Oathbreaker ch 9.30 - Walk In Dark Dreams (Patreon)

Dreamwalking is a skill many spirits master, but it is never without risk. Even an untrained mind will sense the intrusion before long. The psyche rebels against a demon’s presence just as a body will scour itself with fever to fight an infection, sometimes even to its own death.

It also requires contact with the prey to form the link. For any random victim, that would mean making direct contact. I would usually do so in spirit shape, a ghost in the dark hours, and the mortal would think it little more than a vivid wet dream at first. Once that channel was made, a path paved in the dream world, repeat visits were a trivial matter. I only needed a small cut to burrow in.

There are whole universes you mortals only glimpse in dreams. I prowl those worlds like a shark, scenting for the blood of your unspoken wants.

That night, I had a scent already and I followed it right to its source.

I found myself in a hallway. It was large and austere, a vestibule into a larger space. I could hear laughter and conversation ahead from many voices, the sound of clattering dishes. A woman was crying.

I followed those sounds and stepped through an arched doorway into a great room. Richly dressed men and women sat at long tables in a kingly hall, and indeed I saw a king sat at the highest table, an aged man with a golden crown. The crown seemed a weight on him, bending his head over his untouched food. Flies crawled over fine delicacies, and on him, and he did not seem to care. His attention was fixed on the center of the hall, a clear space between the tables where a beautiful woman stood.

She was the source of the weeping and the object of the laughter. Her dress was torn so it hung in strips from one bare shoulder, and there were shallow cuts on her pale skin that wept red. Her chestnut hair fell in disarray over her tear-streaked face. The other occupants of the dining hall jeered and mocked her. Courtiers, lords and ladies, even the servants. Some tossed food and other detritus. A few tossed sharper things, or encouraged the soldiers standing beside the tables to prod at the woman with their pikes. These were the source of her injuries.

Even as I watched, someone demanded she dance, and one of the guards aimed his spear and she flinched. The flinch brought her near another sharp point, and when it caught her in the hip and she cried out, the sounds of cruel mirth grew to a crescendo. A minstrel mocked the woman with a violin, playing to the tempo of her distress in cheery tunes.

Flies crawled over everything. The feast, the minstrel, the guards, the nobles and the servants. The air hummed with their tiny wings.

I stalked around the outside edge of the court, my gaze sliding from the woman. It was remarkably vivid for a dream, and I suspected it to be a memory. Not everyone in the room seemed to be enjoying the show. A handful looked sickened or angered, though they seemed a minority and impotent in their disagreement. Some were dead, their bodies slumped over the tables or heaped in piles along the walls like refuse.

There were devils in the rafters in the guise of rats.

The old king watched with a hollow-eyed emptiness, and I noted that the seat next to his was unoccupied. One of the lords hurled a plate. It broke against the woman’s back and she let out a cry, stumbling to her knees. The king closed his eyes and turned his face away, while a group of handmaidens next to his throne giggled behind their sleeves. Their eyes gleamed red in the poor light.

“You shouldn’t be here,” an angry voice said at my back.

Without turning my attention away from the scene I said, “I shouldn’t be anywhere. That’s what I do, Didikas. I intrude. Who is the woman?”

I heard him shuffle in agitation, but he sighed and answered in a voice as dead as the old king’s face. “The queen.”

I paced behind a group of young men jeering and making lewd suggestions as they gestured with legs of meat. Someone called for dogs to be brought in.

“You don’t want to watch the next part,” Didikas warned me. More bitterly he added, “I don’t have much of a choice. This is an old nightmare.”

I turned to face the dreamer, and blinked in shock at the sight of him, for a moment not recognizing who stood before me. The great wizard wore jester’s motley in black and white, with little bells and a tailed hat. A scepter with a rat skull hung in his left hand, and in his right he held a fragment of a broken crown. The queen’s crown, I realized.

“Laugh if you wish,” he said, though his eyes were hard. Did that mean this took place before he’d come to Rot Voraag, or did his dream self simply not recall the wound?

I shook my head. “Where is this? When was this?”

His gaze slid past me to the dark feast still playing out. His copper irises shimmered with suppressed hate. “Why are you here, Shyora?”

“To ask if you tried to summon me earlier tonight.”

His expression went abruptly neutral, and I had my answer. His face changed again when the sound of a dog snarling filled the chamber, and the noises of dark laughter and terrified sobbing grew to a pitch. Didikas squeezed his eyes shut, his pallor gone ashen.

We would have no conversation like this. I stepped forward, placed my hand against his chest, and shoved hard. Didikas let out a cry of shock as he went backward into the wall, and through it, sinking in the shadows pooled there. I glanced one last time at the nightmare as it began to come undone, seeing the court arrayed around the disgraced queen, hounds being let off their leashes, devils watching with red eyes and that old, haggard king looking like a man whose soul had already fled his body.

Then I turned my back on it and followed Didikas. We reunited on a flat rooftop overlooking an ancient city of dust and desert sun. A distant black sea sparkled on the horizon and lightning from rainless clouds flickered about a great palace atop a mesa. I was dark skinned and wrapped in a maroon dress, and the wizard in weathered traveler robes with a crooked staff in his hand rather than a fool’s scepter.

He blinked at the scene. “This is the Candrian’s House. I… I’ve not dreamed of this in a very long time.”

I looked down at Kaida’s hands. “I don’t dream at all, but I do think about it sometimes.” I squeezed those familiar hands into fists and let my voice drop into a harsher tone. “I thought we had a truce. You used my true name.”

“Only part of it,” Didikas said without apology. “I needed to speak with you. You could have simply answered.”

He was shockingly lucid for a dreaming mortal, but he was also Magi. Control over his subconscious self would be a necessity.

“And wind up inside a binding circle? Or will you say there wasn’t one?” I turned my back on him and walked to the edge of the roof. Flames were beginning to lick up its sides.

The wizard kept away from the roof’s edge, his tone cautious. “There was,” he admitted, “but only to protect myself. You are what you are, Shyora.”

I scoffed. “And what is that?”

“Dangerous,” he said. “How did you invade my dreams? I took precautions against that.”

The fire overtaking the brothel crested so it framed me as I turned and tapped a finger against my left eyelid, closing it so I winked at him. “I ate a piece of you back then. The link is still there. An open door in your mind, you could say.”

He considered that a while, rubbing at his left eyelid. He showed as little concern at the burning building beneath us as I did. “Then I will have to close that door, I suppose. No offense, but I’d rather not have a demon rooting about in my memories. Not even one as comely as you.”

“You won’t distract me with flattery.” I held my hand out so the flames licked around it. “Speak your case. If it’s a good one, I might not leave your mind trapped in here while your body rots on the outside.”

“You’re in a foul mood,” the wizard noted.

“I don’t like being called the way you did,” I told him. “It hurts. Besides, you’ve distracted me when I have other pressing business.”

Didikas nodded slowly. A window shattered below. We could hear voices in the street. Our voices, playing out a theater of the past.

“Business in Bradivara?” He asked.

I blinked. “So, you know.”

“It’s what I wanted to speak about,” Didikas agreed. “You are still employed by the old man in the bell tower? I suppose he asked you to look into the matter.”

He was far too well informed for my liking. But then, it might have just been deduction. “Out with it then, wizard. What do you know? What do you want?”

I’d guessed this to be some manner of blackmail, but his next words took me by surprise.

“I need your help, Shyora.” He swallowed and averted his gaze from me. “It’s my son.”

And just like that, the brothel vanished. We stood in that house in Ember Town, in the dark, with the door ajar and a little boy staring at me in my demon shape with a child’s courage. This time, Didikas stood behind the boy, who cast him over the wall like a shadow.

I remembered his son, though our meeting had been brief and… a long time ago, I realized with a start. He would be a man grown now, in his twenties if my count of years hadn’t gone astray.

We two shadows stared at one another over the child’s head. Didikas spoke first. “I’m not even sure where to start. It’s a long story.”

My tail lifted its head over my right shoulder to flick its forked tongue by my ear. My body was as real here in this realm as the waking one, and I heeded my other self’s whispers as more than just dream-phantoms. “Why don’t we focus on how your son being in trouble is connected to what’s happening in Bradivara.”

Didikas winced. “Because my son is the trouble.”

I swallowed that fact and kept silent, waiting for him to continue. The wizard took a while gathering his thoughts as the still and silent image of his son glared at me from the doorway. What had the boy’s name been? Ammatán, I thought. The word meant fool. I’d thought that strange at the time, but then I’d seen Didikas dressed in motley and now I didn’t know what to think.

“There were some difficult years after our last meeting,” Didikas began. He laughed dryly and corrected himself. “There’ve been difficult years for much longer than that. I tried to educate Ammatán, to teach him to protect himself and make sure he understands just how cruel this world can be.”

I imagined the sound of a queen weeping and a royal court mocking her agony. In the dreamworld, the sound was real and seemed to bleed through the walls. Didikas’s expression darkened and he abruptly turned and walked away, so he vanished from the frame of the open door. I started to follow him, but his son blocked the doorway. The boy stared at me with eyes that gleamed brighter than I remembered. They were too hard for a child’s eyes, too much like sharp glass. He hadn’t looked like that when I’d met him.

I thought better of trying to move past him and went to the window instead. When I emerged from the room, I found myself in the interior of a tomb. The dry walls were cracked murals lit by mundane flames. The air was full of the stink of smoke and decay, and strange sounds echoed throughout.

Didikas and Ammatán stood in front of the largest of the murals, and the boy was older, perhaps fourteen. The mural depicted glaring eyes and shapes of many wings. There seemed to be a pressure to it, like it held back a great weight of water.

“Again,” Didikas commanded. He wasn’t speaking to me.

“I can’t!” The boy said in a voice of exhausted despair. “They’re too strong.”

“My master made me grasp rocks out of the void,” Didikas said coldly. “He did not even provide me a ceiling for when they grabbed me back. Again.”

Ammatán’s shoulders slumped, then he squared them and held his hands up, almost like he prepared to conduct an orchestra. He was covered in sweat and half-dried blood. His knuckles were horribly bruised, and the smallest finger on his left hand was bent at a sharp angle.

He made a grabbing motion, let out a huff of breath, and made an effort like pulling his arms in either direction. Something in the walls groaned. The boy groaned. A seam appeared in the mural of eyes, and something unseen and shapeless lashed out from it. A long cut appeared across the boy’s face, splitting his skin from temple to chin, and he let out a cry of pain.

“Do not let it slip!” Didikas barked. And his son complied, ignoring the weeping wound on his face, a permanent disfiguration, and kept pulling. Whispering voices emanated from the opening wall, the gate, and a putrid, reeking fog began to spill out of it.

Didikas turned to me and said, “I was hard on him. I wanted him to be strong.”

I thought of Nilmarin, and found I had nothing to say.

Didikas sighed. “I pushed him too far. Made him too much like me.”

The scene changed again, the dream shaping itself around the wizard’s own thoughts and memories. We stood in front of a burnt house in a rural countryside. The ashes were not yet cooled.

I knelt and let some of the ash fall through my fingers. “A demon did this. I can smell it.”

The scent was in the wizard’s own memories, but it was vivid.

“Ammatán is repeating my mistakes,” Didikas said as he stared at the destroyed house. “He continued to struggle with the True Art, and eventually gave up on it and on me. He sought quicker means to power, just as I once did.”

He gave me a knowing look, and I recalled a moment where we’d come very close to being… something other to one another.

“A certain group took advantage of his confusion,” Didikas continued. “They are malcontents, led by those all too happy to take advantage of wayward souls. They used parlor tricks to seduce my son and bring him into their fold.”

“A diabolist cult?” I asked.

Didikas nodded. “They pop up all the time, and they’re all the same. Usually it’s some scavenger leftover from the old wars, a demon who got stranded here after the empire fell and is pretending to be a god. Oftentimes, the Dark Lord in the west is behind it, pulling the strings behind one of his minions. He’s never really given up on winning, even though the means are lost to him with the gates shut. It’s not hard for the Cambion King to seed abyssal cults across the nations of the world. The Aureates make it easy on him, with their crusades and their golden missionaries. The light in the east and the shadow in the west send their agents out to war for the souls of humanity, and these brutalized lands are caught in between. Is it any wonder that parasites take advantage?”

It was no wonder at all. I’d seen it, been one of the parasites. I’d survived the Aureate Crusades after many close calls, a long period of being hunted and forced to dwell in the most moldering dens before finding refuge in the Campanile with an open-minded, lonely old man.

“What does any of this have to do with Bradivara?” I asked.

“The cult that took my son is trying to open a Gate,” Didikas said, putting special emphasis on the last word. “A Planar Gate.”

“They would need a godlike amount of power,” I said, not using hyperbole. “The God-Queen took the Silver Roads and tangled them up like a ball of yarn, made the Wending Roads as they are now. The only one who’s managed to breach the network is the Iron God, who is at the very least the waif’s equal.”

As I spoke, I made a vertical swiping gesture with one hand and a burning rift appeared in the air. Embers and smoldering gas spilled out of it, along with a plethora of monstrous voices. It was a miniature version of the rift that Berisembri opened during her war against the Beast of Bedlam, barely taller than a man and narrower than most mirrors.

“You’ve grown stronger.” Didikas said with unfeigned wonder.

I preened a moment, then crooked a finger to make the Gate vanish. It left a burnt smell in the air and a crackling field of energy. “I can make these and use them to travel about this world, or to various places I’m familiar with in the Wend, but I cannot travel beyond that.”

Partly true. The Subfabric was open to the world, but only through narrow passages dug by the Zosite and their servants. If my spirit was shunted from its vessel and caught in Abysm’s gravity, I’d end up in the Iron Hell. There were no gaps in the net anymore.

I uncurled my fingers in the wizard’s direction. “I assume it’s the same for you?”

Didikas nodded, still staring at the spot where the lesser Gate had been with a thoughtful look. “After the aureate goddess reknit the planar roads, we Magi lost the ability to summon beings from the Holy Dimensions.” He used the scholar’s term for the tapestry of realities beyond the mortal universe, a name mostly only known to those who studied esoterica, and mostly forgotten in this new world where anything that wasn’t knit by the God-Queen’s hand was considered unholy. “Fiends, elementals, devas… unless they are already present in this world, or the web of spiritual demiplanes wrapped around it, they are lost to us. The power we can draw from the firmament has also been severely diminished. The Magi are weaker now. We’re barely stronger than the brutes who wield their own aura to make crude weapons, advantaged only by our knowledge.”

I detected resentment in his voice. It must have been hard, to have once had the power to rip stones from the void and now be made less. Was it like being crippled after a lifetime of athletic excellence, I wondered, trapped in one’s own skin?

I’d missed talking with Didikas. He felt and understood things few mortals did. But dreams did not last, and we were running out of time. “So this cult is trying to break through the Wend. We guessed that, though not the reason or the culprit. They are doing it at a demon’s behest? Is it one of the Cambion’s plots, then, another escape attempt?”

Didikas shrugged. “Could be. I know little about the specific demon. It embedded itself with the Bradivaran houses about a decade ago and has grown its influence since. It took over the country’s local cult and has most of the people convinced that it’s their god.”

I called on the research I’d done and my own knowledge of events since the Ruin. “The Bradivaran church is the Falcon Curia, isn’t it? They worship an angel.”

The renegade Onsolain had slain the Wyrm of Bradivara, and then become the country’s guardian protector through the past several centuries of war. Neither the western or eastern superpowers had managed to maintain claim to that little nation, in large part thanks to the God-Saint’s patronage.

“They think they worship an angel,” Didikas corrected. “Something altogether less pleasant is now wearing the Argent Falcon’s wings.”

I moved to stand behind his left shoulder, so I spoke almost directly into his ear. Didikas wasn’t an especially tall man, but he had a touch of height on me, and I looked up into his face as I asked the question. “And Ammatán?”

His jaw worked. “He is the Curia’s oracle. A sort of liaison between the Falcon and its worshippers. I tried to make contact with him, but he wants nothing to do with me, and the cult shields him. Their demon grows fat on sacrifices, and they’re close to doing something terrible.”

“It’s probably trying to bring something out of the Abyss,” I mused. “If I knew its identity, I could say for sure. The Campanile would prefer there not be another hole punctured in the primefabric membrane.”

“I want to save my son,” Didikas said. “If I can’t do that, then…” He took a deep breath. “At least help me stop him. This is my mess.”

I’d been ordered to merely scout, but then I’d never been an ideal minion.

“I will owe you,” Didikas said quietly. “That has meaning, coming from one of the Magi. I’m a recognized member of the Wise Ones, Shyora, not just a vagrant still stained by the desert.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” I said. “I’ll do it. I was going to Bradivara anyway, but now I have something…” I was going to say interesting to do, but that seemed insensitive. Instead I said, “Worthwhile. Do you have some kind of plan?”

“I have contacts in the country,” Didikas said. “And yes, I do have a plan, but I needed… well.” His smile was grim. “I needed someone good at infiltration, deception, and seduction. I needed a succubus.”

It had been some time since I’d played the role. I wondered if I was still any good at it, and immediately scoffed at the thought. Of course I was, it came naturally to me. I just wanted to be good at other things too.

“I’ll have to dust off my wings and sharpen my fangs,” I said. “But I think I can play the part. Tell me your plan, wizard, and we’ll see about bringing down a god.”