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Ka turns like a wheel. Round and round he goes, through the doors and up the stairs and down the road, bootheels clacking on asphalt, leather soles sinking into sand.
Loose change jingles in his pockets. He is attended by ravens. When he snaps his fingers, sparks fly. He knows Nadine’s conflicted mind and Lloyd’s loyal heart and Roland’s stubborn soul, knows how to play them like a flute. He knows everything but himself. Why is he doing this? How long has he been here? Is he a messenger or the message itself? How many times has he walked this road?
He is the lord of nightmares, the king of night terrors, the emperor of the realm that sleepers can spend eternity in for a single hideous night. He sends dreams, he commands them. So why do his own dreams escape him, vanishing from his questing memory like a handful of smoke and leaving only the irrational conviction that if he could recall them, he would understand everything?
Where does he go, between turns of the wheel?
Nadine, Nadine, Nadine. How he loves to love Nadine. He chases her through the turns and through the worlds. Sometimes he catches her, sometimes she escapes him, and sometimes she turns and fights like a cornered rat. Her hair is always white by the end. Always.
How many times has he tested the limits of Lloyd’s fealty? Has he ever broken it? He can’t remember, so he keeps trying. Once he left him too long in the cell, and he died. He scowls at the memory. That was a bad turn, that one. Losing Lloyd means he loses Nadine, loses everyone, becomes nothing more than a phantom in the mind. After that, he doesn’t mess with the cell. But he messes with Lloyd in other ways, using him in public, using a gun, using his teeth. It changes nothing.
Strangely, for all that his nature is to quest, Roland reminds him of a rock. An immense formation, a massive boulder, impenetrable and immovable. A pebble in his boot, rubbing him sore. He tosses away the pebble, chips away at the stone, and yet it never goes away. All he can do is leave his own mark on that tower, swallow the pebble, carve his name on the boulder. Maybe if he could ever know his own name, his true name, it would stay.
Ka turns like a wheel. All the turns are different, some a little, some a lot, but some essence never changes. What it is, he doesn’t know. So he worries at it like a loose tooth, poking and prodding, unable to resist. If the wheel ever stops turning, will he vanish or be remade? Or is there something eternal in him, like Roland's stone or Lloyd's loyalty or Nadine's ever-divided heart, which will persist even past that? Whatever that is.
He walks down the road, bootheels clacking on asphalt. Maybe this time will be different.
Ka turns like a wheel.