Gunsee had never been a big city, nor a famous one or, in general, a place of note. Commerce flowed through it liberally because it had been built on the trails that led into the Tiurna Mountains and down into the jungles. Sure, it meant that, during the winter, the place became basically isolated since nobody in their right mind would attempt to pass through the, as the [Mountaineers] called it, Pineless Strait – a relatively safe passage that had been carved between two mountains and that the mountain folk defended and maintained for a small fee – but the rest of the year they saw plenty of activity!
Recently, in the sleepy town of Gunsee, a new [Baker] had appeared, although just calling him that would be a disservice.
For he made wonders out of things as simple as bread, and the sweets, oh the sweets, they were simply wonderful. A bite was enough to let someone reach Larnos, the shapes he made them into were mesmerizing at worst, downright breathtaking at best. Cakes, candies, sweet breads, you name it, he had it.
Another reason why the folk in Gunsee knew this absolutely wonderful bakery? The man behind the counter.
Once upon a time he had probably been a good looking, even strapping, lad, but now? He looked sickly on the best days, while during the worst ones, the ones where he couldn’t even get up from the padded chair behind the counter, he seemed to have a foot in the grave.
There was a third reason the bakery was on everybody’s lips: Alice.
The girl who’d suddenly appeared in town a few months ago wearing a shirt from the Tower Academy and whose origin was completely unknown, the girl who’d managed to become Herman’s apprentice after talking with him for a few hours, something nobody had ever managed – both talking to him for a few hours and becoming his apprentice –, the girl who’d stolen the heart of the most sought-after bachelor in town and, finally, the girl who’d recently started a business of her own helping people with charms and strange blessings given with plants. Many had called her a [Witch] at first, but every time she’d denied it.
“I am not a [Witch]. I don’t have a hat, after all. At best I’d call myself a subpar [Healer].”
But her remedies worked, her strange amulets and incantations were effective in ways that even potions and spells sometimes weren’t.
Someone had once asked her this: “Why do you call yourself a ‘subpar [Healer]’? You’re better than most!”
The girl, who’d been checking a small cauldron of boiling water with a specific plant floating in it, had looked up and smiled bitterly: “Thank you for the kind words, but I don’t call myself subpar because of my lack of abilities, no, I have plenty of that. I am subpar because I allowed myself to forget them. I thought they didn’t exist. I was wrong. Now they answer my call.”
Her smile had become satisfied as her eyes had looked up into nothingness.
“Never allow yourself to forget, you hear me?” she had added afterwards.
So Alice, strange Alice, not-witch Alice, the girl on everybody’s lips, visited the place every day and treated the [Baker] like an old friend, checking up on him, giving him concoctions that visibly helped him, and bought his stuff saying it was the best she’d ever had, that Alice was the third reason this new bakery was so successful.
Armando couldn’t find the words to tell her how grateful he was.
And, at night, while others slept, he looked out of the window in the bedroom over his shop and thought about the House of Memories, about the people he’d lost there, and about the promises he’d made, the Oath he’d taken.
Alice said she’d find a way to help poison the House’s Mind in the Dream, so now… now I have to think about how to get to Her Heart.
That was easier said than done.
Why?
Because the Heart was in the Basement.
The place where all the monsters hid in the dark, waiting hungrily for someone to open the door to their realm, desiring only to escape. Once upon a time they wouldn’t have been able to step beyond the door even if someone had left it open. Now though? The House was weak, weaker than ever, and her protections had waned. Marta had shown everyone as much.
How does anyone get through a not-place filled with monsters that want to murder you? And all the while look around for a heart that nobody knows the appearance of?
They’d been working on that idea for a very long time but, even then, they’d never managed to find a good way to deal with all the monsters.
Or rather, Marta had thought of a way, but it was a death sentence: to fight one’s own monster. To challenge it and win. Then, maybe, the others would let him go, but they had never found a way to be sure of it, nor did he have more than one shot at this. He considered himself lucky he was getting a second one, for all that he was damaged.
Sigh, I wonder what my monster looks like.
----------------------------------------
Alice stood in the Dream, her [Tools of the Trade] all neatly aligned on a table in front of her, while various plants she had gathered all over the Land slowly dried up on a rack behind her, the warmth of a fire hastening the process. Of course she could’ve just forced the Dream to do that part of the process for her in an instant, but it was important, meaningful, for it to happen in a natural manner.
The Land of Dreams functioned on concepts and ideas: the more someone believed in them, the more powerful they became. And, at the same time, the more truthful these concepts were to themselves, the more believable they were to the Dream, the more power they gained. It was a strange thing to say, a strange balance to put in a place that should’ve made the impossible possible. It was almost as if the Land wanted to remind the [Dreamers] that there was a world out there, in the Waking.
“What are you making?” asked a voice to her left, clearly attempting to stay away from the curling smoke rising from a nearby cauldron (because having a bubbling cauldron beside what was basically an alchemist’s workshop made absolute sense).
Alice turned towards the source of the voice and her leafy mask with a rose over her left eye was met with a fox’s snout that was rather rapidly retreating as the smoke coming off the cauldron curled around and began following him, like an animal sensing fear.
“Hi Albert,” she said with a smile that was mirrored by the leaves and thorns making up her mask. A while ago, while fighting off a Bloody Nightmare – a nightmare caused by a Red Skill – she had planted the seed of a Rose of Saint Agnes in her flesh. It had turned into an armor, a great one, for a price: herself. The Rose had grown on her, in her, drinking her blood and marrow, planting roots in her bones and muscles, growing thorns to pierce both her enemies and herself and, finally, taking her left eye as its final price, but not her sight. The Rose was a boon, but when used to fight it was a curse, a reminder of what it meant to go against its nature as a memory of something saintly, something, altogether, kind. The Dream allowed her this indiscretion, this corruption of purpose, and she, in turn, allowed it to damage her to empower it.
Anyways, the Rose had overtaken her gifted fox mask, making her a new one, a mask of leaves and spines and thorns with a beautiful flower blooming over her eye. A mask befitting her nature as someone beautiful but sharp. Someone not to be taken lightly.
“I’m making poison that should be capable of killing the House of Memories,” she answered lightly as she turned back to her drying plants, considering which ones to use, under which tradition and for which desired effect.
“House of Memories? What’s that?” asked the old fox man as he took out a pipe and began blowing rings of smoke that turned into smoky fishes, which began a battle to the last drop of gas with her own little cloud of harmless steam.
“Wait, you don’t know what that is?” she asked in surprise, her mask’s vines moving to imitate two raised eyebrows.
“Garda, my dear, if I ask you what something is then it means I don’t know, am I right?”
She shook her head slightly: “Yeah, no, it’s not that, I just thought it was common knowledge. It’s the name of the place the College makes its main base.”
This time it was Albert’s turn to raise an eyebrow: “Isn’t that place just called ‘The College of Memories? Has the big bold letters with the words ‘Memory becomes Tradition becomes Law’ stamped right on top of the entrance. I should know, I lived in Alanna back in the day, before I retired from my job.”
Alice – or Garda here, for one should never use one’s own name in the Land of Dreams – didn’t quite understand: “No, that’s just the organization.”
The fox shrugged: “Ah, well, it’s just a case of widespread misinformation then. Nothing new, we’re talking about the College after all. Still, I don’t think any of that explains how you can kill a house of all things. They’re not exactly alive.”
The [Occultist] laughed at that: “Come on Albert, you’re walking among dreams and you cannot accept the idea that a house could be alive.”
“Oh no, I can absolutely accept that idea, living houses are not exactly new, there have been dozens throughout history. What I’m surprised about is that this one didn’t attempt suicide so far. They always do after a century or two.”
A fish fell to the ground, its little fins rising towards the ever-setting sun of the Dream before falling to the ground, dissolving into smoke that was quickly dispersed by an errant gust of wind.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Alice stopped right in her tracks… well, she’d been sitting and looking at him, doing nothing, but you get the gist of it: “Wait, so this isn’t the first time a house came alive?”
“Meh, it used to happen quite often with inns. People come, people go, they leave money and other things, pieces of themselves, then the [Innkeeper] gains enough Levels and suddenly you find yourself with an inn that is alive and very much unhappy about it. Sentience is a curse apparently. They stay around for a while, get a few Levels, then the [Innkeeper] dies, maybe the business changes, stuff happens and suddenly the inn decides to end it and the edifice crumbles to the ground. From what I heard they just sort of… decide to die and do it.”
The fishes rallied against the advancing cloud of lethal steam, their general giving a rousing speech and then ordering them to charge!
“Woah. I’d like to be able to do that: just choose to stop thinking, go catatonic and die. Sounds like a good way to go.”
“Can’t deny that.”
“Well, whatever, this one’s still around and apparently She, because the House is female, cannot die. So I’m helping kill her. Got any tips? Ideas?”
“Yeah, make it painless.”
The fish soldiers attacked and fell in droves, but slowly the cloud receded back towards the cauldron, into its original borders. It was a pyrrhic victory, for far too many lives had been lost. Maybe not enough would be left to make sure that this great enemy couldn’t escape its confinement inside its country of origin, but now it mattered not. Now it was time to celebrate! And they did it by flying around in the air, making amazing acrobatics that left the public breathless.
Then Albert waved his hand and the fishies disappeared with a small scream that they both heard.
“Painless you say? Well, that was my plan already. But it won’t be easy. I’m apparently supposed to create a poison for the mind, but the strongest poisons I have would make the experience, well, unpleasant, to say the least. And before you ask, no, I won’t use less powerful ones to make it better for the House: we need her to die, that’s the priority. Everything else comes second place.”
The old fox man nodded, sitting down on the ground, where a chair of grass wove itself into existence and let him sit comfortably. She’d noticed that, in the last few nights, he’d seemed… different. More tired than usual. His dream self’s mask had more graying hair than she remembered and more often than not she would find him sitting down on cushions and other comfortable things.
So…she did the sensible thing: “Are you alright Albert?”
The [Dreamer] looked her right in the eyes for a few moments, thoughts whirling in the back of his mind, taking on the form of a small storm over his head. Then he sighed a deep, tired, sigh.
“No worse than usual. I’m old, Garda. Older than most people ever manage to reach, especially considering my profession. My body in the Waking… isn’t in good shape. I’m trying my best, but not even the greatest [Healers] in the world can stop the advance of Time.”
Which wasn’t completely right. Once upon a time, well before the Silken Wars, there had been a great [Healer] who had managed that. An elven man who had gotten a Skill capable of shielding him and his patients from the passage of Time. He had trapped the Skill in a Scroll and thrown it into a Bag of Holding, which he’d then collapsed, making it disappear in an instant. For not having given into the temptation Time herself had rewarded him, but that is a story for another time (no pun intended).
“I’ll make sure to stay around long enough for my little girl, Wax, to find the love of her life and marry. Afterwards, well, I’ll allow destiny to take its course.”
The way he said that made it sound like, until then, destiny would need to bow under his will.
She could accept that outcome, so she nodded and went back to looking at her plants. That is, until she remembered something: “Albert, I’ll need to deliver the poison to someone, someone who can use it and knows where to use it. They’re in the Dream and, from what I was told, they’ve been trapped in it for a very long time.”
Albert froze upon hearing this, his mask turning expressionless. She’d learned long ago that that was a sign he was angry and barely keeping himself together.
“An [Oneiric Prisoner]. I see. Poor soul.”
She nodded: “I was told he was trapped inside the House’s dreams.”
The old fox shook his head: “No, he most certainly wasn’t. His mind was probably trapped somewhere else in the Dream, in an endless labyrinth hidden in a grain of dust or something along those lines. The College must’ve found him and trapped him in the House’s dreams.”
He stopped, looking thoughtful, then added: “Or, if he was lucky, he managed to escape the labyrinth and anchored himself onto the House’s dreams.”
She frowned: “Wait, anchored?”
“Yes. What, you seriously think a mind can exist in the Dream without something to anchor it? Bodies exist for that reason: they’re the mind’s anchor, the only thing that keeps it from slowly dissolving into nothing more than dreamstuff. The reason why body snatchers used labyrinths was that their very nature doesn’t allow a person’s ‘being’ to disappear. It just keeps cycling around and around without a way to escape. That’s the cruelest part of their work: either one wishes to live, so they’re forced to stay trapped forever, or if they wish to die they must find a way out of a place that doesn’t want them to leave because it’s built upon their mind.”
Alice gaped at him: “That’s cruel.”
“It is. We’ve been trying to stop this practice for a long time and, in the centuries, managed to kill many, no, nearly all of those monsters. But a few remain, or so we think. There’s too few of us left to truly check and be sure.”
Silence fell between them like a rock – and an actual rock fell from the sky right between them – until, finally, the old fox nodded: “I can track him down. I know people who know people who… well, you get the point. I can find the dreams of the House. I’ll deliver the poison personally if need be.”
Alice nodded. She trusted his word on this and knew that he’d keep to it, no matter what.
“So now I only have to worry about actually making the poison. Goodness me, what should I do?”
The options for killing a mind were near limitless and they all came in the form of drugs for abuse: heroin, crack, all sorts of hallucinogens, you name it, there was a good chance she could make it or create something similar. The problem with those though was twofold: first and foremost, their action was slow. For all that many times one dose of those drugs was enough to get someone hooked or downright kill them, she had the feeling the House wouldn’t go into overdose easily.
The second and, arguably, most important problem was: it was boring. She had to destroy someone’s mind, using drugs was the easy way out, the one that a newbie [Chemist] would think of. But she wasn’t a chemist, or rather, she wasn’t just that, not anymore: she was an [Occultist] and she had to think like one.
So, while drugs were not completely off the table, they would be used as a last resort if she couldn’t come up with anything better.
There was also another problem here: she didn’t have test subjects. She couldn’t exactly go and test a poison that was supposed to actually kill a mind on a human. That was the path of a monster, and for all that she had often thought of herself as one, she wasn’t.
Too much.
“I can tell by your face that you’re thinking of something evil.”
Alice deflated slightly: “I’m not even going to ask what form my mask took.”
“And I shall not tell then.”
But who cares about privacy here? Certainly us all, but this time we don’t so: her mask had taken on the form of a cute little puppy wolf with fangs made of spines longer than Alice’s pinky fingers and drooling chlorophyll that turned into smoke the moment it fell off of her ‘fangs’.
“I’m just thinking about test subjects: I won’t send an untested poison out, but I can’t test it on humans because of what it’s meant to actually do.”
Albert looked at her and, from the way his eyebrows rose, she nearly guessed what he was about to say: “Garda, I’ve seen you poison Players of the Game and laugh gleefully at the effects your creations had on them. I didn’t think you capable of such kindness.”
“Hey! What do you think I am, a monster?”
“I’ve seen Nightmares less scary than you.”
“Oh come on, you must be exaggerating!”
“Yes, I am, but still, I’m pleasantly surprised.”
“Wow, your standards are low.”
They looked each other in the eyes.
And began laughing so hard they both fell to the ground, their laughter rapidly turning into wheezing as they couldn’t get themselves to stop.
It took a good minute for them to calm down and, when they did, they slapped each other on the back.
“Ooohh, I needed that,” said Albert with a gleeful smile.
“Always happy to help!” she said back with a slight wince. The old man was surprisingly strong.
They sat back down, taking deep breaths, enjoying the sudden silence between them. Birds of Larnos flew among the trees, their calls filling the nearby forest with merry melodies. Frogs croaked calmly in the nearby river, which sloshed and flowed musically in its bed of smooth stones and fine silt, the waters so clear the bottom could be seen. Animals rustled in the undergrowth, looking for prey. Were they real, or were they projections of the Land? That was one of the strange questions people asked themselves in here… after they got through all the everyday strangeness.
“You know,” suddenly started Albert, “You could always test it out on criminals. You wouldn’t exactly be doing anything bad.”
She chuckled: “Criminals are people too Albert. And, even then, I’m not stupid enough to make enemies of a good chunk of the criminal underbelly of… wherever my victim would be.”
He hmmed, looking unsure, before making a so-so gesture: “You’d be surprised. Naturally you’d have to be picky, but there’ lots of criminals that aren’t exactly liked in the Underworld. [Rapists], for one. And [Kidnappers] who bite off more than they should. The Underworld has a reputation to uphold, you know?”
Alice laughed again, although she managed to keep it in check and not let it spiral again into an infectious fit of chest-hurting laughter.
“The Underworld has a reputation to uphold? Really? Are you sure we’re talking about the same people? You know, like criminals.”
Albert nodded: “Oh yes, absolutely. The Underworld more than anyone else has to uphold an extremely good reputation. You think of them as your typical street level ne’er-do-wells, but dig just a little deeper and you’ll find entire organizations that exist with the sole purpose of turning criminality into a very remunerative service. Services that won’t be used if everyone thinks that the criminals working for them are monsters that could turn on them at a moment’s notice.”
He put hand to chin, looking thoughtful, before adding: “Of course any criminal worth their Class will turn on them anyway at a moment’s notice if the money stops flowing, but that’s another matter.
“And then, well, again, [Rapists]. They’re not humans, they’re monsters in disguise.”
Alice nodded in agreement. She was relatively certain her old friends, the Skinwalkers, would agree with her on that front. She’d met one that had taken the skin of one such piece of shit relatively recently.
“Well then, we’ve found a solution to that problem too then! And I imagine you already know people to point me towards, right?”
“I have a list!” he answered gleefully, raising his hand and unfurling a scroll that hadn’t been there before, filled with many names written in very small letters.
“How…?”
“I know a friend who knows a friend et cetera et cetera.”
“Ah, yes, that.”
And with that she turned towards her work table and began brainstorming ideas again, a small storm forming over her head.
It was time to start prepping.