Image by Rogier Hoekstra

The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode click here. To read it from the start, click here.

In search of an elusive Beast, and prodded by a pushy sword, Gina and her brother Zack had boarded a coach bound for eastern Frenga.

Gina had slept less than two frightening, fitful hours. But it wasn’t the lack of sleep that unsettled her; it was the nightmare images just below the surface of her consciousness, waiting to spring up and engulf her. During sword practice, she flailed at her trainer Buigor as though he were responsible for every mutilated nerve and hallucinatory beast that assaulted her.

Zack watched senselessly, too tired himself to realize how volatile his sister was becoming. He’d slept little more than she, and was also beginning to be plagued by his own waking dreams. Diamond-shaped patterns of purple-gold amarrildin clutched at the borders of his mind, bottomless funnels tornadoed up within him. “Everything!” he shrieked at one point, jarring himself awake.

“Middleton!” Gina cried in response to her brother’s outburst. “That doesn’t even make sense,” she muttered, realizing she herself had spoken from a trance. Then she picked up her history book and resumed reading aloud: “‘The Frengan tribal leaders grew weary of war…’ Well, duh!” she yelled, as if personally offended by their clannish asininity. She read on:

“’In desperation, ambassadors from the Frengan tribes began to travel to Zshinia, the Knowing Place, that they might gain true understanding. There they found envoys from other kingdoms seeking the same. What must we do to have peace? they asked. “Surrender everything” was all the Zhinian Prophets would say. The ambassadors returned again and again, each time being told the same, and each time departing in ire, countering, We are Frengan! We surrender to no one!

“‘But then a change began to occur. Some returned from Zshinia with a peace inside them, a peace that had come, they said, from ‘surrendering everything to Uol.” Thus, it was not nations but individuals who laid the groundwork for the Ten Kingdoms of Is’mara (“the way of peace”), who formed the first Great Council, and in their prudence chose not a mighty chieftain but a humble prophet to be their Prime Regent.’”

The coach’s travelers stayed at a glorified cowshed that night, sleeping—or rather not sleeping—on prickly hay-stuffed pallets. In lieu of rest, Gina endured endless mental repetitions of swordplay…cut, hack, slice, parry, verbé, scissor, windmill…and more nightmare visions of the Dark Tinkurs.

In his own parody of sleep, Zack watched people being completely erased as stolen memories were used to feed the Tinkurs’ magic.

The next morning, Gina practiced furiously, madly, not so much with Buigor as at him. Then, after two and a half hours of savage hacking, cutting, and slicing, she holstered her blade and stomped off to the coach.

How much longer could this go on?

φ

Thoughts: Most dreams are surreal mashups. But not all. Some are actually trying to tell us something. And the trick is to discern what.

To read the next episode, click here.