by Kyle Johnson
“My current toy has lost much of its entertainment value,” Iggullon’s voice continued to purr. “It has power, certainly, but not the raw talent that you possess, and it has reached the limit of its usefulness. You will provide me with much more entertainment, as I use your power to twist the dreams of the Lightborn into…”
Aranos tuned out the villain monologue and forced himself to calmly consider his options. He could use fire on the chains to melt them, but he wasn’t sure how much power that would take. Already, he could feel the strain of holding his barrier on his flagging willpower; trying to beat this monster with brute force was probably a losing strategy. Lightning might work, but only if he knew the chains were connected to Iggullon somehow. If they were, they’d probably conduct his attack right into the monster. If they weren’t, though, it would be a waste of energy, since the electricity probably wouldn’t hurt the metal at all. If this were the waking world, he could use metal mana to control the chains himself, or maybe to weld them all together. Heck, in the waking world he could probably drain the chains of power or even take control of them using his Mana Vampire Perk…
He blinked as he considered that last thought. While this realm was different from Ka, the waking world, the energy in it should follow the same rules. Any way that he could manipulate mana there should have an analog here in the dream world. He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind, not drawing or pulling the energy around him, but just sensing and feeling it.
The dream energy felt significantly different from mana. Raw, unaspected mana, he knew, was like white light: it was a mishmash of different aspects, all jumbled together. The energy here, though, felt purer somehow, as if there were only one component to it, but also fuzzy, as if it wasn’t very well defined. Aranos frowned; if the energy was homogenous, how could it manifest as so many different effects? How could it create both fire and water, for example?
Curious, he channeled a tendril of power and willed it to form a lash of flame. The energy in his grasp twisted and shifted, becoming less fuzzy. He could sense the changes as the energy almost seemed to collapse on itself, shifting from an amorphous, hazy strand into a brand of flame. He released the energy and felt it shift back into its slightly blurred state, and suddenly, he understood.
The power here is like a quantum waveform, he thought excitedly. Without will applied to it, it exists as every possible type of energy at once – or no type at all, I guess, depending on how you think about it. Willpower applied to it forces it into a specific shape, but when that will dissipates, it decoheres back into the waveform.
That meant that his safe zone, the chains, the monster he was facing, even his own body; all of those were nothing but decoherent dream energy bound into place by will. It was like the dreamscape was a huge sheet of paper, and they were all just creases or twists in it that made them stand out from the rest of the sheet. That actually greatly simplified things, because it meant that, somewhere, those chains were still connected to the dreamscape, and that connection should be their weak point.
He opened his eyes and saw that his barrier had been squeezed much closer to him while he’d ruminated. The monstrous Iggullon was still ranting about something – it was currently shrieking about how it would wreak some form of vengeance, it sounded like – but Aranos wasn’t in immediate danger. He reached out mentally to the chains, feeling their solidity; Iggullon was holding them very firmly, and while Aranos felt he might have a chance to wrest them from the creature in a battle of wills, that would exhaust his already tired mind, and he wasn’t sure what would happen if he ran out of energy while facing this creature. Nothing good, he was sure.
The Sorcerer instead eased his focus along the links, feeling how they were forged, sensing the patterns that Iggullon had used to create them. He was glad he hadn’t tried to use lightning; while the chains looked like metal, they were either something quite different or were an alloy of metal he’d never seen before. In either case, they felt as if they might be incredibly conductive, which meant he might have ended up zapping himself instead of the creature. His thoughts glided down the links, following one chain until he felt it disperse into a chaotic mass of unformed energy. Grinning inwardly, he slipped a mental probe into the spot where the two types of power met, gathering it in his grasp, and then solidified it into a vacuum.
Instantly, the chain he’d been touching stopped squeezing, growing completely still. Cut off from the energy of the dreamscape, the chain began to fade and shift, swirling back into its amorphous state. Aranos glanced at Iggullon, seeing if the vulture-like monster had noticed what he’d done, but the beast was currently examining the dreams lining the edge of Aranos’ safe zone. It reached into one, swirling a finger through it, and instantly Aranos saw the images in the dream cry out in agony. He felt a twinge of sympathy for whoever was having that dream, but he shook it off and returned his thoughts to the remaining chains.
While Iggullon apparently hadn’t noticed the loss of one chain – or had noticed but simply hadn’t cared, Aranos admitted – the Sorcerer was certain that at some point, his efforts would rouse the beast and draw its attention back to him. Plus, the longer he took, the closer the chains would get to him, until eventually he’d start to get crushed by his own wind barrier. He wouldn’t be able to do this piecemeal; he’d have to get all the chains at once. At the same time, he didn’t know if he could spread his focus across all of those chains at the same time, at least not when he was already tired.
Aranos examined a single chain once more and noticed that while it seemed to sprout from the edge of his safe zone, it actually came from a spot just outside of it. That made sense; Aranos had more control over his own stable area, and to make chains from that energy, Iggullon would have had to fight Aranos for control of it, first. With an inward chuckle, Aranos gathered a bit of power from the dreamscape and pushed it into the barrier around his zone. The wall of reflected visions shifted slightly, then surged outward by no more than a foot in every direction.
That foot was all Aranos needed, though. The connection points of the chains were in his safe zone, now, and it was a minor effort to grasp those swirls of dream energy and cut them off. The chains about him clanked once as they slid to the ground, unmoving, before they began to swirl into mist.
“No!” Iggullon screamed, whirling to face Aranos. “How dare you…”
Before the creature could finish whatever exclamation of surprise or threat it was about to utter, though, a golden chain shot from the air behind it, wrapping itself around the monster’s throat and yanking back hard. Aranos heard a mental squawk as Iggullon was jerked off-balance and fell backward. Its stubby arms and many-fingered hands shot up to grab the chain around its throat, but instantly, two more chains erupted from the ground and pinned its arms in place against its head. More chains snaked upward, wrapping about its body and clamping its torso and long legs in place. The creature struggled for a moment, but the chains continued to tighten until finally, it was completely immobilized.
“Those are pretty good chains you made,” Aranos said, still holding his air shield and staying well back from the creature. He had an image of the monster breaking the chains or somehow being immune to them – after all, it called itself the Chainmaster, which meant that it could have all sorts of weird, chain-related Abilities – and he wasn’t about to become victim of a dumb hero cliché. “I wonder how long they’ll last if I leave you wrapped in them? Probably only until I leave the dreamscape, but it’s worth seeing, don’t you think?”
“You are clever, Dreamweaver,” the creature’s voice purred. “And far more talented than I imagined. To be able to use my own chains against me is no small feat. With my knowledge…Awk!” The creature voice cut off as the chain around its throat tightened quickly.
“Yeah, still not interested,” Aranos said drily. “You’re not really very good at this, you know.” He made sure the chains were as tight as possible before calling up the image of his own body. He tu
rned his will to it, and the chained form of Iggullon slowly vanished from his safe zone as the dreamscape began to drift past him. Aranos sighed with relief and channeled a trickle of power into his construct; his mind was exhausted, and his Willpower was down below 20% by this point. He just needed to get past the barrier separating the Shadowed Lands from the Realms of Light; once there, he could at least rest a bit.
The barrier came all too suddenly for Aranos. One moment, he was blithely attempting to ignore the despairing dreams and fear-filled nightmares surrounding him; the next, blackness wrapped around his safe zone, gripping him in its embrace. Screams of torment and sobs of anguish echoed in his ears, and a foul scent of blood and rotting meat filled the air. The nightmarish visions felt like skeletal hands, grasping at the walls of his safe zone, attempting to drag him back into the land of fear and nightmares.
He gritted his teeth and poured his waning energy into pushing through the boundary. His head pounded and twin lances of pain pierced his temples as he watched his Willpower drop below 10%, but he ignored the pain and drew more power from around him. He dumped the energy into his mental image, driving his will behind it. The dreamscape shuddered, seemed almost to flex beneath the onslaught of his will, and suddenly accelerated as he slipped through the barrier and out into the comparatively wondrous maelstrom of the Lands of Light. As he emerged into what he thought of as more normal chaos, he fell to his knees, utterly exhausted. He barely had enough energy to hold his safe zone intact; even the thought of trying to travel right now made his head pound and his muscles ache.
“I do believe that is sufficient for the lesson,” the High Dreamer’s voice suddenly spoke, filling the air around Aranos. The fading shield about him solidified, and he felt the dreamscape accelerate past at a truly horrendous velocity. “Let us now return, Lord Evenshade, and see what you have learned from this.”
Chapter 4
“That is the High Road,” Geltheriel declared as they crested a bare, blackened hill in the midst of the Blightlands. Aranos looked down and saw a long, gray ribbon snaking through the landscape, breaking up the monotony of the blackened stone and blighted earth around them.
After his dream training, the rest of the morning had been spectacularly uneventful. It had only taken the High Dreamer five minutes to bring them back, a journey that would have lasted a half-hour had Aranos been traveling on his own, and the Sorcerer had recovered swiftly once he’d returned to his body and stopped drawing off his Willpower. He’d had that brief time to consider what the High Dreamer meant about what he had learned, and he’d come to a realization.
The High Dreamer had just shown him that, as powerful as he thought he was, he wasn’t ready to Dreamstride into the Shadowed Lands, or to face the darker monsters that dwelled there. He’d barely escaped this time, and only because Iggullon had been so obsessed with ranting and monologuing that it hadn’t actually pressed its attack on him. He’d been surprised that one of the vaunted Nightmare Creatures would be so foolish, but the High Dreamer had laughingly corrected him.
“Oh, I am certain the iggullon wishes it were a Nightmare Creature, Lord Evenshade, but it is truly among the least of the utukku, those which humans call fiends. It is short-sighted and stupid, as you can see, and it can do little more than trouble the dreams of the one it possesses. If you and your party met one in combat, you would not find it a particularly deadly foe. Iggullon is not even its name, as you might have thought; it is merely the type of creature it is. Each has the Ability to animate and control a specific type of object; this one could use chains, a common enough choice among their kind.
“You were in no danger, for had you faltered at any time, I would have stepped in and banished the creature. You chose an interesting method to combat it, when you could have simply willed it from your presence, but it was effective.”
That led to a fifteen-minute lecture on how Aranos’ safe zone in the dreamscape was totally under his control, and he could banish anyone and anything from it that he wanted. The Sorcerer hadn’t actively tried to expel the creature when he released its image; if he had, it would have been forced to depart. The iggullon could have fought to remain, but unless its will was much stronger than Aranos’, it would lose. That was a useful bit of information Aranos tucked away for later.
While Aranos wasn’t totally satisfied that the High Dreamer had tricked him like that, he was happy with the results:
Skill Boost: Dreamstriding (T) has gained a level!
New Rank: Expert 1
Expert Level Ability: Willpower costs in the Realm of Dreams are reduced by 1% per Skill level.
Quest Completed: A Dancer in Dreams
You have successfully completed your training with the High Dreamer.
Objective: Train with the High Dreamer until you reach Expert level in Dreamstriding.
Difficulty: C
Reward: All Dream-related Skills level 10% faster, increased reputation with the House of the Moon, you may use your Dreamstriding Skill freely without loss of reputation, Dream Vampire Perk
New Perk Gained: Dream Vampire
You have learned how to manipulate Dream Energy as easily as mana.
Benefit: You can use your Mana Vampire Perk in the Realm of Dreams.
Cost: 100 Willpower per use.
Geltheriel had met him at the exit to the House of the Moon with Silma at her side. “How went your training, Oathbinder?” she asked as he stepped, blinking, into the sunlight beneath the forested canopy of Eredain.
“I completed my Quest,” he said triumphantly. “That means I can communicate with Phil anytime I want.”
“You can communicate with Lorsan just as well,” Geltheriel told him a bit chidingly. When he glanced at her, confused, she sighed.
“I believe you have forgotten that you are Lord Evenshade, Oathbinder,” she told him, leading him through the city as she spoke. “That Title comes with a responsibility to your House, and it is one that so far, you have done an amazing job of shirking. Have you chosen a Path for your House to follow? Will you be a House of Crafters? Mages? Diplomats? Have you seen which structures Uncle was able to staff, and which still lie dormant?”
Aranos sighed. “There’s just been too much to do…”
“Then you must learn to do that which only you can do, and to rely upon others for that which any can do. For example, was it necessary that only you visited the House of Stars today? Or could you have accomplished the same deed with a simple message?”
Aranos frowned. “Well, I did get some ideas for new Spells,” he said slowly. “But…really, I guess I could have sent a message to Ruehnar and maybe even gotten a list of Spells that might have interested me without having to go there. I do have really good reputation with them, so they’d probably have been willing to work with me.”
“And that is something that Lorsan could have arranged, had you asked it of him,” she concluded. “Just as you could have asked me if I would speak to Jhaeros and convince him to lend you the training crystals for our journey, or asked Saphielle and Rhys if they could arrange for further combat training for the Travelers while we are beyond the Stronghold. These are all things that you could have done, and all would have saved you a great deal of time. You must learn that you cannot do all things yourself, Oathbinder.”
Aranos stopped walking, taken completely aback by her words. She was right; he could have asked for the others to have helped him like that, and if he had, he’d have had plenty of time to go through his new House tab and see what it was all about. Now, he had to go do each of those things before he could sit down to do his own training, and that meant they might not be able to leave for Antas for at least another day. He’d been trying to do everything himself and had forgotten that he had perfectly competent people around him he could rely on.
“You’re right,” he sighed at last, slumping his shoulders. “I should have asked for help. I’ll try to do better. Now, I guess I need to go get those things done, don’t I?”
The Sorcerer fumbled with the finely made box for a moment, figuring out how it opened. When he at last lifted the lid, he gasped. The box was lined with green, velvet cushions, and tucked neatly into perfectly shaped depressions lay Jhaeros’ prized training crystals. He gaped at the crystals for a minute, looking back and forth between them and the grinning Geltheriel in shock. “What?” he stammered. “How?”
“I believe the words you seek are, ‘Thank you’, are they not?” she chided him, her grin not fading. “Perhaps followed by, ‘You are the most amazing person I know’, although that is not required, as we both know it is true.”
“Th-thank you, Geltheriel,” he stammered. “But…how?”
“First, I will tell you that while you did not think of having us do these things, I did, among other things. Each of the Houses of Blades, Twilight, and the Sickle were concerned but not alarmed by our news, and each offered a Quest for us to resolve it. Knowing, though, that you wished for that Quest to be offered to the Travelers, we each demurred and asked for it to be altered to be more appropriate for them. I assume you did the same, and we have each shared our Quests with the Travelers. Those who succeed at it can gain entry into the appropriate Houses, as well as favor with the Stronghold and some trifling XP and money. Is yours similar?”
Aranos nodded, and she continued. “I also requested that Rhys and Saphielle speak to the Masters of their Houses to see if the Travelers can continue their training with those Houses, as I spoke to Dorn’ar’el. The Houses of Twilight and the Sickle opened their doors to the Travelers for training, but the House of Blades preferred to send trainers to your estate and were not comfortable with the idea of the Travelers being present in their walls in such great numbers. However, they were willing to send their trainers immediately, and I believe the Travelers are training as we speak.”