I dreamed of the garden again.
I enter into the
dream through my grave, the way I always do in this dream. The grave is filled
with millions of tiny white wriggling maggots and they press on my eyes and
fill my nose and throat and ears and the touch is strangely comforting. They
will smother me if I stay, so I must force myself to fight, to swim and claw
upwards towards the air and freedom.
It is the
hardest thing I have ever done.
When I pull
myself out, I find I am standing on a high place. A hot wind stirs my hair and
it smells of rot and consequences. Below me spreads the garden, fair as a
maiden. It is a garden of many islands, each a jungle, wild and untamed and
linked to the others by fragile filigree bridges, and the waters between them
are poison.
I am dressed in
court finery, and there is a scepter in my hand. I disrobe, set aside the scepter,
and go as naked and weaponless as the lowest thrall. I go down into the garden,
down a bone-carved way of many steps, and each pleads with me to turn back, to
take them with me or accuses me of abandoning them. Some clutch at my feet with
ghostly hands of ghostly despair, but I am resolute. The future is not saved by
giving in to the past. To go back means surrender to the grave.
The black sun
howls and screams overhead, louder and closer each time I dream, but it is
quiet down here in the shadowed paths and its ravings come as but a whisper on
the wind.
I hear footsteps
behind me and am comforted, though I do not turn around. It is the footsteps of
the living, and the dead, and those not yet born. I must lead them into the
garden, away from the hungry eye of the sun.
There are
guardians that move among the trees and the leaves, great scale-eyed leviathans
whose tread shakes the ground, but they stop and silently watch me pass. I do
not trespass here, and my presence is tolerated.
The path is made
of many small, sharp stones and they slice at my bare feet. It is not a
pleasure garden, yet it is an oasis, a place both untainted and untamed.
I make my way
towards the center of the island, where a great beacon of light burns.
About the beacon
is a soft, wide lawn and I cry with relief as my soles sink into its green
cushion. I am not used to such hardships, not yet. It will all be worth it, if
I can touch the beacon, feel its light. It is filled with death, but it is a
grave of a different kind, harder, harsher, yet also a sanctuary.
My way is
blocked by a figure. A woman reclines upon the lawn. She is beautiful in the
way that the hedonarchs, the sybarithines or the pleasure girls of lesser races
are beautiful--fruit ripe and deliciously ready to burst. As I draw closer
though, I see her skin is not her skin, it is the pallid, hungry grave-worms
and her eyes howl like the sun.
“So this is
where you’ve been hiding yourself,” she says and smiles a hungry smile, full of
hungry teeth. “You disappoint me, Farseer. This is what you dream of? You would
trade your palaces of air and crystal and the delights of sense and flesh for
what--for mud and hides, for rutting in the dirt like animals? A small dream
for a small mind.”
“You are not
here,” I dismiss him, for the one before me is now a boy, lithe as a demigod and
lush as a bed companion. “Not yet. You cannot touch this place.”
He yawns and
waves a limpid hand in dismissal. A hundred pale worms drop from his
outstretched arm and wriggle upon the grass. “I have always existed,” he says.
“I always will. That’s what makes this so futile. Your garden may last a
millennium, an eon or two, and what then? Even if I do not find you, stars grow
dim and fail, the worlds will die and your beacons will shatter and you will be
mine. As long as there is desire, there is me and you cannot hide forever.”
“No,” I shake my
head, more to strengthen my resolve than anything else. “Yet we will buy time.
Time enough to live--what else can one ever do? What else is life but doom
postponed? We will take joy in life’s smaller pleasures; We will be satisfied
with enough.”
They shift
again, neither man nor woman, yet the stamp on their features remains the same.
There are entire geographies of desire there, whole oceans of want.
“Life is never
satisfied, or else it dies,” they declare, with a leering smile. “Those who
want nothing are devoured by those who desire all. Deny it though you will, everything
wants something and when the end approaches your people will call out to me.”
The hopelessness
of those words beat down upon me. I see the path before me, stretching from the
lawn to the beacon, and it is but a tiny rented corner of reality, fenced with
pain and ending like everything else, not in light but in darkness. In that
moment, the dream trembles and quakes. The trees sway and the voices of those
behind me cry out in fear.
The worm-hand
reaches for me, and I know that I will take it.
Then the beacon
pulses brighter. Even though I shut my eyes, still its light is blinding, and
it swells and encompasses everything, the trees, the island, it is everywhere
and everything and it speaks.
It tells me its
great secret: “The dead desire nothing.”
The figure upon
the grass dissolves into howls of impotent rage.
Then I awake, and know it is time to leave.
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