At first, he thought it only another hallucination that the two towers seemed to bend toward one another at their peak, but the vision did not waver. Realization arrived late: these were not two towers, but instead the opposing sides of an arch. Closer now, he could make out the ropes and pulleys lifting an enormous keystone into the heavens. It inched upward as he watched.
The dreaming construct would soon be complete. What would happen then was a great mystery, but not one Garen was eager to solve.
He hurried down alleyways and squeezed between abandoned buildings, looking overhead to orient himself. In this harried state, he nearly missed the shadows that gathered to follow his steps.
The mind of Garen was a nigh-constantly distracted one, but with many nights of training he had honed his observational senses, his deepest, truest mind alert to danger and discrepancy without intentional thought. A prickling of the skin at his nape drew him back to the moment, and with careful side glances he made out the shapes that followed him. They were small and narrow-limbed, soft-footed, naked save for those who wore tangles of rags about their waists.
Children. The dreaming must have overlooked those too small to be of use in its endeavor. In the absence of parental discipline, they had turned feral.
Sensing that they had lost the surprise, the urchins rushed in; they wielded flint knives, crude axes, hammers, and other discarded, broken tools.
These survivors had not been nourished by the dream, Garen saw now. A vision of truth flooded Garen’s mind as he broke into a sprint.
First they had scavenged, but stores quickly ran thin. The half-starved children had learned to hunt the small animals first — cats and other abandoned pets. Soon they exhausted these reserves too. The remaining animals too cunning, the dreaming workers proved easier prey.
What Garen had made for rags were bundles of human scalps and tanned hide; trophies of successful hunts. The taste of dreamer flesh had twisted them past salvation or reason, Garen a morsel of curiosity they risked their lives to taste.
The vision spurred him swiftly forward, but more attackers whooped with wordless battle cries; soon Garen was cut off by another cohort. Too harried to find his blade in his pack, he leapt toward the nearest wall and began to climb, driving his fingers into the narrowest chinks between the stones. He cursed the Alamoi masons who fit the blocks together so well, and his nails cracked and bled. The children lapped at the splotches he left behind, shoving one another to get at his juices.
These drippings and his vertical flight stymied them briefly; they milled about below. A boy nearly twelve winters by the look of him — taller than the rest, with more muscle, and eyes like burning coals — made frantic gestures and grunted at the others. He cuffed a smaller girl behind the ear, and, chastened, she began to climb, a snarl upon her chapped lips.
Garen gained the clay-tiled roof just as the girl grabbed his ankle. A swift kick sent the child sprawling down onto the others in a heap. Their shouts of dismay warmed him against the chill breeze.
Garen pulled at a tile, and it came up easily enough, offering good heft. He pelted the children, cackling with each satisfying thwack of clay against urchin flesh. The pack suffered only a little of this before fleeing back down the alleys.
“You die anyway,” the oldest boy grunted over his shoulder before following the others. “They finish soon.”
“No, no, no!” Meldri snapped. “If you combine the essences in that order, you’ll ignite the fats of your own flesh and burn like a candle.”
Besthamun’s pale fingers scooped up the vials and returned them to the case. “Again, from the beginning.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t concoct the mixture ahead of time,” Garen said with a sigh. They had been at this for three days, and the complex steps of the mixture’s alchemy had eluded him.
“The final compound is unstable. A stray pebble in your sandal could cause it to ignite as you carry it,” Besthamun said softly.
Garen took her hand into his. “I burn already, in spirit. What does it matter to me if my flesh does as well?”
She tugged her fingers free and turned away so he could not see her stinging tears. It was nearly certain that she sent him to his own demise with this task. While she had enjoyed his company in her bed these past nights, she could not convince herself that their time together would be anything other than a brief respite before his inevitable doom.
Garen began again, pantomiming the steps to properly combine the elements and essences of the kit. This recipe had come from the deepest recesses of the Dream Library; its mere existence had been the subject of whispers among their fellow scholars, and the scrolls containing it had nearly combusted in the sunlight — a trap laid by the mad thing who had dreamed the notes and then scribed them faithfully. The recipe itself contained many false steps and dangerous combinations. Such dream knowledge, even when functional, was always counterintuitive and dangerous to use, holding its own logic.
Being unable to dream had made Garen unfamiliar with its peculiar non-logic. Even so, Besthamun did not doubt that Garen would master the formula. Every night, after their pleasures, he threw aside her furs and stepped naked out into the cold night air to practice.
She doubted any knowledge could escape Garen’s grasp for long; despite the fits of madness he suffered when not presented with a task or goal, his mind was one of the sharpest she had ever encountered. It hungered to understand. In these days, Garen was still more ignorant than wise in the ways of the world (a skillful lover, admittedly), but if he survived into his twilight years, his mind might solve some of the deepest philosophical questions, such as the nature of the Dreamers that visited the plagues upon humankind — from whence did their slumbering nightmares emit? Questions no ordinary scholar could contemplate for long without turning mad, but Garen was already lost. It would only be a matter of degrees for him.
Meldri leaned in and whispered as Garen mimed taking the flame to the tincture of aumsblood. “He nearly has it.”
She nodded, and held a finger to her lips.
With a flourish of his right hand, Garen completed the final step. Sweat dripped from the tip of his broad nose, and his blouse was soaked through.
“How was that?” he asked.
“Satisfactory,” Meldri said with a sniff, but he could not hide his excitement, his eyes sparkling in the light of the alchemist’s flame. Their plan might yet work!
“I say we celebrate,” Garen said, and he took Meldri into his arms and kissed him deeply, breaking only to nibble upon Besthamun’s neck.
“I suppose you have earned a brief respite from your training,” Meldri murmured.
Garen sweat under the high mountain sun, relentless in its drumming beat on his copper skin. He threw aside his cape of furs and used his elevated vantage point to survey the territory he must cross to reach the base of the archway.
Mangled, magpie-pecked corpses of those that had fallen from the scaffolding littered the ground below; the living paid these dead no attention. Beyond the field of corpses, a maze of ladders and platforms coiled around the stone foundations like paper snakes. These teemed with the dreaming workers now, but after a moment of watching, Garen could see that the tide of humanity had reversed: the dreamers now climbed downward. A crowd of hundreds milled just below the keystone, which was swinging into place atop the arch.