Day 30 (The Book of Eldess)

(( CHAPTER 18, THE BOOK OF ELDESS ))

The book bore her name as its title. Fitting, she supposed, as her own name was a title in and of itself. The scribbles on the page where she was expecting Savant's immaculate handwriting gave her pause for only a moment, because she didn't have to read it to know what it said. So she simply spoke aloud the words on the page before her.

"On the day of November 1st, 2005..." she began, and at that utterance, everything seemed to change. She was plunged into chaos, she felt, the world twisting with blurriness and sound and eventually falling around her, Jacob and Richard already relegated to memory. They could not help her this time, she was alone in this as she must be. She continued to speak, though the world melted and shouted around her. She could feel everything, it seemed, the entire bubble of a world which she'd created to begin with now available to her. What sound there had been before faded, replaced with a deafening rushing noise like that of the wind. She felt like she was falling, falling as chaos and darkness streamed around her, vying for supremacy.

Her body was torn apart and put together, rent asunder and made anew countless times as she spoke the words, the book an ever-growing spectre in front of her. The Unknown and Unknowable, through with the subtlety of the symbols, attacked her mind directly. They had to have her, to make her theirs. She had opened her mind to their influence in the dream, and they would not be easy in letting go.

She spoke of the dreamer's first assignments, her mentor guiding her even in these early stages.

Lies, spoke the spinning darkness. You are ours.

She spoke of the Sightless, the first among many which would torment the dreamers of old and new and would-be.

The book grew larger as she spoke, assuming gargantuan proportions and beyond. Still she knew the words, still she spoke them, though she felt as though she was falling into the book itself.

Scenes of every time she had killed forced themselves into her mind. The deaths of countless Sightless, the crushing of the Soldier, and finally the callous mere willing of the others to die. Images of her friends, Yael and Richard and Jacob being tortured, images of Chad's inert frame being broken and re-broken, Gideon being killed, rising, and being slain again in a fight against a Shadow which enjoyed his every defeat, delighted in torment.

No. She would not remember them that way.

So she spoke of them from the book, spoke of her friends on the council and off, of Savant and the many servants of the chamber, the other Gifted who she didn't even know the names of. The book spread out before her, becoming the world she had created, and she fell into it, the torrent of hate that was Chaos following after.

Memories, of dream and of the world, flooded her as she spoke. Chaos storm, Jacob's last ride with her. Her original journey through chaos played itself out as she plummeted through the world and into the roiling sea, she read it and experienced it and was broken and made anew. She saw Alyssa fight the Soldier, she was Alyssa fighting the soldier, she would one day become Alyssa fighting the soldier. The book was the book of the dream, the book of the dreamer, the dreamers of the past and present and future, it encompassed them all. She saw her rescue of Jacob, her devotion to those she loved even if imaginary touched even this place.

Order was mingled with Chaos. The Unknown and Unknowable were relentless.

Craig hadn't been her logic, he'd been her cowardice. In a way, he was her enemy. Stay in the dream, they all said. Stay here with us. It is safe here. Do not return to the world. You cannot.

She read the words as she watched herself escaping him, watched herself will the monsters from her mind, watched her pick up the book.

She saw herself reading the book seeing herself reading the book seeing herself reading the book seeing herself reading the book; she read the words she spoke as she read the words she saw herself reading, seeing everything she was and had been and would be in them, the totality of the dream repeating to infinity.

The world shook, her mind ached and shattered, the world of chaos and order merged within her, her bubble keeping out the nothingness collapsed, and everything came into one.

Memories came again, real memories of her real life, that of Michael Dorest. He saw birthday parties, days at school and college and work, girlfriends and girl friends and friends, enemies and petty arguments. They flooded back to him as she read of his life, the dream they shared, the events that made them one.

The noise, incoherent like the plea of a rising tsunami, drummed in her ears and she had to scream to be heard. Her eyes were gone, her voice was gone, her very body had abandoned her in this place, this between-world. She spoke still, at the top of the lungs she'd lost yet again, reading every bit of the book.

He was the dreamer who was and had been and would be, and everyone was the dreamer, and would dream their own books which were dreams and which were and are and would be. He spoke these words as she spoke this, and he felt his body - his real body, come around him then, his eyes sliding open as he prepared to say the word, the word which would end everything, promising, repeating within his mind Remember Remember Remember, I swore to all of you, I'd remember, and with it he spoke the last word in the book.

"Awaken."