The beach is black and naked; no other words depict the stark scene. Not desolate, or abysmal, or abandoned. Naked, in an unexpectedly vulnerable way. Naked in that there is nothing on the shore save for sand; and beneath the tall black cliffs the beach stretches even darker. It is daytime but dark, overcast. The sun never shines on this beach even when it escapes the confines of the winter clouds. Rain falls, sometimes, as you walk; and it buffets the face hard enough to sting, to feel like salt instead of water. Perhaps it is the sand, getting whipped up by the wind, striking you—but no, you know it is the water from the sky and then as you step imploringly closer to the surf you realise it is coming from the sea. The wind is whipping it from the edges of the white, curling surf; it strikes you not only in actuality but in contrast, in the way there is such a clear divide between sea and shore. You don’t understand. You feel as if you are staring at a lover’s quarrel; the man is striking his chest, shaking his head, restraining himself from touching the woman. And the woman stands crossed-armed and turned away, flushed and furious, tears shining diamond-bright in her eyes. Yes. That is the sea and the shore and staring at it you understand some irrevocable damage has been done, some inhumane comment has been made, something irreparable.
You are consumed by the sensation there is something you not only can do, but must do. And so you begin to move more rapidly toward the line of sea and shore; surf and sand; only to discover there is no crashing sound, nothing save a nearly silent shush shush shush. Although you are running now, slow and leaden, you cannot grow nearer; the sand stretches limitless between you and the sea you try to reach, sickeningly slow. At last you stop and turn back toward the right. Breathing heavily now and thoroughly distressed, you begin to trot the narrow line you had before, between the towering cliffs and the ocean. The sand shifts underfoot and the wind whips up with more ferocity; underfoot the beach if shifting, exposing more and more sea-smoothed rocks. You begin to notice pieces of white; when you pause to admire them you realise they are shards of bones. Some are small and indiscriminate, fishes and birds. Others are larger and you do not stare at those for as long.
Endlessly, it seems, you walk. You walk long enough you forget where you are walking. In fact, you are at the end of the beach, where it meets the jutting, unforgiving rocks that rise from the sea and become cliffs. You do not know how you got there, or why it happened so suddenly. You do not know why you were walking or why suddenly your feet are in the surf and you are turning to look out at a horizon—
covered in ghosts.
Ghosts of every colour. Atmospheric, they billow with mist, more coloured clouds than bodies. They fill you with ghastly horror and what becomes even more horrific is the metallic paint covering them. It drips into the sea and from their faces; it covers their bodies in arcane, nature-inspired symbols. Silver, and gold, and copper drips into the sea and your stomach churns with something unnamable. They are staring at you, through you and it is only now you realise you are also a ghost carrying chains and dripping metallic paint. It burns, hot and dripping.
They are chestnut clouds, grey and black, a white so brilliant it blinds you; roan, grullo, and more. One is stepping forward and you do not know why she looks different, why she is the only one with spiralling horns and a tiger’s tail; why she wears tiger’s stripes and bold markings uncharacteristic for the rest. She is speaking to you and the words come through disjointed, bewildering.
“Why—
did you leave?
you were supposed to…
protect—
—they took us all and….
—our Souls?—
what about… our
souls?”
You are reeling. She is stepping out of the sea, dripping water and shapeless, lips drawn back into a ghastly smile with shark’s teeth. You are afraid and begin to press back, against the sea. The other ghostly figures press upon the shore, bringing with them the tide, and you are now chest-deep in the water—
“your name—“
they say it again and again
“your name—?”
and you say, “Orestes.”
They begin to laugh. They sound like hyenas.
"That's the wrong name."
It doesn't make sense as they crowd you.
------
The Sovereign sleeps fitfully in his study, his face pressed against the map of Novus he had been studying. A candle burns out, dripping wax into a small dish. It is dark, but the moonlight seeps in to colour the room silver; and just beyond the window the sea gleams, shush shush shushing against the shore. Orestes continues to dream.
Sand so black it swallows the moody light and climbs up for more; shaping and reshaping itself into dunes. The curl of them like wood shavings.
Magic hungers in one ghost’s bones. It wells up and froths like a caged ocean, full of yearning to shape this dream. It would paint the sands golden, light the sky with falling stars, strike the ghosts away with the back of a hand. One night, it whispers to him, you will dissolve nightmares or, just as easily, create them. You will upend cities and make worlds beyond sight, scent, sound.
But not tonight.
Tonight he is just another ghost in a sea of ghosts, at the edge of the dark ocean. It takes effort to resist the urge to call out when they do, to make demands of his sovereign which he does not understand. The compulsion to speak sits behind his throat, an invader that’s taken root beneath the skin. Not unlike the way he invades this dream, surreptitious. Discrete. For now.
Oh, he despises these wraiths. He’s met them, or something similar, in so many dreams before.
Above his forehead forms a ball of bright white light, centered between the eyes. The ghosts around him shy away with noises of protest (a hiss, a growl, a snap of the teeth). The path, for a moment, is clear.
Dune presses his way through the crowd to find himself face to face with the sun king. The man looks so small in this dream, so childlike. Pressed down by demons. Here, his tattoos are stripped of their gleaming confidence. They seem to shift and stretch as if unsure of what they want to say. Dune almost smiles at that.
He wants to look closer, deeper, at the golden stranger. Not as an orphan to a king but stallion to stallion, the dream world having stripped them of the waking world’s trappings. But the ghosts are pushing in tight now. Dune is calm and silent, a sentinel swinging his head to scatter the ghosts with his light. Yet they only press in with renewed vigor as soon as he turns away.
The two men are up to the shoulder in salt water and being crowded deeper, faster. When his feet no longer touch the sea floor, with a look of calm resignation to the king ("Well. It’s your dream.") the bay takes a breath, out of habit more than necessity, and he leads the way down into the cold sea.
Knowing that sometimes, the only way out was through.
and even if you know it, even if the back of your consciousness you turn your head fitfully on your desk and mumble something in your sleep, even if it is only a dream—
when you plunge into the sea
it feels like drowning.
More fire than water; a held breath that almost immediately expires. You inhale water as if it had once been your rite, as if the gesture is as habitual and mundane as taking a breath of fresh mountain air and when you do, you die all over again.
Don’t worry.
You’ve died before—and those memories are in the amorphous horses that follow you down, down, down,
and even as you dive you are living through a hundred multitudes of lives, lives you have already lead and lived and died in, lives where you were still not enough—
the spirits remind you what the spears felt like lodged in the breastbone (it punctured the lung just enough you drowned slowly in your own blood)
the spirits act out each visceral ending, each carnal and warlike defeat—
the weighted fish nets leaving you to bake in the sun you’d later worship,
the way in one life they cut off your head and brandished it from their battlements
The laughing follows you and so does that naked blackness, so does the vivid reliving of each of your deaths. You are looking now at the stranger who accompanies you; he takes the shape of another ethereal spectre aside from the light above his brow, luminescent and white, bright enough you can’t stare at it—you want to ask why he is there, some other thing, but don’t, but can’t—
deeper
deeper
deeper
have you ever seen the bottom of the sea?
No.
Yes.
It seems familiar; but the moon is familiar, too, when you stare at it from 238,900 miles away.
Your hooves sink into the silt; something slithers out from beneath the billowing cloud and is gone, gone. You glance at your companion, feeling—strangely—as if they should guide you. You are not even certain of their gender; you are not even certain if you know them. Only that they are not usually in this dream, and this is a dream you have had many times.
At the bottom of the sea the spirits do not follow.
“I’m supposed to die again.” you speak it aloud into the water; it comes out in a language you can’t remember how to speak when you are awake, primitive, like whales screaming into the deep.
There is something about the way even this far below the darkness is barren, naked. You begin to walk and each step you take your body takes the form of something else, gone too quickly for you to recognise your own changes.
You are speaking faintly. “There is an altar here…” Even as you say it you do not know if it is true. The confession emerges vaguely, from the many journeys to the bottom of the sea. Phantom shapes dance in the water near them; bulbous; sharp; billowing; if you look too closely they disappear.
And you are wandering in the dark, the deep, with a hundred lifetimes in your eyes, and a hundred ways to die—
do you remember,
—and the silt is billowing into intricate shapes—
do you remember when,
you jumped from a cliffside crying for peace
and
they
Bound
your
screaming
Soul?
Perhaps it’s here. And that thought carries you further, directionless; perhaps it’s sunk like your body was meant to when they sentenced you to death, when they bound you in iron and cast you into a storm—
“I’m supposed to die again.” And now your voice is quiet, contemplative. “... just one more time…”
-----
Orestes in his study furrows his brows; he coughs in his sleep and turns his face the other way into the spilled papers, the imprint of Novus's foreign map leaving sharp lines against the flesh of his cheek. His eyelids twitch. And the dream goes on.
The sea is always warmer in dreams and memories. Dune knows this, yet every time he is surprised. The waves lap at his chest, more comforting that daunting, and as he plunges into the warmth of the sea it does not occur to him to be afraid.
It never does.
Down they sink, swim, dream, cradled in a sphere of cold white light that bursts from the bay’s forehead, a light undecided between ethereal and antiseptic. At its edges there are shadows slinking ominously, just out of sight.
Eventually, hooves silently settle into the silt of the sea floor and Dune looks to the dreamer. The sun king; of course the orphan recognizes him. But Dune had not, in his own wildest dreams, imagined the sovereign to be so… haunted. Weak. Did Solis know, when he chose the gilded stallion to lead his court? Dune thinks with derision, of course he didn’t.
It doesn’t matter, not here. There is no king of dreams, and if there were it would be Dune. Dune with the light cradled on his brow and the eyes that drill deep. Dune with no family, no friends, not much of anything tangible at all except this.
“There is an altar here.” A smile darts across his face quick and silver as herring. Of course there is. Kings and their gods, men and their rituals. Has Orestes ever worried about when his next meal would be? No, Dune thinks for the second time, of course he hasn’t. This didn’t feel like the dream of someone who never had anything to lose.
Hbegins to walk toward the altar. He does not know where it is, but if they move he figures the dream will bring it to them… but then the king is speaking again, “I’m supposed to die again, just one more time...” and Dune stops. His ears flick backwards in annoyance, a gesture he would never dare show in the waking world.
Death. The living were obsessed with it. It haunted their dreams, lurked in the cobwebs of the mind. Dune, feeling restless, agitated, finds it so…
boring.
Dune turns around and the light grows brighter. It casts extravagant shadows across his face, drawing out his cheeks and jaw. The light breaks into whiplike tendrils that reach above his head and form the letters:
“WHY”
Why was the dreamer supposed to die again? Why did he bring that here? He paws at the bottom of the sea with one hoof; silt billows and drifts away in a lazy current. The letters of light reform, briefly, to shape the word “KING.” Dune’s expression seems mocking. He’s vaguely aware it is cruel, to act this way to a dreamer so clearly tormented. Somewhere in the waking world, he cringes with shame.
But what would you do, you who has nothing, if you found yourself face to face with a king in a place without repercussion?
The letters above his head swirl back to their first shape, where they pulse insistently: “W H Y”
