Braehar handled the smelting. It was a simple matter after weighing everything out and copying down disruptor’s sigils. The receiver had the highest melting point, so it went first, then the elf-gold and then the dreamsilver. It made the metal bubble and writhe for a moment, forming strange shapes like crystals and ghosts before settling back down. When all was said and done they had an ingot of bronze that hardly looked any different at all, save that it was so new that it was much shinier than the receiver had been, untarnished.
They cast the metal into gears, some as thin as wafers, and applied a chemical solvent. Corinthian bronze tarnishes a matte purple-black, once famous for its rich color. At Henry’s direction, Braehar painstakingly carved dozens of sigils, digging into the straw-gold color underneath so they shone like fire. They were sigils for strength, motion, dexterity, but also transfersion, binding, trapping. The arm had to be a funnel into Henry, but it also had to prevent Leila from stealing from Henry. It took months to get it right, but soon they had crafted seventeen of them. Braehar inserted them into Henry’s joints, restoring movement to his arm.
He still felt phantom pains, and they were worse when he moved it. But it still felt better than what he’d endured when his arm was actively dying. He wondered if the pain would ever stop.
With movement restored, it was time to impart Henry’s arm with skin and muscle. They would clad the bone in mercury, the metal of transcendence. It would link his dreaming self back to the waking world and shield him from death. Working mercury was very difficult; the sigils had to essentially be made of some other substance and suspended in the liquid, as there was no way to hold the shape permanently otherwise. In the end they chose an alloy of dreamsilver and the iron band Henry had made. The sigils here were for keeping shape and simulating muscle. There were additional sigils for controlling the weight; mercury was not light, and while the arm was essentially hollow, it was still much heavier than a flesh arm.
There was also a minor hiccup that there were no safeguards against mercury poisoning in Phobetor’s instructions. Production was set back a little while for Braehar to get her hands on a bezoar.
In total, three more months passed on this phase of. By Henry’s estimate it had been almost a year altogether since he disappeared, and he winced at his missing time. As with many things, he tried not to think about it. Yet couldn’t help but think about it when he realized he’d missed his birthday. He didn’t know the current date and Braehar didn’t keep track of time on Earth while she was here, so Henry wasn’t even sure how long ago it had passed, only that it definitely had.
He didn’t tell anyone about it, not even Ayane. After The Wald he felt safe in calling her a friend, but they didn’t celebrate birthdays in Desert Reign. He didn’t think she would understand. He still found succor in their near-nightly dreamwalks; He was showing her Rhone now, which was like a second home.
When the skin was complete, he regained something like a sense of touch. Somehow it was both better and worse than his natural arm; the liquid metal could enfold something much more completely than flesh ever could, and so touching gave him more information, if he had the time to think about it. But the actual sensation was like if he were touching things through a plastic bag full of cold water.
Before the skin went on, Henry wanted to restore his missing fingers. It was trivial for Braehar to make some artificial bones from iron and dreamsilver, adding in some of Henry’s own blood to ensure compatibility. Once attached, Henry stretched his cut tendons out and around the fingers, and found they worked adequately, only slightly clumsier than the other three.
But as soon as the skin of mercury went on, they turned to gold. It was clear Phobetor had not wanted him to forget his pains, even if he recovered from them.
But the work was done. Henry flexed his fingers. They were stiff, and cold, and wet, and numb, and they hurt. He smiled.
“Great work, everyone,” said Braehar, and she gave herself a slow opera clap. Ayane was there, and she imitated her. They didn’t have clapping in this world, but she had adopted it quickly since the invaders liked it so much. Clody joined in a second later.
“Are you ready for your debut?” asked Ayane.
“It’s about time,” said Henry.
“No,” said Braehar, as she lit a cigarette. “We need to test its capabilities. Range of motion, dexterity—”
“It’s fine,” said Henry, extending his arm, twisting it this way and that. “It’s stiff and slow, but it works.”
“Keep going,” said Braehar, and she ran him through a number of brief exercises. It seemed he had the full range of motion of a normal arm. The naturally liquid state of mercury offered some possibilities for additional dexterity, but they didn’t push it too far.
Braehar took a long drag of her cigarette and breathed it out. “Next, we must test the ability of the doppelganger token.”
“Absorbing magic,” Henry nodded. “I have just the thing.” Henry drew his knife and laid it on the table, then touched it with the bare palm of his silver hand. The magic jumped into his hand like the recoil of a gun. It was almost eager, like it was happy to be home. The energy was flowing inside his arm, in a shape approximating the original sigils. He knew he could send it on into his spirit, and his magic would be that much stronger.
Instead, he drew the magic into his bones, inscribing them with the same sigils the knife had had. It would be more convenient to have that power on hand, when he wasn’t armed.
When he pulled back, the knife was clean of sigils. Just a knife, though a good one at that. He patted the hilt and sheathed it again.
“Impressive,” said Braehar. “Now let’s try something a little stronger, such as perhaps—”
Henry ignored her and pulled out the barrel of the disruptor, now just a long, inscribed spike.
Braehar frowned. “That might damage your hand.”
“Serves him right,” Clody muttered.
“It only reacts when the sigils are completed,” said Henry. “Only half the spell is on the spike.”
“And you know the rest of it?”
“It’s in his mind palace,” said Ayane, wiggling her fingers.
Before anyone else could say anything more, Henry grasped the barrel. The magic entered his body much more slowly this time. It was the wrong alignment, water, and specifically designed to be antithetical to magic. But, with effort and care, he engraved this spell, too, into his bones. When he let the barrel go, it was blank, the carven sigils scraped clean.
Henry made a finger gun, and his index and middle fingers molded into the shape of the disruptor's barrel. “Clody, give me a target,” said Henry, pointing his hand at the ceiling.
Clody grunted and then shuffled over to a barrel of refined akanite, pulling out a lump the size of their fist and setting it on an empty work table.
Henry shaped the rest of the disruptor’s sigil sequence onto his hand, then flicked his thumb down. The sigil on his thumbprint completed the sequence and a burst of pink light shot out of his fingertips. The akanite was annihilated.
Another round of applause. Henry took a bow.
“That will be an ace up your sleeve when it comes time to face Ghun,” said Braehar. “We can embark on the next phase of the plan.”
As powerful as Henry felt with his new arm, he was still a human child and his magic would pale in comparison to Ghun’s. If he wanted to be accepted as an exotic court magus, he needed something flashy. He’d known from reading Desert Reign that summoning magic existed in this setting, so the next plan was to capture the figment of some fearsome beast.
And according to Ayane, Ghun loved dinosaurs.
It was time to dreamwalk once again. He waited in his butt until night, and again experienced the sense of time speeding up when nothing was happening.
Ayane insisted on coming, darkening his door as if it were any other night.
“It will be dangerous,” said Henry.
Ayane scoffed. “It can’t be any more dangerous than The Wald, where I saved your life, by the way.”
“I think you probably just saved my soul,” he said, grinning.
She huffed. “As if that isn’t worse—”
The clatter of rock on wood sounded as Clody tumbled down the stairs. Their crystalline hooves seemed unusually clumsy as they hurried toward Henry’s butt. It might have had something to do with their huge backpack, or the big dwarven gun they were holding. “I’m coming too!”
“Are you serious?” asked Henry.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” said Clody, setting their jaw.
“Because you hate me?” said Henry.
Clody broke out into a nervous sweat. “Whaaaat? Noooo…”
Ayane sighed, crossing her arms. “They just want to come because I’m coming.”
“Braehar told me what a dinosaur was!” said Clody, face growing pink. “I’d feel terrible if something happened to you.”
Henry sighed. “I guess we could use backup...”
“Henry, no,” said Ayane. With a sharp, fluid motion, she pointed at Clody’s face and they took a step back. “You’ll watch over his sleeping body and make sure no one interrupts us.”
No one had in all the times she’d gone dreamwalking with Henry, and Clody knew that. “If you do, I’ll give you a reward.”
Their face went through a number of expressions in quick succession, before settling on a hopeful grin. “Do I get to pick the reward?”
Ayane swept her hand through their words. “No. Take it or leave it.” She shut the door. Clody grumbled on the other side. The gentle clattering of their hooves on the ground could have been them sitting down to wait.
Henry said nothing and laid down. Ayane sat down beside him and took his hand. By now he was well practiced in falling asleep at will, and keeping himself in the dreaming state instead of falling into deeper, dreamless sleep.
In moments, they were flying through Nod. As he didn’t know the exact nature or location of a projection with dinosaurs, it was easier to come here and feel around. Below, the Hidden Rail shone as always like a golden thread. Henry ignored the wistful glimpse of home and sorted through his thoughts, calling up dinosaurs. A cloudy green dream marble drifted towards them, eclipsing the rainbow sun.
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They plunged into the dream marble, falling for a moment through blackness before landing on their feet, as if they’d simply done a synchronized hop. Henry took his bearings. They were in a jungle clearing. The trees resembled baobabs, strangler figs, palms and mangroves, and while the canopy was dense, the trees were spaced far enough apart to accommodate very large creatures. The ground was covered with thick grass, and exotic flowers shone in neon colors around the edge of the clearing. A volcano smoked ominously above the treetops, filling the air with black clouds. Henry knew enough about science to know that this was a very outdated idea of the age of dinosaurs, but perhaps Ghun would prefer that.
“So what is a dinosaur, anyway?” asked Ayane. “I just know Ghun keeps giving me toys of them.”
Henry snorted. “They’re these huge creatures from the ancient past, so long ago that no person has ever seen them. They’re all dead now, we just find their bones sometimes and try to guess what they looked like from their skeletons.”
“That’s it?” she quirked her eyebrow.
“That’s it,” said Henry. He picked a random direction and started walking. “Say, why were you against Clody coming with us?”
Ayane crossed her arms. “I don’t care for Clody. Why were you about to let them come?”
Henry shrugged. “I guess I have a soft spot for those of you that were in the book.”
Ayane grumbled. “Yeah, yeah. That book.” She brushed some hair out of her face. “You know, I dream about what was ‘supposed’ to happen sometimes. But I only see what happens to me. What happens to Clody?”
Henry cleared his throat. “Uhh, well. They betray the rebellion and kill Amneris to hide their secret. Ramades finds out and throws them off the castle wall for treason.”
Grimacing, Ayane said, “That does not make me want to get to know them better. Who is Amneris?”
Henry rubbed the back of his neck. “A girl you would have met after trying to run away from the palace. You and her and Ramades kinda have a love triangle…”
“Ahh yes,” she nodded. “I’ve dreamed about her, and a few other people I was supposed to meet.”
“Would you like to?” asked Henry.
Ayane thought about it for a while, then shook her head. “I wouldn’t mind if it happened naturally, but I won’t seek any of those people out. It would give me reasons not to leave Desert Reign. I don’t want to be tied down there more than I already am.” She looked up at the canopy. “And besides, trying to befriend someone because you think you’re supposed to never works.”
Henry nodded. “There’ve been times when my Aunt tried to set me up with other kids from important families. It never worked out. There was this jerk named Kevin—” a roar shook the air.
He took Ayane’s arm and pulled her away, into the hollow of a huge tree. “Quick, climb,” he said, scrambling up the rough bark. He’d learned to make his dream hand more solid, allowing him to grip. It helped that the bark had big wide cracks to use as handholds. All the while, the ground shook from the weight of massive footsteps.
The two of them made it to the lowest branch just as the dinosaur emerged. They saw its head first, huge and bulbous, grey and pitted like the moon. Its massive eyes glowed faintly yellow and its broad, square snout reminded Henry almost more of a pitbull than a reptile. Its skin was pebbly and leathery, like rhino’s, crisscrossed with hundreds of little scars. The dinosaur stood fully erect, almost like a man, its huge heavy tail dragging behind and digging furrows into the ground.
“What in all the hells is this?” Ayane said in a half-panicked whisper.
“Tyrannosaurus Rex,” Henry replied. “That means Tyrant Lizard King.”
“I believe it,” said Ayane. Its head was just a few yards below their feet, and it was a miracle it hadn’t seen them.
“I think this is a pulpy kind of world,” said Henry. After her dumbfounded expression he hastened to add, “It’s not like the real T-Rex. It’s the exaggerated fairytale version of it that people believe in.”
“Like the talking wolves in The Wald,” said Ayane.
“That’s right,” said Henry.
“Do you think he talks?” asked Ayane. The T-Rex was sniffing around. “You said he was a king. Should I bow?”
Before Henry could explain that was the name of a species, something strange happened. A loud droning sound pulsed through the air, and the T-Rex looked up. Henry stopped himself from flinching, and whispered for Ayane not to move. “Their vision is based on movement,” he said.
But the T-Rex was looking up, through the canopy. Seconds later, they realized why as a huge, flying dinosaur burst through the branches. Henry couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a…stegosaurus? It looked like a stegosaurus’s body plan, but the plates were overly large and arranged horizontally, allowing it to glide like a weird plane. Henry didn’t think that was scientifically possible. This was probably a pulp projection. No, there were a trio of ape-men riding on the creature’s back. This was definitely some pulp bullshit. “Henry Sinclair at the Earth’s Core,” he muttered. “Henry Sinclair Conquers The Lost World…”
One of the ape-men was manning the reins while two of them were spinning bullroarers, the source of the droning sound. It seemed to mesmerize the T-Rex. The flying party skimmed over its head, so close to Henry and Ayane that their passing almost knocked them both off the branch. As they flew over its head, the ape-men stopped their spinning and flung spears straight down, aiming for the eyes. The T-Rex roared as it turned to face them, not so mesmerized as they had thought. The spears missed their mark; one bounced off helplessly while the other cut an impotent little line across its snout.
The stegosaurus wheeled around, opening its beak to let out a hawk-like roar. It swerved hard, striking the T-Rex across the chest with its thagomizer. It failed to cut, but it used the momentum of the blow to turn in the air. It landed with a heavy thud on the forest floor some yards away, back plates snapping upright with a bony click.
“Holy shit,” Henry shouted, trying not to throw his arms up. “Holy shit!”
Ayane smirked. “I take it you also like dinosaurs.”
“Maybe.”
The stegosaurus charged, snapping at the T-Rex’s knees with its beak. The ape-men hooted and hollered and jabbed with their spears. The T-Rex made to bite, but the stegosaurus turned and swung its tail. The thagomizer landed a solid blow against its thigh, tearing out chunks of flesh. Gallons of blood spurted out onto the jungle floor and the T-Rex roared in pain.
It almost looked like the T-Rex would lose, but it was just biding its time. It snapped its head down and caught an ape-man in its jaws. It popped like a gusher then disappeared down its gullet. The other ape-men shouted in alarm, and the driver accidentally pulled back on the reins, making the stegosaurus buck.
The T-Rex opened its mouth wider than ever before, cheeks stretching back to show off all its teeth. A roar sounded from deep inside its chest, rising in volume and pitch. Then its eyes began to glow gold, and a ball of flame formed in its mouth.
“It breathes fire?!” Ayane shouted, eyes sparkling.
“It’s not supposed to!” said Henry.
A beam of flame like molten steel burst from the T-Rex’s mouth, enveloping the ape-men and severing the stegosaurus’s tail. It yelped and took off galloping into the woods. The T-Rex made to pursue but it stumbled on its wounded leg. It crashed to the ground, growling in pain. It turned its head to glare at the injury, and before Henry’s eyes, it started to heal.
Henry realized then that the T-Rex was a figment, not a mere dream. He wasn’t sure if it was sentient, but it could control the dreaming to some extent. He figured that this was most likely not just a generic tyrannosaurus rex. It was the Tyrannosaurus Rex.1
Ghun would love it. “Hit him,” said Henry.
The whole time, Ayane had been weaving together a stormcloud, a massive thunderhead looming directly over the T-Rex’s head. It looked up just as a bolt of lightning tore down through the canopy. For a moment, Henry could see its skeleton.
The T-Rex staggered around as if drunk, and the air warped around it, gold and purple bubbles forming, some dream-working that would heal it or save its life. Henry had no intention of letting that happen. He leapt off the branch and landed on its head, slamming his hand in the shape of the disruptor barrel into the crown of the T-Rex’s skull. For a moment their wills clashed; the T-Rex believed its head to be as hard as diamond, and Henry believed it to be as pliable as tinfoil. But as soon as he scraped through the flesh and struck bone, it was over. With the spells in his arm, his control of earthy substances extended even to bone. He asserted his authority over the T-Rex, mind and body.
Absorbing something so large would have been an impressive feat of magic on Earth, but in the Dreamlands what mattered more was its metaphysical weight. That largely had to do with the figment’s self image, intelligence, magical power, whether it was sustained by the dreams of others, and how many. The T-Rex was powerful in some of those regards, but ultimately it was only a particularly clever animal. It only took a few seconds of struggle before it broke down, crumbling to a fine, metallic mist that was quickly sucked into Henry’s palm in a swirl of light.
What was more challenging was dealing with the T-Rex after. As he fell the distance from the top of its head to the jungle floor, Henry went into his mindscape. The T-Rex was in there, threatening to tear the space asunder with its size. Henry quickly started to construct an enclosure in his mindscape before it damaged anything or tried to take over his body. The space had expanded a bit since he started, linking Ruby’s flat with his old bedroom, a few other rooms in the house, and even the buttery. But he quickly ran into a problem; creating a room big enough for the T-Rex would mean doubling the size of his space.
No, creating an actual enclosure would be wasteful. He reached out with his hands, touching its skin, and thought about the pulp novels he’d read, the ones where he’d met creatures like this before. Slowly, it began to transform, shrinking, its skin becoming yellowed paper.
There was a loud crack. Then, a guttural croak filled the room, and Henry sensed a killing intent. In the wall to his right, he saw a wide crack, and on the other side, Monte Carlo. And Leila.
She was struggling, sloughing off bits and pieces of stone, revealing metal underneath. One single red eye rolled in her head, directing her killing intent at him.
Henry clapped his hands together, crushing the T-Rex down into the shape of a book. Then he marched over to the crack, seized both ends, then slammed them shut like a door. Leila’s cry of frustration echoed in his ears.
Henry returned to where he was standing in the dinosaur projection, but unfortunately that was some twenty feet in the air, with nothing to hold him up any longer. He panicked, swore, and braced for impact. There wasn’t enough time for his clumsy flying and it might not even work in this projection.
Then Ayane swooped in and caught him. She was wearing a robe made of fluffy clouds, not unlike the clouds of Nod. Henry clung to her with his good arm, and couldn't help but breathe in the scent of her hair. He remembered the crush on her he’d had when she was just a fictional character to him. He had tried not to think about it since meeting her, and had tried not to examine it when he did. It was probably like having a crush on a celebrity, he thought, and she had made it abundantly clear didn’t want to be courted by a fan. But he had her friendship, and for now he could enjoy their proximity. Besides, he had other obligations back home.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, puffing out a breath that blew back her hair from his face. “You’ve gotten really good at dreaming.”
She blew back into his eyes, making him blink. She looked proud, though, as she began to climb, punching through the canopy and into the sky. There was a black cloud of volcanic ash above them. “Get us home then,” said Ayane, as it approached.
“Oh, right,” said Henry. He sent out a pulse of dream magic. It was still strange to him, unstructured, barely constrained by a sigil, defined almost entirely by thoughts and feelings. A pink aura enveloped them both, and then, quite suddenly, they were back in his room.
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Ayane rolled off Henry; as she had no real body, Ayane always returned to the room in the position she was in when she left the dream, which so happened to be an embrace.
“Well, that was nice,” she said.
“Good to have you along,” said Henry.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Henry,” said Ayane. “Get some rest.”
He smiled at her. “You too.”
She stepped out into the buttery and was immediately confronted with Clody, sitting there, looking like they were trying not to be sick. “Listen, Ayane,” they began.
She sighed and rubbed the skin between her eyes. “What is it Clody?”
“I don’t think he has good intentions,” said Clody. “Towards you, I mean. What if he sells us out to Ghun? What if he buys you?”
“If he tried, I would escape,” said Ayane, putting her hands on her hips. “He’s been showing me how to dreamwalk all these months. Well, we’ve been figuring it out together. But if he was planning to buy me all along that would be a terribly stupid idea.”
Clody pulled a face, their fingers twitching together like anxious spiders. “Well, they say that not all criminals are very smart.”
Ayane snorted. “I suppose that’s true. Ghun took over here with just brute force, after all.” Then she shook her head. “I don’t think Henry’s terribly stupid though.”
Clody bit their lower lip. “Why do you trust him so much? You’ve only just met him!”
“It’s been months.”
“You’ve known me longer.”
Ayane took a deep breath and leaned back against the nearest butt. “I trust him because he’s sincere. He’s…good.”
Clody looked away for a moment, lip quivering. Then they gathered themselves and turned back. “Well, I still think it’s a mistake. But I believe that you can handle yourself.”
“That’s wise of you,” said Ayane.
Clody coughed into their hand. “So, uhh. About that reward?”
“Ahh, of course.” Ayane reached into the sleeve of her robe and pulled out a heart-shaped box. “It’s full of chocolates. Have you had chocolate before?”
“Oh yes, Braehar has given me some,” they eyed the box hungrily. “That looks like quite a lot.”
“It is,” Ayane held her arms out straight to present the box. “And it’s all yours.”
“And it’s shaped like a heart,” Clody muttered, taking the box. “Thank you, Ayane.” They held it to their chest and bowed, then scampered off.
Ayane wondered if that hadn’t been a mistake, but shrugged it off. She could handle Clody, if it came down to it.
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1. Henry realized then that he’d even been capitalizing it in his mind.