Chapter Text
demiurge [dem-ee-urj]
an autonomous creative force or decisive power
In the beginning, there’s nothing more than a languorous blackness and a feeble, tingling white dust. But then its particles crust over the darkness to form the gritty shapes of crumbled walls, steps, and brittle concrete, shaping a scene of hopelessness and destruction. Distantly, you recognize you must be dreaming. And yet, somehow you feel strangely alert.
This must have been a castle, somewhen. The rounded and regal disposition of the staircases tells you before you can recognize the dimensions of the room, but among the debris and eerie atmosphere, it’s hard to form an idea of what the palace truly must have looked like. It’s an unsettling and sinister scene. Still, you find yourself somewhat curious. Fragments of glass crumble under your shoes as you take a first, tentative step, but otherwise, silence continues to reign the deserted castle.
You wonder if there’s a throne somewhere. Regal artefacts, furniture, and effects are usually the last to decay since they’re often jealously conserved and protected from degradation. But mostly, you are drawn to the centre of the palace, like an alien, unknown gravitational force was pulling you forwards. You take a second step, then another, approaching what must have been an arch nestled under the pair of stairs, leading to a ballroom.
Suddenly, the cracking sound of concrete ceding. You raise your eyes just in time to see one of the pillars sustaining the stairway crumbling at its base and bowing towards you. Faster than you can react, the massive block of concrete plummets towards your body. You gasp and freeze, waiting for the pain of the impact – but then, unfamiliar energy seeps through your muscles, your body tenses, and a sudden gush of wind whips your hair away from your face. Then – stillness.
“Sir?”
The voice is unanticipated and unknown, and a frantic repetition of the one word is followed by rushed steps crumbling debris and getting closer to you. Though it calls you, you find it hard to concentrate on it and decipher it, because all at once you’re feeling yourself fazing away. Your toes instantly wriggle in your shoes to keep you awake, your hands grab on walls and bannisters to find balance for your wobbling body, but it’s too late. Before you wake up, your eyes manage to glance to the side of the room. There it is, the pillar – laying five meters away from you, collapsed. The moment you see it, you know. You moved it as it fell towards you. Even though you haven’t moved a muscle, you’ve felt the energy travelling through your body to the air above you, displacing the pillar, saving yourself. Your skin tingles peskily.
“Sir? Is that you?"
The voice is getting nearer, but before you can get a glimpse of its owner, your body fragments, and crumbles on itself just as the pillar had done. Your knees give way, your lids tremble, and a strange, but familiar lethargic feeling grabs you and pulls you away.
You wake to find yourself in your bed. For a few seconds, you continue to feel the sensation of gravel, crunching underneath your feet. But it was just a dream.
Standing in the palace hall, Lucienne stares at the empty room. For a moment, she could have sworn – but no. If Lord Morpheus had been back, right there in the palace, she would have surely felt him.
And still – still, she could have sworn she’d seen a pillar move…
**
There’s something strange in the dream you had yesterday. First, you remember it remarkably well. Dreams and nightmares usually fade away hours, sometimes even minutes after you’ve woken up; sensations and fragments are all you usually are left with. But this time, the details of the dream stick to your mind like glue and refuse to leave their place. The dust, the hall, the staircases. The voice. And then, the pillar – moving away from you, as if controlled by magic.
You know that dreams follow no precise rules, that physics cannot put up with what your imagination and subconscious can create. But even in your rare, brief experiences of lucid dreaming, your impact on the worlds your mind created had been limited and feeble. Most of all, they hadn’t been this detailed. Days after dreaming of the castle, you still remember that voice, like you’d listened to it in real life. And your skin still feels tingly, energized. For a while, you hope the dream might come back. That your subconscious will conjure up the image again. But a week passes, and though your memories don’t fade, your nights are dark and dreamless.
**
You wonder if you could force yourself into that world again. You’re not sure the dream you had was lucid, and you have little experience in dreams you have actual control of. But you’ve heard of people who exercise to be able to shape their dreams and construct worlds of their desire. The thought intrigues you. That energy you since have never ceased to feel tickles lightly on your skin when you think of the possibility.
The book you manage to get your hands on suggests exercising with reality checks throughout the day. By asking yourself if you’re dreaming or not while you’re awake, you create a habit it’s possible you will follow in your dreams, too. The book talks about hands and written text, the things your brain has most difficulties replicating in sleep, and suggests looking at your fingers or books multiple times a day, so to convince your mind to do that in sleep as well. In dreams, words and fingers often appear wobbly and unstable and should induce you to recognize your dreaming state. You’re not sure about it. Still, you try.
There are no results for the first four days. On the fifth, you dream of looking at your hand and thinking about something, but you’re tired and lethargic and the dream ends before you can realise what it is. To your dismay, your small success leads to nowhere, because you spend the night unaware and clouded still. But you can still hear the voice of that woman, and your skin continues to tickle. Animated by strength you didn’t know you had, you carry on.
It takes a sixth night for your exercise to pay off. Through your dream you’re reliving a test day in your first year of school – you recognize the shape of a table you thought you had forgotten. Gripping your pencil tight you start to scribble your name in the corner of the page… but the pen replies to your attempt with disorientation, scribbling wobbly letters that keep changing shape and moving freely on the blank paper. Distantly, you recognize this to be abnormal, but you cannot remember why. Then, your mind reminds you there’s something you should be doing, something you do multiple times every day: checking your hands. Your dominant hand lays the pen on the table and then rises towards your eyes. And indeed, your digits are wobbly and indistinct, their confines unstable and unfamiliar. It looks like you have four fingers. Then, fifteen. Your brain can’t elaborate the image properly.
Are you… sleeping?
Dreaming?
You feel something dragging you away, again, but this time you won’t let it. Quickly, your now lucid mind scatters to change the scenario of the dream. You concentrate, and where tables and children were, rubble and debris start to appear, the walls shift from pallid, child-friendly varnish to the dark hue of concrete, and the crumbled remains of two familiar sets of rounded stairwells slowly build at the sides of a large hall.
You’ve come back.
But somehow, though it was your imagination that formed the scenario in your head, it looks… different. Worse. The stairs have lost many of their steps. Dust has accumulated on the crumbled remains of the palace. And the light has changed to project longer, creepier shadows on what is left of the walls, like tall, menacing silhouettes observing you.
Is it then so strange that you feel compelled to go on?
It’s irresistible, that feeling – you’re lucid, yes, but to an extent, you feel like you’re being nudged to walk by a force that isn’t entirely yours to control. You feel… curious. Enticed. This time, your steps are more secure, fearless, purposeful. Immediately, without really knowing why, you head for the stairs, feeling a forceful pull to explore the first floor. There are twenty-six steps to reach the remains of the balcony dominating the hall, and when you reach the middle step of the stairwell you look up to peek at what’s on the other side of the arch. Suddenly, you see it: a big stone throne at the end of the room, deteriorated, yes, but intact nevertheless, illuminated by the feeble light coming in through shattered windowpanes.
Who lived here?
Your feet move to continue towards the top of the stairs. But you notice with disappointment that a portion of the staircase is missing, a large gap of five or six steps separating you from your destination. Could you jump? You’re not sure – though you can still feel your skin tingling in that weird energy, you don’t feel like you can trust it in such a long leap. And mostly, you fear that any misstep could drag you to awareness and wake again. So, what can you do?
Instinctively, your eyes trail to that corner of the room you know the pillar had fallen to. And indeed, you find it there, still. Crumbled and crooked just as you’d left it.
Could you… perhaps…?
It’s a dream, you repeat yourself. The whole purpose of lucid dreams is to be able to control what you’re seeing. If you’ve changed the dream and recreated the image of the palace, then why couldn’t you do this? A few steps, just enough to climb to the next floor?
Yes, you think, yes, of course you can. And immediately, that static, that energy returns to fizzle on your skin and through your muscles, waiting. Uncertain, you stare back at the void and try awkwardly to imagine the missing steps, to let them arise from your imagination.
At first, nothing happens. If anything, you feel that sensation again, the one that signals your concentration is pushing the boundaries of your dream and threatening for you to wake. No – You push forward, anchoring yourself to the floor. Digging your fingers in the stale air, grasping it.
And slowly but surely, six, unstable and undefined steps begin to emerge from thin air. Wobbling, transparent and weak, they’re not anything like their original counterparts, missing the streaks of marble of the rest of the stairs, signals of a distant, richer past. But they are steps, and the right number, and the right dimension, and they feel real. You let out a gasp of marvel and accomplishment when the steps settle with a thud against the rest of the staircase, relieving you of your mental fatigue. But your feet remained fixed, your brain perplexed, as it studies the angles of stone, their defined structure. It feels… strange. Like the molecules that made these new steps were somehow resisting you. Assembling to create something new, but with hesitation. You feel watched by them, stared at, as if you’d done something forbidden. Slowly, wearily, you kneel to try and touch them.
“You should not be able to do that”.
Oh.
You know that voice.
Instinctively, you raise your head to look at the top of the staircase, towards the source of the words. And there it is – a black woman dressed in an elegant, no, refined suit, the purple, tailed vest standing out noticeably against the whiteness of the shirt. A speck of composure and richness in a scene of desperation. And only after a few seconds do you notice her round glasses are resting on a pair of almost elfish, pointed ears.
There’s a moment of stillness as she with a shocked stare waits for an answer to her observation, but you cannot phantom a single word to say. “I –”, you pause, looking back at the steps, their molecules still kind of watching you, “I… think that too”.
For a second, shock fades to confusion as the woman processes the words you’ve just pronounced. But your concentration is drawn away when a familiar ring starts echoing through the empty palace, abruptly.
“What is that?”, you mumble, trying to search for the source of the sound. But nothing else has moved in the hall, and your thoughts are somehow becoming slower, foggier.
“What is what?”
“The ringing”, you reply, groggily. “I know… I know this ringing”.
Through blurred and wobbling vision, you manage to capture the image of her visage falling to disappointment. Distantly, while you reach to grasp for a handrail that isn’t there, you catch the sight of her arms crossing, the sound of a breath being exhaled.
“You’re waking up”, you hear her say, lips drawn in a horizontal line. Then, the image of the castle whirls on itself till it’s swallowed and sucked away by the pull of the darkness.
When you open your eyes, your alarm clock is ringing. It’s half an hour past your waking time. And still, you could swear it seemed to you like the clock had barely ringed for half a minute in your dream. Tentatively, you look at your hand; when you recognize the familiar sight of your five digits, you reach forward to stop the alarm.
**
You open your eyes the following night to see that same blackness and dust that had brought you to the castle for the first time. But when you follow it and try to lift your hand to grasp the shining particles floating in front of you, the dust swirls and settles to form a brand-new scenario. It’s a beach, or at least you think it must be, because all you can see is a desert of white, blinding sand stretching limitlessly to the horizon, flat. In the distance, the quiet, lulling sound of waves. You have no idea what your subconscious has conjured up this time, and you’re feeling almost disappointed, with no castle in sight – but then the rhythmic slaps of the tides are covered by the sound of whirlwinds, and when you turn around you are startled to see a dust devil forming, tall and menacing, just in front of you.
You take a step back when it seems to enlarge and move to engulf you. But then, just as quickly as they’ve picked up, the winds ease and let the sand fall back to the ground, like a veil dropping.
What they uncover petrifies you.
It’s a man. But it’s nothing close to a human.
Pale and tall and skeletal to the point of appearing ghastly, he would surely loom above you if it wasn’t for his crooked and hunched stance. Amidst the white and blinding sand, the black coat that wraps his bony figure stands out almost painfully for your eyes. But it is his face that captures your attention. Pearl white skin, marmorean, almost unnaturally so, and a pair of gelid blue eyes, red and lucid, staring at you.
For a fraction of a second, none of you says anything. A pained exhale slips from his parched lips as his eyes study you, a small line of bewilderment forming just between his brows. Then, a slender, scrawny hand emerges from the darkness of his coat, reaching for you, grasping thin air. The other clenches his stomach tightly.
“Help me”.
A voice deep and plush like velvet, desperate and assertive at the same time.
You want to ask what he needs. You need to know what you can do. But then his eyes roll back to show bloodshot whites, his lids flutter and close, and his knees give away as his body falls ungraciously to the sand.
Suddenly, you feel as if you’ve just woken up from a trance. As if some strange energy had just released you. Instinctively, you crouch before him and try to call him, but no word escapes your mouth, your body a tense shambles of trembling muscles and cracked breaths. When you kneel to him and try to turn him so his face isn’t smothered by the sand, his own body weighs lifelessly in your arms, unresponsive and heavy.
In desperation, you turn to look at the desert around you. There’s no one around, not a movement, not a soul. Just the stillness of the quiet sand, and distantly, almost inaudible now, the uncomforting sound of tides.
There is no time to wait.
You must travel back to the castle.