Chapter 106
Chapter 106
In the Hidden Tower of Chambert, Fregósbor tried to fill in Yukari’s absence with sighs. He sighed inside the tea cabinet, over the shelves, in between the leaves of paper that covered the walls in the unending corridor.
He prepared tea. He couldn’t make it as well as Yukari, but it didn’t really matter because he hated tea. All he liked was the scent.
‘Tea is an aqcuired taste,’ Yukari told him once.
‘Unnacquirable, in my case.’
She had smiled. He loved her smiles: they all had meaning. That one, for example, meant:
‘A taste you don’t deserve to have or that doesn’t deserve to have you.’
Everything Yukari did, from tea to smiling, was sweet and bitter, earnest and playful. She was forever, but she also died.
The first time Fregósbor threw himself awake in the realm of dremas, it was she who rescued him. He had lost himself, gone in too deep, and would have drowned in unrealities. Yukari pulled him back, then scolded him in that black velvet voice of hers.
‘I didn’t think it would be dangerous,’ Fregósbor replied. ‘It was just dreams.’
‘Just dreams! Nothing is only just. Go find Sáeril, learn something before treatding unknown roads. Acquire maps, know the substance your path is made of.’
‘I don’t study maps every time I hit the road!’
The comparison between real roads and dreams was absurd and Fregósbor knew it. Yukari didn’t reply.
Fregósbor was young at the time. He rebelled against everything he considered useless. He thought that the best way to learn was through experience and he still believed that now, but he learned to prepare for those experiences. Sáeril had never studied dreams in depth, but the introduction he offered was enough for Fregósbor to go on with his own research and find the truth behinde the obvious.
Realities interfere in dreams in clear, seemingly distinct traces, at least on the surface. The more Fregósbor analized it, the more intrinsic the presence of one in the other became. Dreams, he understood, influence realities with the same intensity as the other way around. On the surface, they seem very different, but in deeper layers, it becomes harder and harder to tell them apart.
Just as a reality brightens and softens the sharpest dreams, rotten dreams curropt the ligatures of reality like mice gnawing on old rope. Without those ligatures, to change realities, to change lives and the world, for better or worse, became harder. A reality with broken ropes remains estangant, immutable.
Fregósbor finished preparint tea, tasted the scent without ever touching the tea to his lips. Franária’s ropes were torn, but he thought he had found a way to bind them together again.
Pierre knocked on the door. Fregósbor poured him some tea and said:
‘Young man, you have done interesting things in other peoples’ dreams on your way to awakening. I believe that you and I together, through dreams, can fix some ropes here in Franária.’
‘You seem to understand a lot on dreams,’ said Pierre. ‘But why do you need me?’
‘The War has powerful control over Franish dreams right now. I would have to use all my magic to push her away, and then I would be able to do nothing. But if I have access to another source of power, I can tap on it and mend those broken dreams.’
‘And you think I have this power?’
‘You have a hand for shaping dreams.’
Pierre had many doubts. He gave voice to none.’
‘Is it possible?’
‘Yes. Also dangerous. Definitely not easy,’ said Fregósbor.
‘Is it necessary?’
‘Crucial.’
‘When do we start?’
‘When the dreams wake up,’ said the mage.
Pierre left him to prepare and Fregósbor studied the world outside the Hidden Tower. Beyond Chambert, beyond Baynard. His thick eyebrowes kissed each other on top of his pointy nose. There were more enemies out there than Chambert knew of. The War would never surrender. Then Fregósbor saw something black walking North, following a creek. A cloaked figure going decidedly toward the Mouth of War.
You’re still with us, thought Fregósbor.
Sáeril, the Wraith, felt he was being watched and recognized the wrinkled texture of his former pupil’s magic.
‘Fregósbor. We have missed you.’
Fregósbor recalled a time when he was young, when Sáeril didn’t hide under cloakes and Nakamura hadn’t died her first death in this world. Where did that time go?
Nowhere. It is us who came here. Fregósbor went into the corrider of unread letters. He left behind the times in which he lived no longer, focused on Pierre and future pasts.