Dreaming Men Are Haunted Men

[Luned]

Luned had about a dozen tomes of various shapes and sizes piled into her arms, the scents of paper and leather tickling her nose as she edged her way to the corner where she'd left her things in a rather unceremonious heap on the floor. A fellow patron shuffled past and she offered her a polite smile, but it was hidden behind her reading material and the woman had no interest in her, anyway. It was times like these that she missed home. Adventure is such an attractive prospect until you realize you're in it all on your own.

Luned's ink-stained fingertips began to buckle under the weight of the books but she stubbornly made it across the room, resisting the urge to drop them on the desk with a satisfying crack that would percuss through the rafters of this quiet sanctuary and well, then she wouldn't be very stealthy about this whole napping business, would she? Using her upper body as a brace she eased the leaning tower of parchment onto the table, her shoulder forcing a stray volume back into place as it threatened to fall from the top. From there she set to work, constructing a fortress of strategically placed piles around the circumference of her work space. She had this foolproof system down pat. Well, almost foolproof. She did get kicked out of that one archive a couple weeks back, but she'd had a head cold and wouldn't have been caught if it wasn't for a little snoring.

When she was satisfied with the arrangement, having adjusted it carefully as if assessing an artfully arranged bouquet of flowers, she moved her possessions out of the way. Luned kicked her bundle of clothes under the table and set her case of writing supplies in front of her as she sat down, running her fingers over the familiar carvings in the wooden surface. This everyday motion brought her some comfort. No matter where she was, when she wrote, she was home.

It opened with the creak of tiny hinges to reveal a well-organized stock of inks, papers, quills, brushes, and other tools of her trade. Luned extracted a well-worn crow quill that was starting to fray at the tip and a vial of lower quality sepia ink, then reached into one of the deep pockets of her dusty rose-hued homespun dress to pull out a weathered little journal. Upon opening it was revealed to be a diary of sorts, but contained entries from two different sets of handwriting: her own carefully formed penmanship, then one much more hurried and reminiscent of chicken scratches. Bleddyn's.

Bleddyn was her mentor. He was the whole reason she was here, and as she flipped through the pages to find their last spot, a single coin fell out and onto the table with a soft clink. He hadn't written a response to her last plea, but sent a gift instead. It had been some time since she'd found work as apparently the nations with higher literacy rates didn't need scribes as much as others, so this token assured that she'd eat for the next few days. She tucked it safely away with a sigh and quickly scribbled down some notes about her less than remarkable week, along with a brief thank you.

When Luned was satisfied with her report she blew on the pristine cursive to dry the ink, then closed the journal and slipped it back into her pocket. After cleaning the quill with a cloth she put everything away, opened a random book as a prop, and laid her head down to rest. The fortress of books blocked most of her small form from view and she hoped anyone who spotted her hunched posture would just assume she was being very intense about some sort of research. As she lazily skimmed a few lines on the open spread she realized that she'd arbitrarily chosen an encyclopedia on dreams, causing her mouth to quirk in amusement before she closed her weary eyes.

Keeping so very still opened Luned's senses to the library, every cough, page turn, and footstep distinct from the usual chorus of white noise. With her head nestled in her folded arms she could feel slow and steady breathing in her ears like the gentle hum of an orchestra, pulling her into the rolling waves of her subconsciousness. She barely noticed the slight draft that caressed her ankles or the murmuring conversation nearby as her mind drifted from one subject to the next, falling into a stream-of-consciousness tumble of thoughts in the twilight of sleep.


○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Salt stung her sinuses and Luned was home again. Not Radasanth, but the place she knew before that: the trade port where she grew up. Her limbs felt light with the burden of adulthood lifted and she found herself perched like a sparrow at the top of a tree on the hill above town, where she watched her father's flags soaring into the docks atop ships much smaller than she remembered. Purple and gold, they waved hello, and she slid down the tree as if it was no more than a bannister, her bare feet suddenly planted on the cobblestones of the busy streets. Sailors pressed by in the bustle of busy work, bumping into little Luned without so much as an "excuse me, miss". She could see her father's flying colors winking at her in the wind above the crowd but they seemed so far away and so high, almost lost in the clouds. "Is he back?" She asked passers-by, but their faces moved in blurs and none stopped to answer.

[Christoph]

Dark ocean currents swirled around Elijah, enveloping him like a frigid net. He couldn't breathe. I'm drowning. He struggled against the undertow that pulled him toward unfathomable depths. Swimming, flailing. Dying. Finally, he reached the top. Cold night air kissed his face and burned his gasping lungs. He opened his eyes to the sky, a second sea of shining stars stretching across the horizon. When had the sun set? Just a moment ago, he--just how had he gotten into the water?

I'm dreaming. This revelation came as no shock to Elijah, an accomplished lucid dreamer. He spotted lights along the shores and swam toward them. He reached a series of wooden docks and harbored ships rocking gently in the waves. Flags of purple and gold fluttered in the breeze. Something wasn't right, and Eli looked around, trying to put his finger on it. A bustling port town stretched across the coast. Sailors and harbor workers crowded between wooden shops and warehouses on their way home. None of it looked like the familiar jagged cliffs, fiery crags, and great granite spires of his own mind. He was certainly dreaming, but this dream was not his.

"Into whose mind have I intruded this time?" He sighed and climbed out of the water, feeling strangely aware and awake despite his dreaming state. He scanned in all directions, hoping to get his bearings, but the landscape beyond the town looked blurry and indistinct. The 'native' dreamer's mind clearly focused within this port town.

He looked down at himself. He wore a white chef coat, still drenched with salt water. He chuckled. No matter where his life took him, and what roles he assumed in the waking world, his unconscious mind would always see him as a chef. He shivered from the damp cold, but resisted the urge to conjure up flame and warmth. Until he knew more, he did not wish to draw attention to himself.

Then he heard a voice, this one distinct over the buzz of lapping waves and hazy murmurs. He turned about to find a brown haired girl standing in a nearby street leading into town. From a distance, she didn't appear threatening; that was enough for Eli to let his guard down. He called out to her.

"Hello? What is your name?"

[Luned]

The stranger stood out, not just because he was drenched and in a chef's coat, but because he felt real. There's a sort of fuzziness to a dream, as if everything is seen through a fisheye lens and all but the focus of one's vision is slightly distorted. Unimportant edges melt away and details get lost in favor of a general impression, but there he was, every wrinkle on his clothing and whisker on his face in impeccable detail that was almost harsh in the softness of the dreamscape. Luned didn't register this in a conscious sort of way, but it drew her attention and the bustling crowd blurred even more in her effort to concentrate. She looked at her hands which also bore a high level of precision in how her mind recalled the way they looked, simply out of familiarity. The port didn't have that, and everything suddenly felt rather strange.

Her mind had shifted gears, and so followed the landscape. Luned's sudden yearning for detail brought them to the place she knew best: Bleddyn's dark, dusty library back in Radasanth. The old man hunched obliviously over his desk scribbling something, his form a blur of two-dimensional figurative sketches that her mind pulled from her journal, and he functioned as part of the environment more than an active character. Modern lamps contrasted starkly with the dankness of the cold stone walls, moth-eaten tapestries, and shelf after shelf of painstakingly organized books. In contrast with the fogginess of the port everything here felt significantly more solid, so far that every single spine bore a title. She'd spent nigh a decade with this collection and she could find every volume in her sleep, which was precisely what she'd just done.

It was obvious there was access to more modern amenities, but Bleddyn was attached to tradition. To prepare a quill was a sort of meditation essential to the process of creation, even if all his arthritic hands produced now was a harsh scrawling that bled in silent black streams from his pen to form remnants of penmanship exercises Luned had been subjected to until her fingers bruised to uselessness.

The young woman didn't seem to notice any of this, of course. Recalling her home was second nature and the change of scenery made perfect sense in the fluid context of a dream. She relaxed a bit in the warmth of her memory and felt the light fabric of her old uniform hug around her shoulders like an old friend, a dark gray-blue number that was as solemn as her teacher. Her tightly braided hair was almost black in the dim light and she finally looked back up, brows quirked in curiosity toward the intruder.

"Luned. Who're you?"