Bridge Between the Worlds (Dreamwalker Book 1)

by R. B. L. Gillmore

  A distinct hush told him the contact had beaten him to their meeting spot. It was perhaps the most unnerving trait his contact had. Living creatures appeared to have a complete unwillingness to remain in the minotaur’s vicinity. Somehow, that was worse even than the minotaur’s towering proportions, blood stained armor and evil, ruby red eyes.

  “Several minotaurs slain. Captives pursued for at least a week to the south. Explain.”

  The voice was deep, rough and decidedly angry. The wind had immediately been taken out of Vencel’s sails.

  “What are you talking about? No trace of any minotaurs was found and the whole town was taken captive.”

  “No trace because the master ordered no corpses left behind. Raiders were attacked. Attackers not caught. You explain why resistance made.”

  The minotaur took a meaningful step forward and seemed somehow to swell even further in size. The part of Vencel’s brain programmed to trigger the primal fear alarm was working hard to overcome the rest of his brain’s functions, which were keeping him still.

  “There were no defenders! I ordered all troop movements away from the town a week in advance, as promised. I checked all the reports after and all movement orders were obeyed, I swear it!”

  The minotaurs eyes narrowed in suspicion and a deep rumble emanated from its throat.

  “You told master no magic users in human realm?”

  The minotaurs language was horridly stilted, as always, but it was clear that this was a question.

  “Yes of course. There haven’t been magic wielders in the kingdom for decades, they were all banished.”

  A hint of understanding started to break through Vencel’s fear.

  “Surely a few humans shouldn’t have been a problem for a whole party of minotaurs. What exactly happened?”

  The minotaur grunted noncommittally.

  “You speak to the master” it said blankly.

  Vencel couldn’t stop his eyebrows from rising in surprise.

  “He’s here? But I thought…”

  “No. No matter. You speak to the master.”

  “How, if he’s not here?” Vencel asked.

  His eyebrows had returned to a frown. The minotaur didn’t answer. Instead, it stared intently at a spot several feet behind and a little to the left of Vencel. The stare was determined enough to make Vencel turn his head, expecting to see the strange hooded figure that haunted his nightmares. Instead, he felt something smash into the back of his head. Then the world went black.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Amy stood staring up at the fantastic tumult of expansive branches above her. Many of them were so large and thick that they would have been enormous in their own right, even if they had been tree trunks. This spoke bounds about the actual trunks from which they sprouted. You could fit a mansion inside them if they were hollow, Amy thought. They stood a good portion away from each other, evidently allowing space for the presumably preposterous roots that stabilized them. In between lay a beautiful mix of lush grass, neat little bushes and countless colourful flowers like a bejewelled cover over the ground. She had the strangest, strongest feeling she had been here before. No, it was more than that, it was as if this place was a home that she had been away from for a long time, so long that she struggled to remember exactly how it had looked long ago. The only unusual thing about the forest was that it was eerily quiet. Too quiet. There had to be animals living here. The space above her was relatively open until the branches became more prolific in number high above the ground. As if in answer to Amy’s thoughts, she heard a flutter of wings behind her and she spun around to try and spot what had made the noise.

  This wasn’t difficult. The owl had landed on the thin end of a branch above her, the original tree of which was indiscernible. The owl, Amy realised, was not behaving like a regular owl. It stared around intently and then fixed its hard gaze on her. She waved bleakly at it with the flicker of a smile.

  “Hi there.”

  Her voice was unnaturally high, like people have a tendency to do when they spoke to animals. The owl fluttered to the ground.

  The fact that an owl would willingly fly down to the ground in front of her should have surprised Amy, and if it didn’t then she definitely should have been surprised when it suddenly sprouted into a tall hooded figure in front of her eyes. But somehow, she had been expecting this to happen. She couldn’t really explain why, or how she had known that the owl wasn’t really an owl.

  “A human dream tonight Amriel. Not surprising I suppose. You have only had one elven dream so far. However, it is an unlikely choice of locations given you could not have ever been here before. Did your mother ever tell you stories about this place?”

  The voice was unearthly deep, warm and powerful. Amy found it somehow soothing.

  “No, my mother never told me about the forest. Why would she? I mean… this was my home once. I know all about it.”

  The light in the Arbiter’s eyes flared brightly in response. He asked no further questions on the matter.

  “It has been some time since I last visited you and for that I apologise. I have been unexpectedly busy over the past week. Something happened that I needed to look into but now we can proceed with your training.”

  Yes of course, Amy thought, she was here to train, she had almost forgotten that. She smiled at the Arbiter with excitement etched into her face. She was ready.

  “Excellent! What should we start with? What was it I did last time? I can’t seem to remember…”

  Amy felt confused as she tried to think back but couldn’t recall any details from her last meeting with the Arbiter who continued to stare into her eyes silently for a while before responding.

  “My, how beautifully blue the grass is today.” He said finally with a strange air in his voice. He turned his head from side to side, looking around at the green grass. The rapid change in conversation took Amy completely by surprise and she even felt a little irritated.

  “Yes, wonderfully blue, it always is around this time of year.”

  She cast her view away from the Arbiter for a moment to glimpse the now deep, sky blue grass. She did not seem to have noticed the change at all.

  “Human minds truly are astonishing” said the Arbiter very quietly, words spoken distinctly to himself and not to Amy. After a lost moment in thought he came back to himself.

  “Very good,” he said firmly, “I don’t think it is worth trying to build on your control techniques right now. They are not relevant to a human dream and besides, it is daytime, I doubt you will stay in the plane very long. Let us instead use the time to begin discussing the fundamentals of dreamwalking.”

  The Arbiter’s voice was firm and matter of fact but as he spoke the last few words, Amy felt as though he had emphasized them, like they were supposed to have some kind of unique meaning for her. She didn’t understand what that might have been however.

  “Let us walk a little as we speak Amriel. I would very much like for you to show me around your home.”

  The two of them strode across the cool damp floor of the forest, Amy leading the way in no particular direction. She felt warm and content being home again.

  “The first thing which is vital to understand, Amriel, is that physical worlds need to be bound by much stricter rules than those of dreams. In dreams, anything can be possible because its reality is but a fleeting moment of pure creativity. It requires no consistency. The physical worlds are solidifications of this creativity, bound by extremely rigid laws. In short, when the worlds were created, they were designed so that their laws simply could not be broken. They can be bent, twisted and manipulated but never broken. This is the first rule of dreamwalking. Do not create anything which breaks these rules, lest you break the reality of the world itself. Secondly and closely related to this, the physical worlds are in perfect balance. If you create something, it will always impact the world in some way, even if it is somewhere else to your creation. As such, you should not create anything which is not in
ternally consistent with the physical world. This should not be a problem for you, for the time being. Thirdly, you cannot manipulate matter which is controlled by another being with creative abilities. This is very important Amriel. Can you think why?”

  Amy stood still to think about the question. None of what the Arbiter was saying seemed to make any real sense. He kept talking about real worlds and dreams as if they were connected somehow. Then again, she thought, if they were connected and could affect each other, then the logical answer would be that manipulating something which is already being manipulated would cause problems… big problems. Not always though. This occurred to her as an afterthought.

  “Because their creativity clashes? Kind of, as if they were fighting each other?”

  “No” came the immediate and terse reply of the Arbiter. He was displeased.

  “There is such a phenomenon as you have just described but it is not applicable in this instance. It is not related to dreamwalking and I am unsure as to how this idea even came to you. It does not logically stem from the question.”

  Amy felt slightly abashed but then asked herself why this was? She had only tried to answer his bizarre question. The whole topic failed to make any kind of sense. The Arbiter regained his controlled tone as he explained the issue for her.

  “You cannot re-write creativity itself. Creation, yes, but not the raw essence which gives birth to what we call reality. When another creative being is actively creating something, it is controlling that reality with the force of creativity itself and this force cannot be overwritten. The clearest example of this rule is that you cannot physically manipulate another person by dreamwalking your desired change because that person has a permanent basis in creativity. In short, they are who and what they make themselves and seeking to manipulate this through direct creative force can have deadly consequences.”

  Amriel took the point. Don’t manipulate people or bad things happen. She still didn’t understand how or why it worked though. What the Arbiter had said wasn’t clear to her.

  “So, you mean you can’t manipulate someone to make them love you for example? Or make them go bald?”

  “Not by re-writing their existence through dreamwalking, correct. However, you can influence others to adjust their own perception of themselves and then they will change through their own actions. Of course, you can control what I shall refer to as ‘dead matter’ to affect people as well. These are factors which humans are exceptionally skilled at manipulating and terribly susceptible to. Fragile beings.”

  “But wait a minute! If the things you create become real matter, why can’t you rearrange matter to change people physically?”

  “That is a very complex question and I am afraid I cannot answer it in any way that you would be capable of understanding at this point in time. Rest assured, it is an action which has been tried many times in the past by Gorhoth. He tried to control people this way. The elves tried it as a way to heal others.”

  “And? What happened?”

  “Different things in different attempts. Certainly, I know that when Gorhoth tried to force servants to directly change another human’s mental existence, the servants were killed by the attempt. Something powerful within the raw creative essence in sentient beings seems to reject external changes. It is not fighting as you described it. The change simply cannot be. It would be a paradox and paradoxes have a way of being self-resolving. This is not something which anyone fully understands. Consider it this way, how can you possibly hope to understand something that is ever changing and has no rules to which it must conform?”

  “So then… the elves that tried to heal other people… they weren’t killed?”

  “Correct, they were not killed. Nevertheless, they were deeply affected. For many of them who tried, long ago, they were rendered unconscious for weeks, and when they awoke, their personalities and identities had been completely altered. It was almost as if they had metaphorically smashed their souls upon rocks like a wave. They were utterly disassembled and reformed.”

  Amy remained silent in thought for a long time considering what the Arbiter had said. At what point did this rule stop? After all, many animals could think creatively. What about them? And was it only when you tried to change something that existed or could you create new life altogether? Before she could ask any of these questions, the Arbiter continued speaking, as if in anticipation of her thoughts.

  “There are cases which do not seem to comply with this rule and it is also not so limiting as one might think. It is perfectly possible, for example, to call living beings into reality. That is, of course, if your imagination is powerful enough to do so. You yourself have achieved the seemingly impossible by summoning objects from the Arbiters’ plane into the physical world. Your parents also achieved something unbelievable. Disregarding their creation of an entire world, which we shall discuss at another time, when you are ready, your mother also managed to transport your father across the worlds. We still do not fully understand how that could have happened.”

  “Do you have any ideas though?” Amy asked. “Do you think they have some kind of special powers that they passed on to me?”

  The Arbiter let out a rich, warm, enveloping hum which clearly indicated he was pleased.

  “Hmmm, yes, I believe so. Although perhaps not the kind of power you were thinking of. I believe it has something to do with genuinely mutual goals and most critically, love.”

  “Love?”

  “Yes, love! There are boundless cases which indicate that true, deep, mutual love can cause powerful creative bonds. Combine such a bond with your mother’s abilities as a dreamwalker and many things may be possible.”

  “But if love is all it takes, why couldn’t the elves heal their loved ones?”

  “An excellent question! The answer lies in the last point we were discussing. Can you remember? Try and let your mind relax and know what was said, don’t search through your memory, you know that you have the answer.”

  The Arbiter had to guide Amy’s unconscious mind carefully. Human dreams were prone to rapid change and forgetfulness.

  “Because…” stuttered Amy, “dreams are as real for elves as the physical world. So… the elf that was sick, wouldn’t be able to separate its physical self from its dream self? Then I guess, even if a loved one tried to heal them in their dream through dreamwalking, or even by trying to convince the dream version of the elf that they were well again… the sick elf would reject the change because they would know that it wasn’t real.”

  “Try to convince the dream version of the elf they are well?” the Arbiter repeated as a question. “Why didn’t you say, ‘simply dream that the elf well again’?”

  “Because you can only change someone from inside their own mind… surely…”

  “Yes, yes indeed! Now tell me, has anyone told you before that to affect another living being, one must do so through the being’s own dream zone?”

  “No… but…”

  The Arbiter hummed in his pleased way again.

  “Human minds truly are amazing. They simply create answers to problems without even realising the true complexities they have overcome.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean humans simply create answers? It’s just logic.”

  “Yes, it is logic and so often humans are incredibly imaginative in its application. I believe humans would call these creations theoretical hypotheses, solutions which hold their own internal logic but are not proven. You have just done something very much like this, Amriel. If no one had told you so before, how could you possibly have known that it was only possible to affect other people through their own dream state, when you know that you can create and change things through your own dreams? You didn’t know but it didn’t seem to make sense so you simply applied a rule that you made up which could be used to explain the problem with situationally bound logic.”

  The Arbiter seemed so pleased with her that Amy simply remained silent until the Arbiter conti
nued the lesson.

  The conversation drifted on with details about the rules and the Arbiter gave examples here and there of how rules had affected dream walkers or been bent by them, all the while maintaining that Amy should avoid attempting this while she was still in training. It gave Amy an odd feeling inside knowing that it was her own parents who had stretched the boundaries of dreamwalking the furthest and were the only people known to have seemingly broken the rules entirely, and lived. Amy tried to argue that this meant that the rules had to be wrong, that they couldn’t exist if they had been broken even once but the Arbiter had said that these examples showed only that the rules were not fully understood. This made Amy smile.

  It was childish but all she could think of after hearing this was the memory of her father telling her as a child that the rules at school were important to some people even if they didn’t make sense to her. He had said she should obey them to keep out of trouble but that if she really wanted, all she had to do was look at the rules differently, and that he would support her if she did get into any trouble while following the rules in the way she needed to. Amy had done just that and got into trouble for climbing a tree in the playground. She had argued that the playground was not an out of bounds area and as the tree was in it, she was allowed in the tree. She would never forget the indignant look on the teacher’s face when her father had arrived and pointed out, quite matter-of- factly, that Amy was right and that if he heard of any punishment taking place he would write to the school’s board of directors. Her father had always been a bit odd. She wondered if she had ever told Martay that story? He would laugh. She could hear his warm laugh in her head as if he was actually standing right next to her.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Arnorial was worried about leaving Samuka and Eva behind at the camp but he even by himself he needed to be careful not to be seen as he approached the citadel. He knelt carefully behind an outcrop of rock which rose jaggedly out of the ground. It was the only real cover to be found in a wide ring around the area. The citadel itself could have been described better as a tightly packed city with towering spires dotted sporadically throughout the buildings, all corseted by high, black walls. Where a heavy iron gate would have been expected there was no solid barrier. Its absence boded poorly. Though not as poorly as the steady stream of human prisoners that Arnorial had seen led by minotaur slave drivers up into the mountains. The only comfort from the scene was that the humans were at least alive. Arnorial considered this a poor source of solace.