The room was real. It was real in the way that some objects or brief moments can be in dreams, but it was an entire room of realness and it didn’t waver at all. I felt that something outside of me was stopping me from waking.

The room was as it had been that night, but Liana wasn’t there. The bird sat on the windowsill looking at me. Outside it was night. The faces of the buildings were lit up by lamps of unnatural brightness and color. The skyline was like Throne’s built upon with impossible architecture. Towers stretched into the sky, balconies floated without support, and there were things flying through the air. I realized they were people. Voices came in from the door behind me.

“Who are you?” “What’s with the bird?” “Are you looking for someone?” “I felt your sadness in the memory, you didn’t clean it very well.” “A baby, a new one, reaching out blindly. We eat the young and the weak, fool! Why have you..” “Are you with the Emperor? Fuck you!” “It’s a girl, isn’t it, it's always a girl.”

Each voice scraped off my mind like lashes from a whip. Some probed deeper.

“When were you here? I think I know that Inn. Remember! What day were you here, how long ago?” This voice pried my memories up to the surface and I thought of Liana’s legs as they had been in the bed before I caught myself and remembered her body with Ethelyn’s face instead. Her dead face.

“Ah, you’ve been a bad boy!” “Sick fuck! Who are you? I’ll find you!”

The voices prodded and I pushed them out. I focused my thoughts on the sound of rain. It wasn’t raining out the window and I heard it from far away. The voices stopped. I was scared to death. I backed away from the door and sat down on the bed.

So, this was the complex? No, just part of it. I could sense in everything around me that I was on the edge of something. Beyond the door where the voices came from, I knew there was more, like hearing pebbles falling on the wooden lid of a deep well.

I thought of her being there, somehow, listening to voices, or speaking to other listeners. Heldar had said something about messages being passed around. If I said something to whatever was behind the door, would she hear it? I stopped myself from thinking of her. It felt like carving up my brain. I knew I couldn’t speak her name, or her face, I couldn’t let them know that I was looking for her. The bird chirped behind me. I got up and moved to the door.

As I got closer I thought about the voices and that was enough to bring them on. Just whispers at the edge of hearing. I focused my mind on the door and away from them. They stayed just whispers. I put my hand on the knob and slowly opened the door. More voices flooded in but they didn’t scrape my mind like the others. They seemed like echoes.

“Four leaves in the cat's paw.” “Thirty days, nine points, another keg. This one half full.” “Vulture, my friend wants the mail in his soup. Vulture, my friend…” And others of the same kind. I pulled the door the rest of the way. There was a swirl of mindless color. It reacted to me looking at it. Wherever I directed my gaze the blurry light, which seemed to come through a foggy glass, solidified and clarified into a recognizable shape. They were not the images I had expected.

An empty park bench, a naked woman in a mask, a specific amount of coins arranged on a marble slab, two children ice skating. The images became too much and I looked away from the doorway.

I had no way to make sense out of anything. I felt that the place behind the door was open to me and I had to stop myself from thinking anything when I looked at it, or else I was sure my thoughts would pour out and join those other images where anyone could see them.

Something tugged at my mind and drew me to look through the door. Fear cut through me. My mind went silent. I saw only one image. It was Ethelyn’s dead face, floating, just as it had been when I put it on Liana's body, but now it was alone. Something tugged on my brain and I heard a voice.

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“How?”

I thought of Marsten without meaning to, then I thought of her body lying on my matt, then in a flash of fear I focused on the rain, only the rain, and drowned out any other thoughts.

The two figures floated in the doorway now, Marsten, as he had been in my room, and Ethelyn as she was on the bed. The rain fell on the far away windowpane and I marked every drop.

“Is this you?” The voice was undoubtedly female, but not Liana. The phantoms in the doorway faded away and I saw the window as it had been that morning, with the red bird landing and chirping, landing and chirping, landing and chirping.

I thought of the rain on the windowpane, the rain on the windowpane.

“It's only me listening now, I blocked the others out.”

The rain fell down the windowpane and was warm and smelled of pipe smoke.

“That’s ok, I know you’re watching. You should be glad no one else found you first. I want to help you. I know what you want. Here.”

Through the door, I saw a temple, the church of the broken spire. It moved towards me as if I was walking up to it, and the sensation of walking filled me. I focused on its form to keep my mind from remembering where I had gone to sleep tonight.

“Now watch.”

The rain had let up and I knew it was tomorrow. I walked through the tall wooden doors, stood open for the morning, into the arched body of the church. I went to the left and took a votive candle from the rack. I lit it on one of the others and walked down the left side of the church, then went left again to the west wing and through the doors to the crypt entrance, down the stone staircase past two landings to the candlelit room with its wide arches and stone blocks everywhere. The nameplates glittered like dragon scales dropped in dust.

I walked to the back and through one of the doorways to the dead mazes, a right, then a left, then I stopped in the far back where my candle was the only light. I was shown a recess, like countless others in the mazes, but this one with no shrouded corpse inside, just empty stone fading to solid black. I felt myself blow the candle out and lay down in it, completely blind. I slithered towards the back of it in the darkness. I felt out with my hand and where the stone wall should be, I felt wood. I swung the wooden door up and rolled out of the recess to drop down to the floor on the other side. The wooden door swung back silently behind me.

I felt my hands reach down and find a lamp and striker left on the floor. With the lamp lit, I found myself in a slim passage cut into stone. I moved down it and when I came to the end, the passage zig zagged abruptly. I came out in a sewer tunnel probably centuries old with a wide, flat-arched shape. I moved down the walkway at the edge of the water until it dropped down a shaft in a drastic waterfall.

I went down with my feet finding stairs and my hands finding holds hidden by the spray. When I got to the bottom, I stepped quickly out through the edge of the waterfall with my jacket glistening and my torch sputtering.

It was a great cavern with a river flowing through it like liquid obsidian. My torchlight barely reached to the other side, where sheer rocks were riddled with spots of solid blackness in the shapes of doors, cave mouths, and things that might have been windows. The roof, at least three stories above me, reflected my torchlight in odd patterns.

I moved to the edge of the river and climbed aboard a raft that was barely large enough to kneel on but took my weight anyway. I moved down the great river until my lamplight shined off something metal stuck in the sheer rocks on the edge of the water, across the river. I paddled towards it and saw it was a polished copper plate. I reached down in the water and grabbed a chain just below the surface, using it to pull myself to the edge. I climbed a set of slim stone steps cut into the rock until I reached a ledge with a thin crevice as tall as a man. It seemed too slim for me to use, but I moved into it sideways and I saw it was zig-zagged like the other passage I had taken, surely to disguise its entrance.

Down another winding stone passage I found myself in a long hallway. I moved down the hall until I came to a braced wooden door. I knocked and a slit opened and eyes watched me and I was let inside. The vision ended and I was staring into solid darkness.

“Tomorrow. Come to me.” I was standing again before the door, now holding nothing but shadow. I could only think of one thing to say.

“Why?”

“Because I love her.” Then suddenly I knew she was no longer watching, the way you know things in dreams that you can't explain. I shut the door and stepped back. I knew, again with the dream sense, that I could wake up if I willed it. I did.