It stands to reason that the dream of a dragon’s dream cannot be naught but a dragon’s dream. So that same day, for the first time ever, I tried to sleep for real.
At first, trying to keep the eyes closed resulted a challenge. As soon as my mind shifted from the task at hand they were open again. I learned the hard way that we dreams are restless, that we are not afforded that which to the dreamer comes naturally. I tried with concussions, that I, somehow, suspected could cause unconsciousness. I killed myself, reader, by head-butting the wall of the cave. I killed myself and beheld my previous body after returning. Then I killed myself again before giving up.
Maybe I needed the ritual. To make the dreamer recognize me as a person about to sleep. I tore the clothes off from my dead selves and fashioned bedclothes form them. The dragon knew how people slept: he had seen the beds of kings, of their daughters. He had noticed how the homeless napped anywhere they could get a refuge from the climate. Cirruin may have never gotten a deep understanding of humanity, but people are animals all the same, and, when sleeping, animals want for warmth and darkness.
Darkness was a given if I ventured deeper into the cave. Dankness, too. I fashioned a sort of poor-quality cape by tying all the clothes together, the pants by the legs and the upper-bodies by the sleeves.
Wrapping myself in it, I sat against the cold stone of the cave, hidden from the evening sun, and yawned. Then, I looked at the dead me I had dragged up here. A thigh would make a reasonable pillow. I concluded the ritual by lying down, back against the wall still, head upon the flesh of the ones that used to be my legs. Then, with another yawn I closed my eyes and concentrated on remaining still and unbothered.
I drifted away beautifully. I, but not me, appeared outside the cave, and walked up to the spot where I could see it: I was sleeping, I was dreaming and seeing myself asleep from the eyes that I dreamt. I went back outside the cave, not to break my frail slumber, and extended my hands to the skies. At first nothing happened, yet I slowly managed to command clouds: not real, clouds that were a dragon’s dream, to gather and cover the sun to steal its red hue for a while.
I could dream in turn. My dreams were Cirruin’s too, and thus as real as me. I was almost sure that I was projecting them upon reality like my dreamer did: an extension of my life over which I had control. Magic beyond my nature, loaned or inherited from he who dreamt me.
I pushed further. I dreamed that the clouds descended gracefully and gathered on my open hands, coiling around my fingers, gamboling about my arms.
I commanded the clouds to gather now before me, to mirror the image of this dreamed avatar of mine and its movements too. And they did. They formed a lump of water and ice, and from it a copy of myself was born.
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The fingertips of the left hand of my first avatar touched the fingertips of the right hand of the second. Then I mirrored the mirror, and the mirror of the mirror, and so forth. And army of me, about five hundred strong, dreamed with every minute detail I could muster.
As the sun hid they transported to Zenvo. In every street, a Terus walked, searching, peeking into windows, leaning into doors to listen, making the locals run into hiding when they saw two or three of my avatars meeting. I had never heard so many doors bolting simultaneously. A symphony of fear caused by me. A stoke for the flame of a dragon’s pride, but a disgrace for Terus, the no-man.
As the night fell, I searched every corner of the ever sprawling city. Until at last, in a neighborhood where the houses of the poor piled upon each other, I found her hanging clothes on the line of her cozy yard. She froze when she saw my avatar.
I stopped dreaming every other instance of me, but that one, and approached her wish a single step that covered the stretch of the whole street.
“Greetings, kind soul,” my avatar said. She nodded, whimpering. “Fear not, I came to apologize.” And thus, I caressed her face, because I needed to feel her skin. To know how her tact was. The trembled, scared to the bone, but I would soon dispel that fear.
Beside my avatar, next to the potted plants she had cared so well for, a silhouette of vapor appeared, and from its gaseous shell emerged an image of the kind soul. I dreamed her anew, like artists dream statues for the kings. What a better gift than a statue that breathes, that speaks, that could fear just like she did.
The woman’s legs gave in and she fainted, with her copy rushing to catch her before she hit her head against the floor. The basket with the clothes fell over the grass upside down.
The house’s door opened abruptly, revealing a burly man holding a frying pan, ready for violence. He stopped approaching my avatar when he noticed it was his wife who held his wife in arms. The man frantically reached for something on his pocket: a little fetish shaped like the head of a dog. A sighthound, to be more precise.
“Avaunt, demon!” he shouted, extending the fetish towards us, the dreams.
My avatar cracked a gentle smile. “Fear not friend, she’s a gift. A perfect picture of your wife, painted by the mind’s eye of yours truly. I can make one for you too, if you would like it.”
He lowered the fetish and the pan and took a step back. “You look an awful lot like the ghost she was describing at lunch.”
I made the avatar tilt his head a little. “Lunch?”
“The meal between breakfast and dinner. She also told me of this poor understanding of yours. Truly, creature, what are you?” he asked, gripping his improvised weapon hard, yet probably doubting it would do him any good.
“She called me ghost too, and the description she gave of it could fit. However, I doubt I am, in spirit, that which you believe me to be. I shall beg your pardon if this is considered deception.”
The man, taken aback by my apology, showed his teeth to the replica of his wife, and took the woman in his arms. Then he looked at the sky, eyes opened wide, his lips trembling.
“Dragon!” he exclaimed, rushing to carry the woman inside their home and smashing the door shut. At first I feared my true nature had been revealed, but then, with a shift of my point of view, I realized what he truly meant, for the hue of the scales was unmistakable.
There, next to the older and less cared-for sections of the city walls, atop an abandoned watch tower, the vile dream avatar of Mardhaka had perched on.