The sun had only inched forward a fraction in the sky when Gyfree, with Drew in his arms and Mischa tripping directly behind, stumbled into a clearing populated by several small dwellings and filled with a chattering group of people, all relatively young except for a single gray-haired man standing silently in their midst like a lone candle surrounded by a flock of eager, flittering moths. Gyfree stopped abruptly at the sight of the older man, unconsciously tightening his grip on Drew until she felt obligated to protest, "If you squeeze any harder I'm almost certain to wake up!"
The older man, who had been smiling ruefully at Gyfree, shifted startled eyes to Drew's flushed and very alert face. "What exactly do we have here?" he inquired.
When neither Gyfree nor Mischa responded, and the silence seemed to be sucking the breath from all those surrounding her, Drew spoke up, "I'm a Dreamer, or so I've been told. Repeatedly, I might add."
The young people gasped loudly and collectively, as if they had in fact been long denied the right to breathe and had finally been granted the most fleeting of moments to gulp a lungful of sorely needed air. The gray-haired man, however, simply smiled, and lifting a single questioning eyebrow at Gyfree, remarked, "And I suppose your dream involves being carried around in the arms of a handsome young man?"
"Not really. Carrying me was Gyfree's idea, but he didn't really have many other options because of the injury to my leg."
Now even the man looked startled, and the young people all seemed to have completely forgotten how to breathe. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, and finally the man looked at Gyfree, this time his expression far more helpless than rueful or amused. "I have a strange feeling that I was compelled to come here ahead of schedule for a good reason," he admitted. "Although I'm not certain that I'm fully prepared to cope with whatever that reason might be."
"She's just a remarkably lucid Dreamer," Gyfree insisted, glowering at the older man.
"See what I mean?" chimed in Drew, a grin struggling to emerge at the corners of her mouth. "No matter what I say or what happens, Gyfree keeps telling me that I'm just a Dreamer."
"Sir," Mischa interjected, stepping forward. "Would you please look at her leg?"
Although Gyfree's daunting glare was directed her way, he remained silent and Mischa was free to ignore him.
"Her leg?" repeated the older man.
Gyfree and the man locked eyes, and Drew could almost see the insistent questions and hesitant answers streaking through the air like electricity on a power line. Then the man stepped forward and squatted on the ground, taking the arch of her foot in a gentle grasp and rotating her leg carefully so he could examine the injured calf. As if they had no choice, Gyfree and Mischa dropped their eyes to again gauge the extent of the wound, and twisting her neck and glancing down the length of her body, Drew also once more contemplated her mangled flesh. The bleeding had stopped, and a blotchy brown and yellow crust had formed around the edges of the wound, but the ragged gashes still oozed a thick green slime and the skin bordering the lacerations was now laced with fine green strands that traced the pattern of a spiderweb across the back of her leg. Whether it was caused by the sight of her festering wound, or the man's sharp intake of breath, or Mischa's quickly suppressed shriek, Drew's head suddenly reeled and she clutched convulsively at the warm shirt beneath her hand. A jolt skated up her arm as the frantically pumping heart below her palm seemed to catch and match the rhythm of her own.
"Gyfree! What were you thinking?" the man blared. "You should have dealt with this immediately! Why did you carry her all the way back here?"
"I thought it was a normal wound, and just needed to be cleaned and bandaged," Gyfree apologized.
While the man visibly struggled to find a suitable response, Drew watched in horror as a thrashing green thread snaked out from the web to encircle the front of her leg. Yet before she could utter a word herself, Mischa, her eyes still glued to Drew's calf, again shrieked, and this time she made no attempt to stifle her shrill cry. "Now, Gyfree!" she shouted.
Instantly Gyfree dropped to the ground, twisting Drew in his arms so that she suddenly found herself sprawling facedown across his legs. Then his hand was clasping the back of her calf, and his fingers were freezing through her skin, down through her muscles with a coldness so intense it turned her bones to brittle ice. This time when she screamed she called the blackness to her, and when it arrived with open arms, she gladly threw herself into its numbing embrace.
Darkness had no stench, but death did, and it was the stench of death they had carried with them ever since their master had reached through the darkness to twist them irreversibly to his purpose. There had been a time, long ago, when they had served him out of choice, out of pride that they could serve one so powerful, that they were dangerous enough to merit his attention, that they were treacherous enough to suffice as his tools. Now there was no choice; they were his, had been his from the very first without even realizing that to accept such a master was to surrender completely all aspirations of freedom or choice. They were his, so completely his that their forms were finally as fixed and inescapable as his had always been. And the stench of death, of his hand upon them, was now so much a part of them that the grass beneath their clawed feet withered and the trees they passed shed shriveled leaves to mark their passage, leaving across the body of the land the unmistakable slash of a mortal wound.
Snout flaring, Hund unerringly followed their quarry's trail, while Auge dutifully followed him. It was only a short time before Hund scurried down a sharp incline and dropped to his haunches, muzzle quivering in eagerness as he crouched with his head bare inches from something sticky and foul on the ground. "She is sick as well as hurt," he whined excitedly. "She will be easy to kill if we catch her soon."
Auge's slitted yellow eyes gleamed with an insatiable hunger, and it was solely the lingering touch of his master that restrained him from howling thunderously for all of this world, and perhaps even several neighboring worlds, to hear. Instead he growled low in his throat, until his entire body and the scorched ground beneath his feet thrummed with his overpowering appetite for blood. In his heightened state of anticipation, he could already taste the sweet salty tang on his lips, could feel the warm flow trickling down the back of his throat, could see the Dreamer dead at his feet, her throat ripped out and spilling ever more of her bright red blood. "The kill awaits," he snarled, his ravenous need stripping the flesh from all the words he might have said and leaving only a few dry bones for Hund to gnaw. Yet they were enough to whet Hund's appetite, and with a whine as replete with yearning as Auge's growl, he loped ahead through the woods, again following the heady scent of the coveted kill.
Black arms pulled inexorably away despite her best efforts to cling to their comforting emptiness, and as the fingers of dark brushed hers fleetingly in farewell, a finger of light poked into the crease at the corner of one eye, wriggling between her lids and prying them apart. More light seeped through the cracked lid, pulsing like the blip on a heart monitor, and her eye fluttered fitfully as if trying to trace the peaks and valleys flashing across her vision. When a strand of light spiked higher than any preceding peak, her eyelid withdrew so her eye could follow, and she suddenly found herself staring with bemusement into a pair of blazing, golden brown eyes.
"I just had the strangest dream," she mumbled before her mind reluctantly released its hold on the last receding remnants of darkness. Then, as memory returned and she recognized those brown eyes, she sat up abruptly, one shaking hand unconsciously gripping Gyfree's arm as he held her in his lap. "And it's not over yet, is it?" she added hoarsely.
"It's only just beginning," he admitted uneasily. For the first time since he and Mischa had found her, he actually smiled, but his lips were pulled as thin as a rubber band ready to snap, and Drew could clearly see the tautness of his facial muscles and the tension in his eyes. And buried beneath both, a dreadful hope.
In a voice as full of strain as Gyfree's face, Mischa asked, "Not to belabor the obvious, but have you ever before dreamed that you had fainted, and then returned to your original dream after you dreamed that you had regained consciousness?"
Turning her head toward the source of the other woman's voice, Drew smiled weakly. "Dreams within dreams," she murmured.
"Pardon me?" Mischa queried, a frown forming delicate ridges across the bridge of her nose.
"Do you dream here, in your world?" Drew questioned.
Before Mischa could answer, Gyfree, his voice as rough as sandpaper, rasped, "I do."
Returning her eyes to his smoldering brown gaze, Drew continued, "Do you ever find yourself trapped in a nightmare that you know, even as you dream, is a nightmare? And because you know you are dreaming, you also know all you need to do to escape is wake up? That waking up is your only chance to escape? So you will yourself awake, forcing your eyes open even though they feel as heavy as death. You get out of your bed, trying to shake off the clinging grasp of the nightmare, but the nightmare refuses to be shaken and suddenly it is there with you, leaping across your bedroom floor, and you realize that you are not awake after all, that you only dreamed that you had opened your eyes and climbed out of bed. So again you try to will yourself awake, and again you think you have succeeded, only to find that once more you have only dreamed yourself safe when you are still as trapped as before. You do this again and again, all through the night, dream within dream within dream, until somehow, finally, you really do wake up. Yet even though you've succeeded at last, and you know without a doubt that you are awake, you still feel as you wend your way through the day that the nightmare is only a step away, quietly stalking you, until you wonder which world is the real one, the one you dream when you're asleep or the one you dream when you're awake."
Gyfree closed his eyes and shuddered, and as she watched, Drew could see his throat convulse as if he was trying to swallow something impossible to swallow. When he opened his eyes again, she recognized the phantoms in his eyes for she had often seen the same phantoms in her own. "We have to get you out of here," he announced tersely.
"Yes you do, and quickly," interrupted an authoritative voice, and Drew turned her head toward the older man, the lines of age more clearly etched in a face more pale than she recalled. "But this is too hazardous and too important for you to do alone. Like it or not, this woman is not an ordinary Dreamer, and whether she is dreaming now makes no difference. Awake or asleep, the nightmare will follow her here, as you, my son, are well aware. Mischa will go with you. I can take her place until you both return, or until your replacements arrive." He smiled wanly. "Now I know why I felt this overwhelming urge to cut short my inspection of the rest of the Barrier and come straight here. Right now, this is the most important place for me to be." His eyes swept across the young people still gathered at his back, and they too seemed only pale reflections of the lively group Drew had first seen when Gyfree had stalked into the clearing with her in his arms. "I would like one or two others to go with Gyfree and Mischa. Considering the risks, I will not send anyone who is unwilling to go. Are any of you willing to volunteer?"
A young woman even more pallid than the others stepped forward, wringing her hands together as if they were two sopping rags. "I will go," she offered hesitantly.
Gyfree's eyes narrowed and his mouth hardened into a thin, implacable line. "You're too young and inexperienced," he snapped.
The young woman raised her chin and dropped her hands to her sides, clenching her fingers into two tiny fists. "I want to go."
Before Gyfree could refuse, the older man interrupted. "Timi," he asked gently, "why do you want to go?"
Timi's forehead creased. "I don't know," she admitted, "but I feel an overwhelming need, as if I must go or something terrible will happen. Please, sir, I know I probably don't have much to offer, and I know there will be dangers, but I still feel as if I have to go."
"Very well," the man responded. "Then you will go. Now the four of you must be on your way while there's still time." He turned and faced the group at his back. "Hurry and prepare them some packs!" he ordered, and several of the young people turned and rushed into the scattered dwellings. Then returning his attention to Gyfree, he said, "You know what to do. You must travel quickly."
"What about my leg?" Drew protested. "We won't be able to move quickly if Gyfree has to carry me the entire way."
"Take a look," Mischa advised with a quirk of her lips.
Casting a nervous glance down the length of her leg, Drew was shocked to see the previously mangled flesh replaced by skin that stretched smoothly over the taut muscle of her calf, unmarked except for the faint outline of a man's open palm. "Now I know I'm dreaming," she breathed.
Mischa laughed, the glint in her eyes reflecting the sun that seeped through the tops of the encircling trees. "Gyfree has a magical touch, when he chooses to use it," she remarked, casting a suggestively sly smile in his direction.
A moment earlier Drew might have responded, but a strangeness was now tugging at her, tugging with a nearly irresistible persistence, much like the strangeness that had tugged her away from the familiar yet foreign walls of her apartment. Suddenly it felt as if she was on the edge of a chasm she knew all too well, ready to plunge once again into the darkness that she never could fully escape. One step and she would be there, one step in the direction that only her dreams could lead, down where the monsters would surely give chase, down where a man with golden brown eyes and flaming hair and hands that could freeze with a single touch must somehow also belong. One step, and she would take it while standing still.
The shafts of light gracing the forest floor vanished as if a giant hand had eclipsed the sun, and where trees had stood only a moment before, there was nothing but a roiling gray mist that reached out with clammy fingers to raise the hairs on her arms and across the back of her neck. Pain shot up her spine, the gnawing pain that always informed her in her dreams that something sinister was not only in pursuit, but drawing near. Then out of the gray she could see two forms coalesce, slowly and uncertainly at first, as if the gray swirls were being stirred like clouds in a restless wind, whipped into the illusion of meaningful shape and then torn into meaningless shreds again, but then the forms solidified, and out of the gray sprang two beasts with wild eyes and dripping fangs. They were larger than men, much larger, and they loped on all fours, curved talons churning the gray through which they lunged. They raised their heads as if they could see her as clearly as she saw them, and she caught the glint of yellow eyes and a glimpse of a monstrous, quivering snout before the beasts threw back their heads and howled a silent howl. They seemed so distant, and at the same time so near, that she knew she could only be in a nightmare, that she had not actually escaped the nightmare even though she had believed herself awake, and with the return of the nightmare, the dream she had mistaken for reality, the dream that had seemed unmistakably real, was gone. The clearing was gone, and gone were Mischa, Timi, the old man, and all the others who had stood there only seconds before. Yet for once she was not alone in the nightmare; she was still sitting in a warm lap, clutching a dusty shirt, and above her were two brown eyes awash with golden flecks.
Gyfree surged to his feet, roughly hauling Drew up by the arm that a heartbeat ago had clung to his shirt. "Scream!" he ordered brusquely, opening his own mouth wide to unleash a roar that echoed with the crack of thunder. As the storm of his shout crashed over her, she flung her own scream at the encroaching nightmare, and when the shrill blast hurtled after his, it was like lightning chasing his thunder to rip through the gray beasts, dissolving them back into wispy tatters of cloud, and returning a flash of brilliant light to the world. In the light was the clearing, and in the clearing was a cluster of faces with sharp bones and hollow cheeks starkly revealed in the merciless glare.
Grabbing Drew urgently by her free arm, Mischa demanded, "How much time do we have before it gets here?"
As clearly as she could see the earnest face before her, she could still see the answer loping through the woods in her direction. "There are two, and they will be here in a little while. They have just passed the place where I was sick, so we still have some time."
Another arm whirled Drew around, and this time she was snared by the eyes of the old man, and by her own reflection swirling in their incredible depths. There was something inexplicably vast about the eyes that held her, something more than human. Those eyes possessed her for a brief moment that lasted an eternity, and she knew that the old man had seen far more of her than she had ever willingly exposed to another, and perhaps far more than she had ever seen herself. Somehow in that fleeting instant she had been stripped of all barricades, but she had not been found lacking. "Well, Dreamer, time is a funny thing," he told her with a smile full of more sorrow than any single man could carry. "It has brought your nightmares back to you, and so has finally brought you here, to me and my world. And although it took so long for you to arrive, you and I are already almost out of time together. So no arguing; like Gyfree, you must do as you're told. Into that cabin; go change into some other clothes." His other arm whipped out to seize the nearest young woman. "Hurry," he ordered her. "Find different clothes for the Dreamer." Eyes wide with quick understanding, the young woman grabbed Drew by the arm and whisked her away.
Moments later Drew was back in the clearing, clad in a shirt and pants so soft that she felt like a snake that had finally shed its old skin and could stop, at least for a while, the constant chafing. Gyfree, Mischa, and Timi were all waiting, packs slung across their backs, expressions grim as they watched the path that had brought Drew to them, and that was now bringing something far more menacing than any Dreamer. Gyfree, also in clean clothing, was the first to turn as she neared, as if he could sense her just as she could sense the approaching beasts. As he stepped toward her, so did the old man, reaching out a hand to grasp one of hers and another to grasp Gyfree's. "Take care of one another," he told them, and lifting his eyes to include Mischa and Timi, then added, "all of you." Dropping the hands he clasped as if they were a burden too heavy for him to continue holding, he ordered, "Now go, and go swiftly. We will do what we can to delay them."
"Be careful, Father," Gyfree implored, and then turning on his heel, he plunged into the restlessly whispering forest, the Dreamer and the others following directly in his wake.
Gyfree's father watched the four companions until the trees obscured them with twitching branches, and then with eyes still fastened on the shadowy path, he shouted over his shoulder, "Bring me the Dreamer's clothes, and bring them quickly!"
Hund and Auge careened into the clearing, howling in triumph as well as in insatiable hunger, but their exultant howls were arrested as their slitted eyes swept over the deserted site. In the center of the vacant space, Auge stood motionless, and then a growl rumbled through him, building in intensity until his entire body quaked and the ground beneath his feet heaved like waves on the ocean. "I thought you said she would be here!" he roared, shaking the shriveling leafs from the surrounding trees so that all of their branches stretched like skeletal arms against the gray, lightless sky. "Where is she?"
Snout quivering violently, nostrils wide and streaked with pulsing black veins, Hund prowled the area, his piercing whine redolent of unappeased appetite and a mounting frustration. "She should be here," he lamented. "The scent is so strong, so sickly, so full of her pain. This place smells of so much of her pain, so much hurt that she should never have been able to leave here. The odor is strong, so strong, so sweetly pungent, how could she not be here?" Plummeting to his knees and raking the soil with his razor-sharp claws, he loosed a shriek of inarticulate chagrin and yearning that set the air churning until the graveyard of dead leafs swirled off the ground and capered around the clearing like the ghosts of the gaunt and despoiled trees.
Lunging in a burst of animal rage, Auge battered Hund to the ground, but the hand of his master reached across the chasm of space to restrain him, and instead of ripping out his partner's throat and sating himself on the viscous blood that pulsed sluggishly just beneath the surface of the leathery skin exposed to his fangs, he snarled, "Well, she isn't here, and you will find where her scent leads so we can track her wherever she has gone!"
Hund's lips curled away from his own honed fangs, and a growl reverberated in the back of his bared throat, but he too felt the grip of his master, and instead of shredding Auge's fleshy belly with his flexing claws, he snapped, "I will find the trail of her scent when you get off of me!"
The two snarled at each other, fangs dripping and eyes flashing red, and then Auge uncoiled, rolling back onto his taloned feet and dragging himself away from the desired kill. With Auge's withdrawal, Hund bounded onto his feet, and stooping with his muzzle only inches from the ground, circled and recircled the vacated camp. Finally he paused at the edge of the clearing, and dropping down to all fours, snuffled loudly, first creeping forward and back, and then to the far side and back. A whine again built in the back of his throat, escalating to a piercing wail that elicited another thunderous growl from the restlessly teetering Auge. "So where is she?" Auge finally bellowed.
"There are two possible trails," Hund sniveled noisily. "Her scent leaves in two different directions."
"So which is the strongest?" Auge rumbled ominously, his clawed hands flexing and contracting and his taloned feet digging trenches into the dirt beneath the shriveled leafs.
The nostrils of his snout gaped wide as he sniffed the potential paths they might follow, until at last Hund rasped, "One way there is also the scent of many Sentries, a dozen or more. Her scent is less strong in this direction, and most likely is only there because the Sentries touched her and carried her scent away with them. In the other direction there is also the scent of at least one Sentry, but her smell is stronger. We will try that direction first."
"Very well," Auge grunted, a drop of thick saliva dripping from one fang and spilling onto the ground, where dry leafs erupted into flame and a tendril of acrid smoke spiraled upward, its ghostly fingers eventually clasping the bony fingers of the nearby treetops. When the remaining leafs were sucked into the roaring blaze, and fire licked the peeling skin from the trunks of the nearest trees, the predators were already away, chasing their elusive prey.
They tore through the trees, unaware of the devastation they left in their wake, and even more uncaring. Nor did they question the absence of obstructions in their path, as impervious to the trees that leaned away from their passage as they were to the complete lack of any lives other than their own. Where they touched this world there could be no life: no animals, no birds, not even the tiniest insects that burrowed beneath the ground. Their master had shaped them well, had shaped them to scatter death with every breath they exhaled and every step they tramped. Death shadowed them, seizing everything they touched and everything they passed, yet the certain death they brought had been created for a reason, and that reason still fled somewhere on the path ahead.
Snout filled with the heady scent of their quarry, Hund dashed through the nightmare wasteland that they carried with them, heedless of everything but the hunger that rode across his back and sank claws into his belly. A step behind trailed Auge, savage hunger whipping him forward with a brutality no less than his own. When Hund abruptly checked his headlong progress, Auge careened into his back, sending them both sprawling. In an instant they had both bounded to their feet and turned to face each other, each growling viciously, each crouched as if ready to spring and rip the other to shreds. And yet again the hand of their master stretched across the barrier of space and pulled them away from the brink of self-destruction so that they might fulfill their appointed task.
"Why have we stopped?" Auge demanded, standing slowly and retracting his claws.
Hund's claws also withdrew as he too painstakingly straightened his spine. "The scent leads here, to this spot. She must be hiding nearby, very near."
"Then use your nose and find her now!" roared Auge, even the hand of his master unable to hold back his escalating rage.
Hund snarled, baring his fangs and unleashing his claws once more, but he still lowered his muzzle to the ground and, snuffling noisily, laboriously tracked the tantalizing scent to the base of a tree, which immediately shed its now withered leafs. Standing in the flurry of falling leafs, he howled, the sound echoing through the forest to shake the leafs from trees so distant they should have still been immune to the touch of the beasts. Then bending to the forest floor, he swept one large paw, claws fully extended, across the ground, and when he heaved his massive bulk back up, a woman's clothes hung limply from his talons. "Her clothing!" he shrieked. "The only thing here is her clothing!"
Throwing back his head, Auge also howled, his shriek soaring upward as if to tear a hole in the sky. "Where is she?" he roared, lunging forward to grab Hund by the neck, his claws peeking out to extract glistening drops of blood from the other's throat.
Jerking his head down, Hund grazed Auge's paw with his fangs, drawing fine stripes of blood across the clutching fingers, and the two fell apart, lips curling and chests heaving as they confronted each other, their master's distant hand hastily erecting an impassable barrier between them. "She must have gone the other way," Hund finally admitted, the rumble in his throat both ominous and grudging. "The Sentries must have gone along to diffuse her scent so we would be sidetracked. We must go back and find her scent before it is lost."
They had no choice but to backtrack, but first Auge's frustrated bloodthirstiness must be appeased. He could not kill Hund; his master would not permit it. Yet he needed a release of his pent-up passions, and with a swipe of his paw he reached across the chasm dividing them, and swept the offending clothes from Hund's grasp. Plunging to the ground, he shredded the clothes as if the Dreamer's body was still within their fragile folds, tearing with his fangs, rending with his claws, leaving nothing behind except tatters of cloth that lay on his tongue like bitter scraps of skin.
From the shelter of a tree distant enough for safety but near enough for observation, Gyfree's father surveyed the two creatures as one mutilated the Dreamer's clothes and the other hungrily watched. Even pressed against the rough bark his hands weakly trembled, partially in weariness but mostly in relief, for his ruse had succeeded, and the hunters had followed the wrong scent. As a decoy the clothes alone would not have been enough to lure the beasts, but by sending all of the apprentice Sentries to trail behind Gyfree and the others, he had been able to help successfully obscure the true scent of the Dreamer, and the four who needed to escape had gained at least some small measure of desperately needed time. He had in fact accomplished all he had hoped to accomplish; he had diverted and delayed the beasts. Yet as he continued to watch from the relative safety of his hiding place, and as his hands continued to tremble, he realized that what shook him still was neither exhaustion nor relief, but fear. He knew, now that he could see them, see them clearly and feel the full force of their presence, that simply delaying the beasts would not be enough, as much as he had secretly hoped that it might be enough. He could not pretend, even to himself, that they were too weak to do more than minimal harm, that there would be plenty of time to deal with them when Gyfree returned.
Only once before had he seen Figments so solid, so substantial, and so menacing. Their forms never wavered, but remained as immutable as his own. They were here, palpably here, their essence so undiluted and so debased that his world was being ravaged before his eyes. This world could not tolerate the strain of such corruption, not even for a moment, for even from his vantage point he could see the trees shrink away and then succumb to inevitable death, could see the grass knot up and crumble, could even feel the soil parch and the air itself sink with the weight of pollution. Death surely stalked wherever those Figments stalked, and soon they would be back on Gyfree's trail, threatening both him and the Dreamer and wreaking additional havoc on his defenseless land. The pain of that land would be his pain, as the pain surrounding him was already his, for this was his land, his as it was no other's, his ultimate care and responsibility. He could not allow the carriers of such pain to wander unchecked here anymore than he could allow them to kill Gyfree and the Dreamer. Substantial or insubstantial, the beasts before him were only Figments, and there had been a time when banishing two such Figments would have been effortless for him; he had eliminated hundreds of Figments in his years, his bond with the land granting him the authority to dispel Figments as thoughtlessly as the sun dispelled fog. Even now, when age had brought the waning of his powers as surely and steadily as the end of day brought the setting of the sun, exiling two Figments should not be an impossible task. And impossible or not, it was a task he must accept, for it was a task that no one else could perform, at least not yet.
Stretching out his once formidable senses, he merged his awareness into that of the land; with painful abruptness he felt a distantly raging fire as if its flames licked his feeble arms and legs instead of the trunks and branches of so many trees, and for a brief moment all he knew was an agony that overwhelmed any desire for life. Yet even as he and the trees shrieked silently in shock and the throes of death, he detected the touch of rain on the flames, and then the heat was slowly dissipating from his skin, dribbling in flickers down his torso as if sponged away by gentle fingers. With the extinction of the fire, he felt himself standing among the smoking trees, feet entrenched in mud as stagnant as his body, his limbs heavy and lifeless, mere charred remainders through which blood had once flowed like sap through his veins as he was fed by the soil and nourished by the sun.
Whimpering with the death of so much of himself, so much of his land, he extended his senses farther, to land yet untouched by the presence of the beasts, and from this fertile land he drew what strength he could handle, until the blood again pumped through his veins and his limbs tingled both with the renewal of sensation and with the swelling of his power. All of the strength of the land was his, strength that lay in the richness of the soil, strength that hummed in the knee-high grasses, strength that cascaded from the rivers and crashed with each waterfall, strength that burrowed deep with the roots of every tree, strength that was there for the asking, as much as he could hold. Once he had been able to hold it all as easily as he held a single leaf in the palm of his hand, but he was older now, and not as robust, so even a leaf could at times seem more heavy than he could bear, but when there was great need, as there was now, he would bear the weight of so much strength because that was his charge and there was no choice. So he pulled everything he could to himself until he was certain his skin would burst like an old, cracked canteen that had been overfilled with water. Then, the flickering shadow of distant leafs playing across his face and the rush and tumble of a waterfall beating in his chest, he stepped away from his hiding place to confront the beasts. When he raised his hands, wind spilled from his fingertips, and with the rush of wind came the aroma of burgeoning earth, so that Hund's nostrils flared and he tore his eyes away from Auge's ravening contortions.
"You will leave this place!" boomed the old man with the breath of the wind. Specks of green light, the very spirit and essence of every living plant he had called, spurted from his fingers, carried like summer's seeds by the wind to encircle the monstrous trespassers. As the specks of light sailed through the air they lengthened into thin green blades that pierced the leathery armor that fleshed the beasts, but when these spears of grass drew blood, the old man trembled in fear. Hurting them was not what he had intended. The Figments should not be bleeding; they should be dissipating, their skin dissolving like shadows in the direct light of the sun. They should not be able to maintain a hold on the land that had risen to expel them.
The beast on the ground heaved to his feet, tattered clothing hanging from his fangs like dead skin, and together he and the other beast faced the old man, lips and claws curling, slitted eyes webbed with tendrils of blood, massive shoulders hunched and jagged spines tensed, seemingly oblivious to the blood seeping from dozens of gashes spattered across their skin. "Who do you think you are, old man?" rumbled Hund, his snout quivering as if in anticipation.
The old man didn't answer, but instead spread his fingers wide, and this time iridescent beads flowed from his fingers, angling through the air, the tiny droplets merging into bigger and then even bigger teardrops that transformed into blue spears before raining down on the Figments. These too drew blood as they sliced through the leathery hides, yet the figures of the beasts never wavered. Instead the Figments advanced, razored paws swiping aside the plunging spears as if they were only harmless drops of rain, and as they drew near, the old man faltered and his hands fell, the strength of the land draining away from him just as the life had drained from trees that had felt the beasts' approach.
The Figments halted a few feet away, fangs glistening with saliva and eyes dark with hunger. "Who do you think you are, old man?" repeated Hund with a snarl.
Straightening his shoulders and lifting his chin defiantly, the old man declared, "I am Keeper of this land, and you Figments have no place here. I order you to leave immediately."
Auge threw back his head and laughed, the tatters caught on his fangs dancing a macabre dance of the dead. "Well, Keeper, it seems you have no power over us. Either you are too old and weak, or we are stronger than even we realized. What do you think, Hund?"
Eyes glinting and snout twitching, Hund growled, "I think this Keeper brought the Dreamer's scent here, and that he is the one who tricked us. His smell was also on the clothes we found."
Auge's roar reverberated through the forest, felling not just the leafs, but the trees themselves, until the entire area echoed with the screams of roots torn free and with toppling crashes, and soaring above all, the shrill shriek of his bestial cries. When Hund's bellow joined in, the ground beneath the Keeper's feet split apart, cracks snaking out like a spiderweb trying to escape from the poisonous killer in its own center. There was no need for either Figment to touch the old man, for he fell as the forest around him fell, the skin on his face fracturing like the earth on which he sprawled. Yet such an easy kill could not satisfy their rage or their hunger, and the Figments fell upon his body, shredding with the same frenzy that Auge had slashed the Dreamer's clothes. When at long last their fury had partly subsided, and they had been jerked away by two faraway hands to resume their master's pursuit, there was real skin dangling from their fangs and claws, and their bellies were gorged with blood. Behind them, cast aside in the crimson stained dust, was a body too mauled to recognize, but the land knew who rested there and would have reached out to absorb him back into its folds, just as he had so often absorbed it, if the ground directly beneath his silent form, and the ground for miles around, had not been as inert and plundered as his corpse. The Keeper had died and the land could only mourn from afar, mourn for all that had already passed away and for all that might still come to pass.