Blood of the Fold

With a wild shriek Simona leapt into a corner. She screamed as if she were being stabbed. Her hands flailed. Verna rushed to her, trying to catch her arms and calm her.

"Simona, you're safe with us. What is it?"

"That's him!" she screamed. "Jagang! That's the dream walker's name! Let me go! Please let me go before he comes!"

Simona tore away, careering around the room, sending flashes of lightning flicking everywhere. It raked the paint off the walls like glowing claws. Verna and Warren tried to calm her, tried to catch her, tried to stop her. When Simona could find no way from the room, she began bashing her head against the wall. Simona was a small woman, but she seemed to have the strength of ten men.

In the end, and with great reluctance, Verna was forced to use the Rada'Han to gain control.

Warren healed Simona's bleeding forehead after they had quieted her. Verna remembered a spell she had been taught to use on boys newly come to the palace, when they were having nightmares from being taken from their parents, a spell to calm fears and let the frightened child sleep a dreamless sleep. Verna clasped the Rada'Han between her hands and sent a flow of her Han into Simona. At last, her breathing slowed, she went limp, and she slept. Verna hoped it was a dreamless sleep.

Shaken, Verna leaned against the door after she closed it on the dark room. "Did.you find out what you wanted to know?"

Warren swallowed, "I'm afraid so."

That wasn't the answer Vema had expected. He didn't offer anything more. "Well?"

"Well, I'm not so sure Sister Simona is insane. Not in the conventional sense, anyway." He picked at the braiding on the sleeve of his robe. "I'll need to do more reading. It could be nothing. The books are complex. I'll let you know what I find."

Verna kissed her finger, but felt the stilt unfamiliar touch of the Prelate's ring under her lips. "Dear Creator," she prayed aloud, "keep this foolish young man safe, for I may snatch his head bald and then strangle him with my bare hands."

Warren rolled his eyes. "Look, Verna — "

"Prelate," she corrected.

Warren sighed and at last nodded. "I guess I should tell you, but understand that this is a very old and obscure fork. The prophecies are clogged with false forks. This is doubly tainted, because of its age, and its rarity. That makes it suspect even if it weren't for the rest of it. There are crossovers and backfalls galore in tomes this old, and I can't verify them without months of work. Some of the links are occluded by triple forks. Back-tracing a triple fork squares false forks on the branches, and if any of them are tripled, well then, the enigma created by the geometric progressions you encounter because of the — "

Verna put a hand to his forearm to silence him. "Warren, I know all that. I understand the degrees of progression and regression as they relate to random variables in bifurcations of a triple fork."

Warren flicked his hand. "Yes of course. I forget what a good student you were. I'm sorry. I guess I'm just rambling."

"Out with it, Warren. What did Simona say that makes you think she may not be insane, 'in the conventional sense'?"

"This dream walker she mentioned. In two of the oldest books there are a few references to 'dream walker. These books are in bad shape, hardly more than dust, but the thing that worries me is that because the books are so old, the mention of dream walker might only seem rare to us because we have only two of the texts, when in fact it might not be rare at all for back then. Most of the books from that time were lost."

"How old?"

"Over three thousand years."

Verna lifted an eyebrow. "From the time of the great war?" Warren confirmed it was so. "What about the dream walker?"

"Well, its hard to understand. When they mention it, it's not so much a person, as a weapon."

"A weapon? What kind of weapon?"

"I don't know. The context is not exactly that of a object, either, but more of an entity, though it could be a person."

"Maybe it's meant in the way that a person who is so good at something, like a blade master, that they are often described, with respect, or reverence, as a weapon?"

Warren lifted a finger. "That's it. A very good way to describe it, Verna."

"What do the books say this weapon did with this skill?"

Warren signed.”I don't know. But I do know that the dream walker had something to do with the Towers of Perdition that finally cut the Old and New Worlds apart and kept them separated for the last three thousand years."

"You mean the dream walkers built the towers?"

Warren leaned closer. "No. I think the towers were built to stop them."

Verna stiffened. "Richard destroyed the towers," she said aloud, not intending to. "What else?"

"That's all I know, so far. Even what I've told you is largely conjecture. We don't know much about books from the time of the war. For all I know, it could simply be tales, and not real."

Verna rolled her eyes to the door behind her. "What I saw in there looked real to me."

Warren grimaced. "Me, too."