BLINK
Awake.
Or...
No, not awake.
Awakened.
He stands upon a high cliff, watching the waves smash against the rocks. Below him, a city has been carved directly from the limestone, buildings smoothly melting into earth, the outer facades of architecture giving way to cave-like interiors. Pearlescent tiles and Tyrian dyes bring color to the otherwise drab stonopolis.
What a strange place to begin. But he supposes here is as good as anywhere.
He drops down into the city, using his fishing pole as a grappling line to lower himself to one of the more tucked-away alleys, then sauntering out onto the street.
He is starkly different from the rest. The people here are blue of skin, finned instead of furred, some armored with shells. Bipedal, yet clearly marine.
He is pale. Blue-silver eyes and a mop of brown hair. Drab gray underclothes, largely hidden by a cloak splotched with koi-like patterns. He carries his pole like a hunter shoulders his rifle. There is a sharp edge to his chipper smile. He smells of the deep earth. The natives avoid him, though his stature is half theirs.
No vehicles here, save crab-driven carts. No smoke that he can see. No metals in use. Tools fashioned from bone and coral. Clothes woven from dried kelp and scale-hide.
A fundamentally amphibious place.
A man (?) comes up to him, boggle-eyed and huffing, full of girthy confidence. "Ape brat! What business you have?"
The boy smirks up at him. "I hunt for the Shards of Dreams, good sir."
"Shards? SHARDS?!" The man (surely he is with such a boisterous baritone) guffaws like a coughing seal. "Dreams have withered to a grain here, boy! A speck!" He looms over the child. "Listen well, fisher-ape! You tread through rotted reeds!"
The boy is undaunted, grinning up at him with a wily gaze. "Rotten dreams are dreams nonetheless. Even nightmares have their worth."
The man's eyes quiver. His form hunches downwards, until his salty snout grazes the boy's forehead. His voice warbles low. "Wake up, stupid child! You don't know where you are!"
The boy stands tall, raising onto his toes to push back against the man's rough hide. "I have never known where. I have only known why. Now tell me. Where last did you see or hear what remains of your Shard?"
The man lifts his gaze, craning upwards to cast his azure gaze thoughtfully at the grayed skies. "Below. Deep below." He tilts his head to the side in a most unsettling crook, as he raises a hand and corkscrews his tendrillic fingers downwards. With his other hand, he points to the tallest of the stone-carved city's spires. "From above, there winds your way. Don't blame me if you never surface again."
The boy smirks. "Oh, I won't surface. No need. When I find what I'm looking for, I will exit slideways."
The man laughs, and abruptly saunters off. The boy turns and heads for the spire. No one else dares to interrupt his course.
- - -
The building is a central, skinny monolith, with only a single ring of small windows at the very top, just below a mushroom-cap roof. The smooth erection stands strangely alone, despite its placement almost central to the metropolis. The circular road around it is completely abandoned. The blue folk take the long way around to reach the buildings on either side, rather than cut through the plaza. As the boy inspects the building, he sees rectangular blotches here and there, openings hastily stuffed with cracked cobble, sealed with patches of viscous mortar. No ladder or stair ascends to the openings up top.
No matter. The boy casts his line, the overlarge hook catching on the lip of the roof. With a flick of his wrist, the line retracts, yanking him upwards in a bolt of color. He reaches his apex right at the ring of openings, and lands on the edge of one. Whipping his hook back into pace, he heads immediately to the spiral staircase that lines the outer edge of the interior. The rest of the tower is but a dark drop into a ever-deep abyss.
The stairs curl for ages. The boy doesn't tire, never faulters, only striding forward and downward. There is no shift in pressure, even when he knows he is well below the water's surface. Assuming the world he entered is still there at all.
Down he goes.
Down.
Down.
Until the darkness below gives way to rippling red light, and a distinct, itchy chittering.
- - -
The stairwell ends partway down a cavern so large, the edges vanish over the horizon. Crusty crimson rock spears up in mesas and jagged needles from what would appear to be waves, but are in fact the undulations of a swarm.
They are mostly legs. Long and wiry, cast in tarnished chrome, a dozen or more whipping limbs, radiating from a central ball lined with glowing red eyes. It's hard to tell if the things are organic or mechanic or some mixture thereof. An ocean of crawling things, scraping and chattering and hissing and writhing, each large as a whale, and hungrier than god. They bite and claw into each other as they gouge into the crusty rock that penetrates their skittering tides.
The boy scours the landscape from the tower's last, crumbling step. He casts his line, catching on the cracked roof of the cavern. He swings a long path that almost grazes the reach of the topmost whipping legs. As he rises upwards, he unsnags and whips the line forward, catching on another roofly protrusion, letting his fall power his next swing. A few smooth arcs, and he reaches one of the slimmer mesas. He lets his cloak spread wide and he falls with style onto the crusted top.
The rock buckles under him into a foot of clumpy dust as he hits the surface. He sputters, allowing only a brief flash of annoyance to cross his face as he orients himself and stands tall again. He tries to step forward, and the crust buckles like ice-crusted snow under even his sleight weight. He scowls and proceeds to kick his way across the mesa's surface, holding his rod to catch himself should he reach a deeper patch.
The crumbling layer maintains a consistent depth, thankfully. Unthankfully, that depth is enough to hide more than just potential sinkholes. A black shape bursts with fury at him from point blank range.
He dodges. Claws whip by his face, so close that had he born a beard, he'd suddenly have a clean-shaven patch on his cheek. The bolt of black disappears under the crust before he can track it.
The boy grits his teeth in a challenging grin. He grips his rod tightly. He listens through the din of the clattering creatures below. He hears—
He ducks flat as he twirls his rod, and the black bolt slashes a lock of hair off his head. The moment he feels it pass, he leaps back, gripping his rod in both hands, and pulls! The black bolt comes to choking halt as his hook latches perfectly around its neck!
The bolt flails as it is dragged back-first into the ground, and the boy reels it through the crumble. He smirks smugly as the thing comes to a halt a few feet away. With deft flick of the wrist, his hook dislodges. He points the rod the thing as one would the tip of a rapier.
"Not a hard catch, I must say. Now, you can run or you can face me, but I have things that need doing, and the sooner—" He lunged back as the black thing slashed the air in front of it. The boy lands gracefully a dozen feet away, rod at the ready. He blinks in mild surprise.
It is a girl. Short black hair, wide emerald eyes, pupils slit like a cat's. Ears and a tail like a cat's, too. Her body is cloaked in black rags, but her skin, where she shows it, is paler than his. When she speaks, fangs flash briefly into view.
"Hmm. Not a fish after all. Pity. I've been starving down here." She blinks and cocks her head to the side, eyeing him up and down. "Hmm. Man-meat isn't the worst alternative."
The boy grins wildly. "My meat is hardly worth the bones it dresses." He shifts to a casual stance, shouldering his rod again. "So, kittycat. What brings you to these parts."
"Same as you, I suspect. You seek the Shard?"
"Of course."
"Good luck. I think the leggy-things devoured it."
"Hmm. Possible. But I doubt it would be so easily digested."
The girl turns and crunches over to the edge of the mesa, standing just a few feet back from its jagged drop. "I've been looking for a while. I can't see it's glitter from here." She gestures around them. "This was a larger perch a few days ago. My exit was cut off."
As if to prove her point, a chunk on the other side cracks and falls away, and a horrid grinding comes from below, bits of hard crimson spraying upwards in unnecessary emphasis. As it stands, the mesa is maybe a few acres across. It is doubtful the platform has more than a few days left.
The boy glances around. "Well, I can still manage. You should wake up and try again elsewhere."
"Would that I could." The girl sits down with a disheartened plop.
"Ah. You are disembodied?"
"Is that what you call it?" She inspected her claws nonchalantly. "Are you?"
"You think I'd be here if I wasn't?"
He catches the gleam in her eye, and the way her fingers had tensed before he answered. "...I guess not," she says with sharp softness.
"Right. So don't think you can use me to shortcut an escape." He leans over as far as he dares, which is farther than the girl was willing. The chattering things hammer the base of the mesa with machine-gun desperation. He backs away a little faster than is strictly necessary. "Well, I'll be off."
"Leaving me behind?" she says, wide eyes gazing at him with artificial innocence.
He holds out a hand. "Claw me, and I'll make sure you break my fall into those things."
"Only fair." The girl melts into shadow and reforms into a small kitten of obsidian shade. She bounds up his arm and curls about his shoulders like a scarf. She felt like a whisper against his skin.
He turns and casts his line, hooking the cavern roof, and swings for another mesa.
- - -
Time passes. Minutes? Hours? There is no telling, between the ceaseless thundering of the leggy things and the sheer distance of the caves. They pass a few dozen of the slowly thinning mesas, but never find the cavern's edge.
And then, as the boy comes to rest on another pillar, something decides to impose upon their journey. A leggy thing wide as the city above rises from slumber. Its eyes burn the bright orange of raging fire, swiveling around its central form to focus on their tiny bodies. Its smaller ilk, tiny babies by comparison, rain off its sides to fill the gap it left in its wake.
The boy grins, and the girl-cat startles. "Is that the momma?"
"Nay," says the boy. "Can't you smell the mutation? Its dreams are large."
The girl shivers against him. She melts into shadow again, and he feels her body flow off of his. She regains human form, crouching into a pounce-ready stance, her claws extending into dagger-like blades. "You think it has the Shard?"
The boy smirks and readies his rod. "I think it is the Shard! The dream of these things, writ into being." He glances to the side at his still-questionable companion. "Shall we race to its core?"
The girl smirks. "If you can at least get me out of this hellhole, and I'll let you have it."
"So be it."
The titanic thing thrusts itself forward, a multi-pronged mouth unfurling into a hideous maw filled with grinding gears. The boy casts his line to strike the nearest eye and pull himself forward at speed. The girl times her own leap, and halfway through the boy's arc, she launches like a missile into the same eye, blurring past him, piercing the glassy orb. A moment later, the boy's feet impact like a hammer into the cracks her claws formed, and the eye breaks open beneath them. They dive through the muck, arrowing forward against the gooping flow.
And then, they break through, and they stumble into a sudden dark and cool chamber. The two find themselves in a large cubical room, dimly lit by lines of orange circuits along the ceiling and walls. There is a platform in the center, upon which a console of various blinking controls stands tall. On a chair behind the console is a fat blob of pale-yellow flesh, holding a single, watery eye. Tendrils of the blob slowly slither about, most extending to reach the console, the tips tapping various of the blinking buttons.
The thing shivers as they approached. The two look down at the thing as it reaches a few thin strands towards them, quivering in an emotion they couldn't begin to guess.
The girl extends one claw, spearing the thing through the eye, until the claw tip strikes the back of the chair. It shudders, its tendrils spasming, then collapses the next instant. The thing melts off the chair, slopping heavily to the floor, leaving behind a tiny glowing fragment.
No larger than a grain of sand, the speck of Dream Shard pulses with a wisping blue-white glow. The boy picks it up gingerly, poking it with his fingertip so that it sticks to his skin, then gingerly licks it off. For a moment, his eyes flash with that same glow.
He turns to the girl, who looks at him expectantly. "He was right. There was hardly anything left."
"Sad," she says. "I suppose it wasn't enough to reconnect anyway, then?"
The boy's smile holds a sly gleam. "Oh, it's enough. For one."
The girl pouts. "Can you at least help me get to the next dream before you go? We agreed."
"Why stop there? You have a life to get back to, don't you?"
"Don't you?"
The boy's smile shifted somber. "That's not something I have to concern myself with anymore."
The girl's eyes widen. She takes a step back. "You're—"
The boy's smile slides back to cheerful. "Not your concern, either."
"But... you already took it..."
"It's only enough to open one door. Of course, having a key to unlock a door isn't much use when you don't know where that door is." He holds up his fishing rod. "That's what I'm here for."
He turns and cast his rod, hooking the chamber wall. The boy holds out his hand to the girl. Hesitantly, she takes it.
He closes his eyes and concentrates. Then he pulled the line back, and the hook yanks open a rectangular exit that hadn't been there before. A soft white mist wafts in from the opening, traces of blue-white light wisping along the edges.
He turns back to the girl, who had let go of his hand, staring wide-eyed at the misting doorway. He smiles warmly at her, and motions her forward. She looked to him, tears in her eyes. She pounces on him, clutching him in a tight hug. He pats her back, then gently guides her into the mist.
"Good morning," he whispered as she vanishes from view.
The exit fades away. The chamber fades away. Light and sound fade away. The boy floats in the twilight between dreams. Once more, he closes his eyes and waits.
- - -
She opens her eyes. She takes a breath. She feels the weight of gravity, as she remembers it. She feels the sharpness of all five senses coming into clarity. She feels the stiffness of her body, as if she hasn't moved in a long time. She raises her head to look at herself, and notices she is in a hospital bed, her pale skin connected to tubes and wires.
She looks around and sees a teenaged girl sleeping uncomfortably in one of the side chairs. The woman sits up, grunting with the effort, and speaks a name she'd been terrified she might forget.
The girl jolts awake. Her eyes widened as she sees the woman. "Mom!" she gasps, and lunged forward to hug her.
"Oof!" The woman laughs hoarsely as she holds her daughter. "Hi, honey."
"Oh, god," the girl half-sobs. "We were so... we thought you might never..."
The woman pats the girl's back soothingly, matching her tears. "Me too."