The Jarl's Son, Chapter 14-2
Through the Dreamer's Eyes, Part 2
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Astounded, Marten knelt down before her. Then he motioned to himself and the woman darted back further. Her naked form slipped in the bloody mud beneath them, and she fell onto her side. He hadn’t noticed before, but there were rope bindings on her wrists and ankles, each one tied to a wooden spike. The two tethered to her wrists had pulled free of the mud, as had the one bound to her right ankle.
“Be calm, I’ve not come to harm you,” Marten said in a low tone.
On instinct he reached out to help her by dislodging the remaining spike. Had she been less afraid he would’ve simply untied her, but he’d seen how the freshly violated sometimes react to the touch of strangers. Alas, this woman’s fear was such that she still reacted much the same. Screaming at Marten to stay away, she hurled a fistful of mud at him, which he raised an arm to block. It struck him with a wet splat, and he spat as some of the metallic tasting filth got into his mouth and his red-blonde hair.
Presently, Marten had become so focused on trying to help this poor woman that for the briefest of moments, he’d forgotten he was dealing in a dream. Only once the mud struck him did he recall his prior failures to interact with the horrible nightmare in which he found himself, how his hand passed through every solid object he touched. Not so when it came to this woman, as well as the bindings tethered to her limbs and whatever she saw fit to hurl at him, it seemed. Huffing irately, he wiped the mud from his beard and blocked a second glob of the stuff with his forearm as he unceremoniously yanked the remaining spike free of the bloodsoaked soil. From there he might have chided the girl for pelting him like that, but the vulpine chirp of Renald’s voice commanded his attention.
“Come away from there, Marten!” the fox yipped urgently. When Marten faced him he saw Renald’s head was lowered, his legs splayed wide, and the hackles on his back and tail were all raised.
“Quickly now!” the fox demanded. The black lips of his gray muzzle curled back to reveal his teeth and with a snarl, he fixed his eyes on the woman.
Glancing between the dream fox and the terrified female, Marten furrowed his brow and interposed himself between them. “Now see here, fox,” he exclaimed, once more ready to engage in a spirited chiding. However, Renald would hear none of it.
“There’s no time!” the dream guide barked, and with a swish of his bushy tail, Marten suddenly found his body bound up in a ribbon of light! Then, just as he began to protest, Renald turned about and bolted for the limitless darkness that lay outside the borders of the nightmare.
Only the darkness was gone, replaced instead by a blinding whiteness. Marten cried out against it, squeezing shut his aching eyes as it filled his vision like a flash. So intense was this space of white that even this wasn’t enough to block it out fully. Where it would be normally dark behind his eyelids, he instead saw a murky red-gray. It was as if the white or the light, whichever it may be, sought to force its way through the very flesh of his lids.
Marten kept his eyes shut until their throbbing pain subsided. As it lessened, he realized that the stunning brightness did as well, turning that red-gray murk inside his eyelids back to the darkness he expected. Opening his eyes, he sat up to find himself back inside the rain soaked interior of the half collapsed farmhouse. A relieved sigh escaped him, both for his recognizable surroundings and the welcome absence of that blinding light. Yet as he took in the familiar details of this hovel in which he’d sheltered, he began to note a number of bizarre oddities.
Strangest among them, and the most immediately recognized, was the rain that leaked in the far corner of the house. Cascading as usual though that old, splintered gap made by that tree which fell upon the roof years prior, nothing initially stood out as strange. It was only on his second passing that he noticed an unusual aspect to the water’s motion, namely the fact that the numerous drips and trickles weren’t splashing into the large puddle that filled that corner. Upon realizing this, the reason why became clear: the cascading waters were rising to the roof rather than falling from it.
More oddities revealed themselves soon after. A strange skewing of the house that hadn’t been there before, as if some giant had taken hold of it in both hands and gave it the slightest twist. The firepit glowed with embers which gave off no heat. In the spot where Varro slept, the greatwolf lay perfectly still, as though he were a furred statue rather than a living beast. Marten’s tarp was hung much higher than it was in reality, and indeed the entire house seemed far taller than it truly was. That was it, then. Unless he’d suddenly been cursed to become a child, shrinking in size as the very world turned upside down, these odd phenomena made it clear that he hadn’t awakened after all. He yet dreamed.
If Marten had any lingering doubts about this, the reappearance of Renald through the gap in the roof dispelled them. Quickly springing through the upward moving cascades, he shook his silvery fur clean of the cold water, sending droplets everywhere. Then the fox slumped onto his side, panting heavily.
“A moment, if I may. Pulling you from that vision into your own dream was more taxing than I first thought,” he huffed.
“You were afraid of something back there. Something which I couldn’t see.”
Both front paws stretched out in front of him, Renald sat partly upright, though his lithe vulpine body twisted in the middle so that his back legs were still splayed out to his left. “That’s correct, though I should’ve acted sooner,” he said, still trying to catch his breath. “Speaking truthfully, my worry began as soon as that poor woman took notice of you. I really ought to have pulled you here right then, but I must admit, my curiosity got the better of me. No one in that dream saw Gaiur as she dreamed it, yet you were not only seen, but the rules of the vision shifted such that you were able to directly interact with it where you couldn’t before.”
His brow furrowed, Marten rested his head against the palm of his hand, which he supported by propping his elbow against an upraised knee as he sat. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the significance,” he said.
Taking one more moment to fully catch his breath, Renald went on to explain the basic nature of dreams to Marten. “It’s expected that one should be able to interact in a number of ways with the things present in his own dream. This place, for instance. Everything within this house you should be able to interact with because they are the products of your own dream.”
“You mean to say that because that nightmare wasn’t my own, that girl shouldn’t have been able to see me, nor should I have been able to remove her bonds or be struck by the mud she flung at me,” Marten mused, rubbing at his well trimmed beard to feel for the mud she hurled. None remained, not even so much as a crusty flake. It was as if he’d never been struck by it at all.
“Just so,” Renald confirmed. “On the rare occasion an outsider stumbles into someone else’s dream, they usually won’t be able to interact. However, outside presence can cause dreamscapes to warp in reaction to them, often dangerously so. Most times a simple attempt at expulsion is made by the dream, usually resulting in the accidental intruder being ejected. However, nightmares tend to react more violently. Worse yet, if the space is unstable, then the dream’s attempts to drive the intruder out may result in it collapsing altogether, leaving him trapped, or worse.”
“Is that what happened in the other dream? Was it collapsing?”
Renald nodded. “It was. Your focus was fixed so firmly on that woman that you didn’t see the nightmare had started to dissolve away, hence the reason for our unceremonious exit. Forgive me for the suddenness of all that, by the by.”
Marten shook his head. To his mind there was nothing to forgive. Renald recognized a danger which he’d missed. He could scarcely picture what might have happened had the little fox not been there to act as he did.
The question of what they were to do was raised anew. By Marten’s understanding, that nightmare had originally been Gaiur’s. To his mind, it stood to reason that their best chance at finding a path which could point to her location would lie somewhere within that nightmare. Yet there was no guarantee such a path existed, nor could he be certain he and Renald could find it even if it did. Indeed, it was a complex situation in which he found himself, made all the more complex by the fact the nightmare seemed to crumble because of his presence. How could he search a place which had vanished?
He puzzled over this for some time. The nightmare had repeated itself for Gaiur. What if he found a way to make it repeat for himself? Was such a thing even possible? He figured there must be some way, but he couldn’t be certain of that. This seemed to be a question for the fox, and so he posed this dilemma to Renald who, to his relief, didn’t dismiss it out of hand.
“Hypothetically speaking it should be possible, but do you truly believe doing so will lead you to Gaiur?” Renald asked.
Slouching forward, Marten found himself staring at the coldly glowing false embers in the firepit. “I’ve no idea if it will or not,” he said. “All I know for certain is that when I woke the morning after we began our journey, I found her gone. Two full days I spent searching for her with Varro alongside, and neither my eyes nor his wolf senses found a single trace of her. Not a footprint, not a hair, not a smell. Finding that nightmare of hers is the only sign I’ve found this entire week. It’s the only thing we have to go on.”
Renald had begun to pace. His small claws clacked against the wood floor as if it were real, though Marten supposed that to a dream guide, all dreams must be real. His tail hung low and though human expression was impossible given his vulpine visage, Marten could still recognize the contemplative look that came over his features. Come to think of it, the pacing probably helped with that. His father had tended to do that when he was pondering, too.
“No matter what approach we take, this is going to prove tricky. I’ve never attempted to break someone into another’s nightmares before,” Renald explained, but then he paused from his pacing and gave Marten something that approximated a smile. “That being said, I once thought it impossible for a dream guide to cross over into the waking world, yet I’ve done just that on many an occasion at this point! Suffice it to say that my time with Gaiur showed me that I was capable of far more than I initially realized.”
“You’ll help me, then?”
Renald’s grin widened. “Quite so! We’ll find a way to get back in there or my name’s not Renald the Fox! Although, technically speaking that’s not really my name, but you get my meaning.”
Beaming with determination, Marten let out a rousing guffaw and slapped a hand against his thigh. “Good, good!” he exclaimed. “What must we do? Do we go back in the way we came? What’s needed of me to help this along?”
“Well, first and foremost, I need you to waken,” Renald replied.
Martin’s smile dropped from his face. Furrowing his brow, he blinked in confusion at the little fox.
“I understand how unintuitive that sounds, but you must trust me when I say we shan’t be reaching that nightmare again tonight,” Renald assured him. “For starters, I’ll need time to find us a reliable way in. Besides, even if we were to make it back there now, the space has already rejected you. It would simply collapse again upon your approach, and may even drag you into oblivion with it.”
Crossing his arms tight over his thick chest, Marten considered Renald’s words. He trusted what he was being told. After all, he knew full well that the fox’s understanding of how these things worked far outstripped his own assumptions. The issue now was simply what he was to do until tomorrow night.
“My rations are running low,” he muttered, speaking more to himself than to Renald. “If the rain breaks, I’ll head for Tårnkryss tomorrow to resupply. If I’m lucky I may be able to rent a cot to sleep in as well. But what of you?”
“As I said, I’ll search for a way to gain entry into that nightmare for you, alongside a few other things I wish to look into which may aid our cause. Do keep in mind that this may take some time, though,” Renald replied.
“How much time?”
“Would that I could say,” Renald said. “It may be days, weeks, or I might find these solutions as early as tomorrow night. The realm of dreams is unpredictable by its nature. Even dream guides like myself struggle to make accurate predictions, but you can at least count on the fact that I will be giving this all of my effort and attention. If there is a path to Gaiur through the dream realms, I’ll find it.”
Renald’s answers weren’t ideal, but they’d have to do. Nodding his agreement, Marten bade the fox farewell and prepared to wake from his dream. When he did, he saw the cold light of morning filtering down through the broken gap in the roof on the far side of the house. The cascade of rainwater that flowed in the past few nights had reduced to a dripping trickle, and though the air outside was misty, he neither heard nor saw anymore rain. At long last, the storm had finally passed him by.
After preparing a simple breakfast of barley gruel, herbs, and pemmican, Marten saw to it that Varro was fed with the remainder of the dried meat and then stepped out to check on his mare. Satisfied that both animals were still in good health, he packed what supplies he had left, saddled his horse, then mounted up. Then with a whistle to call Varro and a click of the tongue to get the mare moving, Marten made his way to the trading post in Tårnkryss.
Thank you for reading.
The Jarl’s Son sees Gaiur the Valdunite return to embark on a new adventure and acts as the follow-up to my dark fantasy mystery tale, In the Giant’s Shadow. The previous story isn’t required reading to understand and enjoy this tale, but doing so will enhance the experience.
My first novella, In the Giant’s Shadow, is available for purchase! Lured to the sleepy farming community of Jötungatt by a mysterious white raven, Gaiur the Valdunite soon finds herself caught in a strange conspiracy of ritual murder and very real nightmares.
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