by Lincoln Law
The piece she played today was an old one called The Dreamer’s Lullaby. It was her favourite, and when in the mood, she would have Charlotte sing, too. Out of the two of them, Charlotte was most definitely the one born with the singing voice. Adabelle knew she had some small ability, but she could never sing and play at the same time.
As she played it thought, she thought the words.
The Dreamer lays down into bed,
The quiet sleeper rests her head,
The darkness guides, the Dreamer led,
And then she finds she flies.
Through the clouds, she drifts, she floats,
Free as dancing, high as hopes,
The fetters appear, reality’s ropes,
A world so full of lies.
The words went on like that for some time, each verse from there revealing another part of this Dreamer’s dream, falling into the minor key when she fell into the world of nightmares.
The monsters creeping in the dark,
The Darkler Nhyx, the Dreading Thark,
They close in tight; they make their mark,
And then, the bright dawn’s rise.
As she played she found her frustrations and worries slip away, like the tide of a vast ocean.
She finished the piece, the final note of the coda a whisper on the violin, the note rich and deep. Mostly, she liked that song for its variations of major and minor key—it was so rare to find a lullaby that dipped into the melancholy—but she also liked how similar it was to Dreaming. When in the mind of another, one would never have true control. At any moment, the dream could go bad, the monsters caught in a person’s mind’s deepest recesses suddenly unleashed. It was a way to experience the dream, for her, without having to actually enter the risk of the event.
Once finished practice, she locked up her violin again, heading down for lunch, where she found Mrs. Abeth. The Oen’Aerei were gone, thankfully.
“I saw the Oen’Aerei were here earlier,” said Adabelle, whispering just in case people weren’t meant to know. “What were they doing?”
Mrs. Abeth patted her lips with her napkin, dapping away the sauce from the sandwiches. “I’m not really meant to tell students,” she paused, “but then you’re not really enrolled now, are you.”
“No I’m not,” said Adabelle, chuckling quietly to herself.
“Well in that case I’ll tell you, but you’re not allowed to pass it on. Okay?”
Adabelle nodded. “I promise, not a soul.” She sat her own sandwich down on the plate, taking a sip from her water glass.
“Very well,” Mrs. Abeth said. “It seems to me that there was a Nhyx attack last night.”
Adabelle was suddenly very glad she hadn’t any sandwich or water in her mouth now, for she would have spat it out for the shock that shook her just then. “Are they sure?” she asked. It didn’t seem entirely surprising, really, what with those nightmares last night. But Nhyxes normally didn’t attack in dormitories. They kept to lonely old widows, or children left alone in the house, simply because it was easier attacking a lonely, unprotected mind. When many people were asleep, they could pass from mind-to-mind, but usually the good dreams of those within the vicinity of the Nhyx would be enough to fight it off before it could do anything.
“Did it cause any…err… damage?” asked Adabelle.
“Not really,” Mrs. Abeth said, “but the poor girl was quiet shaken. Seems to me like there’s no permanent mental damage, she seems a little shocked. The Oen’Aerei were quick to be notified and the nightmare removed by one of the Dreamers. But she will be in respite for about a week.”
Adabelle bit her lip. “A week? That hardly seems like a mild attack.” She didn’t mean to sound so cynical, but it was, in truth, quite a long while to be in convalescence.
“It’s mild in comparison to what could have happened,” Mrs. Abeth replied rather bluntly. “I mean, when we consider how it could have ended….”
“True,” Adabelle replied, dipping her head slightly, ashamed of what she said. “Do we know who it was?”
The woman hesitated a little, taking in a deep breath before answering. “It was Larraine,” said Mrs. Abeth. “Your cousin.”
“Larraine?” she asked.
“Indeed,” she replied.
Larraine was Aunt Marie’s daughter, and Aunt Marie was Adabelle’s mother’s sister. People sometimes confused Larraine for Adabelle’s sister, which was not entirely surprising given how much Adabelle thought they looked alike. If Charlotte were only a little older, a little taller, then she was sure they’d look like triplets. Larraine was technically a member of the Oen’Aerei, thought not an extremist, which made it even more shocking that she could have been attacked by a Nhyx, considering how good Dreamers were at protecting themselves. She only dabbled in the dreaming arts, occasionally going to classes at the Halls of the Oen’Aerei. It wasn’t complete immersion, but it was enough that Adabelle was nearly always concerned about her cousin’s safety.
And now she had been attacked.
She would have to tell Charlotte sometime soon, not that she worried. Never being able to dream meant Charlotte was safe from Nhyxes, so long as they stayed within the frequency of the dreams. It was odd that Charlotte couldn’t dream, considering the rest of her family were Dreamers. Even odder was that she never had nightmares either. Her sleeping was always silent and dark and peaceful. Adabelle often envied her sister for this odd gift. With all the nightmares she suffered though, some of those dreams that came were heaven. Dreams where she met with her mother and talked life, dreams where she and her sister were able to live happy. Dreams where she’d had a different father to the one with which she’d had to suffer.
She couldn’t remember much of the night she’d left her mother, but she knew after that she’d never heard of her mother again and her father had disappeared, too. Mrs. Abeth had filled in the blanks after that. Her father had killed her mother, and her father, Count Therron Blaise, had disappeared, sealed away into a dreamsphere in the Oen’Aerei’s archives for life. He would never see the light of day again, nor breathe real air. He would stay somewhere in the Dream Archives till the end of his days.
She would see Larraine before too long, just to make sure she was okay, and when she did she would be sure to inform her of her mother’s wellbeing. Larraine rarely visited Marie, as it was too painful for her to see her in that state, but she was always happy to hear that her mother was doing well.
For the time, though, Adabelle enjoyed her lunch while she could, deciding it best to not let other’s troubles bother her until she had to. She had enough to worry about it was.
Chapter Two
A Sturding Nhyx
Adabelle took it upon herself to keep an eye out for the Nhyx that night while asleep. They usually never attacked alone, nor did it ever only attack once. They usually came in waves. She hated entering the Dream Frequencies, but she had to if she was going to keep her dormitory friends safe.
As always, she started within her own dreams—in this case, her room. It made it easier to orient herself when she dreamed into existence the place she slept. By positioning herself there, her subconscious automatically situated herself in the exact same position as the real world. If she looked to her left where her sister lay, she saw only a wall of blackness. A deep, unfathomable shadow so devoid of imaginative thought and dreaming; or at least, that’s what she saw. Beneath that darkness could be a river of thought flowing, a mass of lights and images. But Adabelle only felt silence and saw stillness.
She pulled herself from her bed. Her feet touched what felt like solid floor, and then she walked forwards. The room felt whole around her, but as she walked towards the wall, the paint and plasterboard fuzzed, turning dark, and then shimmered into an entirely different surrounding. This one was a city, it was raining, and there were monsters.
She was in the mind of a girl named Elian, and she was dreaming of what appeared to be a far blander city than that they lived in now. O
dilla was one of the most beautiful cities in all of the countries on the continent. Definitely the one with the most monuments, statues and fountains, at least. This city Elliana dreamt was grey, square and bland and very practical. But there was pollution heavy in the sky, coming from smokestacks in the distance, and from the hundreds of cars that clogged the streets. Engines shook the air in a chorus of fuel-powered rumbling. Headlights bloomed through the smog, shining on the automobiles in front. They were stacked, back-to-back, barely moving. People walked the side streets, damp cloths to their faces, coughing through the pollution. A creature screamed. No, roared. Its cry was like train brakes screeching against railing. Adabelle looked up towards the clock tower above her. The face was illuminated, and in that illumination was a shadow. A beast. It was winged and horned and dark, a monster like in her childhood nightmares. They had teeth and glowing red eyes and claws and pointed tails. These were not Nhyxes.
She pushed through the boundaries of the dream, the door to one of the houses fuzzing again and turning dark. In that in-between darkness, Adabelle felt an oddly endless expanse, as if she would fall forever should she lose herself in there. The only way to describe the sensation was vertigo, so it was with a deep-seated relief that she entered the next dream. The girl sitting in the centre of the field was a young girl named Marley. There were fairies dancing around her, the small sprites smiling and whistling and keeping Marley’s attention as she watched. No Nhyxes here.
From dream-to-dream Adabelle went, keeping her eyes peeled for the familiar sight of the Nhyxes. There was Lauren, who baked cakes, and Danielle, who seemed to be practicing some foreign form of fighting. A boy named Thomas was dressed in a cloak and waving about a wand, and Lionel, who seemed entirely stuck in a dream where he kept trying to convince people his name wasn’t actually Lionel. But there were no Nhyxes tonight. The dark figure in the coat and top hat wasn’t anywhere to be seen, either.
She released the dream tendrils, feeling her conscience snap back to her body, as elastic snaps back into shape. She chose not to move yet for fear of the Dream Buffer: the part of her mind still lost in the Frequencies. It was only a small part, but it spoke loudly, and told her she could fly if she wanted to, or that she could swim through bottomless oceans. It told her that if she believed hard enough, she could do the impossible.
Adabelle had seen the effects of losing one’s self to the dream buffer through Aunt Marie. She was the result of what happened when the tendrils of someone’s mind tied themselves too fully in the Frequency.
The buffer sickness had something to do with the mind being caught in a space where anything was possible for some time, and being fully cognitive of the events, too. When removing oneself from the Frequencies, the mind took a moment to distinguish between dream and reality. During that time some Dreamers took it upon them to leap out of the window and fly away, or to dive into the concrete, as it’s not really concrete, only to discover that those acts were not possible in the real world. The worst result of all this was that the Dreamer would forget reality, lost in the dreams, releasing hundreds of tendrils and tying themselves to other’s thoughts so completely there could be no removal.
Adabelle felt the last few snaking skeins of thought recede into her mind, the more practical, sensible part of it reminding her of reality’s truths, and the physical limitations to which she was bound. Relieved and comfortable, she then rolled over and went to sleep.
The following morning, Adabelle found a note in a brown envelope slipped under the door. She opened it, and was not surprised by its contents.
Adabelle,
Can you please visit the hospital wing this morning after breakfast to visit your cousin, Larraine? She has some matters she wishes to discuss with you.
Regards,
Mrs. Abeth.
She folded up the note and tossed it aside to her work desk. She glanced at her sister. Charlotte was still asleep. Adabelle got dressed, went down for breakfast, enjoyed her jam on toast, and then headed to the hospital wing.
The hospital itself was a collection of three halls, each catering for minor, medium and major illnesses and problems, each equipped with nurses and doctors, and students studying to become any of the former. When she arrived, she asked to see Larraine to the kind nurse behind the counter, and she obliged, taking her to the room of minor incidents. She found Larraine sitting up in bed with her own breakfast of porridge filled to discolouration with brown sugar. She looked up, brown eyes brightening, and smiled.
“Adabelle, it is good to see you!” she said, finishing up the last few spoons of her porridge in a hurry. She put the tray to her bedside table, and hugged Adabelle tightly.
“And you, too,” Adabelle replied, releasing the hug. “And it’s good to see you’re okay. Mrs. Abeth told me about what happened.”
Larraine’s smile decreased all of a sudden. “Yes…the Nhyx attack was rather horrible.”
“How did you fight it off?” asked Adabelle.
“I didn’t,” she replied. “Or rather, couldn’t. None of the usual tricks helped. It’s like in my dream, I forgot I was Dreaming—which never happens—and it took advantage of that.”
Adabelle shook her head, horrified at the thought of a Nhyx attack, and having to face it completely unprepared.
Adabelle bit her lip, hesitant. “What happened, exactly?”
“Well, I went to bed, and I started dreaming. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. And not the Oen’Aerei variety either. I wasn’t Dreaming dreaming, so really I’m not surprised I wasn’t aware I was asleep, but anyway, I was wandering through a dark city street in this. Can’t tell you where—I don’t think it was anywhere I’ve been—and then the dark shadows begin to twist, and I realised I was in a nightmare, and then it turned into a Nhyx.”
“What form did it take?” Adabelle asked.
There were just as many forms of Nhyx as there were people in the world. Literally.
“Well…” she glanced away from Adabelle out the window. “…In all honesty, I’d rather keep my fears to myself. But it took form and it attacked. I…can’t explain what happened next. I was aware I was dreaming, I knew it was a Nhyx, and I knew I had to fight. But something was stopping me. I don’t know whether it was fear, or worry, or just that I was paralysed with shock at the appearance of…” she stopped herself, pausing just long enough that Adabelle was sure she said the word of her Nhyx in her mind. “But I couldn’t fight. I tried telling it that it was only a Nhyx and that I wasn’t afraid, and all it did was laugh. I tried thinking happy thoughts, to pull me from the city into another dreamscape, but still nothing. It was…well…it was almost like having no control over my own dream.”
Adabelle gasped at this. Even non-Dreamers knew that if they became aware in a dream, they could control aspects of it. That was lucid dreaming. Dreamers just had more control over it, and the Oen’Aerei even more than that. It was simple degrees of power. But for an Oen’Aerei to lose control over a dream and be manipulated by a single Nhyx, well that was just unheard of. Multiple Nhyxes, maybe, but even then it wouldn’t take a visit from another Oen’Aerei to rescue them. And Larraine wasn’t a weak Oen’Aerei at all. She was rather powerful, as were most of Adabelle’s family.
“I decided, considering I’d lost control of aspects of the dream, I could run, but again, it was like I was in a child’s nightmare. Like it wasn’t even my own dream. Every step took me an inch, each massive leap I made barely moving me a single step. I felt like a child again.” She stopped, swallowing. The breath that surfaced fluttered in it exhalation. Larraine considered her words carefully. She didn’t want to draw up too much of the memory.
“Like I remember a dream I had as a child, where there was a lion chasing me.” Adabelle quietly laughed at this, feeling guilty an instant later. Who was she to judge this girl? “No matter how hard I ran, no matter how fast my legs moved, I couldn’t escape it. It was like I was pushing my legs through mud, or against the tide at the seashore. You
know?”
Adabelle nodded.
“Then you can imagine my horror when I discovered today that that Nhyx…it was a Sturding Nhyx.”
Adabelle’s eyes widened.
“I didn’t think they even existed,” Adabelle said. “I thought that was just something the Oen’Aerei put out to scare people into needing to employ their Dreamers.”
“Oh, no, Adabelle,” Larraine said, looking and sounding very serious. “They’re very real. Very real indeed. They’re just not very common. Very, very, very rare.”
She pulled back the covers of the bed and pulled the bottom of her hospital robes up to reveal a cut up her leg. It was not particularly deep, nor was it particularly serious. Some ointment on it would stave off infection, much of it already covered in the yellow-brown disinfectant solution.
“The Nhyx did that,” Adabelle asked. “I didn’t think you were a Sturding yourself.”
“I’m not,” she said. Not even a little bit. They did a test and couldn’t find even the slightest hint of Sturding powers within me. But the Nhyx attacked me, and when I was woken by the Oen’Aerei, they showed me my leg and it was bleeding. They can’t even explain it. They’ve never really dealt with dream incidents appearing in this world. I mean, they have a few theories, but nothing proved. Nothing…concrete.”
“And now they do,” Adabelle said. And they’ll probably take her away and study her for experiments, the same way they use everyone.
That might have been a slightly over-dramatic thought, but Adabelle knew the Oen’Aerei’s history, she knew their roots as a school for soldiers and war. She knew they no longer were used in such a fashion, not any more. The thought of that sandstone academy made her blood pulse harder.