A Random(poet) Reply

(A response to this)

Notes flutter through the air. Love notes, death notes. Final wishes, endless goodbyes. Things unsaid, words undone, dreams that were never lived at all. Glass tornadoes spill out into the wall. Small, flecked with colours, freezing in place. A few people push them aside, over, under themselves, and scramble to hide in the detritus of abandoned dreams. Shapes move. There are voices, but they speak words that the waking cannot here. Their movements are stiff, stilted even in dreams, an awful finality to their empty gazes.

“Interesting.” My voice is soft, even to me. One of them turns toward me. There is ugly weight behind its gaze, but I don’t look away. Others begin to move around me, the destruction of dreamscapes slowing as they converge. They look like nothing that they look like. Ice lighting scours the sky, a wind made of butterflies knifing through the air. I stand, certain in my power even in this place. A wandering magician has power wherever they wander. But even so: to make a ward from dreams would endanger dreamers, so I draw power from another place.

There is a sound. Older than these creatures. Perhaps as old as dreams as a warning gong rings out into infinite spaces that are not as infinite as they seem.

“I apologize,” I murmur to this world, “but I have need.” I walk toward the creatures.

No dream is a home when they come. Nightmares, but not of a human kind. Not parasites, because parasites hide so that the host doesn’t notice them. They don’t know enough to hide. Perhaps they have no predators, with few dreamers strong enough to stand against them.

The creatures converge. I snap my fingers, and the freeze as easily as glass tornadoes. Their screams are terrified, and they have never known terror before.

“I don’t know what you are, nor why you are in dreams. I was trying to understand why Jay doesn’t dream, made a door and walked in dreams. To find you here, already. Waiting. Hunting. Hiding? I have no idea, but I do know who I borrowed power from for this binding. I know you can’t escape. I am listening. Speak.”

Their power roars upward. The amber clouds turn dark. Wind turns into ice that tears homes, the tornadoes become a million wounds carving into the world. Or would, except I place my will in this space, and bind each from causing harm.

Even they go silent as time is bent to my binding. Time is malleable in dreams, but this is something more. I wait. None of them speak, all seeking only to destroy. I speak several soft words of command from a book that gave me nightmares for two years to learn how to read.

A magician banishes Outsiders. To banish from dreams is something else, and I barely stop it from breaking some dreamscapes entirely. They are gone, after, and I return the power I borrowed from Jay back to him. I’m left with no answers, old weariness and the distinct impression of not become welcome here.

There are words I could say. Dreamers I could seek. Questions I could ask. Instead, I take a breath, and will myself to wake up. This is all just a dream. But many things are, except for jaysome.