The man walked alone.
He searched the streets for his destination – not a place, or a thing, but a feeling. Even then it was more the suggestion of the feeling than the feeling itself, the stretch-and-pull of a string caught in his chest. It was a sensation of curious novelty and he reveled in the little tug it made between his ribs, in the way he could see it shimmering like a bloody line in front of him, if he angled his head just right.
Around him, the dreamstate was warm. They weren't usually; this one was an exception. The states he usually walked in had a current that throbbed ice-cold, a sense of foreboding, even screams in the distance, sometimes. He wasn't put off by those, not as much as the others, but he still preferred when it was calmer.
Though it was warm the state was still dark, muggy – the air clumped around itself and stuck to his skin. He peeled it off as he went, digging his nubby nails under it and yanking with more force than was necessary. It made a sort of shrill whistling as it left him, a sound he imagined only he could hear.
The floor changed under him. Sometimes it was a checkerboard, sometimes it was cement. Other times it became the pelt of a leopard, spotted with grinning eyes, then morphed into gold-veined marble. When it shifted he was momentarily startled, but soon felt as though it had been that way the whole time.
The dreamstate played many tricks, even if you were not the dreamer.
It was a vast room, this one. In the distance he could see others walking, but their eyes were void and they stared straight ahead, one foot in front of the other again and again. They were not like him; not with their own thought and worry. He ignored them and walked on.
Soon the ground began to warp and rise from the ground, fold into tall skyscrapers. The empty roof became sky the color of whispers, roiling grey and silver, and the buildings dived into it and disappeared. He tried to count the buildings, but there were first fifty and that became a thousand and suddenly the single building in front of him was immeasurable.
He shook his head, and the dreamstate laughed at him.
The inchoate darkness pooled and slithered into forms that were both frightening and curious. The man did not deign to notice these. He hurried on, for the red string now pulsed heavy and thick as blood. He was close. So, so close, and the dreamstate couldn't lie about this.
It led him to a building, solid and grey, which turned in a slow circle as it spiraled up from the earth. An edifice, imposing and baleful, its tip marred by the soft bunching of clouds. A doorway slid open at its base – one second it was not there and the next it was – and he slid through. It felt much like a hole made specifically for him.
Inside, the stairs spread themselves apart. They ran up to infinity, and he counted the uncountable: one, two, three, four, as he put his feet down. They were made of empty space that shivered and rippled like water when he touched it.
At last he reached the roof. It was not pointy like a needle like he'd expected, but neither was it flat. He had emerged somewhere else entirely. Around him lay a necrotic field of grass. Flowers, cyanosis blue, crumpled on their knees. The wind laughed like an echo. It rattled of damnation.
But the man kept his focus on the figure in front of him.
His destination.
"At last," said Grimmus.
The man bowed, shoved to his knees on the ground.
Grimmus turned, and the man kept his head down. He'd heard stories about those who looked into the Sifter's face – they were trapped in the dreamstate forever.
Not that he wasn't already.
"My Nightwalker," rasped Grimmus, and smiled. Not a real smile, but the sketch of how one should be: hollow, thin. "I have been looking for you. Through a thousand existences. Yet you find me in the first."
There was no concept of time in the dreamstate – it looped and circled itself. The man had been weaving backwards and forwards through eons like they were rooms.
He lifted his head, his eyes waiting. Almost imploring. His knees burrowed themselves into the ground. The skin felt like it was staining, even though here he had no skin at all.
Grimmus opened its nothing-mouth. The quiet was sucked in and released, like a breath that was not a breath: again and again, the dreamsifter traded silence with the air.
A heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Then, words. "I like to have under my command those who are a danger to my work. You understand, yes?"
The man did not give a response, and Grimmus did not wait for one. "You are a danger, an anomaly. You should not exist. Your Gift interferes with the dreamsifting."
He kept silent. The dreamsifting – the dealing of dreams to those in the Corporeal world – did not affect him like it did other people. He could stay conscious in the dreamstate, observe it. He traversed the subconscious shimmering of people, looking at their fears and their secrets and the insides of their hearts, ripped wide open, and felt nothing for every one of them.
And it was true: he should not exist. It was not the natural order of things. Long ago, in real time, he'd left the Corporeal world for this one. He had not aged in what must have been a thousand years.
Grimmus smiled, as if it had read the man's thoughts. "And so I will make you mine. My first Cardinal."
Shock, sudden and mustard yellow, morphed into the chartreuse of confusion. It churned in the man's stomach, bright and stalling, and a reply hissed the wrong way up his windpipe: "No."
"Yes," said Grimmus. "It has already been decided. By the dreamstate itself."
And Grimmus was right – the man could feel the air around him begging for a shift. Begging him to become part of it once and for all.
He closed his eyes. Gulped. Opened them again, and stared at the nothingness of Grimmus's hood directly. The world froze.
Then it shattered, and he bowed. Not of his own accord. Something was shoving his head down to his chest. He did not struggle.
He felt his clothes – unassuming, utterly forgettable – morph into robes not of white or black, but a color of pale sickness, a pallid in-between. It felt like tepid water. Like grime.
There passed an inexplicable change – utterly tangible, heavy, unsettling. It crawled in his skin and through marrow and cell. He shuddered, once, twice, a rippling of his entire soul, and at last the feeling left.
And suddenly he was no longer the lost soul, no longer the glitch – he was the Nightwalker.
