Visioness (4 page)

She couldn’t remember much
of the night she’d left her mother, but she knew after that she’d never heard
of her mother again and her father had disappeared, too. Mrs. Abeth had filled
in the blanks after that. Her father had killed her mother, and her father,
Count Therron Blaise, had disappeared, sealed away into a dreamsphere in the Oen’Aerei’s
archives for life. He would never see the light of day again, nor breathe real
air. He would stay somewhere in the Dream Archives till the end of his days.

She would see Larraine
before too long, just to make sure she was okay, and when she did she would be
sure to inform her of her mother’s wellbeing. Larraine rarely visited Marie, as
it was too painful for her to see her in that state, but she was always happy
to hear that her mother was doing well.

For the time, though,
Adabelle enjoyed her lunch while she could, deciding it best to not let other’s
troubles bother her until she had to. She had enough to worry about it was.

Adabelle took it upon
herself to keep an eye out for the Nhyx that night while asleep. They usually never
attacked alone, nor did it ever only attack once. They usually came in waves.
She hated entering the Dream Frequencies, but she had to if she was going to
keep her dormitory friends safe.

As always, she started
within her own dreams—in this case, her room. It made it easier to orient
herself when she dreamed into existence the place she slept. By positioning
herself there, her subconscious automatically situated herself in the exact
same position as the real world. If she looked to her left where her sister
lay, she saw only a wall of blackness. A deep, unfathomable shadow so devoid of
imaginative thought and dreaming; or at least, that’s what she saw. Beneath
that darkness could be a river of thought flowing, a mass of lights and images.
But Adabelle only felt silence and saw stillness.

She pulled herself from her
bed. Her feet touched what felt like solid floor, and then she walked forwards.
The room felt whole around her, but as she walked towards the wall, the paint
and plasterboard fuzzed, turning dark, and then shimmered into an entirely
different surrounding. This one was a city, it was raining, and there were
monsters.

She was in the mind of a
girl named Elian, and she was dreaming of what appeared to be a far blander
city than that they lived in now. Odilla was one of the most beautiful cities
in all of the countries on the continent. Definitely the one with the most monuments,
statues and fountains, at least. This city Elliana dreamt was grey, square and
bland and very practical. But there was pollution heavy in the sky, coming from
smokestacks in the distance, and from the hundreds of cars that clogged the
streets. Engines shook the air in a chorus of fuel-powered rumbling. Headlights
bloomed through the smog, shining on the automobiles in front. They were
stacked, back-to-back, barely moving. People walked the side streets, damp
cloths to their faces, coughing through the pollution. A creature screamed. No,
roared. Its cry was like train brakes screeching against railing. Adabelle
looked up towards the clock tower above her. The face was illuminated, and in
that illumination was a shadow. A beast. It was winged and horned and dark, a
monster like in her childhood nightmares. They had teeth and glowing red eyes
and claws and pointed tails. These were not Nhyxes.

She pushed through the
boundaries of the dream, the door to one of the houses fuzzing again and turning
dark. In that in-between darkness, Adabelle felt an oddly endless expanse, as
if she would fall forever should she lose herself in there. The only way to
describe the sensation was vertigo, so it was with a deep-seated relief that
she entered the next dream. The girl sitting in the centre of the field was a
young girl named Marley. There were fairies dancing around her, the small
sprites smiling and whistling and keeping Marley’s attention as she watched. No
Nhyxes here.

From dream-to-dream Adabelle
went, keeping her eyes peeled for the familiar sight of the Nhyxes. There was
Lauren, who baked cakes, and Danielle, who seemed to be practicing some foreign
form of fighting. A boy named Thomas was dressed in a cloak and waving about a
wand, and Lionel, who seemed entirely stuck in a dream where he kept trying to
convince people his name wasn’t actually Lionel. But there were no Nhyxes
tonight. The dark figure in the coat and top hat wasn’t anywhere to be seen,
either.

She released the dream
tendrils, feeling her conscience snap back to her body, as elastic snaps back
into shape. She chose not to move yet for fear of the Dream Buffer: the part of
her mind still lost in the Frequencies. It was only a small part, but it spoke
loudly, and told her she could fly if she wanted to, or that she could swim
through bottomless oceans. It told her that if she believed hard enough, she could
do the impossible.

Adabelle had seen the
effects of losing one’s self to the dream buffer through Aunt Marie. She was
the result of what happened when the tendrils of someone’s mind tied themselves
too fully in the Frequency.

The buffer sickness had something
to do with the mind being caught in a space where anything was possible for
some time, and being fully cognitive of the events, too. When removing oneself
from the Frequencies, the mind took a moment to distinguish between dream and
reality. During that time some Dreamers took it upon them to leap out of the
window and fly away, or to dive into the concrete, as it’s not really concrete,
only to discover that those acts were not possible in the real world. The worst
result of all this was that the Dreamer would forget reality, lost in the
dreams, releasing hundreds of tendrils and tying themselves to other’s thoughts
so completely there could be no removal.

Adabelle felt the last few
snaking skeins of thought recede into her mind, the more practical, sensible
part of it reminding her of reality’s truths, and the physical limitations to
which she was bound. Relieved and comfortable, she then rolled over and went to
sleep.

The following morning,
Adabelle found a note in a brown envelope slipped under the door. She opened
it, and was not surprised by its contents.

Adabelle,

Can you please visit the
hospital wing this morning after breakfast to visit your cousin, Larraine? She
has some matters she wishes to discuss with you.

Regards,

Mrs. Abeth.

She folded up the note and
tossed it aside to her work desk. She glanced at her sister. Charlotte was
still asleep. Adabelle got dressed, went down for breakfast, enjoyed her jam on
toast, and then headed to the hospital wing.

The hospital itself was a
collection of three halls, each catering for minor, medium and major illnesses
and problems, each equipped with nurses and doctors, and students studying to
become any of the former. When she arrived, she asked to see Larraine to the
kind nurse behind the counter, and she obliged, taking her to the room of minor
incidents. She found Larraine sitting up in bed with her own breakfast of
porridge filled to discolouration with brown sugar. She looked up, brown eyes
brightening, and smiled.

“Adabelle, it is good to see
you!” she said, finishing up the last few spoons of her porridge in a hurry.
She put the tray to her bedside table, and hugged Adabelle tightly.

“And you, too,” Adabelle
replied, releasing the hug. “And it’s good to see you’re okay. Mrs. Abeth told
me about what happened.”

Larraine’s smile decreased
all of a sudden. “Yes…the Nhyx attack was rather horrible.”

“How did you fight it off?”
asked Adabelle.

“I didn’t,” she replied. “Or
rather, couldn’t. None of the usual tricks helped. It’s like in my dream, I
forgot I was Dreaming—which never happens—and it took advantage of that.”

Adabelle shook her head,
horrified at the thought of a Nhyx attack, and having to face it completely
unprepared.

Adabelle bit her lip,
hesitant. “What happened, exactly?”

“Well, I went to bed, and I
started dreaming. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. And not the Oen’Aerei
variety either. I wasn’t
Dreaming
dreaming, so really I’m not surprised
I wasn’t aware I was asleep, but anyway, I was wandering through a dark city
street in this. Can’t tell you where—I don’t think it was anywhere I’ve
been—and then the dark shadows begin to twist, and I realised I was in a
nightmare, and then it turned into a Nhyx.”

“What form did it take?” Adabelle
asked.

There were just as many
forms of Nhyx as there were people in the world. Literally.

“Well…” she glanced away
from Adabelle out the window. “…In all honesty, I’d rather keep my fears to
myself. But it took form and it attacked. I…can’t explain what happened next. I
was aware I was dreaming, I knew it was a Nhyx, and I knew I had to fight. But
something was stopping me. I don’t know whether it was fear, or worry, or just
that I was paralysed with shock at the appearance of…” she stopped herself,
pausing just long enough that Adabelle was sure she said the word of her Nhyx
in her mind. “But I couldn’t fight. I tried telling it that it was only a Nhyx
and that I wasn’t afraid, and all it did was laugh. I tried thinking happy
thoughts, to pull me from the city into another dreamscape, but still nothing.
It was…well…it was almost like having no control over
my own
dream.”

Adabelle gasped at this.
Even non-Dreamers knew that if they became aware in a dream, they could control
aspects of it. That was lucid dreaming. Dreamers just had more control over it,
and the Oen’Aerei even more than that. It was simple degrees of power. But for
an Oen’Aerei to lose control over a dream and be manipulated by a single Nhyx,
well that was just unheard of. Multiple Nhyxes, maybe, but even then it
wouldn’t take a visit from another Oen’Aerei to rescue them. And Larraine
wasn’t a weak Oen’Aerei at all. She was rather powerful, as were most of
Adabelle’s family.

“I decided, considering I’d
lost control of aspects of the dream, I could run, but again, it was like I was
in a child’s nightmare. Like it wasn’t even my own dream. Every step took me an
inch, each massive leap I made barely moving me a single step. I felt like a
child again.” She stopped, swallowing. The breath that surfaced fluttered in it
exhalation. Larraine considered her words carefully. She didn’t want to draw up
too much of the memory.

“Like I remember a dream I
had as a child, where there was a lion chasing me.” Adabelle quietly laughed at
this, feeling guilty an instant later. Who was she to judge this girl? “No matter
how hard I ran, no matter how fast my legs moved, I couldn’t escape it. It was
like I was pushing my legs through mud, or against the tide at the seashore.
You know?”

Adabelle nodded.

“Then you can imagine my
horror when I discovered today that that Nhyx…it was a Sturding Nhyx.”

Adabelle’s eyes widened.

“I didn’t think they even
existed,” Adabelle said. “I thought that was just something the Oen’Aerei put
out to scare people into needing to employ their Dreamers.”

“Oh, no, Adabelle,” Larraine
said, looking and sounding very serious. “They’re very real. Very real indeed.
They’re just not very common. Very, very,
very
rare.”

She pulled back the covers
of the bed and pulled the bottom of her hospital robes up to reveal a cut up
her leg. It was not particularly deep, nor was it particularly serious. Some
ointment on it would stave off infection, much of it already covered in the
yellow-brown disinfectant solution.

“The Nhyx did
that,
”
Adabelle asked. “I didn’t think you were a Sturding yourself.”

“I’m not,” she said. Not
even a little bit. They did a test and couldn’t find even the slightest hint of
Sturding powers within me. But the Nhyx attacked me, and when I was woken by
the Oen’Aerei, they showed me my leg and it was bleeding.
They
can’t
even explain it. They’ve never really dealt with dream incidents appearing in
this world. I mean, they have a few theories, but nothing proved. Nothing…
concrete.
”

“And now they do,” Adabelle
said.
And they’ll probably take her away and study her for experiments, the
same way they use everyone.

That might have been a
slightly over-dramatic thought, but Adabelle knew the Oen’Aerei’s history, she
knew their roots as a school for soldiers and war. She knew they no longer were
used in such a fashion, not any more. The thought of that sandstone academy
made her blood pulse harder.

 “So what did they do
once they’d gotten rid of it?”

“Well that’s the problem,”
said Larraine. “They…err…couldn’t quite get rid of it. Because it was a
Sturding. They couldn’t just seal it away in a sphere…or rather, they should
have been able to. They just couldn’t.”

Adabelle’s brow furrowed.
“So what did they do with it?”

Larraine pursed her lips,
the red, puckered set straining towards her own ears.

“Well they’ve had to leash
it.”

“But…you can’t
leash
a Nhyx, can you?”

“Well, apparently you can if
it’s a Sturding.” She shrugged, probably just as confused as Adabelle. A
Sturding was a Dreamer who could enter the Frequencies, mind
and
body.
What a Nhyx was doing with
that
ability, though, had Adabelle stumped.

Adabelle imagined the
shadowy form, attached to a chain, struggling to break free and terrorise the
others around it. There would be no question that it would be caged and they
would search for a way to seal it away. Perhaps in a dream sphere, though the
fact that it resisted earlier was a sign that wouldn’t be particularly
effective. Perhaps they could come up with another possibility, rather than
leaving it leashed or caged.

“What did it look like? Out
of the dream, I mean.” Adabelle was curious. If the Nhyxes took different forms
in the dream depending on who looked at them, then what form could it take when
stuck with the limitations of the real world?