The blur was only seconds away from us now.
“And here comes Djibrak down to greet us,” said The Clown.
Djibrak finally stopped just in front of us, his sizable form hovering in the air, high enough that we had to crane our necks to look at him.
Big and weird — his body was a floating sphere the size of a minivan, covered in baby blue fur which stopped only at the borders of one of his many eyes. His entire body was covered in eyes — eyes that pointed in every direction. All of them were looking at us.
“Greetings upon you, few-eyed colleagues!”
How is he speaking? Does he have a mouth on top of his head?
“You too,” said The Clown.
“You all look very small and harmless from up here!”
“Thank you?” I said confusedly.
“You're very welcome!”
I had never met Djibrak before. He seemed very different from Jarqual. He felt friendly, in a way that seemed more genuine and normal than Jarqual. Still, who knew what really went on in the heads of dream-beings like them.
The blue sphere that made up Djibrak’s body floated down and flattened out slightly.
“All aboard,” announced The Clown.
The Knife Thrower had already climbed on top, clearly taking care to avoid standing on one of the many eyes that adorned even the top of the sphere, eyes that were still looking at us, now from below. Footing was hard to find, though the plush softness of Djibrak was helpful in that regard. There was no mouth up there either.
Djibrak started flying back towards the castle. Nobody had bothered explaining to Djibrak what we were doing here. We had all been informed that he was almost always watching, and therefore knew what we were there for.
As the Flying castle of Djibrak came nearer and nearer, without the great distance blurring the details one could see how truly colorful it was. The walls of towers were adorned with elaborate frescoes depicting Djibrak’s many eyes and there were few window without lovely looking plants in them.
As we made our way over the courtyard of the castle, I could see that it was filled with cages. We were flying too fast for me to make out what was in them, if anything, but they were surely meant for the strange beasts Djibrak was known to manufacture.
Whatever it was, we soon flew into the central tower from an oversized window, gently landing in its center.
The central tower was filled with telescopes. All around its circular walls were square little peep-holes, each with its own telescope. The very top of the tower had the long tubes of each telescope placed so densely that the top might as well have been a dome. We got off as soon as Djibrak had landed, and he wasted no time in floating up into the center of the half-sphere of telescopes, each one perfectly aligned with an eye on the top half of his own spherical body. The eyes on his bottom half contented themselves to watch us instead.
I wonder if he flips on occasion to give every eye a fair shot at the telescopes?
“Dear friends, Alain will entertain you while I search for your destination. My many eyes will make quick work of it.”
Alain was clearly the man in the lab coat hunched over one of the telescopes. When he heard his name called, he got up from his awkward seeming position and looked towards us. His face made him look like he was mid twenties and he had an overall healthy physique. A pair of oval glasses framed his head, their golden frames contrasting with his black hair and green eyes.
“Hello to all of you,” he began, “especially to the new Magician, who I have not met yet.”
“As disgusting of a kiss-ass as usual,” jumped in The Knife Thrower. I threw him a look, to which he didn’t react, but it was plenty clear from his scrunched up facial expression that he felt something negative. The man really wasn’t subtle when he disliked something.
“It’s nice to see you too, though I still maintain that you could benefit from us having a proper HR department.”
“There is no us!” responded The Knife Thrower. His fingers twitched, almost as if he wanted to reach down and grab a knife.
The Clown laughed.
“I will remind you, Knife Thrower, that each of us dreams can manage our staff as we please. Incivility between you that rises further than mere insults will not be tolerated. I am watching, and I have many eyes — all of which possess a high visual acuity.”
The Knife Thrower chose to stay silent, and most importantly, calm.
“Well now that that's all over and done with, what sort of entertainment do you have planned for us?” asked The Clown. I preferred it when didn’t have to make his own entertainment.
“It should not take Djibrak more than an hour or two to find the location, provided he doesn’t get too distracted. I was planning on giving you all a brief tour of the premises. We should have time to go through some of our experiments, the tea room, and then the telescopes.”
“That all sounds good to me,” I pitched in.
The Clown was all smiles as usual, and The Knife Thrower didn’t object. He seemed to have firmly decided to keep his mouth shut. It was a good look on him, as far as I was concerned. So, the tour got started fairly easily.
We made our way to descend down the staircase at one end of the tower. The room we were in was located at the very top floor of the tower, and there seemed to be quite a few floors below us, judging purely from its size — not the best indicator here in dreamland.
The floor below us was filled with wall to wall cages.
“Bwiiiii— Bwiiii—” cried a frog with a bird's beak from the other end of the room.
The cages were filled with dreams of all types, many chimeric in appearance — made of what were clearly once separate beings seemingly stitched together.
“The experiments here are all more or less failures. Wild dreams that we caught and whose abilities we have attempted to use for our benefit,” explained Alain. “And a few which were useless individually, but we thought might have some promise if fused. That being said, fusing them only works part of the time, for whatever reason. Most of these will be fed to the actually useful ones downstairs.”
“Such as?” I asked. Nobody really went into detail about the resources we had available. Other than a few key things, there were just too many to talk about except in general terms.
“Bigger ones trained to obey orders, the swarm of flesh eating bees, the mind squids… There are quite a few in our collection.”
I didn’t want to hold up the tour, especially with The Knife Thrower already being prissy, but I really wanted to ask about the mind squids.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Keeping them all in a stable form with all the cannibalism is quite tricky. We resort to giving them temporary dreamers on occasion, but we do not want them to become fully stable. Unfortunately the resulting losses make us cycle through a lot of inventory.”
“Do you handle that task personally?” asked The Clown.
“Sometimes,” Alain chose not to elaborate.
I could hear The Knife Thrower grinding his teeth at that statement.
Our tour group went down a few more floors, most filled with similar looking cages until one last flight of stairs took us into a full blown cafe. This was clearly supposed to be the tea room.
“The tea room” had two or three people in it talking over a cup of tea. Their fervent gesticulation stopped as they noticed us.
“Alain! It’s good to see you! We have so many questions for Djibrak The Wise. So much enlightenment is to be had…If only we could be granted an audience today, it would be splendid.”
“Sorry gentlemen, Djibrak is far too busy attending to the needs of our present guests, friends that work for another dream much like our dear Djibrak,” calmed Alain.
“Are there truly more dreams from which we can seek wisdom? How can we reach them?”
That sentence was when it clicked for me. These people weren't like us. They were dreamers.
“Unfortunately the other dreams are not as welcoming as Djibrak. They do not take petitioners,” explained Alain.
“Ah,” said one of the dreamers. “Then we shall need to come back another time. At any rate, our cups have run dry.”
“Farewell,” said the other, their forms fading fast as they began to wake up.
“You let the dreamers come and go?”
“Yes. It works just as well as your method. As long as they dream of Djibrak frequently enough, he will remain stable.”
“Bullshit,” replied The Knife Thrower. “With this sort of set-up drift is inevitable. As long as they're free to think whatever they want, it'll change Djibrak around.”
“Djibrak’s personality is not compatible with torturing people in eternal slumber. Or Lying to them excessively. Doing things your way would make him very different from what he is now. Sure he’d stay that way, but isn't permanent change worse than the random, fleeting change?”
“You already know what I think about that.”
“Then why are you wasting your breath explaining?”
There was a beat of silence there, just long enough for me to interject.
“And how do you make sure that they don’t, you know, let anyone in on the whole alternate dimension thing?”
“Djibrak has fed them gambling odds that beat the bookies. They won't bite the hand that feeds them. Anyone they tell winds up here, in the tea room eventually. Besides, they're not even privy to any of our actual goals or secrets.”
“It still feels riskier than what we’re doing,” I insisted. Though, I felt like my comment was somewhat unreasonable by pure virtue of being on The Knife Thrower's side of the argument. “I understand, however, that this may be the best from Djibrak’s perspective. I don't think it's freakishly risky and it's frankly a matter of his own bodily autonomy—more or less. And—”
“I’ve never understood why you couldn't just sustain Djibrak yourself, Alain, if drift was that big of a problem?” probed The Clown.
“Djibrak isn't stupid. He knows I could change him to better suit me if he made me his only dreamer. Jarqual takes bits of your souls hostage to make sure you stay on his side, so I don't think Djibrak is being excessive.”
“I wouldn't say my soul is being held hostage,” I said. Honestly, I felt pretty good about all the benefits of the situation, and I’d always had confidence that Jarqual was a reasonable nightmare demon.
“Can it leave freely?” smiled The Clown
“Well no, but…”
“Ergo, hostage”
“Captive, at most!” I protested.
“Tomato, tomato.”
I was just going to shut up now.
“The silent treatment,huh? Just like old Knifey there.”
Would this torture never end?
----------------------------------------
After the entire debacle in the tea room, we made our way back to the top of the tower. Djibrak was still silently floating above us, his many eyes still fixed on his own personal circle of telescopes.
“I suppose that the last thing I can show you is how we do our reconnaissance.”
“I was always curious about that actually. I know you can see things at a distance, but how exactly remains a you-stery.”
No one took the bait. The Clown didn't seem put off by it.
“It's simple, really,” said Alain boredly. “you look through the telescope and see something far away. You move it a bit and you'll see something close to it. Either spatially or conceptually. Adjusting them can be a pain. The one on the left points to your house, Clown.”
The Clown put his eye right next to the telescope. Then he stood up, and promptly turned the thing sharply left.
“I’d rather not be spied on. I prefer to stay a me-stery” said The Clown.
Hear, hear, I thought, minus the pun, as I went poking around the other telescopes. I picked one at random to look at.
It was a wearhouse. My warehouse. The one with all the crime families. It was creepy but I’d been told that someone would keep an eye on it 24/7. Lots of bad stuff could happen to helpless prisoners. Looks like The Freak just came in to feed them. She looked at me, meeting my distant eyes, and then nodded. Creepy, but friendly enough I guess.
I nudged the telescope to the left, and showed a similar warehouse, sans the captives. I nudged it again, and the viewport moved slightly to the left. Again, and it became a grocery store. Again, an open air market this time. Again—
“I'm going to have to readjust all of those you know. It could take hours.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not sorry” added The Clown.
And The Knife Thrower took one telescope in each of his hands and turned them a hundred and eighty degrees. It was a bitch move from a bitch person.
“You have so few eyes, and yet you waste them on squabbling,” commented Djibrak. “One of my many eyes has spotted what you seek. It is… strange. Not one of my many eyes has seen the likes of it. Cumulatively, that would work out to several dozen normal eye-lifetimes of vision, so it is more than strange. It is… very strange.”
“Which direction?” Asked Alain.
“312.17C bis.”
Alain’s hand touched the telescope that the Clown had moved and deftly turned it in one smooth motion. He looked through the hole, adjusted it once more, and that seems to be it.
“I see. That is strange.”
“Could you two stop being so fucking cryptic!” yelled The Knife Thrower.
“It would be easier if all of you just had a look.”
I called dibs.
To be fair to the two of them, it really was strange. The landscape was dotted with the same sort of material that made up my new knife. Here and there the material would spring forth from the earth, producing what looked like irregular, lopsided arches. The whole area seemed to be patrolled by giant, marble-white animal statues. Tigers, lions… fish.That much was par for the course for dreamland, but the sheets of solid black that filled up the space inside the arches was new. The black was so black that my mind felt like it had classified it as a new color. It was weird and definitely not normal as far as dreamland landscapes went. I supposed we'd have to kill all the big white things first, before doing any investigation.
The others all took their turns, and agreed, begrudgingly, that it was strange.
One short discussion later and we were flying on Djibrak again, straight towards the edge of his domain. From here on out we would have to walk, it would be dangerous business and the unpredictable nature of distances here might make us need to to turn back, but out there was the key to our victory, if one was to trust The Fortune Teller.
“May your eyes be keen, friends” was Djibrak’s way of saying goodbye.
We took one step into the veil of chaos and it parted around us our own nature as stable dreams imposing order, if only in a 5 or 6 foot bubble around us. Then we took another step and another. On the fourth step, there was a giant marble wolf waiting for us, a sheet of solid black behind him.
The Clown had already teleported away.