A brief statement: Dream/Morpheus and other characters associated w/ the
Dreaming belong to Neil Gaiman and DC Comics - Lakintah is mine. I am not
Native American, (well, one-sixteenth Cherokee, but that truly doesn't
count) and what bits of story and such used here have been collected from a
bare minimum of research. I may add a bit more at the end that explains
what parts are mine and what parts belong to the Anishinabe people, but
this is what you need to know: the Anishinabe, these days known as the
Ojibwe (there are many different spellings) is a Native American tribe that
lived/ is living near the Great Lakes region; it is the tribe primarily
responsible for the tradition of the dreamcatcher. Now that I have bored
you to death, read, and, hopefully, enjoy.
They circle. They web. They converge.
All drawing in to that one point, intensifying, spiraling, leaving wild netted snares behind them, whirling, thickening, inescapable-
-and out through the pinprick eye of the storm, out the way good dreams know, through the center of the dream-catcher.
The boy cried out and awoke, dragged from some shattered dream, and looked up. The cold moonlight picked out the hoop and the web and the feathers as they moved uneasily in some night wind, like a skeletal bird. He sat transfixed and briefly petrified, then closed his eyes and tried to remember.....
It began with the void. It always began with the void. Starless. Empty. Unimaginably vast, and cold, and vacant, and silent. The boy would feel the blood freeze in his veins, and the marble certainty that, yes, you can die in your dreams..
And then there was the heartbeat that filled the world. It filled everything, filled the world, blotted out everything but the sound, deep and resonant, hard enough to make his own heart stop.
He knew what it was, a deeply and certainly as he knew which way was up. The Earth. The Mother. The Land.
And gradually the sound would let him go, release him from its grasp, but it stayed with him, in the base of his mind and the foundation of his dream.
Here was the plain, the white plain where the sky burned blue as flame and pale dust rose from the earth and caught in his throat, a smoky ghost. The Lake was nowhere to be seen, only Land and sky and heat. He felt as though the world was burning, and he could almost sense the individual tongues of flame.
And then something slid into him, dark coolness that was welcome as water and filling his brain. He moved in it, easy as swimming, floating, relishing it. But it changed.....
It grew darker, and colder, and sharp bursts of sound exploded around him. It was the sound of screams, of lamentation, of all-consuming fire, with glittering sparks of cold, flaming stars.........
He opened his eyes and stared into space, disquiet and wondering.
His name was Lakintah, which means "sorrow" in the language of the Anishinabe, and there was ample reason behind it. His eyes were the grey- black of storm, his face thin and his body scrawny and weak. He was an orphan, and had been forced to move from one longhouse to another before the Gift was discovered, and the feeling of utter loneliness was not unknown to him. He was useless in the tribe, for his legs were weak and he fainted, often. He also daydreamed, his too large eyes always open in wonder and timidity, and, as he grew older, reflection. The art of listening was easy for him. Speaking was not.
The other children had taunted him, calling him Baby (he would not be parted from the baby's gift of the dream catcher, though he was eleven summers old, in that terrible point in life between being too old and being too young), but that was stopped, once his Gift was discovered. There is reason for holding on to safe measures when one is dealing in dreams, however little good they may do.
He rose now, shivering in the pre-dawn chill, and slipped outside his longhouse.
The sky was streaked pale gold and grey on the very lip of the horizon, sending its eerie half-glow upon the Lake, which steamed cold mist. Lakintah watched, and moved, and walked down to the shore, and sat.
"I wish you good morning," he whispered to the silent world, then breathed and waited and watched it until the first of the tribe arose. He held the dream catcher, and unconsciously fingered the web.
Lakintah's first clear memory was that of Black Feather telling his story, the medicine man made even more incredible by the light of the central fire. But there were other fragments that swam in his mind; indistinct and scattered, catching his attention like dust motes catch the sun, then floating away just as easily. He remembered a touch, something like ash and something like ice, that burned against his forehead briefly, and remembered the pain.
Other memories he was born with. He knew as certainly as any other Anishinabe the centricity of the earth, the sacred air he breathed; the Great Mambhazo, Grandfather Sky. He knew the way dreams tread when they go through the dream catcher, though this belonged in the realm of his Gift and was hardly common knowledge.
And he also knew, most certainly, most acutely unspeakably painfully of all, that he was not, and could never be, part of this earth his tribe focused the foundation of its mind upon. Lakintah had never told this to anyone, but some part of those that feared and belittled him knew, which is why they had mocked him.
But not anymore.
The quiet air of the morning soothed Lakintah. It spoke of cool gentleness, and he lifted his face and closed his eyes as it caressed him. A loon called, unusual for the morning, and he opened his eyes to look.
An arrow flashed past him, close enough for him to feel the burn of flint and feather, and the loon's song was cut off. Lakintah stared in shock at the blood that tainted the water, then turned lightning-like.
There was no one there. But he felt the air disturbed by someone moving out of the corner of his eye, and turned to look directly it.
It was a warrior, too old to be humble and too young to be wise, that started at Lakintah's gaze, and froze.
Lakintah merely looked, long and deep and silent, and then turned and waded into the lake to retrieve the bird. The warrior slipped off, already regretting the wager he had taken with a friend, and he regretted it even more when he had a nightmare about arrows and shot birds. That was none of Lakintah's doing; he saw dreams, did not create them. But the warrior had the dream none the less.
The child cradled the frail bird to his chest, ignoring the blood, and wept silently. He carried it back to the shore tenderly and set it down, staring at it, quiet and still. Then he pulled seven feathers from its tail and set them aside for future use. Among his strange and select talents was the gift of crafting his own dream-catchers, incredibly complex and fragile things. He knew they didn't work, not for him and his strange dreams, but made them obsessively in desperate hope.
Lakintah was a dream seer, a sage, that was obvious, but the full extent of his Gift was unknown. The shaman said he had been touched by the Dream Chief, the spirit with burning white skin and deep black eyes; but the Dream Chief was known for both kindness and cruelty in equal measure, which might explain Lakintah's....other traits.
"He has a touch that burns," the medicine man had said. "Like hot coals and ice. That is why you faint sometimes. He can scar the mind."
"Is he kind?" the boy said, staring into the middle distance as his fingers traced the circumference of the dream catcher.
The medicine man considered this, choosing his words carefully.
"None of the Seven are kind. He is..... just. Meticulously just. That is all."
The medicine man was old, and tired, and had taught Lakintah everything he knew. His name was Black Feather, and he knew more than anyone about the Dream Chief. He was the first to understand Lakintah's Gift.
"How do you know so much?" the child had asked of him.
The medicine man was silent for some time.
"I was named Black Feather for a reason," he murmured finally. "When I was young I wandered into the wood and...lost myself. I spoke to the ravens, learned their tongue, their thoughts......
"They tell stories, like us, lies as well as truths. They are servants of the Dream-Chief, messengers, advisors in a way. They are as dangerous as they are wise.
"They told me of him, so I know more than all men of him, and told him of me. He is present in my dreams, on occasion. I can feel him.... looking at me." The old man shifted uncomfortably. The words had spurted hesitantly, his hands moving, illustrating as a sort of sign language when they failed him.
"He is not evil, any more than the ravens are. But I left them, remember. They are not human, but similar enough.... similar enough so that you cannot turn your back on them, for you will feel their eyes watching you, and saying nothing." He shook his head, the feathers of his headdress dancing around him, his eyes roving and clouded. Lakintah had said nothing, only watched with his strange startling gaze, filing the words into the back of his mind.
Now the boy moved silently under the moonlight to wake the old man.
"Black Feather?"
There was a moan, then a bout of coughing. Finally: "Yes?"
Lakintah crouched next to him. "I had the dream again. It was..........worse." He could feel the man stiffen, then rise.
"Come. We will speak outside."
The night was cool and rippled with the sad sound of loons. Lakintah stared up into the moody face of the moon, and sighed.
"The moon is the women's business," said Black Feather. "But it also figures in dreams." He gave the boy a sympathetic glance. "How long has this one been going on?"
"Six days."
"It will last seven, if it is from the Dream Chief. Unlike the Earth, he is of the Seven, not of the Four." He looked across the lake, at the shifting reflection of the sky, and sighed. "What happened?"
"I was on the Land, but I couldn't see the Lake. It was hot, and everything.......everything was burning, hurting. And then there was darkness, and it felt soft, but it turned bad somehow, it turned cold.......Then there were things like fireflies, or stars, and they...... screamed." He paused, and thought.
"It felt like they were part of something bigger, though. Like they were the edges to some pattern, like the ripples made by water. Something on the edges of the center. And they died out. And then I woke up."
The old man sighed again, and sat down on the grass, his movements stiff and slow. His breath came ragged, and he coughed once more. The boy sat beside him, feeling drained and a little scared.
"I don't know," Black Feather said, when the bout of coughing was through. "I don't know."
"Help me," Lakintah said, numbly. "I'm scared. This dream scares me more than any I have had before. Something bad is going to happen, but I don't know what. Help me."
"I can't, Lakintah, I can't. I'm too old. I don't know....." he broke off once more, and the boy felt the old man's body quake with the force of his coughing. "I will not live to see the end of the summer, Lakintah. I am dying....."
Lakintah leapt to his feet.
"You can't!" he shrilled, desperate and high and crazy. "You can't leave me! You're the only one who knows enough." He began to sob hysterically, for he could feel one more cornerstone of the foundation of his world slip away.
"The earth isn't staying still," he moaned. "It isn't staying still long enough for me to get back on."
Black Feather touched his shoulder gently. "No. It never will. You are a wanderer, and the world never stays still for those who wander far from it." His voice was smooth, and serene even, without the roughness it had held for the past season.
"You will find the key to your dream, Lakintah. You will. Pray that it is one better unlocked."
The dream came the next night, as Lakintah shivered in his own longhouse. He was the only one in the tribe with his very own, for he could not bear to sleep close to other people. He would get tangled in their dreams and feel as through snakes were twisting through his gut, his nerves; snakes of cold and darkness.
Dreams have raw power. Lakintah knew that. Dreams come from the back of the head, from the reptilian brain, where the lucid events of rationality and day twisted and grew dark and unpredictable. They deal with instinct, with the feral fear of the unknown, with the sex drive and aggression, all of the wild, raging darkness that makes up the part of the brain connected with the body. Sleeping near a dreaming person at best was like standing too close to white flame.
He could still slip in, though, if he wanted to. From this distance the brutality of wild dreams was lessened, and he could sense the shape of them without being hurt. He could even tell who was dreaming them, and watch. It wasn't hard, not if he held his mind right. Lakintah had the incredible ease of movement in dreams that he lacked in real life.
He dreamed:
His mind moves restlessly in the darkness, seeing the points of delicate fire, like candles, that marks the dreamers, then soars up into the night, losing himself in the darkness fraught with stars.
Stars above, cold and distant and celestial; stars below, a network of stars complex and dizzying, flickering and pulsating as some winked out into darkness, some flaming in as new dreamers were born, like the dance of electricity between neurons of Mozart's brain....
He soars higher, like an eagle on an updraft of heat, lost between the two stretches of infinity.
There are more now, dreamers ranging far beyond anywhere he has ever been, or even heard of...
He slips beneath the closed eyes of a man caught in a nightmare, and saw a priest with a feathered mask raise his hands to a sky red as blood, crying out some divine prayer of brutal poetry. The flint knife glints, and flashes as it is raised and swept down, the man staring up in sick fear as it plunges into his ribcage to cut into his beating heart, jumping in his chest like a frog....and he awakes, gasping.
Lakintah flies again.
("It has begun, Lucien," and the speaker moves into the crux of the Dreaming, searching)
In the north women sing in a strange tongue as they dance beneath the midnight sun, their voices wild and ululating as their feet stamp, and they sing from their heart, and their womb, and their blood, up to the sacred. A girl lies nearby, barely asleep, and dreams of wolves tearing at her with teeth both cold and hot, singing in the women's voices, calling to her. She sinks deeper into the dream, head full of the hot salty smell of blood.
The dreams are burning hotter now, and the child soars on the updraft of their heat, laughing, laughing...
(oblivious to the figure silently pursuing him, all stark darkness and hot- ash skin and burning like a morning star)
This is the happiest time of his life.
Lakintah is swept up, and soars in the direction of the dawn, over a lake a thousand thousand times greater than the Lake, the cold wind throwing up the smell of salt and fish. Here is a land, a land that possessed the musky scent or orange, and a man with red hair sleeps in his small room, sprawled across his maps, and dreams of the rumors of a shortcut to the riches of the east, of exotic eyes, veiled women, and the heavy smell of gold.
He flies up, dips down, leaping from one dream to another all across the wide Land, laughing in wonder as he sees the world again and again, always new, through another pair of eyes.
(enough)
But part of him aches, for in each dream is a current of loneliness, sometimes only a faint edge, and sometimes the pounding heartbeat of the dream. Each star alone. Each on its own solitary course, running blind through the world, oblivious to the others hurtling around it on their own trajectory.
The walls separating dream from dream are thin as pale light, but might as well have been stone four feet thick, and part of Lakintah cries out at this. It twists in him, as the dreamers stared through him blindly, incased, trapped, begging to be heard by something, so horribly alone.
And Lakintah saw the stars flaming above and below, and saw it.
There was a pattern.
Here was the hoop, here the places where the threads converged, here the bindings, and here the center of centers, the eye of the storm.
It was as easy as seeing the Big Dipper in the scattered trail of stars, and he joined them together,
(Enough.)
caught all on the Land up in it, weaving it together, connecting all into the one dream of seeing the world through a different pair of eyes, the walls tumbling down.
(Enough!)
Dream flooded into dream, as fire leapt between them all, growing, building, spreading, and Lakintah laughed as the lines webbed, and converged, and held. It was simply, unutterably perfect, and he laughed as the Dream burned high and mighty and one, as the power flowed through him and held it up, as the fire singed the heavens.
But it failed.
He knew immediately, felt whatever that had supported it fall, and the dreams raged through him uncontrollable as a wildfire. It crashed around him, turning black, each flake of ash whirling on its own vertigo way, confused, united only by their terror and bewilderment.
He fell.
He fell, so hard, so long, the sound of grief and lamentation exploding around him.
He fell, his heart empty, tired beyond reckoning, tried beyond all endurance. There was only numbness, and cold, and some gulf splitting his heart.
He didn't know for how long.
He neared the center of centers, numbly watched it begin to collapse on itself.
A hand shot out, white as burning ash and as hot while still being cold enough to burn, and grabbed his wrist with such force that there was a sickening crack of bone, and a shrill scream that tore through the Dreaming.
He fell through the needle-thin eye of the dream-catcher as it collapsed behind him, and crashed.
"ENOUGH!"
The word tore through Lakintah, and he realized, with what was left of thought, that someone had been shouting it for a long time. But mostly he was beyond thought. His soul had been torn. His mind shattered.
He couldn't hear the heartbeat anymore.
You cannot faint in dreams.
Lakintah did not faint. He lay crumpled on the figurative earth, and thought stopped. There was nothing to think. There was nothing to dream.
Only pain.
Only silence.
Morpheus released the vortex's wrist slowly, and straightened. He noticed the cluster of dream-creatures watching him for the first time (fear of the vortex making a wide circle of emptiness around them). He looked at them, his glance terrible in its calm non-expression, and that was enough. They left. Hastily.
He squatted down beside the child once they were alone once more, then shut his eyes in complete concentration.
There.
There was damage. Dislocation. Desolation. Despair. In the mirror of the child's half-open eyes, Morpheus noticed the stare of his sister, and nodded briefly, an acknowledgement, his face inscrutable and smooth.
The doors to the throne room were fastened shut, the Dream-Chief glancing around quietly to make sure this was so, then slipped into the child's mind like cold smoke.
He began to repair, painstaking and silent, what could be repaired of the vortex's mind, teasing out what shreds of the Dreaming had caught in the shattered psyche as he worked.
Major reconstruction would have to occur; this one had done more than considerable harm.
But this first. Morpheus is satisfied with proper endings.
When what could be healed was, he slid out again, and touched the child's forehead with cold fingers.
Lakintah blinked, slowly, his eyes blank. He slowly became aware of the marble beneath him. It was cold, and the smell was of frost and silence. The lack of the Land felt like the bottom of his mind had dropped out.
"Earth," he murmured, "Mambazho. father sky. earth. "
"Hush."
The voice was quiet and had the power to move mountains. Lakintah knew this with dead certainty, then carefully uncurled and looked up.
The man stood tall and white and gaunt, his hair black and tangled, his robe a skin of shattered night, tattered to the point of seeming an extension of his hair. His eyes were cold, burning midnight in his white face.
Lakintah stared up at him, frozen, his heart beating like a jack-rabbit. His gaze shifted, darted around, and he began to panic.
He was in a room, vast and cold and sterile, without texture, lacking a sense of realness to the point where Lakintah felt dizzy and sick. There was no smell, no sense of the wind, and every movement echoed and all sounds were made alien. Fear clawed up, the blind claustrophobia of the caged.
He twisted up and tore away.
Tearing away is the only way to describe it, for you can slice through time and space in dreams, if you know how, and Lakintah could move with all the ease in dreams that he never could in life. He flickered through the Dreaming, skipping from scene to scene and place to place, occasionally running through the startled inhabitants, running amok through nightmare, running, running.......
And all the while he could feel the Dream-Chief pounding behind like a black-white wolf, and knew in the bottom of him that he couldn't escape.
He ran anyway.
What else was there to do?
And then the world twisted and turned and he was thrown back into the throne room, the floor bucking horribly, sending him to tumble across it. He scrabbled at the walls as he was flung past them, raking at the stained glass, trying to set the trapped rainbows free.
Then Lakintah hit something and stopped and lay crumpled and breathing in huge gasping sobs. He could feel the cold floor, and the colder feet that had stopped him; white and chilly and utterly still.
He whimpered.
Lakintah's breath sobbed as he gasped for air, and he looked around wildly, and the tears finally began to roll down his face. "Mambazho, help me." he groaned. "Earth, oh earth, where are you?"
The boy gulped down his tears and looked up, wary and scared, staring through the ragged veil of his black hair.
The Dream-Chief was gazing down at him, his face reflective. Lakintah wiped his running nose and sniffed.
There was cool silence.
"What do you want?" Lakintah finally asked, his voice small.
The blank eyes stared at him silently.
Lakintah looked around, cautiously, curiously, and waited. He was good at waiting, at feeling his mind settle like a stone in a pool and rest until the next thing happened.
"I want nothing," the man said finally. "There are duties I must attend to."
Lakintah glanced back at him, quietly. His fear was spent up now, and he knew in some tired way that this strange non-world would be the closest he would ever come to home. His heart ached with a grief beyond himself, the loneliness of all the ages and endless night-watches crashing through him and burning. He was lost, and desperate past any sort of panic, and resigned. "Why am I who I am?" he asked, soft. "Why can I never find the right place to be?"
The man was still for a few moments, with an expression that was not unkind.
"I do not know."
"But this is your realm. You are the Dream Chief," Lakintah said with certainty. "You are the one formed from night, and from darkness, and from stars. And I am yours."
"Yes," said the Dream Chief, softly. "You are.
"But there are things even I must bow to; there are rules. What was done was done by you, little mortal of the Anishinabe. For you mortals never learn. You never have." The man sighed, and turned, and padded up the white stair to his twisted throne, and sat, precise and starkly elegant.
Lakintah simply stared, and then said softly, "We do what we do because of who we are. Never forget that."
Sparks flashed in the dark eyes. "Are you ordering me, little vortex?" he said, deadly calm, and Lakintah could smell frost on his words and remembered the burning anger.
"Do you know what you have done? A man lived across the sea from your land, a man of ambition and pride. He dreamed of finding your new world; I know. He will never understand that what he will find will never be what he sought, but he received effects of your work as a vortex as a sign from his god, and he will go, and he will bring disaster and death upon all of your people and upon all others you touched. You have brought about the end of your world. Some will hold on, and live lives hollowed and splintered; some will live and bring strength. But your world will end, your Earth will be taken hold of, and your people shattered. That is what you have done."
The boy said nothing.
The Dream-Chief sat still and waited, cold and distant as the moon.
The boy rose on feet roughened and calloused and dirty from walking on the dusty earth, and moved, padding softly and leaving grimy footprints. He reached a window and peered at it, teetering on tiptoe. And he moved his mind in the way he instinctively knew how and made it transparent, the colors dancing silently through the air like dust motes. The Dream Chief brooded, watching them inscrutably. The child ignored him. He was looking through the window.
He could see the remnants of his dream catcher. The hoop made from stars was shattered, the webs ripped and blowing forlornly in the dream wind. Lakintah closed his eyes, and grieved.
"Why am I here, then? What happened? What-" he swallowed hard, afraid of the answer. "What exactly did I do?"
The man crouched down, and Lakintah felt cold radiate from him. He smelled of stars, and night, and wind.
"It is not what you have done. It is what you are."
Lakintah raised his chin a little. "I am Anishinabe. I am Lakintah of the- "
"You are Lakintah of the Anishinabe, the people of the Lakes, yes. That is your name. But you are a vortex, little mortal. And much damage has been caused because of that."
The child was silent.
The Dream-Chief sighed, a barely audible sound, and Lakintah realized that he was very tired.
"The fault is.....partly mine. I misestimated your abilities, and left matters unfinished...."
"You tried to kill me," Lakintah said, suddenly. "I remember that. I was very young, but I remember. Black Feather said that your touch sears. It did. I am a cripple," he said, simply. "I can never be a warrior. But I lived. And I know dreams."
"Yes. You do know dreams. I did not realize how well."
He gestured around him with an ash-white arm. "Look."
Lakintah looked, and saw the last tattered remains of his web, saw the rips, the gashes, the torn edges that rippled in the wind of dream, and a tear slid down his face. He sat very still and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were wet.
"You could have supported it," he said, dully. "You could have kept it alive."
"Why should I have done so?" the man asked coolly.
"This would not have happened," Lakintah said, as anger and pain rose in his voice. "My world would not have broken. We could have seen. We could have seen that there was nothing to be afraid of, anymore. That we don't have to be lonely. We could have.
"But your kind do not care, do they? You depend on us, but you are too bound up by rules that you cannot, or will not, help us. It would have worked. If you had helped. It wouldn't have fallen. You did not. And now my people are lost. Now a world is dying. Because of you. I can't help what I am. I couldn't help what I did. But you could. And you did nothing."
The Dream-Chief said nothing, but his silence was uncertain. "We do not interfere with your lives," he said finally. "There is but one who does on a regular basis, and she follows not our rules."
Lakintah stared at him. "Interfere?" the child whispered. "Perhaps not. But you and your kind define our lives and the edges of our universe, and that means you have a duty to us, for we define you as well."
He looked out the window. "I am dead now," he said, and his voice was dry from sorrow. "My world is dead." He closed his eyes. "Let me die."
The Dream-Chief looked at him, expressionless. "As a vortex you have the right to chose to be a dream."
"No."
There was a singular silence.
"Then I shall make my choice," said the man that towered above him, terrible and cold.
Lakintah braced himself, a skinny child taut and quivering against the rush of the forsaken world.
There was a scream of wind, and night, and then strange gentleness.
He opened his dark eyes, and stared.
Then he smiled on the edge of grief, and wept, and shone, and stepped, hesitantly, through the eye of the dream-catcher, through the portal to whatever dreams may come.
Morpheus turned away in strange silence, his face grave and patient, and fingered a feather left behind, that belonged to a dead loon, and felt the smooth kiss of the Lake and the heat of the Light and the rushing air of falling flight.
Then he raised his dark head and went on, repairing the new day.
They circle. They web. They converge.
All drawing in to that one point, intensifying, spiraling, leaving wild netted snares behind them, whirling, thickening, inescapable-
-and out through the pinprick eye of the storm, out the way good dreams know, through the center of the dream-catcher.
The boy cried out and awoke, dragged from some shattered dream, and looked up. The cold moonlight picked out the hoop and the web and the feathers as they moved uneasily in some night wind, like a skeletal bird. He sat transfixed and briefly petrified, then closed his eyes and tried to remember.....
It began with the void. It always began with the void. Starless. Empty. Unimaginably vast, and cold, and vacant, and silent. The boy would feel the blood freeze in his veins, and the marble certainty that, yes, you can die in your dreams..
And then there was the heartbeat that filled the world. It filled everything, filled the world, blotted out everything but the sound, deep and resonant, hard enough to make his own heart stop.
He knew what it was, a deeply and certainly as he knew which way was up. The Earth. The Mother. The Land.
And gradually the sound would let him go, release him from its grasp, but it stayed with him, in the base of his mind and the foundation of his dream.
Here was the plain, the white plain where the sky burned blue as flame and pale dust rose from the earth and caught in his throat, a smoky ghost. The Lake was nowhere to be seen, only Land and sky and heat. He felt as though the world was burning, and he could almost sense the individual tongues of flame.
And then something slid into him, dark coolness that was welcome as water and filling his brain. He moved in it, easy as swimming, floating, relishing it. But it changed.....
It grew darker, and colder, and sharp bursts of sound exploded around him. It was the sound of screams, of lamentation, of all-consuming fire, with glittering sparks of cold, flaming stars.........
He opened his eyes and stared into space, disquiet and wondering.
His name was Lakintah, which means "sorrow" in the language of the Anishinabe, and there was ample reason behind it. His eyes were the grey- black of storm, his face thin and his body scrawny and weak. He was an orphan, and had been forced to move from one longhouse to another before the Gift was discovered, and the feeling of utter loneliness was not unknown to him. He was useless in the tribe, for his legs were weak and he fainted, often. He also daydreamed, his too large eyes always open in wonder and timidity, and, as he grew older, reflection. The art of listening was easy for him. Speaking was not.
The other children had taunted him, calling him Baby (he would not be parted from the baby's gift of the dream catcher, though he was eleven summers old, in that terrible point in life between being too old and being too young), but that was stopped, once his Gift was discovered. There is reason for holding on to safe measures when one is dealing in dreams, however little good they may do.
He rose now, shivering in the pre-dawn chill, and slipped outside his longhouse.
The sky was streaked pale gold and grey on the very lip of the horizon, sending its eerie half-glow upon the Lake, which steamed cold mist. Lakintah watched, and moved, and walked down to the shore, and sat.
"I wish you good morning," he whispered to the silent world, then breathed and waited and watched it until the first of the tribe arose. He held the dream catcher, and unconsciously fingered the web.
Lakintah's first clear memory was that of Black Feather telling his story, the medicine man made even more incredible by the light of the central fire. But there were other fragments that swam in his mind; indistinct and scattered, catching his attention like dust motes catch the sun, then floating away just as easily. He remembered a touch, something like ash and something like ice, that burned against his forehead briefly, and remembered the pain.
Other memories he was born with. He knew as certainly as any other Anishinabe the centricity of the earth, the sacred air he breathed; the Great Mambhazo, Grandfather Sky. He knew the way dreams tread when they go through the dream catcher, though this belonged in the realm of his Gift and was hardly common knowledge.
And he also knew, most certainly, most acutely unspeakably painfully of all, that he was not, and could never be, part of this earth his tribe focused the foundation of its mind upon. Lakintah had never told this to anyone, but some part of those that feared and belittled him knew, which is why they had mocked him.
But not anymore.
The quiet air of the morning soothed Lakintah. It spoke of cool gentleness, and he lifted his face and closed his eyes as it caressed him. A loon called, unusual for the morning, and he opened his eyes to look.
An arrow flashed past him, close enough for him to feel the burn of flint and feather, and the loon's song was cut off. Lakintah stared in shock at the blood that tainted the water, then turned lightning-like.
There was no one there. But he felt the air disturbed by someone moving out of the corner of his eye, and turned to look directly it.
It was a warrior, too old to be humble and too young to be wise, that started at Lakintah's gaze, and froze.
Lakintah merely looked, long and deep and silent, and then turned and waded into the lake to retrieve the bird. The warrior slipped off, already regretting the wager he had taken with a friend, and he regretted it even more when he had a nightmare about arrows and shot birds. That was none of Lakintah's doing; he saw dreams, did not create them. But the warrior had the dream none the less.
The child cradled the frail bird to his chest, ignoring the blood, and wept silently. He carried it back to the shore tenderly and set it down, staring at it, quiet and still. Then he pulled seven feathers from its tail and set them aside for future use. Among his strange and select talents was the gift of crafting his own dream-catchers, incredibly complex and fragile things. He knew they didn't work, not for him and his strange dreams, but made them obsessively in desperate hope.
Lakintah was a dream seer, a sage, that was obvious, but the full extent of his Gift was unknown. The shaman said he had been touched by the Dream Chief, the spirit with burning white skin and deep black eyes; but the Dream Chief was known for both kindness and cruelty in equal measure, which might explain Lakintah's....other traits.
"He has a touch that burns," the medicine man had said. "Like hot coals and ice. That is why you faint sometimes. He can scar the mind."
"Is he kind?" the boy said, staring into the middle distance as his fingers traced the circumference of the dream catcher.
The medicine man considered this, choosing his words carefully.
"None of the Seven are kind. He is..... just. Meticulously just. That is all."
The medicine man was old, and tired, and had taught Lakintah everything he knew. His name was Black Feather, and he knew more than anyone about the Dream Chief. He was the first to understand Lakintah's Gift.
"How do you know so much?" the child had asked of him.
The medicine man was silent for some time.
"I was named Black Feather for a reason," he murmured finally. "When I was young I wandered into the wood and...lost myself. I spoke to the ravens, learned their tongue, their thoughts......
"They tell stories, like us, lies as well as truths. They are servants of the Dream-Chief, messengers, advisors in a way. They are as dangerous as they are wise.
"They told me of him, so I know more than all men of him, and told him of me. He is present in my dreams, on occasion. I can feel him.... looking at me." The old man shifted uncomfortably. The words had spurted hesitantly, his hands moving, illustrating as a sort of sign language when they failed him.
"He is not evil, any more than the ravens are. But I left them, remember. They are not human, but similar enough.... similar enough so that you cannot turn your back on them, for you will feel their eyes watching you, and saying nothing." He shook his head, the feathers of his headdress dancing around him, his eyes roving and clouded. Lakintah had said nothing, only watched with his strange startling gaze, filing the words into the back of his mind.
Now the boy moved silently under the moonlight to wake the old man.
"Black Feather?"
There was a moan, then a bout of coughing. Finally: "Yes?"
Lakintah crouched next to him. "I had the dream again. It was..........worse." He could feel the man stiffen, then rise.
"Come. We will speak outside."
The night was cool and rippled with the sad sound of loons. Lakintah stared up into the moody face of the moon, and sighed.
"The moon is the women's business," said Black Feather. "But it also figures in dreams." He gave the boy a sympathetic glance. "How long has this one been going on?"
"Six days."
"It will last seven, if it is from the Dream Chief. Unlike the Earth, he is of the Seven, not of the Four." He looked across the lake, at the shifting reflection of the sky, and sighed. "What happened?"
"I was on the Land, but I couldn't see the Lake. It was hot, and everything.......everything was burning, hurting. And then there was darkness, and it felt soft, but it turned bad somehow, it turned cold.......Then there were things like fireflies, or stars, and they...... screamed." He paused, and thought.
"It felt like they were part of something bigger, though. Like they were the edges to some pattern, like the ripples made by water. Something on the edges of the center. And they died out. And then I woke up."
The old man sighed again, and sat down on the grass, his movements stiff and slow. His breath came ragged, and he coughed once more. The boy sat beside him, feeling drained and a little scared.
"I don't know," Black Feather said, when the bout of coughing was through. "I don't know."
"Help me," Lakintah said, numbly. "I'm scared. This dream scares me more than any I have had before. Something bad is going to happen, but I don't know what. Help me."
"I can't, Lakintah, I can't. I'm too old. I don't know....." he broke off once more, and the boy felt the old man's body quake with the force of his coughing. "I will not live to see the end of the summer, Lakintah. I am dying....."
Lakintah leapt to his feet.
"You can't!" he shrilled, desperate and high and crazy. "You can't leave me! You're the only one who knows enough." He began to sob hysterically, for he could feel one more cornerstone of the foundation of his world slip away.
"The earth isn't staying still," he moaned. "It isn't staying still long enough for me to get back on."
Black Feather touched his shoulder gently. "No. It never will. You are a wanderer, and the world never stays still for those who wander far from it." His voice was smooth, and serene even, without the roughness it had held for the past season.
"You will find the key to your dream, Lakintah. You will. Pray that it is one better unlocked."
The dream came the next night, as Lakintah shivered in his own longhouse. He was the only one in the tribe with his very own, for he could not bear to sleep close to other people. He would get tangled in their dreams and feel as through snakes were twisting through his gut, his nerves; snakes of cold and darkness.
Dreams have raw power. Lakintah knew that. Dreams come from the back of the head, from the reptilian brain, where the lucid events of rationality and day twisted and grew dark and unpredictable. They deal with instinct, with the feral fear of the unknown, with the sex drive and aggression, all of the wild, raging darkness that makes up the part of the brain connected with the body. Sleeping near a dreaming person at best was like standing too close to white flame.
He could still slip in, though, if he wanted to. From this distance the brutality of wild dreams was lessened, and he could sense the shape of them without being hurt. He could even tell who was dreaming them, and watch. It wasn't hard, not if he held his mind right. Lakintah had the incredible ease of movement in dreams that he lacked in real life.
He dreamed:
His mind moves restlessly in the darkness, seeing the points of delicate fire, like candles, that marks the dreamers, then soars up into the night, losing himself in the darkness fraught with stars.
Stars above, cold and distant and celestial; stars below, a network of stars complex and dizzying, flickering and pulsating as some winked out into darkness, some flaming in as new dreamers were born, like the dance of electricity between neurons of Mozart's brain....
He soars higher, like an eagle on an updraft of heat, lost between the two stretches of infinity.
There are more now, dreamers ranging far beyond anywhere he has ever been, or even heard of...
He slips beneath the closed eyes of a man caught in a nightmare, and saw a priest with a feathered mask raise his hands to a sky red as blood, crying out some divine prayer of brutal poetry. The flint knife glints, and flashes as it is raised and swept down, the man staring up in sick fear as it plunges into his ribcage to cut into his beating heart, jumping in his chest like a frog....and he awakes, gasping.
Lakintah flies again.
("It has begun, Lucien," and the speaker moves into the crux of the Dreaming, searching)
In the north women sing in a strange tongue as they dance beneath the midnight sun, their voices wild and ululating as their feet stamp, and they sing from their heart, and their womb, and their blood, up to the sacred. A girl lies nearby, barely asleep, and dreams of wolves tearing at her with teeth both cold and hot, singing in the women's voices, calling to her. She sinks deeper into the dream, head full of the hot salty smell of blood.
The dreams are burning hotter now, and the child soars on the updraft of their heat, laughing, laughing...
(oblivious to the figure silently pursuing him, all stark darkness and hot- ash skin and burning like a morning star)
This is the happiest time of his life.
Lakintah is swept up, and soars in the direction of the dawn, over a lake a thousand thousand times greater than the Lake, the cold wind throwing up the smell of salt and fish. Here is a land, a land that possessed the musky scent or orange, and a man with red hair sleeps in his small room, sprawled across his maps, and dreams of the rumors of a shortcut to the riches of the east, of exotic eyes, veiled women, and the heavy smell of gold.
He flies up, dips down, leaping from one dream to another all across the wide Land, laughing in wonder as he sees the world again and again, always new, through another pair of eyes.
(enough)
But part of him aches, for in each dream is a current of loneliness, sometimes only a faint edge, and sometimes the pounding heartbeat of the dream. Each star alone. Each on its own solitary course, running blind through the world, oblivious to the others hurtling around it on their own trajectory.
The walls separating dream from dream are thin as pale light, but might as well have been stone four feet thick, and part of Lakintah cries out at this. It twists in him, as the dreamers stared through him blindly, incased, trapped, begging to be heard by something, so horribly alone.
And Lakintah saw the stars flaming above and below, and saw it.
There was a pattern.
Here was the hoop, here the places where the threads converged, here the bindings, and here the center of centers, the eye of the storm.
It was as easy as seeing the Big Dipper in the scattered trail of stars, and he joined them together,
(Enough.)
caught all on the Land up in it, weaving it together, connecting all into the one dream of seeing the world through a different pair of eyes, the walls tumbling down.
(Enough!)
Dream flooded into dream, as fire leapt between them all, growing, building, spreading, and Lakintah laughed as the lines webbed, and converged, and held. It was simply, unutterably perfect, and he laughed as the Dream burned high and mighty and one, as the power flowed through him and held it up, as the fire singed the heavens.
But it failed.
He knew immediately, felt whatever that had supported it fall, and the dreams raged through him uncontrollable as a wildfire. It crashed around him, turning black, each flake of ash whirling on its own vertigo way, confused, united only by their terror and bewilderment.
He fell.
He fell, so hard, so long, the sound of grief and lamentation exploding around him.
He fell, his heart empty, tired beyond reckoning, tried beyond all endurance. There was only numbness, and cold, and some gulf splitting his heart.
He didn't know for how long.
He neared the center of centers, numbly watched it begin to collapse on itself.
A hand shot out, white as burning ash and as hot while still being cold enough to burn, and grabbed his wrist with such force that there was a sickening crack of bone, and a shrill scream that tore through the Dreaming.
He fell through the needle-thin eye of the dream-catcher as it collapsed behind him, and crashed.
"ENOUGH!"
The word tore through Lakintah, and he realized, with what was left of thought, that someone had been shouting it for a long time. But mostly he was beyond thought. His soul had been torn. His mind shattered.
He couldn't hear the heartbeat anymore.
You cannot faint in dreams.
Lakintah did not faint. He lay crumpled on the figurative earth, and thought stopped. There was nothing to think. There was nothing to dream.
Only pain.
Only silence.
Morpheus released the vortex's wrist slowly, and straightened. He noticed the cluster of dream-creatures watching him for the first time (fear of the vortex making a wide circle of emptiness around them). He looked at them, his glance terrible in its calm non-expression, and that was enough. They left. Hastily.
He squatted down beside the child once they were alone once more, then shut his eyes in complete concentration.
There.
There was damage. Dislocation. Desolation. Despair. In the mirror of the child's half-open eyes, Morpheus noticed the stare of his sister, and nodded briefly, an acknowledgement, his face inscrutable and smooth.
The doors to the throne room were fastened shut, the Dream-Chief glancing around quietly to make sure this was so, then slipped into the child's mind like cold smoke.
He began to repair, painstaking and silent, what could be repaired of the vortex's mind, teasing out what shreds of the Dreaming had caught in the shattered psyche as he worked.
Major reconstruction would have to occur; this one had done more than considerable harm.
But this first. Morpheus is satisfied with proper endings.
When what could be healed was, he slid out again, and touched the child's forehead with cold fingers.
Lakintah blinked, slowly, his eyes blank. He slowly became aware of the marble beneath him. It was cold, and the smell was of frost and silence. The lack of the Land felt like the bottom of his mind had dropped out.
"Earth," he murmured, "Mambazho. father sky. earth. "
"Hush."
The voice was quiet and had the power to move mountains. Lakintah knew this with dead certainty, then carefully uncurled and looked up.
The man stood tall and white and gaunt, his hair black and tangled, his robe a skin of shattered night, tattered to the point of seeming an extension of his hair. His eyes were cold, burning midnight in his white face.
Lakintah stared up at him, frozen, his heart beating like a jack-rabbit. His gaze shifted, darted around, and he began to panic.
He was in a room, vast and cold and sterile, without texture, lacking a sense of realness to the point where Lakintah felt dizzy and sick. There was no smell, no sense of the wind, and every movement echoed and all sounds were made alien. Fear clawed up, the blind claustrophobia of the caged.
He twisted up and tore away.
Tearing away is the only way to describe it, for you can slice through time and space in dreams, if you know how, and Lakintah could move with all the ease in dreams that he never could in life. He flickered through the Dreaming, skipping from scene to scene and place to place, occasionally running through the startled inhabitants, running amok through nightmare, running, running.......
And all the while he could feel the Dream-Chief pounding behind like a black-white wolf, and knew in the bottom of him that he couldn't escape.
He ran anyway.
What else was there to do?
And then the world twisted and turned and he was thrown back into the throne room, the floor bucking horribly, sending him to tumble across it. He scrabbled at the walls as he was flung past them, raking at the stained glass, trying to set the trapped rainbows free.
Then Lakintah hit something and stopped and lay crumpled and breathing in huge gasping sobs. He could feel the cold floor, and the colder feet that had stopped him; white and chilly and utterly still.
He whimpered.
Lakintah's breath sobbed as he gasped for air, and he looked around wildly, and the tears finally began to roll down his face. "Mambazho, help me." he groaned. "Earth, oh earth, where are you?"
The boy gulped down his tears and looked up, wary and scared, staring through the ragged veil of his black hair.
The Dream-Chief was gazing down at him, his face reflective. Lakintah wiped his running nose and sniffed.
There was cool silence.
"What do you want?" Lakintah finally asked, his voice small.
The blank eyes stared at him silently.
Lakintah looked around, cautiously, curiously, and waited. He was good at waiting, at feeling his mind settle like a stone in a pool and rest until the next thing happened.
"I want nothing," the man said finally. "There are duties I must attend to."
Lakintah glanced back at him, quietly. His fear was spent up now, and he knew in some tired way that this strange non-world would be the closest he would ever come to home. His heart ached with a grief beyond himself, the loneliness of all the ages and endless night-watches crashing through him and burning. He was lost, and desperate past any sort of panic, and resigned. "Why am I who I am?" he asked, soft. "Why can I never find the right place to be?"
The man was still for a few moments, with an expression that was not unkind.
"I do not know."
"But this is your realm. You are the Dream Chief," Lakintah said with certainty. "You are the one formed from night, and from darkness, and from stars. And I am yours."
"Yes," said the Dream Chief, softly. "You are.
"But there are things even I must bow to; there are rules. What was done was done by you, little mortal of the Anishinabe. For you mortals never learn. You never have." The man sighed, and turned, and padded up the white stair to his twisted throne, and sat, precise and starkly elegant.
Lakintah simply stared, and then said softly, "We do what we do because of who we are. Never forget that."
Sparks flashed in the dark eyes. "Are you ordering me, little vortex?" he said, deadly calm, and Lakintah could smell frost on his words and remembered the burning anger.
"Do you know what you have done? A man lived across the sea from your land, a man of ambition and pride. He dreamed of finding your new world; I know. He will never understand that what he will find will never be what he sought, but he received effects of your work as a vortex as a sign from his god, and he will go, and he will bring disaster and death upon all of your people and upon all others you touched. You have brought about the end of your world. Some will hold on, and live lives hollowed and splintered; some will live and bring strength. But your world will end, your Earth will be taken hold of, and your people shattered. That is what you have done."
The boy said nothing.
The Dream-Chief sat still and waited, cold and distant as the moon.
The boy rose on feet roughened and calloused and dirty from walking on the dusty earth, and moved, padding softly and leaving grimy footprints. He reached a window and peered at it, teetering on tiptoe. And he moved his mind in the way he instinctively knew how and made it transparent, the colors dancing silently through the air like dust motes. The Dream Chief brooded, watching them inscrutably. The child ignored him. He was looking through the window.
He could see the remnants of his dream catcher. The hoop made from stars was shattered, the webs ripped and blowing forlornly in the dream wind. Lakintah closed his eyes, and grieved.
"Why am I here, then? What happened? What-" he swallowed hard, afraid of the answer. "What exactly did I do?"
The man crouched down, and Lakintah felt cold radiate from him. He smelled of stars, and night, and wind.
"It is not what you have done. It is what you are."
Lakintah raised his chin a little. "I am Anishinabe. I am Lakintah of the- "
"You are Lakintah of the Anishinabe, the people of the Lakes, yes. That is your name. But you are a vortex, little mortal. And much damage has been caused because of that."
The child was silent.
The Dream-Chief sighed, a barely audible sound, and Lakintah realized that he was very tired.
"The fault is.....partly mine. I misestimated your abilities, and left matters unfinished...."
"You tried to kill me," Lakintah said, suddenly. "I remember that. I was very young, but I remember. Black Feather said that your touch sears. It did. I am a cripple," he said, simply. "I can never be a warrior. But I lived. And I know dreams."
"Yes. You do know dreams. I did not realize how well."
He gestured around him with an ash-white arm. "Look."
Lakintah looked, and saw the last tattered remains of his web, saw the rips, the gashes, the torn edges that rippled in the wind of dream, and a tear slid down his face. He sat very still and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were wet.
"You could have supported it," he said, dully. "You could have kept it alive."
"Why should I have done so?" the man asked coolly.
"This would not have happened," Lakintah said, as anger and pain rose in his voice. "My world would not have broken. We could have seen. We could have seen that there was nothing to be afraid of, anymore. That we don't have to be lonely. We could have.
"But your kind do not care, do they? You depend on us, but you are too bound up by rules that you cannot, or will not, help us. It would have worked. If you had helped. It wouldn't have fallen. You did not. And now my people are lost. Now a world is dying. Because of you. I can't help what I am. I couldn't help what I did. But you could. And you did nothing."
The Dream-Chief said nothing, but his silence was uncertain. "We do not interfere with your lives," he said finally. "There is but one who does on a regular basis, and she follows not our rules."
Lakintah stared at him. "Interfere?" the child whispered. "Perhaps not. But you and your kind define our lives and the edges of our universe, and that means you have a duty to us, for we define you as well."
He looked out the window. "I am dead now," he said, and his voice was dry from sorrow. "My world is dead." He closed his eyes. "Let me die."
The Dream-Chief looked at him, expressionless. "As a vortex you have the right to chose to be a dream."
"No."
There was a singular silence.
"Then I shall make my choice," said the man that towered above him, terrible and cold.
Lakintah braced himself, a skinny child taut and quivering against the rush of the forsaken world.
There was a scream of wind, and night, and then strange gentleness.
He opened his dark eyes, and stared.
Then he smiled on the edge of grief, and wept, and shone, and stepped, hesitantly, through the eye of the dream-catcher, through the portal to whatever dreams may come.
Morpheus turned away in strange silence, his face grave and patient, and fingered a feather left behind, that belonged to a dead loon, and felt the smooth kiss of the Lake and the heat of the Light and the rushing air of falling flight.
Then he raised his dark head and went on, repairing the new day.