That night Wixelor was visited by four fiercely vivid dreams, at turns arousing, disturbing, groteqsue and mysterious. This shouldn’t have surprised him, for less than a month ago he was a Dreamer leading a Dreamer’s vicarious existence, but so much had happened since then, his mind had forgotten itself, caught in the thrill of real life.
The first one seized at once his – in more ways than one – dormant masculinity, for it was Raddia dreaming of herself in a dim warm room, baring her bosom and then getting into bed. But just as Wixelor expected some imagined lover to materialize from the darkness of the bed’s other side (her brother, perhaps? Yodren? himself?) Raddia, with a tenderness unfamiliar both to herself and to the spying Dreamer, welcomed into her arms a younger version of Yonfi in the nude, though not so young as to be devoid of male desire, for as soon as he nestled against Raddia’s flesh his thin little cock hardened, pressing against the taut skin of her flank as keenly as his mouth sucked the breast that had been offered him, biting so hard the sweet watery milk was mixed with blood.
Then another dream of fantic passion suddenly elbowed its way to the forefront of Wixelor’s mind – this one dreamt by Gallan, or that was what he thought at first, for this was a darker dream, alien to the previous fantasy’s motherly warmth, in which two bodies rolled and wrestled on bare ground, uttering the growls and pants of animals in heat. Besides the disorienting factor of the Dreamer’s own stimulation, this imaginary mating was further obfuscated by not knowing whom the feelings belonged to: was it Gallan’s breathtaking desire he felt, or was the object of it, the shadow lover, the one in control of the dream – even, perhaps, the mind that had created it, masking its identity to placate a shame than ran deeper than the passion? But as the dust began to settle, and the naked limbs became distinct, Wixelor realized that it was Yodren, sitting astride on Gallan’s heaving chest – and knew at once that two exceedingly rare things were staring him down from this shadowland of lust: first, the coincidence of two people grasped by the same dream simultaneously, and second, the terrifying intoxication of the dreamers’ mirrored virginities: not knowing how to quell the hunger of their quivering flesh.
The scene changed just as the onlooking Dreamer wished it gone, to be replaced by a dream of such incongruous sexual longing, Wixelor knew his sleeping self must be laughing aloud: the female camel that had courted him awkwardly a few hours ago, was revisiting the encounter, but her imagination had adorned his lanky anatomy with a big hairy hump, and similarly altered his nether regions, replacing Wixelor’s penis with a male camel’s alarmingly smaller one. Finally, adding insult to injury, the ruttish beast sprayed him with urine, whereupon he made his quick departure from the dream.
It was the fourth and final dream that drew him more forcefully, however, even though the woman unconsciously weaving it was a stranger not merely to Wixelor, by to the very fabric of time that contained him. He didn’t know how he knew it – even back in Ienar Lin, he’d never known for sure; maybe it was her unusual clothes, or the elaborate way her flaxen hair was fashioned, or the lush red-cushioned seat on which she reclined, but somehow he could tell she belonged to the distant future, yet not the future of some other, equally distant world, but of a different place in Erat Rin. And in her dream, this woman (in whose mind stirred a great power, which made Wixelor wary of disturbing it with his presenece) was obsessing over an object, a unique, precious but also somehow dangerous object, hidden where no one could ever find it. And yet she knew that it must be found, at all costs, for if allowed to stay where it was, this thing, though small, could breed such chaos and evil that the world itself lay in peril. And while lurking quietly in this tangle of worries, Wixelor was suddenly convinced that the dreaded object, despite its tiny size, was indeed the seed of all devastation; it was the Rune of Death.
The Runes of Norien Page 60