SSCS 03: Installment 34 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 34 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
We’d all been cast into the Dreaming. And even if we refuse to remember them, nightmares have a way of perpetuating themselves.
And, if you’re wondering (though Jack pointedly is not), the lions weren’t part of any of that. It’s just that, where there is tragedy and opportunity, the lions will come. They can see through the Dreaming, and will gather to lick heartily at the bones of whatever else is then on offer. For some reason, when it was my turn to join them, they had already decided that ten years of Dreaming had been enough. They’d feasted on possibilities and now were full. They had decided, now we should see about waking everyone up again.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 34: 22.1204
—
I was on my knees, crouched amidst muddy River water, when the last pieces of understanding clicked into place and my mind finally stopped swimming, finally escaped the trap of memories – mine and others’ – that were still barely even tangible. But what were tangible were the great Fish, our nightmare Fish – hidden for now by a mist that had drifted out over the River – and also the bell, my Bell. The Minister had commissioned it as another gesture only, another Memorial appeasement, but the lions had had other plans, had made sure that there would be real magic in it. If I finished it in time. And not just the half-Template of it either.
That’s why those other girls had died, of course – the ones (sacrifice girls) before me. Lions are predators after all. And when they circle ‘round, you either join them, or are consumed by them. And this Bell, that was the key they’d decided on, a piece of potential they hadn’t been willing to call off the hunt for. So they’d pushed and pushed, sending visions of the shape it must become, if only the shaper could herself become one of them. Each and all, it had driven the other girls mad with fear, until it came to me. Because even in the Dreaming, there aren’t many of us who are willing to strip off our own skin.
But now I had, and I could do the rest of it too. Not for the lions’ sake – though I could feel the shape of their hungers, could taste the future possibilities they planned to drive us both toward and away from – but for the city’s sake, besieged, and for all of us Dreamers, striving to wake.
The River tugged at my feet, at my knees, as I started back across, to cross from the ruins of the old Palace back to the shores of the city once more. The sky above was grey with smog, the world stretching to either side of me white with River mist, and my clothes and hands the color of mud, the color of bricks now crumbled. When a Fish reached out to snag me and pull me under – just the tip of one, just one twining black tentacle, questing – I felt the spines of it bite into my wrist, and merely turned, and slashed at it with teeth much longer, and sharper, than a human girl would normally have. Then I peeled it off me and flicked it away, not worrying that it might try for me again. Predators do not become easy prey. And lions are never really alone.
Then the rain came, rushing up from the River, dashing away the fog. And I ran with them, with the pride of them – the lions. We were dark shapes flashing by through sheets of silver rain. I ran through the streets of the city, through loud traffic made momentarily quiet by the rain. I stopped when I reached the gates of my factory. Regained my human form. And waited patiently for the doorman to let me back inside.
There was a Bell I had to finish. A spell I needed to cast. And a beautiful boy, with black eyes and white teeth and beautiful, long-fingered hands who was waiting to be saved. He would help me cast my Bell in bronze, pour two molten metal sheets across my Template, wrap them around with plaster, and then, deeply, pour in molten metal again, for real. And when the Minister came next, to hold the Court’s ritual ceremony of False Appeasement, I would be there.
I would stand inside that Bell, and speak us into the Dreaming, and dream us free. And I, then, would wake everyone up.