Champion Souza slept on his bed, in a room bounded by walls covered with posters, photographs, faded memories. His experiences while held captive by the French mafia in Belleville were more traumatic than anyone knew. He would wake, terrified, from sickening dreams that he was back in the pitch-black chamber concealed behind the portrait of the owner of the Bellevillian French Wine Center, awaiting certain torment and death. Then he would awaken, and remember he was in Paris. That those who would have harmed him were dead or in prison. That the Bellevillian French Mafia's vile game of kidnapping Tour cyclists, drugging them, and seeing who the last to collapse from exhaustion when pedaling a stationery bike would be, was ended for good.
But he remembered things.
Things that no one should have to have encrypted in their memories.
He remembered hazy, peaceful visions of a black-and-white countryside, as he pedaled...a false sense of freedom...and a gunshot.
At the time he had neither known nor cared who had fired it, and even less, why. But he had later learned that it was the administration of death to a fellow cyclist who had become exhausted and fallen off his bicycle.
Thus the conscious thoughts upon awakening from a nightmare were no better than the nightmare itself.
His deepest desire at these moments was to go into the room where his grandmother slumbered, but at the age of twenty-one he felt that he could not do that. Usually, he would hold his obese bloodhound, Bruno, in his arms and gaze out the window at the elevated train tracks just feet from the house, feeling the wind on his face, the moonlight reflected in his enormous soulful eyes of liquid brown.
He was having one of those nightmares now. Black-clothed figures shaped like wardrobes marching down a glowing corridor...images of wheezing cyclists...an intravenous line connected to bottles of dark red liquid...he stirred fitfully but didn't awaken. "Au secours!" he moaned, and flung out a long-fingered hand. Two-foot high little men with pitted red noses...more angular, inhuman, rectangular men...and a tongue on his face. He spluttered, and at last jerked himself from the coils of sleep, his gray-lidded eyes snapping open. "Pfft-" he reached up a hand to wipe his face, and found himself staring into a pair of shining, dark brown, orblike eyes. A greyhound was standing on his chest. "Bruno?" Champion mumbled wonderingly, still in the throes of that state of mind where the world of half-consciousness is ruled by your own strange logic. "Bruno, tu as maigri! Tu n'es pas gros!" His obese dog had become exceedingly skinny..."Non, c'est faux, Champion," said the greyhound. I must still be dreaming, Champion thought. It's a nice dream, it would be a pity to wake up. I'll just stay here... The greyhound continued to speak. "I am Sonya, your dæmon." Champion didn't speak this language, but he somehow understood. "Dæmon? Qu'est-ce c'est?" he asked.
"I am you, but the part of you that you don't see. I take animal form...I changed shape often when you were a child..." ...quand j'étais un enfant, Champion's brain echoed. "When you grew up, I settled on one form, permanently. I am a greyhound..." This was too weird. Champion sat up with a great effort, trying to wake up, but the greyhound was still there. He rubbed his eyes, stood up, turned on the bedside light. "Tu es ici!" he exclaimed. The dog laughed, softly like a breath of wind. "Yes, I am still here. Where did you expect me to go?" Champion jumped. There was a talking dog on his bed. Seeing his distress, the dog said soothingly, "Don't worry! I am your very own dæmon. I am you. My name is Sonya..." Champion was breathing heavily, his eyes wide open now. He looked intently at the creature.
She was a beautiful slender greyhound, with oversized paws, long graceful limbs, and a streamlined body. Her face was delicate and reminiscent of strong character, and her eyes were large and expressive. Her fur was sleek and very short, and of an interesting color: a monochrome, a light gray tinged with sepia. Still not knowing what to make of the apparition on his bed, and feeling as though he were within a dream, he asked her if she would be by his side to help him through the nightmares. "Of course," she said. "I am your closest companion. I will be in your dreams with you. I have always been here, but within you. But now I have rendered myself corporeal." Feeling dazed, Champion compulsively ran his fingers through his cropped dark brown hair and switched off the light, then stumbled back to his bed. He lay on the mattress with the busted springs, and ran trembling hand across a furry spine...
The gaunt young man in the bed with the creaking springs awoke from a dreamless sleep, just as a pale amber light started seeping into the sky. He stretched all four limbs, feeling oddly vulnerable, and caught sight of a skinny grey dog on his left. He was suddenly aware of another dog, of tawny-brown color and immense proportions, on his right. The yellowish dog was trying to clamber over him to get to the innocuous-looking intruder on his left. Champion knew now what the skinny grey dog was-- or, rather, who the skinny grey dog was—and had accepted it with the feeling that he was functioning within a dream that he would never truly wake up from.
He hefted Bruno off the bed and regarded his dæmon with gentle interest. He found she was awake also, and watching Bruno (who, at that moment, was preparing to spring onto the bed) with a lofty sense of calm. Her eyes were so quietly intense and full of focused consciousness that Champion followed their gaze just to see what she was looking at.
"Bruno..." he intoned affectionately, and hunched over the bed; he placed one hand firmly on the dog's back to discourage it from jumping, while scratching him briskly behind the ears with the other. A complacent voice said, "I'm not afraid of that dog, save for my inherent desire not to be flattened. To be honest, I don't know how you've managed to exist in three dimensions for this long." Champion laughed, a low and quiet chuckle like a gurgle of clear, pure springwater bubbling up from the dark and troubled bowels of the earth. He lifted his hands from Bruno and gestured for him to stay put. He chose not to discuss the reason Bruno was so fat; he knew it was partly his own fault for feeding him so much, and was sure Sonya knew it, too.
His pupils were shrunk to pinpoints from the glare of sunrise, and his limpid brown irises—of a color in between chocolate and dark amber brown—were brightly illuminated by the rays of almost blinding yellowness creeping in through the window. He pulled away the thin brownish sheets and pushed his thin frame, creakingly, from the bed. As his feet touched the floor, Sonya asked placidly, "Where are you going?"
"À la salle de bains..." Champion responded, slightly perplexed. Sonya nodded. "You can't do that right now, you must wait for me." Champion frowned in confusion. "Pourquoi? Je dois t'attendre?" Sonya raised her lithe form from the bed and stretched, saying as she did so, "Yes, a human cannot stray very far from his dæmon, nor she from him...a maximum of two to five meters. So you must wait for me to follow you to the bathroom..."
Champion stood up in shock. "Mais—mais—" He was a cyclist! he explained. Cycling was his lifeblood, and he had to go fast! "Not to worry!" Sonya said pleasantly. "I am a greyhound, am I not? Why, at times you may struggle to keep up with me..." Champion sighed in deep relief, and sank back onto the bed. Then a thought crossed his mind, and he said he was curious; it was just morbid curiosity, he supposed, but he was curious; what, he wondered, would happen if he were to go too far from her? Sonya shuddered. "I have yet to experience it, of course; I have been within you ever since we came into being. But I know that it is not a pleasant sensation, to pull at the soul-link between us..." Champion felt reassured to now be informed of this aspect of living with a dæmon, and even more reassured to know that he would still be able to race. His beloved red racing bike had been trashed long ago, left behind on rocky, sun-sapped Mont Ventoux, and mangled beneath the wheels of a voiture-balais. He'd scraped together enough for a new bike, but not a sleek red one like he'd had before.
With a great tumult and creaking of bedsprings, Bruno leapt upon the bed. It undulated for a few moments, during which Sonya looked at Bruno reproachfully as he attempted to sniff her. Champion sighed heavily. He looked apprehensively from Sonya to the door, unsure of how this was done. Finally, he held out one long, pallid hand in his dæmon's direction, but didn't touch her; it was as though he was afraid that if were to touch her, she would somehow galvanize him. Sonya contemplated his outstretched hand for a moment, then said, "I expect you'd like to get up and get dressed, then. All right, I'm coming. You know, you needn't be afraid of touching me, or carrying me, even. Dæmons thrive on touch. Though you are right to assume that I am in some sense untouchable; no one but you may touch me." With that, she leapt delicately from the bed. Bruno looked puzzled, then followed suit by tumbling heavily onto the floor. Their human and master, respectively, got up off the bed and left the room amidst them.
