Kerry Schafer - Wakeworld

The Chancellor was dead, but surely that wouldn’t matter. It hadn’t been his dream to start with; he’d used the dreamsphere. Which meant it was a stable dream that could be entered by any Dreamshifter.

Wrapped in a blanket, Vivian descended the stairs to the store and curled into one of the chairs to breathe and clear her mind. When she was calm, she created a door to the Between. It was so easy. Just a thought and an intention, and a green door materialized right in the middle of a shelf of books. She crossed to it, put her hand to the knob.

It wouldn’t open.

She twisted the knob harder.

There was no give.

“Open!” she commanded. And still the door remained locked. She rattled the knob, panic welling up inside her. Stepping back, she hit the stubborn thing with her shoulder at a run, rebounding with a pain that took her breath away and promised a colorful bruise.

She knew she could not afford the panic; too much depended on her. So she counted to ten. Walked into the bathroom and splashed cold water onto her face. Sat down in one of the chairs, closed her eyes, and breathed. Only yesterday she was able to create doors and walk through them. Now, for some reason, she was barred.

Why? She hadn’t had the pendant last night when she’d created the door at Jared’s house, so that wasn’t it. Maybe it had to do with the fact that she’d created a door to the same place at Jared’s. It was closed, but maybe if it was still there she couldn’t create another.

Closing her eyes she focused on a different area of the Between, and when she felt the door emerge she approached it with a heart full of hope. But again it was locked and would not allow her entrance.

Sinking back into the chair she confronted the possibility that she was locked into Wakeworld. Maybe the unknown source of power had broken her, rendered her incapable of opening doors.

This was not acceptable. She had to get to Zee, had to find that Key before somebody else put it to use. She was still not entirely clear what evil thing was going to come about if somebody did get the freaking thing. Jehenna had been after everlasting life. So what. Let somebody have that for all she cared. What would it hurt?

Well, maybe a lot of things, if that somebody had a lot of power. Enough power, say, to lock a Dreamshifter out of the Between. Enough power to hammer a brain into mush.

Her thoughts circled round and round like an amped-up hamster on a wheel. The series of events played themselves over and over. There must be a solution to this problem; she must be smart enough to figure it out. There was nobody to go to, nobody to ask.

Poe waddled across the floor and bellied up onto the coffee table, where he took up his watchful penguin stance, fixing her with a disconcerting stare.

“What? I suppose you know.”

She sighed and slumped down, stretching her legs out in front of her and letting her tired head rest against the back of the chair, her gaze drifting over the array of strange and wonderful hanging sculptures Zee had created. There was a flight of dragons, a waterfall made of silvery beads, a fleet of sailing ships.

And an intricate creation of tiny winged books, flying through a maze of stars.

Her eyes snagged on that one sculpture; the frenetic hamster came to a stop.

A fragment of poetry filled the calm space in her thoughts.

I have been a tear in the air,

I have been the dullest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,

I have been a book in the origin.

Poetry written by the enigmatic bard Taliesin, lost in battle at Camlann. Not dead, but missing.

There had been another name on the scroll reported as missing. Maybe, just maybe, Vivian wasn’t the only living Dreamshifter after all.

Sitting here was stupid and futile, and nothing would be accomplished by wishful thinking. If she was locked into Wakeworld, maybe it was time to do a little digging into what happened to the man named Weston Jennings.

Zee opened his eyes to stars.

They were not stars he had ever seen before: too bright, too close, too obviously balls of burning gas rather than the familiar pinpoints of cold white light. The constellations were also complex and strange—no friendly Big Dipper, no Orion striding across the horizon.

It didn’t help that the light blurred in and out of focus, and it took a minute for him to realize that his vision was at fault, likely connected to the pounding of his head. He lay flat on his back with his hands folded across his bare chest. A line of fire ran the length of his right bicep, another along his left side. Every breath felt like a stiletto between his ribs. Thirst constricted his throat and papered his tongue.

A cool breeze flowed over him and he shivered. Whatever it was he was lying on was cold. Stone, if he judged by the hardness of it, probably a dungeon floor with not so much as a heap of straw beneath his naked shoulders.

Only if it was a dungeon, then why the stars? A hallucination maybe, a product of a severe concussion. He thought about moving his hands to feel what was beneath him, about sitting up to look around, but the act of even wiggling his fingers took an exorbitant amount of energy.

He’d lost a lot of blood, he guessed, and his body felt dry, dry, dry. He would need to find water soon.

Where was Vivian? She could doctor him up and they could get on with things.

Vivian. At the thought of her his heart beat faster, loss twisting in his gut. The last memory he had was of shouting at her to run, just before one of those gray bastards clobbered him over the head with the flat of a sword. Cowards, all. He had to find her. Would find her.

Just as soon as he could move. Tentatively he tested his muscles. It took a few trials before the brain signals got through to their targets, and the movements he could manage were sluggish and weak. His injured right arm moved at his command, but the pain made his breath hiss between his teeth. The left was stiff, but not seriously damaged, and his legs seemed okay.

Something rested on his chest, cold and narrow, long enough to run the length of his naked belly. He ran questing fingertips along its length. A sword. His sword. He wrapped his hand around the familiar hilt and instantly felt stronger.

Slow and careful, he eased himself up to sitting, taking the sword in his left hand since the right hung nearly useless. As he came upright his vision went dark and blood roared like ocean waves in his head. Little by little his vision cleared and he was able to take in his surroundings.

The giant stars lit the night as brightly as a full moon. He sat on a flat granite slab, one of seven set in a circle. On each lay the unmoving figure of a man. Each was naked to the waist, clothed only in white cotton breeches. Their feet were bare. Their hands were crossed over an unsheathed sword. No movement. No breath or other indication of life. All were scarred; some bore unhealed wounds. And their faces, one and all, were grotesquely twisted with agony.

Zee felt the prickle of fear on his skin.

His own wounds didn’t seem to be life threatening. His right arm was caked with dried blood from a deep laceration that he knew needed cleaning and stitches. It was still oozing a little, but most of the bleeding had stopped so if it didn’t get infected it would probably heal all right. Another jagged cut scored his ribs. This one was shallower but had also bled profusely. There was enough bruising to explain why it hurt so much to breathe, and the blood loss would account for his weakness. As for the blinding headache, he’d had enough concussions in his younger, fighting years to recognize that particular pain.

He was still alive and planned to stay that way, which meant putting distance between himself and the dead warriors with all possible speed. It would have been nice to know where he was in space and time, but a circle of rough standing stones blocked a wider view. They reminded him of the Finger Stone, all with that same sense of foreboding power, only these had been set in place by a conscious intelligence.