Chapter 11 – Dreamstone

Beyond the forest, the dirt path changed into something that was halfway between gravel and concrete. A light gray stream of rocks kept up the appearance of a path, while to both sides, the ground grew smooth and hard and black as midnight. The sky overhead went from green to deep purple, even though the sun shone almost directly overhead. Now and then, a dark cloud would obscure the sun. To either side of the path, hemming in the new area, there stood a wall a good twenty feet high, stretching off as far as the eye could see. Under the wall, in the distance off to the left, a sharp bank leading down to a river. Ahead down the path, the rock on the sides of the road gave way to patches of soil, in which grew grain and corn. Beyond the meager attempts at farmland there was a city.

Buildings made of dark stone barely distinguishable from most of the ground and the wall made for a skyline that appeared to be in silhouette even with the sun not behind it. Most of the buildings were of medium height. A few looked to be only a story tall, but the majority stood at least two, and a few reached higher still. The architecture looked like it belonged to no age in particular; everything was simple and functional, with no excess ornamentation intruding on the pervasive minimalism. The bare-bones design grew ever more apparent the closer Chrono and Coppelia came to the outskirts of the town. Chrono guessed the simplicity had something to do with the cost and labor necessary to carve a building out of rock.

Chrono might have recalled that most ornamental statues are carved out of rock, but his mind's attention belonged to the jade's poem, not the surroundings.

"Does this mean that Nadia is here somewhere?" Chrono asked Coppelia, almost as if he expected her to know.

"Perhaps the Nadia mentioned in the poem is not the Nadia you know, Mister Chrono," she answered. "Were you not the only one forced here?"

"I was," Chrono said, "but maybe she got sucked in, too. Maybe she ended up elsewhere."

"Gates usually do not send two travelers to different destinations except under extreme high energy circumstances, according to the Theorem of the Conservation of Time."

"You're probably right," said Chrono. "But that doesn't mean she didn't come in a different Gate."

"Jiao said she watches new arrivals. That someone from here could observe your time and know Nadia's name is not inconceivable."

"Maybe we're dealing with something magic, too. I sure hate magic, except when I find it useful. It just complicates things."

"Did you not assume some connection between the jade and magic when you saw it merge with your sword?"

Chrono winced. "I should have remembered that. I guess I'm not thinking too clearly right now."

"You seemed quite focused during the fight with those imps."

"That was because of Nadia. I fought for her. Now that I'm not fighting anything, my thoughts of her are taking over my mind and hurting my thinking."

"I see," said Coppelia. "Passion for a loved one is a double-edged sword."

"I wouldn't say that," said Chrono. "You make it sound as if the drawbacks and the benefits cancel each other out. What you leave out is how on a real sword, a skilled user can use both sides to his advantage. With love, the good far outweighs the bad in any situation."

"As you say that, you are blinded by your love for Nadia, but you just demonstrated one weakness of love. It can blind you."

"So they say."

"What occupies my mind now is not love."

"And you're expressing that by talking about love to me?"

Coppelia stopped walking. "Those imps we fought trouble me."

Chrono noted the change in Coppelia's tone and attempted to cheer her up by flexing his muscles and saying, "They're dead now. They shouldn't bother you anymore."

"I know that they are defeated, but I have never seen imps that skillful. Are they not supposed to be dumb creatures?"

"They are," said Chrono.

"If you think back to your battle, you might remember that one of them nearly turned the tables on you. You attempted to use the same strategy you used to dispatch the first imp against the second, and it anticipated your move and countered it. Never before have I seen a simple imp with the capacity to do that in the heat of battle."

Chrono scratched his head. "You know, neither have I, and I've seen lots of imps in my day. I hope this doesn't mean all the monsters here are stronger and smarter than anything I've encountered before. I'm always up for a challenge, but I don't want to die here."

Coppelia laughed. "If you fight like you did back there and against the cave monster, I do not think you have anything to worry about. My concern is for whether or not Miss Orchid can handle the dangers here."

Chrono shook his head. "I don't know one way or the other, but you have to be optimistic. If you didn't think she could survive, would you have bothered coming in the first place?"

"Mister Chrono, if you did not think Miss Nadia would survive a journey to an unknown land, would you still follow her?"

"I see your point. Still, I think you have a seed of optimism in you somewhere. Look to that. Even if it's just one tiny seed, it's still there. It can still grow into something bigger and more sustaining. It's just like a trip I once took."

"Where did you go?"

"I went to the future. Nadia came with me, and when we got there, we saw nothing but desolation. But it turned out that the one little seed of hope we found was enough to fix everything."

"I see," said Coppelia, who began walking again.

"Why did you… Look out!" Chrono pointed ahead to a figure cutting across the path. The newcomer looked only vaguely humanoid. It had a head and arms and feet, as well as a face and a tuft of hair crowing its scalp, but its head was too big for the rest of it. So was its mouth. Its legs appeared too small to support its bulk, but that didn't stop it from hopping along, showing no sign of noticing the two strangers.

"I've seen those things before," Chrono said. "I never really figured out what they were, but I know I've seen them."

"That is a Nu," said Coppelia.

"I know what they're called," said Chrono. "I just don't know what they are. My understanding is that they show up all over time, from the millions of years in the past to what I call the present and on into the future. They mostly hide out in forests, and they're fierce fighters if you make them mad. I don't know what else to say about them, though."

"Neither do I," said Coppelia. "Even in my time no one has been able to determine just what manner of creature they are. I can not even say for sure whether or not they are native to Earth."

"They show up here, don't they? That's a good clue that there's something spooky about them. I never like the things, myself. They always gave me a queasy feeling, like something was poking me in the middle of my stomach over and over. They're just so weird. They're like a reminded that I don't know everything about the world, no matter how much of it I see. I can't know everything about the world."

"That is an appropriate interpretation, Mister Chrono. I, however, view them as emblematic of the challenge to discover new knowledge, although I must confess that such a view originates with Miss Orchid. I am merely copying her opinion and passing it off as my own."

By the time the Nu vanished from sight off to the right, two more appeared ahead of Chrono and Coppelia. These two, like the first, didn't acknowledge either Chrono or Coppelia. They didn't even look at each other as they hopped off to the right.

Four more Nus appeared, two at a time, before Chrono and Coppelia finally reached town. When they did get there, the first thing they saw was the only bit flourish in the entire city's design, at least seemingly. In the middle of the town square, there stood a statue of a man in full armor. The helmet on his head looked like it was made out of scales, as did the flaps hanging down past his ears on either side. His face showed no expression. His right arm reached around his front to a scimitar hanging from his left hip. Tall military boots shielded his shins from whatever he was fighting. Below the statue itself there was a pedestal, and a plaque on the pedestal identified the carving as a statue of "Kuei the Tortoise."

Chrono very nearly commented on how whoever lived here at least had some sense of aesthetics, even if those aesthetics were rooted in militarism, or else on how the name "Kuei" had been showing up with some frequency lately, but before he could, he saw the second thing about the town that stood out: his sword began to glow again.

He gave it to Coppelia to read:

While this world in cradle lay
Though naught but dreams its substance then
It came to be one sleepy day
Far back before one could say when
With Heaven torn across its seams
The quarter charred with flames of war
This land, though dark, still sometimes gleams
If you've the presence to look far
And deep, to find the perfect glow
A thing that shines can yet be low
Eternal nocturne from a stone
And endless flows the River Black
In our fair world by hammer and light protected
And guided by rich wisdom that we one day might go back
To a time when war was not suspected

"Is this supposed to help us find our way around?" Chrono wondered. "Because it isn't. I can't make head nor tail out of it."

Coppelia pointed out the silver lining. "It is a pretty piece, is it not?"

"Does it tell us anything? This place is dark, butwe already knew that. Something about it shines, I think. I have no idea if that's literal or metaphorical or what."

"Might a local help us interpret what we have read?"

Chrono felt the wind drain from his protest's sails. Reluctantly, he agreed. "Yeah, maybe. Whom should we ask?"

"I do not know," said Coppelia. "I recommend you lead the way."

Chrono looked around the square. Paths led off in four directions, counting the one from which they originally came. Two of the other three went deeper into town, while the one directly across from their entrance quickly exited and seemed to carry on down to the river. Chrono decided to pick one of the other two, so he looked either way to see if he could spot any sign of life.

He found his efforts rewarded when he noticed a few people—actual humans, he hoped—walking through the streets. Why no one bothered to come by the square, he couldn't guess, but distant people were better than no people. Chrono pointed to the left and half walked, half jogged toward the first person he could run down.

"Excuse us," he said to a thickly-mustached man carrying a pot on top of his head. "We're new here, and we don't really know our way around. We were wondering if you have seen someone called Orchid. Can you help us?"

"New, huh?" said the man. "Try talking to Paem over at her shop. She's the one who handles new arrivals."

"Really? Thanks," Chrono said. "You've been very helpful."

"Think nothing of it," said the man. "You might not know this, but we get lost people here all the time."

"Could one of the lost people have been Miss Orchid?" Coppelia asked.

"Can't say, miss," said the man. "You're really going to have to talk to Paem about that. If your Orchid has been through here, she would have gone to see Paem anyway, I reckon."

"Thank you again," said Chrono.

The man pointed further down the street. "She's right over there. You can't miss her."

Decorations down this street were slightly less sparse than they appeared at a distance, but that wasn't saying much. Pretty much everything was as plain as it could have been, but apparently some distinguishing characteristics were necessary for attracting business to a shop. In other words, Paem's building had a little marquee hanging over the front door, with "Paem's Fortunes" written across it in block letters.

Chrono knocked on the door. A voice from inside responded by telling him to come right in because she wasn't busy. Chrono obliged by opening the door.

Stepping into "Paem's Fortunes" was like stepping into (yet another) different world. The dominant color of the interior was actually something other than black; red light danced across the stone walls and played around on red lengths of silk hanging down from the ceiling. A red carpet welcomed them and showed them the way to the back of the room, where a young woman sat at a rosewood desk. The woman wore a red skullcap and a set of rich black clothes. Red light glanced off her dark eyes and stained her black hair. Her face was as pale as any Chrono had seen before, dotted with a speck of red near the bottom that he suspected was her lips. Sitting on the desk in front of her, on top of a red placemat, was a round, red rock, which slowly rotated, allowing the woman at the desk to see all sides of it.

The light in the room all came from the rock.

"Is that what I think it is?" said Coppelia.

"That's Dreamstone," said Chrono. "And it's the biggest piece of it I've ever seen."

The young woman smiled upon hearing this.