Dream Lord Wars Chapter 7
Previously on Dream Lord Wars…
Teddie escapes Barry’s dream prison but has no idea if she’s safe. As she’s drowning in dreams, she’s fighting to keep Barry from discovering what she’s found. Meanwhile, Harley is saved by a very unexpected person, Dream Lord M’Alaena T’sai, one of Dreamland’s sandmen, giving Harley the one thing she’s dreamt of for years; the token of the mechanic.
When I woke up, I didn’t know what to expect. Would I wake up in Barry’s lab? Would I wake up in his architecture? Back on my dreamplane? Would Ikari be standing over me?
Instead, I opened my eyes to a blue-feathered set of sails and a pair of suns, one small and yellow, the other large and white.
Fear ran through me momentarily, but I pushed it aside in an effort to stop, think, and assess.
Falling asleep in this dream wasn’t waking me up, which meant I was probably being sedated. This was something I had assumed already since Barry was trying to figure out how I’d gotten my tech to work, which… I still probably hadn’t. I still had to figure out how I’d gotten here.
I woke up in the same place I’d fallen asleep, which meant that my dreaming self was somehow being protected. And that was good. That was good.
It also meant that escaping was going to be rather difficult.
However, my dreaming self wasn’t with Barry, so, that… was a win?
If I could assume that Barry could no more read me while here than I had been able to, then Dreamland was safe. Mostly. It meant that for as long as he kept me in a drug induced coma, I could travel and figure out how Dreamland worked.
But how long would he keep me? When would my company come looking for me? Would anyone think to look for me in Barry’s lab of all places?
I couldn’t go there. I had time and time was fluid in dreams. I’d been able to live entire years in the span of a few hours, or a handful of minutes in the span of hundreds. So…
Stop. Pause. Assess.
I swallowed and got to my feet.
People moved about the deck like it was any other day, some with shoes, most without, and they all wore clothes that were a mix of eras and areas and regions like they’d gone to some thrift store in Time Land—if that was a thing—and they’d just grabbed whatever they could.
If the architect had built this thousands of years ago and it touched on all dreamers throughout the world, then it would make sense I wasn’t just seeing Americans in today’s era. Ikari, for instance, was hundreds of years old.
Maybe some of these people were too.
It might be time to reach out to Ikari and ask for help. I at the very least knew who she was.
“Ah, there you are,” a male voice said brightly with a slight accent.
Searching the deck for the man behind the voice, I swayed with the slightly rocking ship.
I recognized the face of the man who’d given me the taste-of-death candy and did a double-take. Now that I wasn’t nearly dying, the man was quite good looking. I found myself smiling back at him without realizing why. He just made me feel good.
That had to have significance in a dream. If he could invoke a reaction from me, then he had to be important to the scene. The architect had to have designed this man to elicit this reaction because I did not typically respond to people this way. He either held a clue or he could be some kind of agent of the dream. Heck, for that matter, he could be the architect.
He had kind of a Captain Kirk vibe with a Captain Hook look. He had dark hair with a purple sheen and dark scruff along his chin. He wore eyeliner, which actually looked really good on him, though, to be fair, there were several men who could pull off guyliner well. He also wore black clothes of the pirate king era, though he was missing the coat and hat.
His bright blue eyes were similar, in a sense, to Ikari’s. They were dark on the outside with large irises that were pinpointed to a tiny dot and seemed to glow. Did that mean he was a dustman? I felt like I could trust him, like I should trust him. Did that mean I could?
He smiled, his eyes twinkling as he gave a slight bow, his hand to his chest. “Captain Brax Wynter, at your service, madam.”
How was I supposed to even respond to this? If he was a dustman, wouldn’t he know who I was? “Are you the programmer?”
His dark eyebrows shot up as he gave me a surprised smile. “Uh, no. There are no programmers here, love.”
Right, but what else had I thought he’d say? “I know this is Dreamland. You don’t have to hide. I’m supposed to be here.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and then reopened them, his brow furrowing. “And just what do you suppose you know, love?”
Irritation bristled at me. “I’m not your love, for one.”
He smiled and raised his eyebrows, ducking his head. “Fine. What else do you think you know?”
Not much more than that, but did I try to bluff my way out of this? “I don’t know who you are.”
“Ah.” He sucked in his teeth. “You want to exchange Whos, then?”
I got the rather sudden impression that sharing Whos with this man would be dangerous. “Maybe not,” I said with a sigh, raising my hand in surrender. “I’m still new at this. I’m just… trying to figure out what’s going on.”
The corners of his lips turned down as he nodded and then smiled, a hint of respect pinching his eyes as he looked away. “Do you know where in Dreamland you are?”
“Not even a clue.”
He chuckled. “Your honesty is refreshing.”
“I’m really not a good liar.” Which had been the biggest reason I’d found someone to help me run my business, which had been more blind luck than anything else.
A young woman with bright white hair stepped onto the deck from a door tucked behind stairs leading up to another deck at the rear of the ship. The sunlight from the pair of suns reflected back and shone in her bright blue eyes, making them almost appear to move as if there were streams of information passing over them.
I stepped closer to get a better look.
Her eyes were computer screens and code ran through them.
I wasn’t entirely certain what I was seeing, but this could very well be a way to see Dreamland’s programming. I didn’t entirely believe this was a world, exactly. In order for me to be in another world, I’d have to also not be in a bed. It made more sense that this was a mind upload of some sort, like the Matrix.
“Ah, Sandrj.” Brax waggled his dark eyebrows at the shining-blonde woman and then cracked a cocky smile at me in full Kirk-style. “Ready for a bit of an adventure?”
“No,” I said. “My body is being held by someone and I’m in a chemically induced coma.”
“You’re sure about that?” Brax stopped, going very still.
I already knew the reason. The living only walked Dreamland if they were dreamers and dreamers didn’t have full access to Dreamland. That much I’d gotten from the incredibly short initiation I’d received. “Yes. I was kidnapped right before I was brought here.”
“I hate to break this to you, love, but you are most certainly dead.”
“I assure you,” I said, growing tired of his cocky attitude and his need to call me love, “I am not.”
He slid his gaze away like a debater who was talking to someone incapable of listening and continued to move toward the stair leading up.
I understood that he thought he was one hundred percent correct, but in this case, he wasn’t. It was not, however, my job to show him. I simply needed to find a safe way back to my body. “I need to leave.”
“You’re not a captive, love.” He paused on the second step, one hand on the rail, and looked at me over his shoulder, one dark eyebrow cocked. “But good luck swimming or finding any kind of land.”
Ikari had mentioned that one could travel through a place with a Who and she made it sound like Place was a thing and not just space. I didn’t fully understand how it could be more, but after experiencing the Who exchange, I had to realize that these architects had a higher grasp of concepts like what made a soul. It wasn’t beyond imagination that they’d be able to figure out a way to create the shortest distance between two points by drawing them closer to one another.
Could I do that with Ikari?
Brax made it to the large, spindled wheel.
I followed Sandrj, trying to figure out how to access her code. I needed a terminal or, I don’t know, a jack. If she was a walking version of the program, did that make her an artificial intelligence?
Brax pointed his chin in a direction and then nodded to the blonde.
Sandrj raised her hands and her face to the sky as code spilled out of her eyes and danced along her pale skin with a golden glow.
The code was interesting. It was written in a language I understood. I could make out where command lines started and ended, or at least I thought I could , but I couldn’t make out much more than that.
The blue feathered sails rippled to a soft green, giving off the air of prosperity as they filled with wind and the ship moved forward.
She seemed to have the same programming abilities I did when I was in my own architecture. So, maybe if I studied her? Asked her to do specific things for me so I could learn her language to understand what I was reading?
Brax pushed his shoulders back with a smile. “You interrupted our little adventure,” he said with a soft lilt to his words. “I’d like to see how well you do. See if you were worth the effort to save you.”
Stop. Pause. Assess.
I currently had three potential avenues to get back to my body, to somehow free myself from sleep, and get my body back to safety; Ikari, Brax, or Sandrj.
Ikari seemed like a good choice except that when I’d originally thought of her, I’d instinctively shied away. Was it because I was afraid of what Barry might see? No. Was it because I didn’t think she’d help? Yes.
Brax beamed a carefree smile at me and grabbed the wheel.
He gave me every indication that he was someone to trust, and that made me wary of him. I didn’t want the programming to tell me what to do, like hormones infecting my brain with a need to reproduce against my better judgement. There was something about him that set me off. Or, well, not set off, exactly. More… I didn’t want to give him too much of myself until I better understood who he was. I didn’t know his intentions. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know where we were.
That left Sandrj. She was the option that made the most sense because the solution she offered was one I understood. Programming. Architecture. All I needed was to understand the language.
But what if understanding was like everything else here? What if it was more intuitive? What if, like the Who exchange, I’d get in there and just understand? These were advanced people. Or, at least, I had to assume they were to create this. They wouldn’t allow ignorance to impede them.
I took a step toward Sandrj.
A rainbow-dressed woman walked up to me and gave me a curved sword. “Bunny.”
I took the sword out of reflex. “Huh?”
“My name’s Bunny.”
“Ah.” I didn’t need this, and I didn’t care who she was.
“There’s a good chance,” Bunny said as the wind picked, the skies darkened, and the sea started to swell, “that things could get a bit dicey.” She grabbed a rope and hopped into the rigging. “You’ll want to keep that in hand.”
Okay. I was intrigued, but not enough to not be annoyed. Hyper focusing might be my superpower, but it was also a hinderance. Gritting my teeth, I walked to the rigging and grabbed a rope, not quite sure what I was preparing for.
Information gathering.
This, too, had to be something I allowed into my fixation. I was trying to learn information about Dreamland. What was it? How did it work?
A screaming roar filled the air.
“What was that?” I asked to no one in particular as I searched the rising waves.
Bunny glanced at me, keeping one eye on the water as the sky darkened. “We don’t know. But there’s been a rise in monsters in the past few weeks.”
“Monsters?” In the past few weeks? “And this is new?”
Bunny nodded. “Look, I know things are crazy and you’ve got a lot to learn. Don’t kill us. Don’t fall off the boat.”
“Got it.” I had so many questions. “What is this?”
“The place?” Bunny asked as a wave hit the hull and sprayed us. “That’s the Sea of Dreams, where all the dreams are stored.”
This was the server? “And this ship?”
“Is what we survive on, so we don’t hurt her.” She gave me a hard look as her arm worked in the rigging to keep her feet planted as the ship fell suddenly.
My feet lost traction, finding air briefly before the deck met me again. This was going to be rough.
Hard, small hands gripped my waist and kept me from flying over the railing. “Grip this,” a woman said in a calm almost robotic voice behind me, a soft hand taking mine and moving it. “Brace with the swells. I’m told it is much like riding a bucking bronco.”
“I don’t have experience with that either,” I muttered, not sure how I was supposed to stay on the ship and not stab myself on my sword. If I died here, would I die in the real world?
She looked at me and tipped her head to the side. “Sandrj.”
“Excuse me?”
“You may call me Sandrj,” she said almost robotically. “It means Cruel Night.”
“In what language?” I tried to focus on rising with the swells and using the rigging to help me keep my feet on the deck.
“Eg’cri.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“You would not have,” Sandrj said matter-of-factly. “It is the name of our home planet.”
“You have one language for the entire planet?”
“There is one language all citizens must speak. There are many others people can choose.”
It was interesting her choice of words. “I need to leave, Sandrj,” I said as the deck rose with the swelling seas. “Is that something you can help me with?”
The blonde woman turned to square off with me and tipped her head in the other direction. “You cannot leave, Theodora Lillybelle Thorne.”
“You know who I am?”
“Of course, I do, Theodora Lilly—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, call me Teddie.”
She blinked as the wind whipped rain into her face. “Of course, Teddie. I am not the one keeping you here.” The wind pulled Sandrj’s hair away as she twisted away to look at something that had caught her attention, revealing a blue rectangle at the base of her neck.
Was that a port? That might be my way in, but now was definitely not the time as I struggled to remain on the feet. “What is keeping me here, do you know?”
“There is a drug in your body that is keeping you in a sleeping state, Teddie.”
“You can see he’s drugging me.”
“So, it would appear.”
“Is there a way—”
The ship bucked and I stumbled, fighting to not be flung off the ship.
The air ripped with a terrifying scream and a blue fin-tipped tentacled creature shot out of the water and landed on the deck.
“What is that?”
“We don’t know,” Bunny said, her voice calm over the storm, her face showing fear around the edges of her normal brown eyes. “We should kill it before it kills us, though.”
I didn’t know what to do with a sword. A tentacle sliced through the air toward me, hitting rigging and ripping the posts it was tied to right off the ship. Raising my blade, I slashed down with it and barely scraped the blue fin as it narrowly missed my head. I wasn’t much of a monster fighter and this rigging wasn’t going to hold for much longer, most of it flapping in the wild wind. I let go of it and ran for the door under the deck. I wasn’t looking to hide. I was just looking for better bracing and there was a railing there and a slight roof where the top deck came over a little.
A tentacle grabbed my ankle and threw me, sending me flying from the top deck to the lower one. I landed hard and slid, stopping when my shoulder contacted something solid.
A mouth the size of my head towered over me, shielding me from the drenching downpour. The monster opened its mouth and screamed again, giving me a full view of rows and rows of sharp teeth.
I wasn’t about to die by sea monster twice. I pulled on that thing inside me I used to create my dreamscapes while inside my programming. I didn’t know where the sword that had been in my hand had fallen, only that I didn’t have it anymore. I placed my flat palms on the rising nearly squid-like body of the monster and screamed.
The world went silent.
Then still.
Raindrops froze in place.
The ship slowed on the upswell.
Then the monster exploded into a billowy cloud of mist as the ship settled on a now calm sea and the storm disappeared as if it’d never been there.
What… the crap was this?
And why hadn’t I found my way out yet?
Brax ran down from the top deck, his booted feet heavy in the sudden silence. “What did you just do?”
An alarm blared through the dreamscape before Harley had a chance to even put the token in her pocket.
“What is that?” Master Evroul shrieked.
“Your mechanic gift cannot tell you?” Sandman M’Aleana asked in disdain.
Harley didn’t make the mistake of asking another question. She asked the plane if it was in trouble.
Yes, the dreamplane shouted.
Following the path of pain, Harley sensed fear and hunger coming from two different sources. The hunger seemed more like a leach and felt eerily like the fingers that had tried to pry their way through the rift that had opened in Master Aldo’s shop.
Focusing on that, Harley sought out the thing that needed to be removed, the thing that was draining dust and eating knowledge.
She found it like a barb in the door to the rooftop. It was a small black box with a golden eye that roved around like an eager fish waiting to devour. She touched it with her fingertip. “Stop.”
The golden light flicked off and the feel of hunger disappeared like a door had been closed.
The dreamplane was still in pain, though. A storm appeared overhead and a blue tentacle shot out, reaching toward her. Harley raised her hand reflexively, not sure what it was or where it was coming from as her gift gave her nothing.
Before she could try to heal the plane by getting rid of it, the monster emerged with a mouth filled with rows of teeth, and then it disappeared into mist.
“What was that?” Master Evroul demanded again.
“The thing you are ill equipped to fix,” Sandman M’Alaena said coldly.
The air popped beside Harley, Master Aldo’s Who touching hers right before he appeared. “I need y—” He stopped, blinking as he took in Master Evroul and Sandman M’Alaena.
The dream lord nodded sagely, clasping her hands in front of her thin blue dress, her white hair cascading down from her crown of branches. “Indeed you do. Mechanic Harley, you are not our only hope, but you are a necessary one.” She blinked once and disappeared.
“Mechanic?” Master Aldo asked, his bushy eyebrows raised.
Harley showed him the token still clasped firmly in her tool hand.
“I see,” he said, surprise filling his tone and his blue eyes as he looked at Master Evroul.
Who glared and took an ambling step back, his stubby arms raised slightly in defeat. “In the end, I have no doubts I will be proven right.”
“I’m sure you won’t,” Master Aldo said to the cloud of dust the other master mechanic left as he Placed himself away. He took in a deep breath and looked at Harley with a wave of relief washing over his wrinkled features. “That was a surprise.”
“I think the dream lord saw the tear I told you about.”
“I’m sure she did.” Master Aldo grabbed Harley’s hand and reached for a Place without a Who, the pull louder and colder as they slipped away from the dreamplane.
They stepped into a darkness filled with black opalescent bubbles filling the void in all directions. A man wearing all black lay on the open air as though it was an invisible floor that only collected his body and not his dangling necklace or falling black hair.
“Nightmare Keme has been attacked,” Master Aldo said.
“Who could attack a nightmare?” Harley was more surprised that her feet were here in the Nightmare Realm where only a handful of specially trained mechanics were even allowed to roam. However, the fact that a nightmare, the scariest of all the Dreamland people, was attacked shocked her further.
“A dreamer,” Master Aldo said gravely. “Whatever is going on is something much bigger than any of us old masters suspect.”
Change, the sandman had said, was the evil that could do more damage by avoiding. That had to be the key to this. Harley pinned her token to her leather apron and got to work.
The input you’ve given already is great! Thank you! I really do appreciate this!
Can you take a moment to tell me what you thought of this?
Was there something you didn’t understand?
Was there something you couldn’t see?