Waking Dreams

Death In Harmony: Part Twenty-Two of Twenty-Nine

Death In Harmony is the fifth in the Tales of The Lesser Evil and this is the twenty-second chapter.

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This is a fantasy series—not quite grimdark, but dark nevertheless—with complicated and believable characters doing their best to survive in a world simply indifferent to their existence.

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Waking Dreams

The Present: somewhere north of The Pit

Flin and the still unnamed woman continued in silence—tracks and signs pointed out here and there, scuffs, broken grass stems, displaced leaves—before she stopped, suddenly, and held up a hand.

She pointed at her eyes, then made a gesture of walking with two fingers, before holding up her index finger and pointing it ahead.

Flin strained to see the man, but could only make out tall grasses and low walls.

The woman looked around and pointed at a tree just ahead. At first Flin wondered what she was looking at, then she made out something hanging from a branch, a collection of sun-bleached white wood, incongruous against the darker trunk and leaves, like a child’s mobile or a set of wind chimes.

‘It’s a marker,’ the woman whispered, ‘we put it there to warn us if we were reaching the centre. He’s gone in. I suppose we should follow a bit closer?’ She waited, as though she needed a response, perhaps hoping Flin might actually say no.

‘Let’s go then. Why wait?’ Flin asked and the woman frowned in response.

‘I told you, I really don’t want to go in there. That’s why.’

Flin stood and started moving forward.

‘Then I’ll go alone. I’m not letting him get away, I can’t risk that.’

She heard cursing behind her, then felt her shoulder gently pulled back.

‘Since we’re going, I’ll go first. I have the bow, after all.’

The woman had an arrow nocked and ready to fly but, from the look on her face, Flin wondered if she would rather shoot her own foot than continue. From the description of the city centre she was not surprised. She had seen worse.

Flin had happy memories of exploring The Ribbon with her friends, playing some of the best music she had ever performed with others, the rhythm bringing her back to herself after a difficult time in her life. It had been ideal, right up until she and Shint had decided to go witness the Maelstrom in person, and had walked too far, pushed too close. Before that day, his locks had been thick and black. After, his hair turned white and the ever-present laughter on his lips evaporated, replaced by a constant frown. He would keep a hand raised at all times, flapping at the air, as though batting away something only he could see. He would not talk about it, nor would he look to the future, instead withdrawing and pulling away from the group. The experience had ruined him utterly.

They had tried to continue, but the fun was gone just as, one morning, so was Shint, vanished with the early tide. She had never seen him again, and the thought still haunted her. How had she escaped the same fate? Why him? Her hand touched the pouch at her throat and felt a flash of familiar guilt. She knew why. Had she noticed what was happening to Shint, paused when she felt the first heat from the ring, had she stopped and pulled him back with her, perhaps his life would have been different, perhaps her own would have followed a happier trajectory.

Flin shook her head. She could not change the past but, perhaps, she could alter her future.

The trees had thinned, and the previous riot of plants was more sporadic now, as though they too struggled to survive this close to the centre. The buildings were considerably more substantial here, some two or three stories tall and, ahead, they looked to be even taller. Time had clearly not ravaged this place as it had the rest of the city. As the trees cleared, the tower came into view. Tall, imposing, round and wide, it was still some distance away, but it was huge.

Something moved up ahead and Flin finally caught a first glimpse of the man they followed. He disappeared behind a wall then, as she watched, reappeared, paused and began flailing with his arms, as though being attacked by something she could not see, perhaps a swarm of bees. Flin felt a moment of panic. She had once witnessed an attempt to gather honey go disastrously wrong, two people stung many hundreds of times—too many times. It had not been pleasant to see or hear their screams. Then her mind made the connection with Shint and his constant hand movement.

‘He’s seeing things. I told you, this place messes with your mind, screws with your senses,’ she whispered, ‘Let’s wait here, while we can still see him. With luck, the city will help us, and we won’t have to get any closer.’

They were both crouched, squatting to lower their profile. Flin looked at the buildings around the man, taking a moment to realise what was different about them.

‘They have doors. And windows. Is that glass? How?’

She looked more closely, seeing painted signs: a stylised hide, a shoe here, a boot there. Nearer, a wall was covered in graffiti, something Flin recognised as writing, in an script she had never seen before, mingled with comical pictures of people seemingly attending an execution. It was vivid and clear, as though painted only yesterday. On most of the buildings the masonry was still sharp, the mortar still whole.

‘It’s what I said. This place is different, odd and unpleasant.’

‘But why are there barely any plants? Why is the stone still standing like this, still mostly untouched?’

‘It’s not normal. None of it is. Imagine you take a giant string, stick one end in the ground and then draw a huge circle to outline this valley. The point where the string would be attached in the middle is ahead, several streets over there. The closer you get to the middle, the more strange things get, the more time has simply not affected anything. I don’t know how to describe it, beyond the fact it’s some sort of magic. When we first came to this place, first explored it, we didn’t get much further into the centre than half the distance to him,’ she gestured, ‘and it made us very ill. That’s why we walked around, leaving markers as soon as we felt the nausea, the confusion; and everywhere we looked it’s the same, as though the city has just been abandoned yesterday. Whatever happened, happened long ago, but somehow left the centre relatively unscathed. We thought the damage was from when the city dropped down to this level, but that should have created more destruction, which maybe means that when whatever the fuck happened, it happened slow enough that the city didn’t simply shake apart. Or maybe it is easier to just say it was magic, leave it at that.’

Flin did not reply, her hand holding the pouch at her neck.

The woman was silent for a moment, then pointed back to the man, her eyes never having left him. He was standing, feet planted, legs slightly bent, arms wrapped around his head, rocking from side to side.

‘Waking dreams. Memories. It really isn’t good. Look.’

Flin looked, the man was walking backward towards them, one step, then he’d crouch lower, before taking another step, another crouch, a flinch, another step.

The woman stood, her bow ready. At this distance, they could see where the man had already been shot, a dark stain spread down the back of his right leg, a broken off arrow still protruding from his thigh.

His arms began to bat away invisible objects again, then he suddenly turned and ran straight towards them. The woman pulled back the string, drew a deep breath, let it go, and released.

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