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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ycore Rixle" data-source="post: 4255105" data-attributes="member: 675">There is in the ocean of Tvir a strip of land which has no slope and no neighbor. It curves like a moon caught in crescent, and on the land <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34397" target="_blank">the towers of the city of Sarntis rise</a>, redolent of lime trees and the hookahs of poets.It was late in the day, and the sun was sinking under the waves like a lure to a nocturnal leviathan, when Knight Admiral Rhys recognized an ill portent in the throne room. The girl with whom he was sharing these delicious grapes – what was her name? - stopped giggling. Everyone stopped talking, actually. This was the hour when the grape girls and the oil girls came round, all laughing, and he would put aside the rolls and charts and wonder at how a Knight Admiral could ever select just one consort. But now: silence.He looked up to see the prophet.So. The time had come.Rhys had known it would. He was a bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. He had heard the rumors in the coconut groves and the narghile houses where he walked with his brother and discussed the grape girls and the oil girls. Such always came, and it was his misfortune to be Knight Admiral when the hour came round at last.Now the prophet shuffled forward in rag sandals, clicking his stick on the polished marble floor. “Doom,” the old man said. “Doom will come to Sarntis. The dreamers in the ocean wash up with the waves, and the fires of their hopes burn down your towers.”There was more but Rhys was not listening. He was Rhys the Bastard, and for a reason. He flicked a lever under his desk. A marble wall tile rattled up, and from their kennel the rykhounds came yowling.***“Sarntis has never been at war.”The conference was in the king’s sea office, on the Foam Portico overlooking the beaches and the lime trees. It was twilight still, and Rhys was there, and king Volle, and, notably, the grape girl that he had been in converse with. What was her name? Apparently the king liked her for a handmaiden.“No, we have never fought a war,” the king said. “It is not our way.”“Let us hope we can keep the old ways, despite the prophet,” Rhys said.“And if we cannot? You’re the Knight Admiral. All eyes fall to you. Are you saying you won’t fight?”“Of course I’ll fight. But Knight Admiral is a hereditary position, not an earned one. Keep that in mind as you make your plans.”“And you keep this in mind: no more of your hounds siccing old men at court. If your beasts had not spooked him, then instead of burning himself to oblivion – or whatever magical disappearance he wrought– the prophet may have stood fast and talked. He might even have explained that nonsense about the dreamers.” The king stared off into the twilight. He took a wine glass from the girl and sipped. In Sarntis, there was wine even at war conferences at twilight.“Bah. He was one man, in rags,” the king went on. “Probably this is a squall that flashes on the horizon and never makes landfall. Nothing but vain fantasy from a man who could sell his dreams to no one else.”“And yet, as you point out, I am the Knight Admiral. The prophet had a presence. His eyes were wild with surmise, but he knew you. The question is, how do we investigate? Sarntis is not accustomed to mystery, or to peril.”“Isn’t your brother a wizard of sorts?” the grape girl asked. She was looking at the Knight Admiral.Both nobles stared back at her.“Tara,” she said. “My name is Tara.”***The wine flowed while they waited for the grape girl – Tara – to fetch Dal.Dal was younger than Rhys, and only in Sarntis could the two be imagined brothers. Dal was a broken man who refused the litter that his deformities and his station warranted. Instead he traveled on a small wheeled chariot pulled by two clockwork tortoises, designed by the cripple himself and powered by the remnants of the dream that had saved him.The stars were burning holes in the firmament’s cerecloth when the whirrs and clanks of the turtles finally announced Dal’s arrival at the Foam Portico. It was a moment’s work for Rhys to tell his brother the story of the prophet.Dal’s face fell, and Rhys’s heart followed. If Dal were worried, then the prophet was genuine after all. For Dal knew Sarntis as few others did.“We must find out what this doom is,” he said. “For all dooms can be avoided. And we must get help. The city must rise.”***“I don’t understand,” Tara said. “Why am I here?”Knight Admiral Rhys and his grape girl were behind an arras in the shade of the stage wings at the Amphitheater of the Prothalamion. Rhys smeared a lime on his lips against parching in the heat. After the nobles assembled, he was going to be doing a lot of speaking. Through a hole in the arras, he watched his audience, fanning themselves in the sun, some fresh from dreaming a thousand gold in the morning sea, some waiting for evening dreamtime before work, and many that only peripherally depended on Sarntis’s unique industry.“We’re here because Dal is steeped in retorts and bubbling sulfur, divining the nature of the doom. That’s his half of the job. Our half is to get help.”“That’s why you are here, Knight Admiral. Why am I here? I’m a grape girl.”“Call me Rhys. And you’re here because you know these people. See old lady Thel? You carried her wine at the suckling roast. You knew my brother was a wizard. Tell me those people’s secrets: who is in whose bed, whose debt, whose dreams.”He stared through the arras-hole out into the chrysoprase, sard, and onyx amphitheater, lustrous in the midday heat. He did not want to meet Tara’s eyes because he could imagine the surprise and suspicion there. All the stories at court, all the women that he had been with. Rhys the Bastard, they called him. Maybe she thought this was another ploy. No matter. She would either help him, or she wouldn’t.And in the end, she decided to help. He was impressed with her acumen and the suitability of her secrets to his purposes. Was this how one selected just a single woman?He stepped out from behind the arras armed with Tara’s knowledge. He wielded it skillfully, menacing this trade, promising that lure.But unlike Tara, the nobles were not convinced.They said he was the Knight Admiral. Defense was his duty. Sarntis had never been to war, had no standing navy, or armed forces at all. His fault, for not having foreseen this. The rich (and that was everyone in Sarntis) would flee, and maybe come back if Rhys found a way to avoid the doom – if, indeed, the doom were real. Was his only evidence the words of a madman and a cripple? ***So Rhys, Tara, and Dal went to see the doom and prove its threat. They flew across the waves in the Crepuscular, a galleon with dragon wings for sails and half a will of its own for an anchor. A mighty dream-fact was the Crepuscular.Wind lashed Tara’s hair. She didn’t serve grapes, or wine, or tell secrets. And she didn’t ask why she was here. She smiled whenever Rhys met her gaze. That smile, at least, the Knight Admiral could understand.But Dal? Why was he happy? The young cripple tooled around the aft deck on the back of a clockwork tortoise, sounding waves with a knotted rope, bubbling three alembics on the gunwale, shouting orders in a strange click-language to the other tortoise (which looked to Rhys to be doing some sort of Thunttian bear-dance, all that was missing was a red ball on its nose). Dal, of all people! Smiling!That made Rhys happy. Why else had he spent ten years in the waters, dreaming? It was true: the Knight Admiral could have risen above his hereditary title. He could have been a duke or a comneni, either through talent or lucre. But he had spent a decade in the Sarntian trade of dreamcraft and sold not a single piece. The work went to Dal. Their parents did not exactly tell Rhys to let Dal die. They simply ignored the waters off the coast as if magic did not float there, as if those who swam in the Sarntian Tvir for a year or more could not, through skill and yearning, suture together fact and dream. Rhys was old enough to despise his parents for their cowardice (for a failed dreamer is often a drowner). Rhys walked into the ocean at fourteen and floated, dead to the world, dead to the salt and the foam, dreaming. Each year, Dal got healthier. At twenty-four Rhys awoke and walked out of the waves, across the beach and the Smoke Way, and into Dal’s room. His parents had passed, but Dal lived. The younger brother was still a cripple, and club-footed and bandy-legged to boot, but he lived, appearing healthy, almost Sarntian, from the waist up.And now he smiled!And shouted!Actually, now his shouts were not in the click-language. “Rhys! Tara! There!”They had been sailing for a day and a night and a day. The stars were out again, lighting the sky like someone had smashed the sun and left pieces guttering here and there. But in one part of the sky there was nothing but a black void. No stars? No. Something was blocking the stars.Tara stood closer as Rhys hollered again, this time in the click language. A swarm of clockwork birds flapped up out of the open hold, each one carrying a limelight lantern. The birds scudded across the ocean waves, faster than the Crepuscular itself, and set up lights around the doom.<a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34395" target="_blank">The thing was enormous.</a> Taller than the tallest tower in Sarntis, and just as wide. Coiled around its central eye were chrysoprase, sard, and onyx tentacles, all the stones of Sarntis. An oleaginous effulgence glazed the eye like a hookah-smoker’s after long hours at the pipe. At length, the eye blinked in the lime lantern beams. A roar came across the waves from the base of globular monstrosity, where swirled a miasma of salt spray and the fatty effulgence that turned Rhys’s gut to contemplate. But the thing was merciful in its hatefulness: it spared Rhys a long view. Once focused on Dal’s birds, the eye was quick to act. Its tentacles snapped out with such ferocity that Rhys expected them to rend the night sky itself. They did not. But they struck each and every lime lantern-bird. The birds died with keening wails, and then all was dark, and the Crepuscular reversed course, the roar of the miasma chasing it back to Sarntis.***Now the Knight Admiral took the stage with more confidence. The entire city had turned out for this. The stage was a platform suspended from two distant towers by cables Dal provided. A sea of people was under and around Rhys as he spoke, his voice amplified by yet another of Dal’s ingenious devices. And while the younger brother had nothing to amplify Rhys’s arguments, the encounter with the eye fired his words and steeled his resolve. Tara and Dal also spoke, describing the doom that approached.The jeers were beyond Rhys’s belief.He gestured to Dal. Louder! But as loud as the Knight Admiral’s voice became, the crowd’s boos swelled louder. At the end, Rhys could feel the platform swaying as the people pounded and yelled and shook the supports.“Time to go.” Rhys picked up Dal, descended, and with the aid of a cloaking spell, dodged through the crowd, Tara in tow.“What are we going to do?” Tara said, ducking a vase that would have cost a mainlander a year’s salary as it shattered against the wall. After they had made their way through the worst of it, resting against a marble wall, she said, “This is madness. They’re mad. And they’re leaving.” She pointed down Smoke Way, to the docks, where every sloop and caravel was raising sail.“We have to get to the king and –“ Rhys started.“Time to go,” said an unfamiliar voice.There was a tall man, grey beard, bald pate, in a commoner’s ruby-embroidered tunic. He held Tara’s arm. Rhys drew his sword. He was a bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. This was daddy, obviously.Or maybe he was stupid. What good was a sword here?“Tara,” her father said. “Now. We have a zeppelin waiting. And you, Knight Admiral, let my daughter sink from your thoughts as you and this city will sink beneath the waves. Sarntis is doomed. It has been coming for a long time. You should have been prepared.”“I asked for help. Every year. Again and again I was told that nothing would come to Sarntis. We are too distant to be attacked, too benevolent to be hated, too understanding to offend. Our wizards have proved again and again that the dreamcraft of Sarntis can never harm anything, so why would anyone see us as a threat? So it was argued. Still, I asked for help. But there was never any help for me.”“Then you should have forced people!”“That is not our way! Help me now. Together we can convince more. The city united can stand.”“You disgust me. Tara!”Rhys did not understand the look in Tara’s eyes. But he wasn’t going to force her to stay. He wasn’t going to force anyone to stay.She left with her father.***Rhys and Dal caught up with the king in the coconut groves in the courtyard of the palace. Mainlander servants scurried past with treasure-laden trunks. The king had a galleon in the harbor.King Volle told Rhys that the people of Sarntis were dreamers, not warriors. He mused that perhaps it was wrong to sell dreams for gold, and the gods, so long thought dead, had returned to punish the dream merchants. At any rate, it was foolish to take up arms against the doom. What could be done? The people of Sarntis could take their riches to another place.And trailing him from wagon to wagon, weaving through servants loaded with paintings and intaglios and dragon ivory, Rhys argued that without Sarntis, his brother would not be alive. Gold cannot heal a cripple.“No. No, it cannot, Rhys. But I can heal you. You have been crippled by your duty to me and to our city. Be free, Rhys. Go. You do not need to save this city. Go find that girl that I saw you with, that night on the Foam Portico.”Instead, Rhys watched his king leave, on a galleon riding low in the water, weighted by a city’s treasure and, Rhys wished, guilt.***And so Dal and Rhys were alone in the city when the eye rose on the horizon. It was little more than a shadow under the clouds now, but in a day it would be upon them.The lime orchards were more fragrant than ever before, the scented waters of the hookah parlors sweeter, as the brothers walked the Smoke Way. The creaks of Dal’s chariot wheels, and his turtles’ whirrs and clanks, were louder than Rhys could ever remember. Something about the desertion of the city amplified the few sounds and smells that were left.They discussed strategy. They spent four hours sinking a chain across the harbor, in the absurd hope that the eye had a keel.Dal had eldritch seals guarding his laboratory. They lifted them, placed them on ropes, and festooned the towers. The hope was to catch a tentacle as it reached for the marble and emerald spires.The planning went as well as possible until Dal decided to leave.That pushed Rhys to despair. At first he thought that his brother was merely missing. Perhaps his chariot broke, and he was stuck in a high tower with no way to descend. Or a seal had gone off and injured him. That was unlike Dal, but Rhys wanted to believe it had happened.A thorough check of all the buildings nearby took even that unlikely possibility from Rhys. Not a sign of the chariot or the wizard.Then he decided to check the docks. What he found there made him regret the decision. If he had stayed in the city, looking for his brother in the towers and the narghile houses, most likely he would have died when the doom came, oblivious to the real truth. In his despair, he wished for ignorance. But he had seen the docks.Besides the Crepuscular, which would sail only for Rhys, there was one boat left in the city. The people had taken all of the others. But for some reason known only to wizards, Dal had a strange narrow boat, little more than a split log with pontoons, in his laboratory. They had placed it in the docks after hauling the chain across the harbor.Now it was gone, and so was Dal.Rhys wept for several hours on the planks of the Smoke Way pier while the doom swept closer. He snapped out of it when the increasing winds – storm strength now -  blew an alembic into his forehead. The pain took his mind off the grief for a moment. As he picked the shards of glass out of his forehead, he remembered all the time Dal spent in his laboratory – and he had the answer. He tied a bandana across his head to stop the bleeding and ran. If only the Crepuscular was fast enough.***It was, and it wasn’t.He sailed out to where he had spent a decade dead to the city, dreaming of a brother who was whole. The dreams of Sarntis could never be used as weapons. That was an established fact. There had never been a wizard in five centuries who could overturn that. Dal was a rebel, to be sure, but not even he questioned the nature of the dream-magic in the Sarntian Tvir. But there was another possibility. Rhys had not thought of it, of course. Too busy with Tara or pleading with the nobles. But Dal was always the smart one. And Dal would know that Rhys would never, ever let Dal try it. Better to die facing the doom.Taking a boat from the Crepuscular, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34396" target="_blank">Rhys fished Dal from the water</a>.“I have lived forty lifetimes since you saw me,” Dal coughed. His legs were useless, and his arms were little better. He sprawled in the bottom of the boat. “Each one a new nightmare. I have seen our parents die a thousand times, crying for you. I have seen Tara leave us every morning. I have seen horrors to make the eye that is coming here nothing to me.”“It’s going to be ok, Dal. It will be ok. We’ll run. We’ll go somewhere else. Let the doom have the city.”“No. Without the city, I would not have lived. Take it.” He lifted a small black ball to Rhys. “It is not a dream that I crafted. It is a nightmare.”Rhys felt the emotion rise in his voice. He understood what his brother had done for him. It would be a long, long time before he saw Dal smiling again.***Back on the docks, Rhys set Dal in his chariot.Black ball raised high in his hands, he started to chant as Dal had instructed him on the ride back in. He wasn’t counting on the doom’s tentacles.With a thunderclap, the tentacle reached somehow across a mile of open water. It knocked the nightmare ball flying.“The eye sees! The eye sees!” Dal shouted and twisted in his chair. Rhys shook his head. There would be time for Dal later – or not. He needed to act now.The black ball – where was it?“Looking for this?” Tara smiled at him. She held up the nightmare ball. Behind her was the most beat-up zeppelin the Knight Admiral had ever seen. But that only registered for a moment. Tara tossed him the nightmare ball.He chanted quickly. The heat coming from the ball told him the spell was working. Dal screamed and twisted in his chair as if knives, long inserted, were being pulled slowly out of his skin. The <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34394" target="_blank">nightmare rose out of Rhys’s hand, crackling, burning, ascending into the clouds in a conflagration of torment</a>.The lightning, fire, and smoke inferno was accompanied by a thousand screams. As the nightmare raced across the harbor, Rhys realized that every one of those screams belonged to his brother.***The doom and the nightmare collided and annihilated. The wind and the rain and the fire seared the tops of buildings and blew down the lime orchards, but the whole of the spectacle was not recorded, for Rhys and Tara only looked at each other, and Dal was still mad. In the years to come, that madness would fade, and the two brothers and Tara journeyed far, far from Sarntis.At night under the distant stars, rocking on Crepuscular or lying on Thunttian grass, the former Knight Admiral would recall how he had been tempted to turn the nightmare against the city after annihilating the doom. But he always ended his reveries believing that he had made the right choice, and he drifted off to sleep in Tara’s arms free of nightmare, and hearing his brother tinker or snore or click happily nearby.One day, the city will dream again. There is no doubt of that.But for now, though people have returned to Sarntis, that city gleaming in marble and redolent of narghiles, few of the returnees are poets, and even fewer are dreamers. It is difficult to craft poems and dreams amidst the hot wails of torture. The word spread, as it always does, and today there is value in novelty. When the mainlanders come to Sarntis, they want nightmares instead of dreams.</blockquote>

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