Dream King by Elise Knight
20
“What did you think you were doing?” Aethelu demanded as she closed the door of the small house behind her. Her face was calm, but I could hear the anger in her voice.
“I was running away from a load of crazy idiots,” I explained, though it was unnecessary. She’d seen enough herself. “I told them I was from the Dark Court.”
Aethelu sucked in a breath and brought her hand to her mouth. “You didn’t? Your hair...No wonder they believed you.”
“They didn’t believe me, and what the fuck has my hair to do with anything? They mentioned it too.”
She narrowed her eyes. “The people from the Dark Court have not been seen for a great many years, but most of them are known to have hair of silver like yours. You really should not have told them that.”
I rubbed my arm, pissed off that I’d managed to hurt it in the first place, and now it seemed I was about to be reprimanded for the whole load of inbred villagers chasing me.
“It’s not my fault they are all crazy. Maybe the lack of light drives everyone to madness. I didn’t even do anything.”
Aethelu pursed her lips. “Sit down,” she demanded, pointing at a chair in the corner.
I fucking hated being pushed around by anyone, but somehow with Aethelu, I didn’t mind so much. She was my only ally in this place where seemingly everyone and everything was out to get me.
I did as she said and took the seat in the corner.
Aethelu paced the room in front of me, her mouth set in a grim line.
“Didn’t you listen to me? Have you not listened to me at all? I’ve been quite clear that this isn’t the place for you. I honestly thought when I left you earlier that you’d see sense and go back to your own world through the red door.”
“I’m sorry, but...”
“Sorry?” she shouted, making my heart leap. I’d only ever heard her voice in soft lyrical tones. The harshness of it now made me more nervous than when the villagers were shouting at me.
“No need to be sorry to me. None of this will hurt me. The only person going to get hurt here is you. You came here like a lamb to the slaughter.”
My muscles tightened in my jaw. “How was I to know the villagers would turn against me. It’s hardly as though I was doing anything wrong.”
“You just being here is wrong. Don’t you think we have enough to worry about without humans coming into our world? It’s so rare that most won’t understand what you are, but they know you aren’t from here. And if they think you are from the Dark Court...” she gave a shudder and trailed off.
“I still don’t understand why it matters. So what if they think I’m from the Nightmare Court or the Dark Court or whatever court.”
Aethelu sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I’m going to make us some tea. Don’t move a muscle until I’m back.”
She hurried out through another door, leaving me with time to assess the room around me. In the corner, Tour sat on a perch, the beautiful coloring in her wings barely visible in the low light.
“Hey, Tour,” I said to the bird. She clucked her beak and gave me a wink. Maybe Raven needed to take a leaf from this bird’s book. The house was basic with drab brown walls, but Aethelu had adorned each wall with dozens of beautiful abstract paintings. Each had a range of blue hues, ranging from pale blue to almost black. Silver stars dotted each one like jewelry. It was like looking at the milky way. It was also odd that someone who only ever saw the night would decorate their house with paintings of it, but then again, this was all she knew. I wondered if she’d ever seen daylight. The strange tone of her skin told me that it had been a long time, if ever. I was saved from pondering it further by her bustling back in with two mugs of tea, one of which she handed to me.
I took a sip and almost spat it out.
“It gets better,” Aethelu smiled, nodding to my mug.
I’d been expecting tea. She’d said it was tea, but this was the strangest tea I’d ever drunk. I couldn’t think of a single taste to compare it to, but as I let the liquid sit in my mouth, I got used to it. I swallowed and took another sip. The second sip tasted better than the first.
“This is...”
“I know your tastes may be different from ours.”
“No..it’s good. Really good, once you get used to it.”
Her face relaxed a little.
“If you are serious about staying here, and for the life of me, I cannot understand why, then there are things you should know. Hopefully, if I tell them to you, you might be persuaded to leave for your own safety.”
I sat back in the chair, excited to finally hear what all the madness was about.
“Over a thousand years ago, there was no Dream Court or Nightmare Court. Nor was there the Dark Court, although that came first. The people here have always been the creatures of the night, just not in the way you would expect.” She paused and took a sip of her tea. “Our world shouldn’t even exist. We only exist as an extension of yours. We came about hundreds of thousands of years ago when humans started to have dreams. At first, or so the story goes, we were nothing but an extension of those dreams. A place where human minds came together through sleep.”
“So you are quite literally dreamed up?”
She nodded. “Succinctly put. In a manner of speaking, yes. That’s why many of us look so different from humans, why our creatures resemble creatures in your world, but not quite the same. We were nothing but the collective imagination of human minds. However, as the population of your world grew, our world grew with it. A hundred thousand years ago, it took on a life of its own. Our people became real. Our lands solidified. It didn’t take long before our realm was as real as yours is. People began to forget where we came from. Our humble beginnings became nothing but myth. Most people don’t even believe in humans anymore.”
I almost choked on my tea. “Don’t believe in us? What do they think is behind all those doors in the forest?”
Aethelu smiled. “Listen to what I am about to tell you, and you’ll understand. The royals knew that they were responsible for guarding the dreams of humans, even though the people began to forget. Those that didn’t forget didn’t care anymore. Humans were nothing to them. The royal palace kept everything running smoothly, and the knowledge of our past and the responsibility of the dreams of humans was passed down from generation to generation. For a long time, thousands of years, it worked. Even as your world grew and our world grew independently of it, the royals took an oath to protect your dreams.
“Protect?”
“Do you know what happens to humans when they don’t dream?”
Finally - a question I could answer...sort of.
“Dreaming helps humans sort out their memories. It determines what to store for long-term memory and what to disregard from short-term memory. Imagine a giant filing cabinet, and dreams help us sort memories into the right files.”
I was quoting one of McGee’s favorite lines to potential customers, but I didn’t care.
“And so what happens when the filing cabinet drawer is jammed?”
She waited for my answer. I didn’t have one. “I don’t know. I thought everyone dreamed.”
“I don’t know what happens either, but if your filing cabinet analogy is true, not dreaming could have catastrophic effects on humans, could it not?”
I shrugged. Despite working in a sleep clinic for over three years, I’d never really thought about it.
“So what happened?”
“A hundred or so years ago, a new queen came to power. Like all the other royals, she was brought up to keep order in our world in the knowledge that anything that happened here impacted your world. Her job was to keep the peace of our world while making sure the people of yours carried on dreaming. It was a symbiotic arrangement, really. Your world dreamed; our world survived.
“But this queen lost her parents while she was still very young. She was fifteen when she came into power and had not yet had all her training. Whether from grief or something else, she stopped listening to the royal advisors, some of whom had ancestors that had worked for her ancestors for generations. She began to listen to the naysayers. Those that thought that the human realm didn’t exist, and those that believed it did exist, but that the humans were leeching from us. The truth was that the dreams of your people only enriched our world, but she started to believe otherwise.
“When she fell in love and married at the age of eighteen, she was already halfway to corruption and evil, but the man she married hammered the point home to her. I don’t know his reasons, but he believed humans were scum. Having never been in the royal household, he was never privy to what they really did, nor the fact that human imagination was quite literally keeping our world alive.
Sure, we were independent of you, but I don’t think it would take long for our world to crash and burn if our connection was destroyed.
“He didn’t believe any of it and made it very clear. His motivation was complete power over everything and everyone. He hated to think that the humans had anything to do with his life at all.
Honestly, if he’d stopped to smell the coffee, he’d have realized that the human world didn’t really affect him in any way. Maybe the shape our world took was molded by humans, but I believe that we were strong enough to be our own people, our own land.
“He was scared, and he passed that fear on to the queen. As I told you, she was already angry with the world. By the time they had children, twin boys, both the king and queen were done with the human world. The queen hadn’t been doing her job. Humans were still dreaming, but not like they used to. The color of dreams had begun to fade. And as it did, the light in our world began to fade along with it. Gradually, our days got shorter and shorter and our nights longer and longer. And then the king was murdered by a human that had found a way into our realm. The boys were only ten years old. The queen was destroyed by grief, and the madness that had been threatening her for so long finally took over. She threw the boys out of the palace as the pair of them reminded her so much of her late husband.
“Oh, she told everyone that she was sending them out into the world to learn, but the truth was, her bitterness had consumed her. She had each of them a palace built in different parts of the land and gave them the job of keeping the dreams, not caring that they were only ten years old.
“Thus, our land was broken up into three parts. This is the Dream Court. To the east is the Nightmare Court, run by the king’s brother, and to the north is the Court of Darkness, run by the queen. It’s the biggest of all our lands and once the capital. Nowadays, no one goes there, and those that do never return. the villagers were scared because it is now known to be a place of evil.”
I sat stock-still, taking this all in. In all my years of working in a sleep clinic, I had never known how insane our minds were and what they could achieve.
“And that’s why it is dark now?”
She nodded. “It has been this way for fifty years. King Dream and his brother have been keeping the dreams going, but it is a burdensome task. In the Dark Court Palace, the royals had a staff of thousands doing the job. Now it is only the two.
There was something I didn’t understand.
“What exactly is it that Dream does? I’ve been in those dreams with him, and he just stands there, watching. It’s not like he conjures them.”
I cannot speak for him. His job is not something I know about. The secret of it was protected by the royals for millennia, but I do know that without him doing it, the humans will fail to dream, and if that happens, our world will fail to thrive. If he gives up, we will all cease to exist.”
I sat dumbfounded. The weight on Dream’s shoulders was immense, and to have been doing it since he was ten years old. A job that had been performed by thousands.
What happened to his court? You said there was a palace?”
She shrugged. “It was his home for a long time, but it was a big place for a little boy. His subjects helped out as much as they could, but I don’t think anyone really understood the burden that was placed on him. As the world got darker, he retreated in on himself and eventually gave up the court entirely. He moved to be alone in the woods. Just him and his raven.”
It was a lot to digest.
“It certainly explains why he’s a moody bastard.”
Aethelu snorted. “He is a man of depth, but he has had no real contact in his life. I doubt very much he has spoken to either his mother or his twin since the day he left the royal palace. Everything I’ve told you I’ve found out through hearsay and myth. As I told you before, I barely know him. No one does, despite us all being part of his court. He comes to town only when he absolutely has to, and even then, he keeps to himself. Luckily, there are few problems here in the Dream Court. We usually go about our business without any problems.
“Until today,” I said, rubbing my elbow again.
“Until today. I fear that the people knowing there is a human here will frighten them. You are nothing but a myth to them.”
I sighed. “So what should I do? I can’t pretend to be from another court. No one believed me. You saw what happened.”
“You go home, Ana. Go home and forget any of this exists. You will still dream. His Majesty has many faults, but not doing his duty to humans is not one of them.”
I sat up straight in my chair. “I’m not going home. I told you. My mother is asleep. Nobody can wake her up. She’s not the only one. Thousands of people are in an unwakeable sleep just like her, and I know it has something to do with this place.”
She seemed intrigued now. “Your world is failing too? I wonder if somewhere along the line, the symbiotic relationship between our worlds is fading. I thought it had only affected ours, but maybe it has affected yours too.”
“It started a year ago. Did anything happen here a year ago? Our whole population fell asleep.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know anything about it, but it sounds strange. Of course, I know little about the inner workings of dreams. I said right at the start that all my information was hearsay and years of listening to other people’s thoughts on the matter. Only King Dream knows the truth, but there is a reason he spends his whole life out there alone. I believe he likes humans a lot more than you give him credit for.”
“Right,” I snorted. “He likes us like a hole in the head. He told me that humans revolted him. Maybe he just doesn’t want to disappear like everyone else if he stops working.”
Aethelu looked like she was thinking. “I don’t believe that is the full truth. If he wanted to kill you, he would have done so already. You are the first person I’ve ever seen him with for more than five minutes. I’d say he likes you a lot.”
“He made it very clear I was worth less than shit on his shoe the last time I saw him,” I mumbled.
Aethelu stood. “Let me take you back to the doors. You’ll be safe with me. If you decide to go home, then so be it, but if you decide to stay, I hope what I’ve told you today will help you understand why The King is the way he is. I also hope that you’ll stay close to him. However much you think he hates you, you are safer with him than anywhere else in this world. Stay by his side and listen to him if you ever want to find out what is happening to your mother... assuming he even knows himself.”