Chapter 109
Like a ghost from long ago, Fregósbor roamed the walls of Chambert. He felt rusty and believed himself incapable of using his wrinkled magic and his dusy science. Gradually, as he waled and saw farthar away in every direction, Fregósbor remembered. He watched them, first from far away, then closer and closer, the reality threads and the brushstrokes of dreams inside and around Chambert. One tying the other, dying the one. The edge separating one from the other, this delicate thing, easy to trespass: the mind.
The Franish dreams were heavy with oily darkness. They poluted instead of bringing color to the fabrics of life, making realities rough and harsh like old rags ready to tear. Reality and dreams tangled together, pusshing one another down. The colors in dreams, aged and faded, had dried and cracked like dead earth.
With a gentle touch, Fregósbor wroked on that cracked paint. Magic cannot defeat darkness, just like water cannot defeat oil, but, if handled with care, it can push darkness away a little so another force can leak in and unmake the pollution. The problem was to deal with the breaking realities in a way that they didn’t crack even more. Fregósbor had never been good with realities. He was, after all, the Master of Dreams.
The sun went down on a clear horizon, pulling a nightly blanket over Franária. The moon gave a sidewas smile and the stars blinked up drowsily. There were many stars on the sky that day, blinking, waiting.
Pierre looked up at the moon, framed by the walls of the hidden garden. He crossed the marble wolves onto the lawn. Golden light, weaker than a distant star, trmbled on the hidden tower’s window. The tower itself blackened a piece of the sky, throwing a threatening shadow over Pierre.
For the first time, Pierre opened the door to the library of unread letters. There were so many! More pages than stars in the sky. He didn’t notice the marble floor or the marble animals, who made way for him. Pierre kept on turning his head this way and that, so many letters. To whom? Could they all be from the same persin, to the same person? Why did nobody read them? Was it their destiny to gather dust there, in the shadows, forever unanswered?
Fregósbor found Pierre crying in the middle of the paper corridor.
‘What letters are these? Why are they here?’
‘They aren’t for me,’ said Fregósbor. ‘Come.’ He took Pierre by the arm, guiding him like a blind man. He took Pierre back to the door he had just crossed, but instead of Yukari’s little apartment, there was a world without floor. Pieces of cotton, metal and wood floated in the doughy nothing.
Fregósbor stepped onto the nothing, Pierre followed with care. He didn’t fall, but neither could he stand still.
‘Balance yourself,’ said Fregósbor.
‘On what? There is no floor.’
‘There are many floors.’
‘I feel none.’
‘That’s because they aren’t solid.’
‘Then how are they supposed to support me?’
‘Dreams may not be solid, but they are very real. You have recently walked reality in a body of dream, now I brought your real body to the realm of dreams.’ Fregósbor opened his arms. ‘These wrecks are all dreams in need of mending. You need to restore them, before they gnaw on the ropes of reality, like rats.’
‘I’m struggling to stand.’
‘The struggle itself is the problem. Standing should be natural.’
Fregósbor knew Pierre’s difficulties and was ready to wait many hours until Pierre was able to take his first real step inside a dream. A moment later, Pierre straightened his back and landed his feet on the unexistent floor. He took na unsteady step, then another. That made Fregósbor feel unexplicably proud, almost like a father. Oh, yes, they would mend thos dreams. Together, Pierre and he.
Fregósbor gave Pierre a blue yarn to hold. Gently, Fregósbor pulled on the yarn and used it to connect the debris, sewing them into mountains, castles chimerae. As he walked and collected the shards, Pierre began to feel heavier.
‘Hang on,’ said Fregósbor. As he pulled on the line, he also tapped on Pierre’s strength, using the young man’s power to glue the pieces of shattered hope; spreading onto Franish dreams Pierre’s own colors. ‘Careful,’ he said. There were shards sharp as blades, bathed in poisonous darkness.
Pierre began to sweat.
‘Are we almost done?’
‘We’re about to begin.’
Fregósbor took that living being that was Pierre, his body, his soul, and crumbled it in millions of little particles. Pierre wished to lose become oblivious, give up everything, even Franária, as long as that torment ended. Fregósbor kept him aware and alive while he turned Pierre into dust and spread it on the oneiric winds of Franária. The dust Pierre crossed the borders of every dream, lifted the curtains of every nightmare, brightened every sky.
Franish dreams all had a star that night. A moletule of braveness, covered with magic, suffering this rupture for them. It rekindled na older star, that was aparently dead until then: hope, which infiltrated the darkness and puffed those dreams like baloons. The lightness of dreams softened Pierre’s suffering. He became mor stable, less stretched. The stronger he became, the higher hope went, the stronger Pierre became.
What about those people who were not sleeping? Does reality stop existing when you dream? Likewise the dreams are still there when you are awake.
No one had ever done so much for that Franish people. They wanted to be saved, for Pierre to be strong, to withstand the pain, to rescue them. And he did so for so long, with so much courage, that one by one the dreamers said, ‘Enough.’ Still he stayed, pulling them all up to the surface of darkness, to the clean air of pure dreams, unpoluted nightmares.
One dreamer climed a rock, reached up and piched Pierre-dust, cuddling him.
‘You’ve done enough,’ said Vivianne. ‘Leave the rest to us.’
Other dreamers followed her example and shook the darkness from their inner selves. They enveloped Pierre in their hands to protect him. They were safe, now they wanted to protect him.
On the night of the day he became king, Frederico didn’t sleep. Even so he dreamed. He noticed scraps and lint hanging on elbows and noses. He recognized the white webs of chaotic spiders. The same webs, though essencially different, as the ones that pushed away his own greyness in the hidden tower beyond the wolves, there where the Old Woman’s book had ressurected.
That first time, the webs were old and rancid, turning everything into past. The webs from this dream (Frederico knew he was dreaming awake — he was too used to diving into nightmares with his open eyes) were crystaline like spring spidewebs covered in morning dew. They landed soft as a humming bird’s plum, tearing away the stickiness of the darknes that (Frederico saw it now) pervaded the Franish unconscious.
So that was why nothing moved, that was why they were so blind. Darkness had glued to the bones of every dream, like parasite lichen on trees.
He put his hand on the little dog’s head. ‘What say you, Old Woman? Is it time to redecorate my soul?’
Old Woman barked and wagged her tail with so much strength that it raised so much dust and Frederito had to put his hands in front of him to walk. His fingers met cold glass. On the other side of this glass there was a table with a board game and four players. One of the players was Faust. He was . One of them wore an armour, the samw one Frederico wore on his first battle.
Then he heard an eagle scream. It was natural and wild, and it forced him to look up. Frederico raised his arm and the stone eagle from the Fountain of Tales in Beloú landed on his forearm. The eagle’s eyes were the color of honey.
Olivier a hand closing on his stomach. The chains that held his wrists were shaped like crowns. On his head there was also a crown, made of paper, connecting his skull to Henrique’s. Olivier didn’t have the strength to tear that crown and it kept on smashing both heads inside the same space while their bodies struggled in different directions, opposite directions, all of them wrong.
Neville kept moving on though invisible claws tore at his cloak. The claws belonged to him: Neville with a golden beard like Henrique of Baynard’s. His black face contorted by fearful ambition. Neville in Olivier’s skin, a misture of old white with shiny black, teeth sharp like a poisonous snake’s. The Neville who dreamt kept on walking, leaving behind the other Nevilles, one after the other.
He found a round mirror in a white frame. The reflection was Frederico.
‘You have never killed,’ said Neville. ‘I admire you for that. Death may have permeated my entire live, but the day I didn’t kill, it was you I saved.’
Neville noticed that the mirror was made of very thin fabric, and that the fabric was everywhere. He picked up a thread and followed it until he found a spindle Working the spindle fervently was Fregósbor.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Neville.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said the mage. ‘Go back to your dream.’
‘You are the one who is always appearing to me.’
‘Yes, yes, I apologize. We are connected by the story Franária conjured, is all.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Can’t you see? Franish dreams were all polluted with the War. I’m spinning new dream materials.’
‘How is that possible?’ asked Neville.
‘I’ve got the right stuff.’
Neville came closer to the spindle and examined the thread.
‘By the black wolf of Sátiron,’ he whispered. ‘Impossible.’
The thread was Pierre.