VI. Eater of Dreams

            It was a butterfly that the Fencer hungrily devoured, though he had no way of knowing this.  Light warm things, such as butterflies, perished in the harsh eternal Winter.  A few strains of similar creatures, called snowflies, survived the perpetual cold, but even these were rare in the far polar south where the Narwhal hunters dwelt and did violence to each other.  Now butterflies have a further significance, one the desperate man was equally unaware of as he fell to dreaming after his meal.

            Feelings swam through the warm air along with flower petals on a slow, heavy breeze.  He had a difficult time holding the wooden sword because his hands were sweating so.  Grey hung lazily where he stood like a man about to fall dead, but the practice sword in his hand was poised perfectly.  A thousand times and blue and red-eyed they clashed against each other in a play of movements blurred down into fragments of an instant, each seeking the mirror’s heart.  It was a matter of standing where the sword wasn’t and a struggle to presume life from death. 

            This duel morphs into other through an unseen alchemy; a thousand struggles overlaid on top of each other as a kaleidoscope of conflict.  Blood red devolves into a fever of steel angles, their placement and their dance, a twitch of victory, an echo of loss.  Shapes and faces and a bright open-wide world flickering at the edges into one loud bark of a trumpet’s blast.

            The sound was cut off as the Fencer awoke.  Half seen in the haze the Trumpeter was being dragged off into the azure gloom.  The Fencer reached for his sword but it slipped through his fingers as it too was pulled away, all towards the same source; something unseen through the fog except for a swarm of red glowing eyes.

            Dashing towards the staring horror the Fencer was met with his own blade which flickered and reached for its former wielder’s heart.  He dodged past, surprised at this sudden deftness.  He made it a few more paces towards the Trumpeter who struggled silently against some ropey mass around his neck, but again the nightmare blade whirled.  Only a few inches separated his life from death, yet still he was miraculously left untouched, despite the speed of the strike.  The Fencer had no time to consider how he was managing these feats as the mist cleared, revealing the hand which now wielded the blade.

            A long and dexterous tentacle seethed through the air, elegant and otherworldly in motion, like no octopus or squid from the great bay.  From its surface a million tiny cilia danced and trilled on the unwholesome appendage.

            Magic troubled the air as the Fencer chased after his hapless friend.  The Trumpeter kicked the ice as he was drawn closer and closer to the tower of glowing eyes in the mist.  The air itself twisted with the heady stuff of dreams.  Beyond reason, a nightmare thing reared up and struck at the weaponless man time and time again sending great grouts of ice into the air with each titan blow. 

            Another’s memories had taken hold of the brave ever since he had awoken, these warm flickers jostling alongside his own cold times.  Thanks to these transplanted experiences he dodged and vaulted every serpentine attack aimed for him.  Yet for all he felt, for every response to his rogue blade, there was a stalemate.  The Fencer avoided each bone-shattering strike but without some means of advantage he would eventually tire and fall.  It seemed nothing would break the cycle.

            The horror brought the blade down once more to rend the Fencer’s left from right.  Sidestepping this by centimeters the wary man was showered by dark and ancient ice.  In this spray of blues and violets and dark, dark indigo, many pieces clattered and one of those he grasped, uncaring of the blood it drew as he made ready a final gambit. 

            It was a desperation, and wholly divorced from the cold reason the Fencer had honed in his sullen years as a narwhal hunter, to fling himself into the path of the whirling blade to save the Trumpeter.  And this action also denied the shadow of memory he felt as his own, the expertise of a swordsman, whose life blended with his own through some incomprehensible alchemy.  With a lunatic strike he pitched himself forward, gashing himself on the dark crystal blade of his naming, and past and through, striking with the stinging bit of ice he gripped too tightly in his hand. 

            The Fencer cut his sword free from his pretender, the tentacle’s eager cilia grasping at the ice knife he used to do the deed.  Dhala spun through the air with the force of the strike.  In an instant the sputtering pseudopod raced up the Fencer’s dagger towards a new prize.

            The horror’s hair-like cilia began tickling their way into the muscles of their victim.  The man caught his sword as it arched away and freed himself.  Where the nightmare blade cut the protoplasm of the horror froze and broke.  Cilia calmed and died, falling away.  The Fencer could feel the air boil and froth, the disassociation of the azure fog reacting violently to the distilled and stygian black of the creature.

            A certain madness took hold of the Fencer. 

            Beyond, the horror was massive, roughly egg-shaped, sitting on its side, in recline like a decadent upon a cushion.  In its seeping flesh various internal mechanisms divided and bubbled.  Though its plasm was darkly transparent the light of its many proto-eyes illuminated unwelcome galaxies of its alien physiology.  Covering all was a countless and almost unseen mass of cilia dancing frenetically. 

            The Fencer saw only a glimpse of the thing before it lurched a swarm of tentacles towards him.  The Trumpeter was nowhere to be found, probably absorbed into the thing’s eager flesh. 

            Together, his stubborn self and the strange other dream, met the onslaught.  A dozen ropey reaching arms streamed towards his throat but his sword turned them aside as stumps.  More came, growing stronger with each volley and generation.  A swing here knocked the Fencer down, another whipped open a gash down his thigh, trickling blood which various appendages lapped up eagerly.  The horror’s strength shattered ice, ripped apart stone, and wore down the Fencer who was weak from the long abuse of his journey.

            So the young man leaped towards the obscene protozoan thing.  Its ropey arms wrapped him tightly but he kept a grip on his nightmare blade.  The icicle sword cut deep into the thing which emitted a scream of visions.

            He was suffocating on a balmy summer night.  Blue was the color of the air.  Someone close, a family-type thing stood above his bed, drifting with power, gauging the perfect fear in his heart.  The gold-eyed woman placed a mask over her face and became something else.

            This vision impressed itself on his mind in such a way that it became his vision too, just as the memories of swordplay and a thousand duels had become his as well.  In the slow embrace of the thing he had a few moments to examine the similarity of the phenomena.  It could just be the last thing his mind would consider.

            The black jelly of the nightmare thing’s flesh welcomed him in.  The dark recesses became space and the red eyes stars.  Solar systems of organs pulsed and glowed in dreadful procession.  The fencer could feel the thing’s emotions, its desire to include him into its cosmology, to make him a part of the nightmare which defined and confined its being.  As a nightmare it desired a subject to be a part of the experience, to be a victim of the phantasmagoria, and this line of reasoning drew him deeper into the thing where thought and flesh met. 

            Time spun away from him as he neared the nucleus.  There the Fencer saw the crimson-eyed nucleus in the murk beckon and transform, becoming the gold-eyed woman of the nightmare who floated over his bed and suffocated him.  Only her head could be seen drifting closer from below, gaining to become planet-sized.  An inescapable gravity drew the Fencer down, towards one of her craterous burnished eyes and union with a fate stranger than the violence he always guessed would be his end.  His vision was hers, the iris opening up to welcome him into the dominion of her perception.

            Cringing at the last moment the Fencer stabbed out and the woman’s eye burst.  A squamous blast echoed as the young man’s thoughts became his own again, mostly.  Still entombed he fought against the weighty darkness and was rewarded with the satisfying snicker-snack of his blade cutting through the dying plasm of the nightmare thing. 

            With a sickly sound he spilled out of the protozoan monster onto the ice.  Fragments of the nightmare, the feelings and the forms, clung to him as a wet goo while other fleeting emanations vibrated from the dying thing, gaining ephemeral substance through the magic of the place, only to be swallowed up once more by the mist.  He had pierced its nucleus as he had sunk to the center and now it frothed in its death throes.

            As it did the putrid nightmare stuff effervesced into the cloying blue atmosphere.  This disassociating smoke had grown even thicker.  Between the heady fog and lingering motes of nightmare the Fencer was taken completely by surprise as a something sharp and cold was pressed to his neck.

            “Ok, let me think for a second,” said the indecisive voice of the Trumpeter from behind.  “I need to make sure you are who you appear to be, though I know the real you is dead after being eaten by that...thing.” 

            “Who am I supposed to be, if not the Fencer?” asked the Fencer wearily.

            “I’m still considering that,” responded the Trumpeter.  “I mean sometimes you’re the Fencer and sometimes you’re the Outcast, and maybe right now you’re something completely else.  Hard to say considering all the things in the mist.”

            “I presumed you were dead as well since the Trumpeter I know couldn’t handle a few lemur-men, let alone a nightmare made real.”

            “Oh, I cut my way free,” shrugged the loon, which was worrisome given present circumstances.  Under scrutiny the object proved to be a petrified limb taken from the descent which had occurred so many miles and what felt like a thousand years ago.  It had been sheared off at and acute angle, forming a potent edge.  “See?  I even have the marks to show where the vile thing’s tentacles throttled me.”

            “If you weren’t so inattentive you’d see that my arms, legs, well, most of me carries the same marks,” said the Fencer coolly.  “Are you content with this proof?”

            “I am,” agreed the Trumpeter relaxing his grip.

            “Then for your sake I too am content,” growled the Fencer.

            The Trumpeter backed up a few meters, out of easy swinging range from his beleaguered companion.  The atmosphere was thick and while there was small danger of losing their way in its gloom, due to the shadow of the great tree, there was increasing pressure to lose their minds from whatever sorcery lurked in the smoke.

            In an objective sort of fugue they watched the body of the nightmare thing diminish and flux into the air.  Even the ichor which covered the Fencer flickered away.  At the same time more of the crimson-eyed things seem to move beneath the glassine ice of the basin’s floor.  More creatures seeking the same prize that their sibling had failed to obtain.  The Fencer felt like curling up and dying; in such a state he was ill-prepared for one last challenge.

            A blur of movement and the Fencer’s arm whipped about in a defensive arc familiar to the transplanted memories he now claimed.  The offender’s arms and head came off with the sound of a slaughtered seal.  Weak, thin blood trickled from the stumps.

            Their host lay dead and in death troubled the Fencer greatly.  Many times he had seen tableaux like this, or at least his last meal had.  He stood over the fool, chastising himself, strangely, for always falling for the same trick.  A bit of broken ice in the mute’s weathered hand and a serene calm smile at play across his ruined face were at curious odds.  There was no intention of victory in the ancient’s action, this was a perfect gambit.

            The butterflies fluttered and the air cleared some.  As the mute’s weak blood began to chill into ice the reclining tree gained life, becoming something fearsome and beyond the two travelers’ experience.  The nightmare things beneath quivered, so that the whole basin filled with the scratching sound of cracking ice.  In the Fencer’s hand Dhala twitched as if alive. 

            Into green, mossy bark and lush, broad leaves, the tree grew.  A smell of verdant and imagined seasons pulsed in the air.  Changing then, foliage brightening to yellow, to orange and gold.  The tree’s boughs danced with the motion of the rebelling caged things which broke their prison in a massive chime of metal.

            In a whirlwind of colorful, flapping wings the form of the tree relaxed and withdrew, not as boughs of wood, but as arms of flesh; roots shrinking to feet, the trunk dwindling to the body of a stately youth garbed in a gown of madness.

            “One of them?  But how can that be?” rasped the Trumpeter to the all too beset Fencer.

            The swordsman’s weapon awoke.  His mind flooded with the cold, the Dhala, all the world slowed to an absolute stop.  He fought, with what was left of his mind, he fought the thing back.  The Fencer, lost in his inner struggle, wandered off into the haze. 

            The Trumpeter couldn’t stop watching the transformation, seeing here, feeling a mote of what kept him tuned to the clouds above so many days and nights.  He watched the dance of the flying things which rushed to swarm the figure now.  These landed and stretched their wings flat across the man who welcomed them with open arms.  They became a part of him, their forms blending seamlessly. 

            Then the ice burst and the nightmares came forth, not as an eruption of gelatinous abominations but as a swarm of black and crimson butterflies which joined their brethren to land and fuse with the man who after a few seconds of this wonder stood alone, a few creatures clinging to him in unfinished union.  From the hair colored that of the deep and rare cloudless sky to smoldering eyes like cooling coals, what now stood, uncertainly, listing to one side, was an unblemished version of the mute stranger who had greeted and confused the two travelers. 

            The Trumpeter soon discovered he alone waited to greet this creature with the corpse of its dead twin lying as a pile of limbs and frozen blood.

V. Empty Stomachs

            Where cold is the only constant there are many faces of ice, facets which vary from settlement to settlement.  Where Winter breathed dry and sandy there were frost kinds and grain kinds, kinds which would melt at daybreak and pool up if the diligent prepared and kinds that encased those who died of thirst upon the way.  For as many forms and faces of ice there are many more and varied kinds of death.

            The village of the narwhal hunters was far, far south of the arctic deserts.  So far down that many believed the inhabitants to be demons, which is a common affliction placed upon the unknown and the distant.  The ices which surrounded them were those of ancient snows compacted by the ages and clear blue shards formed by the cyclical freezing of the great bay which provided both bounty and horror, in unequal amounts.  They measured the days and months by the movement of the ice and they metered their fears by its color. 

            The Wondering Mountains, possessed by the lost, damned and insane, were home to a strange, tinted kind of ice more ancient than the rest.  The respectable hunters shunned that circular range of peaks.  It was home to those strange mountain folk anyhow.  The ice on those slopes, often hidden behind dusting snows of common white, began at the foothills as a pale shade of blue and then evolved darker, towards indigo and unwholesome black.  Within the stygian depths of the most ancient precipitation, clusters of deep crimson watched, like eyes.  The mountain people avoided these; they brought unwanted dreams.

            The Fencer drifted in warmth and with a jerk he lunged awake.  It was warmer in the great basin than any place he had ever been; the ice was wet near the tree, wet and dark.  Red eyes stared up at him as he stood.  Torn between the uncomfortable warmth and exhaustion the young man sat dissolute and anxious.  He hadn’t eaten for days.

            There was the blue-haired man at the base of his tree, just standing.  Their meeting had yielded nothing but dumb stares from the mute, spoiled by occasional knowing smiles that lead nowhere.  The creature wandered off and the Fencer, not having anything better to do, followed.  Distantly a trumpet played.

            His host’s slow shamble of a walk gave the Fencer ample time to take stock of the shrouded land he had toiled to reach and where he would most likely die of thirst, hunger, or rage.  They stood on what could be described as a frozen lake of well-carved jet frosted with snow.  Here the ice was most black, and crystalline, the growth lines of the glass tessellated and fractal. Colonies of scarlet eyes seemed to watch their progress.  Occasional structures rose up from the surface of the lake; waves frozen at the moment of some ancient violence.

            After an hour of walking the mute found the deeply cut line in the ice the two travelers had crossed the previous day, as far as time had any meeting in this place.  For several more hours the creature stalked this line, the slow arc of which described a circle.  With deft hands he mended the break the weary two had gouged with their passing.  In the face of such industry the Fencer could only stagger along as deepening pangs of hunger and thirst trilled through his stomach.

            Above them the roiling clouds of azure loomed.  That boundless presence the Fencer had felt back when he was still the Outcast, hanging from the icy cliff, at the mercy of the Lemur-men, was ever everywhere.  Again, and more acutely, he encountered the disassociation he first felt upon entering the hazy barrier on the descent.  It was as if all the parts of him separated and began drifting away and all the laws which made up the world were undone, which was a far more pleasant experience than dying of thirst.  It was, in a way, enlightening, to objectively view himself outside himself.  A pang of hunger brought him back together; the mute was watching him.

            Gesturing for the Fencer to follow, the ancient man walked off into the gloom of the basin.  Baffled, pained and confused, the traveler stalled a minute before chasing after.  It was all becoming too much for his reason to handle.  The old, rabid fury that had followed him all his life boiled with the clouds.  When he did end up following, it wasn’t before he pulled out his nightmare blade to savagely break the careful circle his host was so intent on keeping whole. 

            He smiled to the half-naked idiot he found stooped over a basin in the ice.  The idiot smiled back with broken teeth and then the Fencer’s eyes saw the glimmer of water.  It was warm indeed in this place and though the ancient and cursed ice never melted frost and light snows did, according to some slight variation in the air.  Here the melt pooled up in a secret well, only a few inches deep.  The thirsty man drained it completely.

            At the bottom, through meters of black ice, more red eyes stared.  The Fencer had drunk down some exhaustion with the water and was bent panting over the dry well.  The eyes move and tumble away.  He could see the swish of dark currents through the cold glass.  The lattice of ice itself seemed to bend and flow.  Then the eyes were gone.  The mute failed to notice this as he was once again staring back towards the tree.

            “I’m troubled,” stated the Fencer when some hours had passed and the three men sat under the fluttering boughs at the center of the basin.  They had found many more secret wells which had only kindled the Trumpeter’s curiosity as it satisfied his thirst.

            “Deeply,” replied the tattered musician as he joined in the mute’s meditations.  “But I perceive that there are other matters that you speak of, the magic circle, or the health of the water, the curse of this tree, the clouds of insanity, or maybe horrors unknown.  It could be any of these things.”

            “The eyes in the dark ice; I saw them move,” pondered the Fencer.  The Trumpeter began coughing immediately.

            With a sigh the Fencer dragged the dramatist a ways off, trumpet scraping out discord on the ice.

            “That was unnecessary,” said the Fencer when he had gotten his companion to stop his hysterics.  “Do you know something?”

            “Of course I don’t!” declared the Trumpeter.  “Yet I dare you to conspire any process of thought or delusion of wit which allows for the movement of crimson eyes in a bed of ice older than time to be anything but a bad thing.”

            This satisfied the Fencer but, like his hollow belly, the complications implied rumbled around in his mind.  Perhaps it was the diluting effects of the endless clouds above but piecing together a coherent thought in that place seemed as impossible as solving the riddle of Winter.

            “You say the circle is magic?” the Fencer asked.

            “Well, protection, or so the old wisdom goes.  He must follow its passage in order to ward off evil, to mend any breaks; a broken circle affords no protection.”

            Concealing his alarm with a thick layer of rancor the Fencer brought the Trumpeter back to the tree and tried to change the subject.

            “One of your people?”  The Fencer gestured at the mute who smiled once more.  “He has signs of the gift, perhaps he is a survivor of your quaint mountain ways.”

            “It is possible that some grace or knack has kept him alive so long in such a forlorn place, but even I have difficulty fathoming those chances.  In addition you have fallen into a paradox; while the Uplifting and therefore the origin of the practice of exposure occurred no more than fifteen seasons ago, that man is certainly older than fifteen.  Too tall, also,” finished the Trumpeter, once more gazing up at the tree or perhaps the struggling things in the cages.

            The Fencer hadn’t noticed the stature of the creature, bent and humble as it was.  Indeed, their blue-haired friend stood a good head taller than even the lanky Trumpeter.

            “Perhaps that is another aspect of the gift as well,” he said as he stood up.

            It was a good thing that he was in the company of fools because the Fencer’s exit was without grace or excuse.  Turning his head back in the hazy air he heard and saw no sign that either man followed him.  He was careful not to lose his way, despite his desperation, as he followed his own tracks from hours before.  So much walking on an empty stomach was tiring in a way he found surprising.  Every man has his limits.

            It would’ve been simple enough to find the damaged point on the circle and fix it.  In mind he could envision the simplicity of his little indiscretion; nobody need know.  This was a comfort, but it was not to be as what he found turned hope into fear of an alien sort.

            Familiar tracks slithered over the break in the circle.  Was it a day ago when the he first saw the same ropey markings?  Was it ten?  Time was all disrupted and confused, split apart by the cursed clouds above which extended to the ground as a haze.  For the first time he could taste the heady scent of magic for what it was. 

            Wasting no time with idle meditations the Fencer quickly fixed the break in the circle, with special care taken to smooth out the undulating ruts on the inner portion.  He used his blade for the circle itself and worked the superficial top of the ice so that his body heat ironed out the wrinkles of the unknown creature’s passage, the tracks of which vanished soon after entering the inner portion.  He felt unsatisfied, but he had no energy left with which he could worry. 

            Back at the tree he fell asleep to the sound of snowflies of all shapes and colors struggling against gilded cages, which chimed in the still, warm air.  Under the ice deep things moved and he fell towards them in slumber. 

            Dreams had never troubled the Trumpeter before, but in the ever-dusk of the basin he awoke, awash with cloying, heavy things crouching over him.  These paralyzing shadows vanished only reluctantly as wakefulness took hold.  He trembled and not from the cold.  Lights gleamed crimson through the misty realm.

            Walking over to his traveling companion, the red eyes in the black ice glowed and thronged about the Fencer.  The Trumpeter let out a little scream, something he would never admit to.  In his heart, he wished he still dreamed, though in truth it was more of a nightmare and in a further truth he was awake.  He kicked the Fencer.

            “You damned simpleton, I was trying to die down there,” blustered the Fencer, fighting his way from sleep to violence.  The red eyes in the depths faded with his waking.  He grabbed his sword, standing like a drunken man holding his tender belly.  “Get out of the way, Trumpeter.”

            “There’s something you should know,” began the fidgeting musician.

            “I said get out of the way!”  Now the Fencer leveled the strangely whorled weapon at his friend, that old mad fever in his eyes.

            “It is broken,” stated the low, dry voice from behind the Trumpeter, who turned and stared in disbelief at the form of the mute.  The worn down ancient stood blinking, addled, changed from his normal, jovial silence, a pained look on his face.  “We fail now.”

            “What are you talking about?” asked the Fencer, advancing.

            “I don’t know,” he responded, and there was joy in the words.  “I know nothing.  I understand nothing.  I contest nothing.  I create nothing.  I destroy nothing.  A wide open plain and it is green.  There is a hill covered in green feathers which ripple in a warm Summer breeze...”

            “Summer!?”  The Fencer’s exclamation sounded across the hazy basin.  Startled snowflies in the ancient tree doubled their efforts to escape and their music filled the air.  In all the noise and motion the mute’s happiness melted.  He sunk down to the ice to sit stooped and vacant.

            “What do you know of Summer?” demanded the Fencer, whose blade added incentive a few inches away from the broken face.  But the man only smiled with broken teeth.

            “He doesn’t know anything,” admonished the Trumpeter to which the strange, blue-haired man beamed as if he had just received the greatest of compliments.

            “Just now he mentioned it, the taboo word, he must know something.”  But to the Fencer’s urgency and passion the mute only smiled more and gestured back to the tree and the strange, caged creatures fluttering. 

            “I saw something when you were sleeping,” said the Trumpeter trying to change the subject.  His stomach was too squeamish to stand the sight of blood right then and he quietly regretted the drink of water which had robbed him of the right to die quickly of thirst.  “Those crimson eyes in the nightmare glass, I saw them glow around you and stare intently.”

            “They were outside; now one is within,” rasped the ancient.  “I’m so sorry.”

            All three men felt the presence of another.  Not so much the presence of a man, though, and not like the thing in the alien thing in the azure cloud.  This thing they felt was formed differently for each of them.  Yet the menace was no match for exhaustion. 

            The Fencer knew the tracks the thing left and so drifted off to troubled sleep imagining a tentacled mass of cold descend seeping across the land.  He ran.  This cold was Dhala, absolute and everywhere.  Eventually there was no where left to run and he was forced to return home.  The villagers all glared at him when he tried to warn them of the coming doom.  It ate the sun.  He suffocated into stillness, once more in the village which cast him out. 

            To the Trumpeter the fourth presence was a particularly large and hungry Lemur-man.  This creature, standing over four meters tall and possessed of a deep hatred of music, would descend from the petrified tree in his dreams and wrest the trumpet away from the terrified musician.  It would then proceed to play the worst possible sounds on the instrument in a grand solo which would climax with tearing the ancient device asunder. 

            But to the mute the fourth presence was something else, something known, and this was most fearsome.  He truly didn’t know much of anything at all, and this was by intent, a gift to himself, a secret.  He knew only to tend the cages, and the circle, and to live, through endless and thoughtless eons.  What frightened him so greatly was neither the end of his life, nor loss of any kind, but in regaining what was lost, in remembering, and in doing so a great nightmare would be loosed.  The mute never slept.

            Like a somnambulist the Fencer awakes from his icy slumber.  Taking no notice of the glimmering crimson eyes following his movements he moves past the Trumpeter murmuring to his bad dreams.  The mute is nowhere to be found.  By now the cloudy mist in the air has progressed to a fog. The Fencer doesn’t need to see what he was after as he moves towards the fluttering sounds of the great old tree.

            His hunger swings the sword, cutting down a low hanging cage, and with desperation he frees the strange, ruby creature inside.  The innocent thing struggles terrified, or exuberant, in the scarred hands of its benefactor.  Scarlet dust turns the Fencer’s fingers blood red.  It is all motion and flapping and frond-like antennae and large gem-like eyes staring up and out, above the clouds to mysteries lost.  He holds beauty for a moment. 

            A man in normal circumstances might have felt mercy or sadness towards the helpless creature, but the ice is cold and harsh lives breed rapacious thoughts, starvation, all sorts of hunger.  It was a specific set of circumstances with brought the young man known as the Fencer, and sometimes the Outcast, to a lost and forlorn corner of the Winter world, starved, half-mad, desperate for all too much. 

            When at last he slept, the broken remains of his meal hidden down the fissures following the petrified growth of the ancient tree’s roots, the Fencer’s dreams had changed.  They were dreams of another time and place, where wondrous characters acted in incomprehensible ways.  All made more alien by the character whose life he lead in that outré land of green ground and blue sky, while he slept with a full stomach on the ancient ice.