Knights of the Grey City

Chapter 70 - CORRUPTION

For each individual in my world, events have a sequence: cause and effect are clear within our own minds and bodies. However, just because events proceeded in a certain way for me does not mean they proceeded with the same tempo in another being.

I was once attacked by a wolf and bear a scar on my side. I wounded the wolf in return. Yet, depending on where I travel, I may encounter that same wolf before he bore his wound, though I still bear my scar. Time is a dance, moving back and forth.

I do not understand how time works for the dreamers. They tell me that, in their world, all share the same time, and so their perceptions are all in lockstep. There is no rhythm, no back and forward motion, only a relentless march toward a future that cannot be grasped and a past that cannot be revisited—not by anyone.

And so it was natural that they created things that could not be changed or visited before their existence.

I visited a new land created by Lilith and could find no trace of what had existed in that place before, if anything.

Lilith was a ruler. A warrior. In this world, she was not Nebu's daughter or Aram's sister, but her own self, Lilith the Fierce, the wolfslayer. She made herself a land of walls and battlements and created vessels to walk with her as her subjects.

She was able to speak with the Core and create new types of beings that had not existed before. Normally, vessels were built piecemeal from dreams and stories, things which were the lifeblood of the Core. Yet Lilith was able to say, "I wish for there to be walking suits of armour to protect me," and the Core obliged, filling those vessels with spirits of its own accord.

How long had it been for her? I cannot say. In appearance she had changed, her skin worn, her face longer.

I visited the lands of Nebu. "I have found heaven," he said, and built all that he desired, and invented farms and trade and wealth. It was a strange thing, a new thing: where he walked, time fell into lockstep, people desired to acquire the goods he offered, and he was regarded as a great merchant. The rules he lived by seeped into the soil, making this land more like his than ours.

"How are things in your world?" I asked him, and he looked at me as if I spoke of a place he'd never been to.

What would happen to them if they stayed here? They were only visitors. I had expected them to be turned away at some point—yet the Core loved them and their ideas and was still absorbed in the joy of creating all that they imagined.

I visited the lands of Aram. Aram built bridges, all manner of them, until they spanned the sky and the ground and the chasms beneath the ground. I knew now that he was trying to get back to his world, but not alone, not empty-handed.

"What is the value of these?" I asked, nudging a pile of gold and gems. "Why take them with you?"

"I can have wealth," he said, and I remembered what Nebu the Lord had created, and I understood his desire.

Yael had many lands.

She created them like a child drawing, creating then moving on to create another, trailing worlds behind her like footsteps. They were beautiful worlds. Waterfalls flowed in reverse from oceans to hovering islands; stone statues the size of immense mountains looked down on fields of rainbow colour. Spaces appeared that you would float through rather than walk, breaking through trails of light.

"I love this place," she told me. "The dream realm exists to be moulded and changed. Our presence only speeds things along."

"This is true," I said, "but I fear you began to change the Core itself, and I do not wish for anything to happen to it."