Dreams of Cities Lost and Damned

[Cherny]

In the Rememdium Edificium a boy sleeps, rests, heals. At his bedside crouches a friend, a man with white-blond curls inexpertly cropped, head lowered to the blankets such that the sleeping boy's hand might rest lightly upon the man's scarred brow.

The boy dreams.

He soars high above everything, land stretching in every direction to the blue distance where ice-capped give way to verdant forests, then a broad valley, countless herd beasts roaming like cloud-shadow across the fertile plain. He moves on balmy winds and the world slowly turns beneath him; sinuous threads blaze like precious metal, rivers catching the low-hanging sun as it circles but never sets, while a single star hangs pale and unmoving in the deep blue vault above. A similar speck draws his eye below, a mote of silver-white brilliance moving slowly, inexorably, towards a smudge yet further ahead, a darker spot that spreads and grows even as he draws closer. A settlement, a village, a town, stout walls and sward roofs, hair-fine strands of sweet woodsmoke rising from clustered hearths and firepits. The settlement grows slowly, gradually, noticeable only if he looks away for a time to follow the track of that silver speck; when he looks back timber constructions have hardened to shells of rough stone, narrow dirt roads stretching out from the town to smaller settlements scattered across the wide valley.

That gleaming spark reaches the gates at last. It crosses the threshold and the change is sudden, abrupt: the town surges, seethes, details shifting and changing faster than he can follow as buildings rise and fall and rise higher yet; the only fixed point is that gleaming spark in the centre, bright and constant as the pole star hanging overhead. The settlement spreads ever wider as streets shift and writhe, hardening from dirt to cobbles to flagstones, a web that pulses with constant life; sturdy walls form brief boundaries that are swiftly exceeded, left embedded in the town's fabric like rings in a felled tree, a map of unstoppable growth, of progress. The roads beyond the gates widen, thicken into broad paved arteries that pour prosperity into the burgeoning city's veins.

It's at the heart that the first gleam of marble appears, a flash of white amid the dark granite from which the city had grown; the silver spark rests on a square of velvet green, a garden dotted with trees and strewn with drifts of vibrant blooms, sheltered behind gleaming walls and colonnades. Graceful towers and domes of burnished gold strive upwards, while the palace itself sprawls out to engulf the districts around it, streets and alleyways subsumed into a maze of airy courtyards and sheltered arcades; the wider city brightens in turn, a mesh of broad avenues and stately boulevards leading inwards to that shining point at the centre. He lifts his eyes and sees this change echoed in the surrounding countryside, a patchwork of golden grainfields and lush meadows; even the lesser towns prosper as the roads swell with wealth beyond measure, carried in a tide to the City's gates. Looking down again and the palace is almost a city in itself, a froth of spires and arches washed in gold by the low-swinging sun. Even from his high vantage he can hear the distant peals of temple bells, countless joyous voices wafting up to him like sweet incense.

The palace grows deeper, more intricate, layer upon layer, an ever greater profusion of gilt and marble, more domes, more towers, more clustered columns and glittering fountains. Once-spacious courtyards grow cramped and shadowed, closed in on all sides by looming walls and spires that crowd out the sky; even that central garden shrinks inwards, a sacred space nibbled at every edge by walls that once sought to reflect the spark that dwelt there and now try to contain it, a shrine become a prison.

Chaotic, unconstrained, the gilded palace grows ravenous, impatient; the chimes and choirsong fade to be replaced by battle-drums and brazen horns as armies crawl out across the land, taking by the sword what was once gladly offered in tribute. Far out at first and yet ever closer the distant towns and cities fall, each replaced by a pillar of black and bitter smoke. Even this is not enough, and the hungering citadel consumes that which once nourished it, district after district darkening and falling into drab disrepair as the city withers to sustain the roiling tumour at its heart. A prideful clot of white and gold atop a pool of rotting filth, the citadel turns away from the world, outer windows blocked and blinded as it looks only inward. The outer city decays, thin wails of despair rising on air grown cheerless and cold, and the distant ice-tipped mountains seem to draw nearer, a ring of gleaming teeth around the horizon.

The biting breath of mountain winds stir something within the city, in the last scrap of green at its heart. The star-bright mote moves again, exploring the garden-prison, at first with slow and aimless meanderings, then with increasing determination, purpose; it finds its way into the palace, a frail and silvery glow lighting the windows from within as it roams the endless halls and chambers, searching. At last it makes its way to the citadel gates, vast portals of gilded iron that spring wide, and a cold and brilliant radiance blazes as the wanderer descends into the blighted slums below.

What follows is uncertain, as he finds himself buffeted and battered by clawing gusts that drive him up and away from the Golden City. Even so he hears clearly, cannot help but hear the dreadful howl that goes up from below, vast and deep and baleful as of the tolling of a great and terrible bell. The clustered spires of marble lurch and sway as the city burns and bleeds, proud buildings licked by tongues of fire, paved streets and squares awash in lurid crimson.

Far overhead the sky grows midnight-blue and is filled with countless pitiless stars that reel and spin and tremble at that cry; their breath is bleak damnation poured out upon the land, upon the city, and the valley blanches at its cold caress. What was green now fades and withers, silvered rivers shocked and frozen white, and the city lies dark and dead and cold. The sun sinks ever lower to the horizon, dipping below the serried mountain peaks, sending jagged fangs of shadow to rake across the plain. From every side loom encircling walls of glacial ice, closing in to gnash and gnaw the city's marble bones.

Mirth wells up in his throat like harsh black bile, to see such proud vainglory fall and fade; he laughs a long and croaking cry, and the bitter winds whisk him swiftly away.

The boy wakes in the pallid light of dawn with that laugh still on his lips; quickly lost, though, as it tugs upon his scarred lung and wracks his thin frame with hacking coughs.

[catch]

He did not dream. He did not have the Mind for Dreaming, his dreams long taken and shattered at the edges of glass-knives, broken up into stars with each waxing and waning of the moon. He denied his dreams for what they were, and took them into himself, and thought them real. He did not dream. Yet, under Cherny's tangled fingers, where the man seeped into the boy, the boy seeped into him -


He was warm, and this was a strange thing for Catch, for he remembered his boyhood in a vague, animal way, and he had never been as warm as this; not even at his mother-child's breast. The word was slow into focus, for his eyes were most important, and his smell soon after, and for long he was the warmth and the fuzzed shapes and the fragrant smell of mother. He had but to eat, and there was plenty, though he was aware of other-smells and other-shapes, older brothers and sisters. He came to know them in a slow way, as they smiled and laughed and played, and he clung close to Mother and watched, once his sight had become keener, and his ears were full of love and crooning.

It was not all just soft mother-song and sibling-laughter, for every night Father would come from the day's toils, and shake his great, black cloak free of snow or of dust or of mud and rain, depending the season, and gather all his children to him, and laugh his good belly-laugh and present the presents, the toys and things he brought from the Town, and the food he gave to Mother, so that she may prepare it and spread it as she saw fit. Catch felt the love as if he were Cherny, and they would all sleep together in one, giant bed, in this single-room cabin, and Cherny was in their midst, and Catch was Cherny for this, and he was moved almost to tears at the seeing of it.

Catch's eye blinked, and in that blinking years passed. That morning, Father came to him, a morning crisp but not cold, and he roused Cherny with a gentle stroke, and a twinkle in his eye.

"It is time for you to learn your business," his Father said, "And to know what we are about."

He took Cherny into the woods, and he showed him then the Sounds of the trees, and the feel of the wind through it. Their magic was this, a magic that Cherny was only aware of, dimly, and now blossomed under his hands and in his mind. He had much to learn, but his Father was patient, and kind, and he taught him too the smaller magics of the Earth, of spying on the deer, and where to find squirrel-caches, and to tell when the lambs or the sheep may be lamed or ill, or how to tell when the meat or milk may be spoiled. He spoke, too, of far-off lands, of Mountains and the Sea, and Cherny always wondered at such places, but had long to go until such a wanderlust gripped him. His Father, and his Mother, were great craftsmen at this, and others would come from far and wide to their little cabin in the woods, to chatter and to learn.

But to Cherny, it did not matter if they were magicless, or idiots, or the lesser of all men. That warmth never left, and it was only Love that he felt, and in that Love he turned his hand to learning, eagerly devouring all that his Father may teach. And then.

And then.

He was alone. This was what Catch knew, this loneliness. That was because he was Catch, once more, and he watched Cherny and his Father through the trees, the woods, no longer the Feeler, but the Watcher, and Catch wondered to find that, yes, he remembered Cherny, before the boy ever became the ward of Waldemar.

And he had watched Cherny, wandering alone, eating things no boy should eat, for he was alone, and desperate, and frightened.

Catch wouldn't stand still. He wouldn't just watch, not anymore.


Fitful coughs. catch did not wake, but his hand moves, broad and hard; it settles, faithful as a dog, on the boy's struggling chest. Catch sighs, a child-sigh, and he nuzzles his broken head against the slim warmth of Cherny. It is his. He would trust it with everything of him.

[Khalika]

When a sleeping boy cough and an adle man stirs. A chair leg rubs slightly against the floor by the foot of the bed a single candle rest on a stool near by. The occupant looks up from her book at the two.

Having come by not to long ago, with the sole purpose to leave a gift for the healing boy. A small leather bound book filled with blank page, a good piece of rope is used as makeshift ribbon to hold in place a writing tool and a note which read.

For the learning of letter
and add of number..
K

Inside the front cover one will discover the words

Property of

A below a line left blank for him to fill with his own hand. When he awakes he will see it upon the bed side table and that should have been the end. She would slip out and go about her business.

It was perhaps their stillness, the calming silence of slumber that held her in a pause, that had her quietly maunvering chair, stool and candle. That had her pull a similar book from her cloak pocket. writing instrument tuck inside. To begin to read old pages and fill new one, some with words, some with scetch, only breifly looking up if either should stirr..

The book is rest upon the stool and she would move towards the front of the bed..Pouing a glass of water and offering it to with him,with nothing more then...

"Drink this." Her words are soft and quiet, not wanting to stirr the sleeping Catch.

[Cherny]

The boy frowns as he coughs, stirs, not even halfway awake; enough to pull the blankets more closely about his shoulders, to shift a little. That voice, that instruction, has one eye cracking open blearily; a glass of water before his face, and he lifts an unsteady hand to take it, sipping slowly even as his eye drifts closed again.

If he finds the gypsy's presence strange, if he even recognises her, he gives little sign; such visits seem part of the routine here, healers pressing tonics and tea and bitter medicine upon him at all hours - to soothe his cough, to ease the tightness of healing flesh, to restore his blood, to calm his sleep. So the glass is drained and held out to be taken, his duty done; he settles back into his bedding, hand brushing clumsily across Catch's calloused paw where it weighs upon his chest, before lowering to rest thin fingers at the crown of the sleeping man's head.

[Rance]

She sat outside the room, working a rather stubborn fold of burry wool. She thrust the needle through the bottom of the garment with a bare hand, and pulled through with the black glove. A repretive process. Over and over. And over. Calmness and comfort in the predictability of it all.

The wellsmiths went in. The wellsmiths came out. It would be an indignity for her be at the boy's side all through the night when they worked more privately with him. When the gypsy arrived, the girl looked up from her work, and leaned in her chair to follow the woman with her eyes.

She was not a wellsmith. She was not the Lady of Knives. No, Khalika was something else, something else. The gypsy brought the gift and poured the boy a small glass of water. In the doorway, sewing abandoned, Gloria stood with one hip against the doorjamb and her arms crossed across her belly, daring not to interrupt with anything but a whisper.

"They say that too much water might disturb his lungs. They warn him it may drown him from the inside, you see, if he is given too much in this state." The words were not a criticism -- they were information, passed from one to another. "You are kind to come see him. He grows restless, and while I may say, 'Master Cherny, you should rest,' or 'Master Cherny, you should enjoy your medicine now,' he will refuse to do either, because that is what healthy boys do."

The young woman watched Cherny as he drank. He had a glaze to his eyes and a ghostliness to his motions -- sleep-moving, the kind one might not remember when morning came. Only when the boy would fully return to sleep did she speak again to Khalika, watching her littler friend and Catch in that frozen moment, having no idea what transpired beyond the touch of skin and the silent song of sleep.

"I am proud of my friends," she said to Khalika. "I am proud they are strong people; Ser Catch has overcome great fears to be with his Eater; Master Cherny has healed with the strength of a bull. A heart could scarcely be happier.

"I will be outside if you need anything, menna," were her final words to the gypsy, before she dipped into a tired bow, and left the woman to her visit. The door was not closed all the way, left open only the width of two fingers. The thread and needle were returned to their rote adventures.

[Khalika]

Something else indeed. The Gypsy was a alot of things the Good, the bad and the ugly. Tonight though she was simply concerned, so much so that she barely noticed the girl when she entered the room. So much so she held a hidden joy when the boy woke and took the water inhand, when it is emptied and he back to his back she will set the cup down and pull the covers high to the neck. When the girl spoke she looked up to her with a smile before the eyes peer back down towards the slumber twosome.

"His blood has spilled on Myrken soil. He will need that strength if he is to survive what comes after." For Myrken is a starving beast that craves and whines and must be fed.

Returning to her chair, she would speak to the now closed door. " My sister was ill when she was young, I use to read to her." Journal replaced with Wryin's dogeared copy of "A fairy tale collection" she would turn to the story of Jack and his beanstalk. "If you wish to turn your chair in and listen for a spell, it will not bother.."

With that the words would flow..Jack, the cow and three beans..

[Cherny]

The gypsy's tale is a soothing murmur, the words themselves blurring and blending as Cherny sinks back into sleep, a scarred and broken brow beneath his fingertips.

He sleeps, he dreams.

The world wheels below him once more, painted with smudges of ochre and tan, moss and slate; he drifts lower in lazy loops, the horizons climbing around him until the landscape is a bowl of deserts and plains, forests and mountains. He straightens his path and soars onwards, racing the sun until star-flecked darkness looms ahead, the hem of night's cloak fleeing before the coming day. A thin line of white-capped breakers marks the boundary between land and sea, and then he is sweeping across a vast and featureless expanse of water, an azure desert, dragging a trail of glittering sunfire across the waves into the inky murk before him.

He cannot tell for how long he keeps pace with the dawn, but at last a smear of pink-tinted cloud ahead promises land. Land! The peaks catch the sun first, drawn out of the gloom as if rising from abyssal depths. Scraps of white skim above the waters and upon them, flocks of seabirds above, tiny sails below, and dawn washes upon the shore to reveal a town of simple whitewashed buildings clustered in the belly of a bay, encircled by gentle green hills. He slows, letting the day catch up with him, watching the town creep gently out along the shore as small fishing and trading ships ply their way up and down the coast; even as he does so his attention is drawn to a single point of light that approaches from the landward side, a silver star left behind by the retreating night, crawling down the hillside between terraced fields and pastures to the harbour town's gates.

The details are different, but the broad sweep of events is repeated.

Prosperity, expansion, hope. White-walled buildings climbing the hillsides in stepped terraces, wharves and piers lining the waterfront, stout harbour walls reaching out to embrace and shelter the ships now crowding the bay.

Majesty, glory, grace. Hilltops sprout beacon towers to guide ships to port, a temple raised in enormous sandstone slabs upon the waterfront, ships becoming fleets that sail beneath the noonday sun for distant shores, bringing back riches from trade and adventure.

Pride, arrogance, avarice. Many-oared warships now outnumber the fat-bellied merchant vessels, sliding out across the waves like thirsty blades, and threads of smoke rise up from distant coasts. The temple grows a shell of bright marble that glows gold in the afternoon sun, visible across the sea from leagues away.

Corruption, depravity, excess. The temple squats like a gilded toad, broad and fat and ever-hungry, and the ships return with chains of living prizes that shuffle their way to rust-caked altars. The harbour's waters thrash and churn as still-wailing offerings are consigned to the depths, and the sinking sun washes sails and streets and walls with blood.

Fall. Again that cry, again that horror, a thundering blare of wide-throated bells; the land so far below shudders and heaves as wine-dark waters froth and foam, as buildings shatter and walls tumble into the streets. The sea drops back as if repelled by the city's touch, gouging spiteful rents and runnels into silt and sand as it flees, until it joins the distant darkness on the far side of a stinking plain. The air grows thin and chill, the heavens darken above and still that roar continues, until bright stars shiver and weave through the high abyss. The city now sprawls atop a dome-like mound as wide and flat as a blister, an inverted bowl whose curve confounds the eye; the stars reach down to the too-near horizon, and where they touch the land they birth peaks like wicked knives and pillars of red-lit smoke.

With a vast concussion the city drops away beneath him, whatever force raised the mound finding sudden and catastrophic release. The hill collapses like a lanced boil, great blazing fissures opening in ever-decreasing circles that march in from the horizon; ring within ring within ring of fire, pouring gouts of dust and ash and molten rock until as far as he can see is a basin of fuming gold.

The land sinks and sags further in upon itself, the horizon-peaks sliding down into fiery ruin, and at last the sea rolls in with a triumphant roar to smother the world in a steaming, stinking shroud.