Dreamfish

Another flash-story in the same setting as The Praetor “From Thazan”.

You’ve never seen a dreamfish.  You think you can say whether they exist or not?  Shut your idiot mouth.  You can barely feel the mana you’re huffin’ on a good day–doubt you’ll even comprehend what the dreamfish are swimmin’ in.  Yeah. You gotta comprehend before you can see it–it’s backwards that way.

What?  Ain’t satisfied?  Tough shit.  I didn’t tell you that to convince you it was true.  I told you because it is true, and I hoped you’d hear it and then go the fuck away.  This is a sizeable establishment.  Go find some other corner to infest. 

But. 

You’re still here.  You’ll have to pardon me–it’s difficult to tell the difference between curiosity and envy these days, and no, I will not elaborate.  But you haven’t fucked off yet, and I’m thinkin’ you may have a mind to act on this, so fine.  I’ll share more.  Ain’t like it’s gonna hurt me.

So you ever met a Sunsinger?  Like one of those sleazy storyteller types with the “gather round! Gather round!” who’ll sit against the wall like that’un there and slur out some half-baked folklore while picking your pocket for ale?  Or maybe you just know the generic variety?  Whatever–bardic tradition is dying like everything else.  Even the generics are liable to break out the creation story, though.  You know: Night Sky dreams the world and three animals–three Old Gods–wheedle their way into its stewardship.  But then there are other stories–sometimes with the same gods, sometimes new ones.  Like the one where the Night Sky breaks the Fox’s nose.  Were they fighting–as the Diarchians told it–over the campfire he built or over the scarab he mentored in the Khettite myth?  Particularly: Were there Old Gods besides the three?

Short answer’s yes.

Longer answer, well, you get that the Blood God was just a mage, right?  A fucking strong one, yeah, you don’t just jump from drip-drinking mana to leveling cities, but he wasn’t the first one to brush up against the metaphysical.  What?  Does it seem so unbelievable that animals can learn magic?  That the world’s first super-mage was a fucking fox?  Keep your shoes on.  It gets weirder still.

History’s hard, and I’ll spare you the details, but it’s likely the Old God pantheon was way bigger than the old Kolai orthodoxy taught.  All the spirits and “gods” you heard about in the stories, the Scarab, the Moon Lily, the Wendigo: They were all probably rolling with capital G’s.

You…don’t get it?  Fucking godshell, kid.  If you take nothing else from this conversation, you ought to learn to read.

Anyway, obvious assumption: The world’s finite.  Where’d that come from?  Shut the fuck up and pay attention.  The world’s a dream, right, and a dream has a beginning, an end, and boundaries: limits in psychic time and space.  The substance of the world is mana, death, not an especially great outlook, but that ain’t my point.  My point is: What happens at the end of the world?  Is there mana and then, just, nothing?  Don’t give me that “no one’s ever seen the end of the world” crap.  It’s a fucking embarrassment.

Kid, we’re in Piraeus.  If you wanna see the edge of the world, go outside and just look west.  It’d be one thing if no one who sailed over that horizon ever returned, but I challenge you to name one person who ever tried.  You can’t, right?  You think maybe someone has to have had this idea before because it’s so damn obvious, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: Lots of people have sailed west before.  You don’t remember them because they aren’t in the dream anymore.  Oh, they’re dead too–that ain’t ambiguous, but we’re getting to it.

So engrave this in your memory: I’ve gone there.  It don’t look like much, not to your eyes, just open water and clear-ish sky, but if you’re attuned to it, the mana out there is strange.  It’s not nothing, but there’s a gradient, a blurry, gradual frontier where the death loses its structure.  It stops making things, stops enforcing causal relationships.  And it’s hard to perceive, even if you can channel mana, because more than likely it’s taking all the focus you’ve got to keep your mind from unraveling.  Buf if you somehow get that down, all you gotta do to see them is look up.

They’re everywhere out there.  Dreamfish.  These swirling loci of that proto-mana, maybe just eddies in the entropy that laps at the border of the Night Sky’s mind–but they’re stable enough to persist for awhile.  And make no mistake, they’re fucking dangerous.  They’ve got these tentacles dragging from ‘em, and if they touch you, they’ll spiralize your soul, take your essence and slurp it like chowder in a whirlwind.  The fuck is that metaphor?  It’s messy and ugly, just like the process.  Should watch it sometime.

So that’s why you can’t see ‘em.  But that ain’t why you’re asking, is it?  This ain’t about me and my crazy talk.  You’re bothering me because you heard about dreamfish out there, and you heard about dreamfish out there because of Legion.  The Cult’s schism has blown this whole business public, and now crazy Edward’s crazy stories aren’t so crazy anymore.  Fuck you all, it was easier when you thought I was crazy, because now you think I’m important, but you still aren’t going to listen.  You think that the problem is that Legion’ll swarm the Hospitality Quarter again or some other nonsense, because you can’t bear another look into the infinity mirror of the society you chose.  You can’t stand knowing that you’re all the same.

No, the problem is the Cult.  The problem is Glaucus.  The problem is the Old God we found out here at the edge of the world eating dreamfish–the Old God who we couldn’t just leave alone.  The problem is that half this city is high on a kraken’s dandruff and can’t give up the notion that their psychoplasmic degradation must mean something.  You can take it or leave it, but the truth is it ain’t worth shit.  You’ve been offered the Terminal Man’s product by now, yeah?  My advice is you fucking decline.  Only thing down that way is suffering and an eventual cessation of existence.

Oh, what is that sneer?  A tepid fucking thing, like you wanna fight with an “or flight” in parentheses.  Had a taste, have you?  Carry the fuck on, then.  I know where you’ll end up eventually.  It is inevitable.