And Melei longed for more.
She felt their eyes upon her as she wandered down the road, and round a corner, her eyes searching the sky for the first stars, that she might turn homeward and settle herself down to the repose and reverie that only sleep could bring her.
* * *
The black night-ocean roared beneath, broad and noisy with the lapping of waves that she could hear clear as children’s voices, so silently did she glide through the deep, familiar sepia that always preceded sunrise on these flights.
The ocean was new: often, she had soared above grasslands, occasionally among the buildings of a smog-choked city, but tonight, this dream-morning, she found herself above some expansive southern ocean. Below, from time to time, a lumbering darkness could be seen, spilling light from tiny windows, luminance far different from any reflection of the whole and simple face of the single crescent moon above her. These were windows in the hulls of lumbering ships that crawled across the ruined sea.
As sepia slowly burnt into orange with the coming of the morning sun, Melei spied the coast ahead. It was an immense and hideous metal graveyard, the hulls and decks of broken ships protruding from the sand, their bare bones laid out as if upon an examiner’s table. Among them gathered labouring men, already at work hauling enormous rusty chains and ruined slabs of metal ashore. The ships looked as if they had been hewn in half by some enormous, awful blade and left to bleed into the ocean. For the waters, too, were sullied here, stained black and putrid. The rancid stink of the waters wafted up into the air, and Melei gasped in stunned disbelief.
This was not the same site as she had visited in previous dream-flights, though the people shared the same dark hue of skin, wore the same resignation on their faces. A man beneath her dropped his load, a gargantuan link of chain slamming down onto his leg, and he collapsed upon the poisoned sand with a cry so loud she could hear it as she soared past.
It was exquisite, wrenching but enchanting. It was a place where mistakes mattered, and this was why Melei kept returning. Because this world was one of consequences and dire meanings, godless and hard and amazing. But this beach was not the precise place she sought. In Ulthar, Melei was a mere seamstress, a needle-girl who day in and day out walked the streets careful not to step in cat shit. But in this strange world, she found herself possessed of powers beyond anything a real person in Ulthar could have boasted in millennia. She could soar in the sky, and she could go anywhere.
And there was a place that she was seeking, these nights.
Below her, a fence surrounded an enormous tent village. Men shouted, and there was a violent clattering sound, and screams. She saw people running, people clothed in white that shone against their dark flesh. To Melei they were unspeakably beautiful in their terror. Running for their lives, panicked. She felt her tears welling up. Such awful lives; and yet they held onto them so desperately. What humbling beauty, what endless rapture, that beings could live that way, in a world so starved of magic and gods. It enchanted her, as she swooped down low enough to brush her fingertips against the tattered hems of a few of the dingy white shirts that ran long enough to reach down past the knees of the scrambling men and women.
Melei concentrated, and suddenly spun in the air, soaring now into the northwest. There was a city there that she had read of in secret books hidden in the drab tearooms of Ulthar, books only secret because nobody read them—for the denizens of Ulthar spoke only of the failed expeditions to unearth Kadath, old dead Kadath, and of gossip in the wracked court of Ulthar that was now under Southern rule. But Melei had read on fragile, forgotten pages of the wild tangled passage-roads that ran between the great grey monoliths of that old city on the coast, the city with the unbroken towers and the bridges and the streets laden with music and voices and wavering lights. Across an ocean, it lay: unutterably far by the standards of these folk; but for a dream-traveler, its bright roads and bustling noise lay within reach, if the will was strong.
If only she could find that strange and mystic polis… nobody had done so in aeons of dreaming, not in the lifetimes even of gods. The sky swallowed her, and she soared into it not lightly, but as an arrow soars toward its victim’s death: unstoppable, unabashed, and filled with the most resolute certainty imaginable.
* * *
Excrescences thick and strange rose from the drowned streets, wafting steamily up from broad, jagged-barred holes in the ground, and Melei swept down into the fog of the broken city. This was the place, but no longer the city of the pages, not the city about the magnificences of which had been whispered and scribbled out by dream-wanderers in ancient tomes long-lost. This polis had changed, its million secret details discarded like the flimsy skin of an ancient serpent drifting through the slow eternity of its being.
The city had, by some horrid magic or doom, been drowned, and slain. Ruined, its towering spirit smashed apart, the smithereens tossed into cold water and frozen away into bitter ice.
Here, a great library stood encrusted in ice that gleamed chill as diamonds in darkness; and before it, barges poled by men in thick woolen coats, shivering and calling out in their strange tongues, baleful cries. Old men and women gathered upon the library steps and huddled at its high windows as flakes of snow fell enormous and faintly grey with the ash of fires half a world away.
And there, further along, the great old temples of the last true religion in that world, the fanatic cult-houses of the worshippers of the magical curve, the endless blessed marketeers and insatiable blood-hungry pirates of water and light and time. There, these rectangular temples of lost merchandises stood with windows smashed, empty from lootings, empty except for the poor useless souls who took refuge in their icy halls remaining since the cult had loosed its foul and terrible powers upon the world, and toppled everything that humankind had once built up.
Thence flew Melei, deeper into the city, over crumbled steel bridges and the steeples of abandoned, burnt-down churches. She heard singing, not of human voices, not of ghosts—for this world, haunted though its inhabitants’ faces were, was a place bereft of stalking ghŭls and spirits hungrily wandering. No, not like the frightening lands that lay distant from Ulthar; nothing like the shadowy passes near high Old Kadath or the caverns of B’thaniss. Only the wretched faces of the living gazed out through the smashed-glass windows. The voice she heard was none other than her own, crying out her exultant terror.
An open square between the broken buildings spread out below her, and she wondered whether this had been a park, or the base of some enormous destroyed temple, or perhaps that square where, in ancient frigid nights, the folk of the city had gathered to witness the death-knell of the ending year and cry out jubilant with the beginning of the new. No hint suggested which guess might be correct.
She thought again of living here, in this strange world of cold consequences, as often she had before. Shivering—not from cold, for her dreaming self was swaddled in thick, warm wool, and something of the power of her dream-voyaging shielded her from the worst of the awful, ruined clime—but rather from a titillation derived less from horror at the ruined city, or that such ruination was possible, than out of the purer terror that shook her upon witnessing the magnificent finality of the fact of the ruination itself.
Broken buildings slumbered all around her as she flew past, and she marveled that this world was thus; a place where ruinations could be visited upon mighty civilizations in a generation, yet where the people here would endure on, shivering and hungry, fighting to continue. Whisperings of the fate of Sarnath bubbled up from the silence of her forgotten childhood, but there peered no specters from the windows of this city, at least none that had died. Only the pale and sallow faces of the hungry stared out at her, living scavengers looking out, lit by fires and shame.