My esteemed friend and very first reader, I hope you move like a peddle rolling down the hillside: bouncing on each surface you may touch, with every little tumble being the consequence of your position in the previous instant and following logically from it, with no sudden turn backs, no looping actions born out of the caprices of a dragon’s mind. I hope you are bound by the laws that confine wood, metal and stone, with every of your steps being as mundane and effortful as the last. I hope, in other words, that you exist, my friend, because me and my hometown do not.
If you need a name, Terus will do. All names would be the same, truly, but pray let me keep the charade going in the page, my last bastion.
In the depths of the cave by whose mouth this manuscript was written, sleeps —or once slept— Cirruin. He slumbers in a dank room, among speleothems and some treasures he amassed during his golden years. I seldom disrupt him, for a dream must strive to not awake the dreamer. He dreams of me and dreams of Ludlun, town of smoke and mirrors, town where doors lead to rooms they have no business leading to. Ludlun, that maybe existed somewhere, in other shape, with people that moved like pebbles rolling down the hillside. Ludlun, which his shadow terrorizes to this day, both bringing us all to life and scorching and mauling us to death. Today —that is, the day I write this section of my story—, as a folk of this town of dreams, I am a merchant. A peddler. What I peddle doesn’t matter, for it is not of the interest of dragons. I have a backpack, but the items inside are misshapen, misunderstood by the dreamer. He only seeks to revive his days of glory, when his wings could effortlessly take him soaring across the skies, when he perched on town halls and spat the end of the world upon the disgraced passersby just to punish a noble that had committed some perceived wrong against him.
If I peek out of the cave’s entrance, I can see Ludlun, ever changing mirage somewhere down the valley. The trees of the dreams mix with the trees of the real in it, blurring the lines between both, I’d say.
I could tell you about my neighbors. There is a redheaded, pale woman that always has to go somewhere, yet never arrives to her destination. She disappears around corners, enters your reality in a blink and exits it in another. There is always a bar, and if often has only one table, and at it sits Jeller, always bald, never sober, always babbling and faceless. A man made furniture, decoration. Someone in the town is nobility and dresses as such. Sometimes, it’s me. Not me: today, I am a merchant.
Ludlun, manifested by the magic of the dreamer, can sadly be reached by souls like yours, by misfortune or by boldness. And I still remember him, the first man whom we ever saw moving like a pebble rolling down the hillside.
Back then, I was doing my rounds as a guard. Or, well, some Terus was. It’s hard to stablish identity when you belong to this mosaic of halfway-done persons. The face is the same, the thoughts somewhat belong to him and to me, yet it’s all foreign for a while, until it settles or I stop being dreamed again. The thing being, I saw this man, dressed in drapes most bright and delightful. He was a wandering merchant in search for new business. His clothes were marvelous, and I was tempted to touch him as he, scared and amazed, went about the city, mumbling words we didn’t understand.
I tailed this man like only a dream can, not step by step, but by being present wherever he didn’t turn his gaze to. He was like a sentence, unaware of the period that inevitably comes after her —I believe sentences to be female. I may be wrong. Not even a single one of his steps wasn’t coincident with the previous one, every drop of his sparkling sweat followed an almost unimpeded trajectory downwards. It glistened on his skin, wetted his clothes, A man whose sweat behaved like true raindrops, a most beautiful sight.
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He walked our path of dreamed cobblestone, or of pure solid rock of dreams. He circled around blocks of our town, confused by the shifting buildings. I was not the only one following, But, if one thing apart from the man was real back then, was my infatuation with such a creature. Exhausted, he arrived to the bar, and there he found Remelias. She was standing alone on a corner, sipping water from her cupped hands —Cirruin dreams of what he knows, and dragons aren’t avid drinkers.
He tried to strike a conversation with her, disgruntled by the lack of seats in the establishment. The man couldn’t believe we had no place to seat. We didn’t need it, and dragons didn’t use chairs. Reflexing on it, it was a miracle the fact that there was a table or two about. Cirruin must have seen the interior of a bar somewhere, before razing it to the ground.
“You even have a closet in the bar, a closet? And it has no doors! What sort of nest of madness of a town is this?” He ranted, and we, expectant, observed from the windows.
If there is a human tool Cirruin knows well since times immemorial, it is knives. Swords. Blades.
And things he knows, Cirruins dreams. It was a fraction of a second that it took Remelias to stab the man in the stomach so he would die and shut up for a while. Death for the people of Ludlun, I must say, is but a slight annoyance. Those of us who die, victim of the dragon or off the actions of each other, most of the times appear back in a dark alley of the town, coming down from the forests, or exiting a house that should have been empty. Our return may take days, or it may take minutes, but Ludlun preserves a static cast of inhabitants: we aren’t born, and we do not perish. We just shift in little, not meaningful ways. I will be tending to the bar someday, and the current bartender may be making the rounds as a guard, or wandering the streets, carrying a fishing rod without ever fishing.
The blood pooled under the man as he called for help, and nobody extended him a friendly hand. Consequences of a dragon masquerading as people.
And, what would we know, he remained there. Dead as he was, in the very position he passed out due to blood loss, over the stone of the real that, that fateful day, doubled as the floor of the bar.
The first day of the corpse remaining in place was the usual fare. People, including me, went around it without paying it major attention, save for checking the fabrics of his clothes or the mats of long, bloodied hair due to the incredible detail they possessed. And, friend, I was captivated by that exquisite corpse too. How could I not be, when this was the most beautiful death we had ever witnessed. A cadaver most rich in detail.
It was no morbid fascination, no, it was the innocence untainted by reality that only dreams are privileged (or cursed) to have.
We kept watching and the corpse, changing. First it got pale, then rigid, then came the foul smells and, as we grew more anxious and the days passed by, it bloated. Four days had passed since the stabbing by the time the whole town was gathered to behold, both in awe and horror, the man who remained dead.
I walked through the crowd, away from the body, and emerged at the cave’s mouth. Inside, Cirruin dreamed us all to life, except for the snakes that slithered underfoot, or for the flies that were attracted to cadavers of the real, the very same flies that had begun to covet the man’s body.
Cirruin dreamed us all to life, except that man. Yet it was not my prerogative to ask questions to our maker, for that would disturb his slumber.
I felt myself began to waver, just like I am doing right now. The dream was (is) getting unstable, and I was (am) going to stop existing, if luck were to be on my side, for a while.
I will keep writing this later. Replace the parts of the text that got erased due to being a mere construct of the dream instead of one belonging to this real quill and ink I have found. The paper, to dispel any doubt, is also real: I may be a dream, but I wish for this register to be the kind that fears water and fire more than its own nature.