary legs back toward the road. The voice of the man, who tried to bind me in steam and steel, floats up to me unbidden. I gaze upon the magnificent walls and soaring towers of the land that lay in the distance, the land upon which my feet now points. Words like “Long Neck” and “Kitehawk” swirl like vague memories in my mind. I pull them to me, learning all I can from the soul that now lives inside me. I will need this knowledge in the time ahead.

A small part of me regrets the things I may have to do, but I salve such wounds with the reminder that a few deaths are a small sacrifice to stop the coming horror, where corpses will be heaped upon themselves like logs on a fire. I look again to the city in the distance and I wonder if anyone there senses what is among them. I doubt it. To me the beast stands naked in all his true horror, but to them he is nothing more than a stranger.