Night Raid

Seti woke me up in the dark of the night. Groggily, I grabbed for my fleeting dream and my book to write it in. Preoccupied with this, I didn’t ask why he had woken me, or how he’d known to find me here in the dream quarters instead of my room or Valerie’s.

“Never mind that,” he snapped, hauling at my elbow to pull me away from my dream book.” There’s a place I need to show you.” I padded after him, following as though I was still dreaming. And maybe I was, because he took me through a wasteland that I could not imagine existing within walking distance of Ezmereld.

“There she is,” he said, pointing. I squinted ahead into the night, across the dark lumps of land squishily rising from brackish trails of stale water. The near horizon was lined with cubicles made of illusion. I looked into one and saw a small room of stark white, outfitted with ordinary-looking furnishings. Ellie was inside the cramped room.

Seti didn’t have to tell me: somehow I just knew that this was a fetch of Ellie, and not her whole self. Someone had taken it from her, and created this room to control the influences the fetch would come into contact with. The bland furnishings looked like actual chairs, chests, paintings, and the like, but in fact they were psychological programming constructs. If the mantra “I-seek-a-spouse” could be converted into a sofa dominating the center of the room, and “I’m-respected-for-my-job” could hang upon the wall as a clock, then this was the place it happened. The miserable fetch wandered this small space, repeatedly confronting a very short list of thought-furnishings. The experience of these limited interactions here filtered back to the person the fetch had been taken from.

Seti said, “You can see why some people associate a white room with death, for there is little of true life or liveliness here. But it has just as little in common with the true nature of death. Many people do construct small worlds for themselves when they die. It’s not necessary, but sometimes they do so from fears and stupidity, or for the comforting familiarity. But this one was not created by Ellie.”

“Who made it? Who snatched her fetch, and imprisons her attention here? And why, what purpose does it serve?”

“The purpose is to limit her growth and shape her to a template in accordance with the desires of the perpetrator. The obvious reason is that someone else wants her to be a certain way.

“Actually, it’s not that unusual to find this done unintentionally. Someone without a thought of magical consequences will take her impression of another person and lock it away in a little box of pre-set beliefs about the kind of life that other person should live.

“Often this is done by someone who professes to love the person they’ve confined. It might even be one of the parents of the poor person who gets boxed in. As for who it is in this case… there is a way to find the author of an astral construct.” So saying, Seti went up to the wall of this one and broke off a piece. Then there was a flash and crack like lightning and Seti was inside the room, wrapped his arms around the fetch, and was out again before the rumble of sound subsided. He disappeared and a dragon flew off across the wasteland, with Ellie’s fetch swaddled like a cocoon between its legs. I flew off after it, and we flew side by side into and through a landscape of fire caves. These caves were home to dragons. We both had to concentrate on holding fast to the fetch between us. If it dissipated, its parts might not find their way back to their source. We hoped to retrieve as much of Ellie as we could. We took this route through the place of our strength to give us an advantage as we struggled to control the outcome of this raid.

We popped up into the small bedroom that was Ellie’s. She lay on the bed, sleeping. I assumed this would make returning her fetch easy, but Seti fussed and flitted about the room in agitation. I saw him as two superimposed images: one the short professor, and the other a standing dragon, pacing on two legs, still holding fast to the fetch between his arms. Finally, spitting angrily, he hurled the fetch at the sleeping girl, and it faded from view. We popped back to the fire caves.

“Why the agitation?” I asked.

“It wasn’t right,” he fumed.” She won’t be able to hang on to the fetch; she’s grown too used to having it apart and controlled by another. I should have had another astral construct prepared to bring the fetch to, in order to impart a transition imprint. Without that, it will likely revert to what it has come to know and expect.”

“Did you find out who made that room?”

“No, not yet. Let’s do that.” He took the piece of wall out and flung it onto a molten lake, chanting as it began to char and smoke: “Cast into the heart of my power, reveal your truth to me this hour. Fill the flames with pictures that speak to all the answers we here seek.” As his chant ended, the piece burst into flame. The flames revealed a picture of a fat woman in a baggy dress. Seti spat angrily again and waved a clawed hand at the image. It crumpled in on itself and charred to nothingness. We both gazed down into the fire lake in silence. I was silent because I had no answers, Seti because he had answers he didn’t like the taste of. His mouth worked around their bitterness. I waited for him to tell me, in his own time.

“That was Ellie’s mother, all right. I had an encounter with her once—along with that bastardized group of so-called Magicians with whom she keeps company. A blot upon the world, they are. I had hoped that if Ellie came to Ezmereld, she would be protected by the guarding spells of the school. But those would have no power to prevent fetch magics. The fetch was probably stolen during one of her visits to her mother, anyway. I doubt they breached the defenses of Ezmereld to take it from her while she was here. Cowardly, despicable, poison-hearted, twisting . . .” His invective trailed off into mumbling. After another silence, he sighed, and then seemed to put off bitterness like an old cloak.” We should do something about this then, shouldn’t we. None say of me that I let a challenge go unanswered.” And he grinned a wide, menacing, sharp-toothed grin under that ominously twinkling eye.

Mission of Meddling

I woke in the dream chambers and dutifully reached for my book. I’d been dreaming about furniture: I was supposed to polish and maintain it, but other people kept moving it, or leaving things on it that would stain or scratch it. What I wrote seemed stupid and petty. If dreams were supposed to reveal great truths, I wished I would hurry up and learn the trick of it, because recording mine felt like a fruitless exercise.

Thinking of stains, as I got dressed, I noticed my toenails were stained with the brackish water I’d fallen into last night when I’d failed to judge the distance to the next dry hummock as we crossed the wasteland. I had forgotten Seti’s visit. Since it was much more interesting than my dreams, I wrote that down instead.

When Kefer-Ptah checked on me, I shoved the book at him and dashed off, explaining that I wanted to catch Seti at breakfast. But I didn’t find him that morning.

Morning diners enthusiastically swapped bits of news about the ghostly visit that had occurred last night. They were now sure the periodic night visitor was a ghost. The word “fetch” only applied to pieces or projections of a soul still otherwise incarnated. This time, someone had seen the ghost clearly enough to identify it as the reliably dead Founder, Ezmer the Elder. Now the consensus was that the Founder had something very important he wanted to bring to someone’s attention, or perhaps pass on to a chosen heir. No one had yet identified the object the ghost was reported to carry in his outstretched hand. Some suspected this proved that the item would only be revealed to the right person.

I filled Kefer-Ptah in on the gossip when I returned after breakfast for our morning class. But he was more interested in my journal entry about last night. I must have been still mentally asleep when I wrote it, because as Kefer-Ptah asked me about the particulars of our dragonish flight through the fire caves, I realized that this had to have been a dream also, not Seti waking me from my dreams, as I’d thought.

“But how did I get stains on my feet, if that was a dream?” I burst out in the middle of one of Kefer-Ptah’s questions.

“The divide between the physical world and the spiritual world is not as absolute as people like to think. Your dream was a classic example of night flight. Centuries ago, Witches would use this technique to meet when other ways of meeting were too dangerous. You combined it with a classic example of shapeshifting. These often occur together, although one may fly in human form just as well.

“There are tales from around the world of a shaman or sorcerer returning to human from shapeshifted form still bearing a wound that fearful neighbors had inflicted upon the animal shape in which he had traveled the night. So, my advice to you is to protect the safety of forms you take, even if you think it is only a dream. Have you ever shapeshifted before?”

“No,” I said, rather stunned. Somehow I kept tripping over my expectation that magic only happened in orchestrated, ritualized circumstances requiring the right words, and knowledge, and years of training. Magic wasn’t supposed to sneak up and ambush me without warning.

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