Hovering, invisible; the Nightwalker watched from the shadows as the girl entered the room.
This was the one Grimmus had sent him to find. The second anomaly. She had a strange Gift, he had been told. Even stranger than his.
He lurked, half-hidden, waiting to watch what would follow.
The dreamstate was a large room, the ceiling adorned with a shifting fresco of clouds rendered in satin strokes. High and arching, the walls curved into delicately embroidered doorways that led only into blackness; in fact, the edges of the room rippled with shadows. They puddled in the alcoves and slimed the great marble columns.
The girl wore a blue dress, made of gauze and silver, which she kept smoothing down as it lifted up around her knees. Her head tilted to the ceiling, she surveyed the velvet-coated balconies that lined the ornate floor. All of them led into whorls of thicker shadow.
And then he saw the first Manifestation.
The balcony the girl watched began to stretch towards the ground until it joined with the floor in jagged protrusions that resolved themselves into a grand staircase, with gilt-edged banisters and curving arms. The balcony itself had three doors; each one empty, lurking, sinister.
The Nightwalker saw now why he had been sent here. So this was the girl's Gift – she could manipulate the dreamstate. The Nightwalker smiled to himself. Indeed, it was a strange talent. One that Grimmus would not like to have out of its control.
As the girl continued to stare, squint-eyed, at the balcony, the darkness on the farthest door to the right began to take shape. From it came the form of a woman, dressed in white gossamer and a mask of utter sorrow. She stood at the railings, looking straight through the girl below as if the latter was invisible – but it was the woman herself who was transparent, filmy, floating inches above the ground.
The girl's face changed as he watched. Her focused expression became lost, vacant. Her mouth moved, but made no sound.
Hours passed, the dreamstate wavered, but held, and at last the girl spoke.
"Mother."
The woman startled, and so did he. The girl could not only manipulate the dreamstate – she could see those who had left. He remembered, now, this woman's last dream, in which he had ushered her from the Corporeal to something even he had not seen. Perhaps if the woman were to see him, she would remember him as a grim reaper of sorts. Would she scream at the sight of his blackened face? Would she and her daughter disappear?
Nothing happened. Yet slowly, infinitesimally, the woman began inching down the stairs. She did not bother with the steps, and instead she glided over them. Her hands passed through the railings. Even here in the dreamstate, the woman did not have a body. That seemed to be the limit of the girl's abilities.
The woman reached the bottom of the stairs, and the three of them stood like statues for several eternities.
Then the woman embraced the girl. The room faded away; the dreamstate turned pliable, cottony, pale. And he recognized it.
Even before he'd walked through the dreamstates on Grimmus's missions: he pulled handfuls of fear and hatred from inside himself, scattered it around like sand. It fell upon the dreams of people whom he hated, whom he did not, whom he could not even have known.
Those seeds of sand blossomed; not like flowers, but thorns. They grew into something wicked. As the man walked through the eons he planted gardens of hate and terror and worry, and these dreams turned sour and wilted.
He made people bolt upright in bed in the wee hours of the morning. He made them soil their sheets and run to arms of comfort. He made them suffer, and he enjoyed it.
But after: his fear-scattering was to be controlled. Where earlier he had gone on rampages, on missions of only vengeance, Grimmus now asked him to give the Nightmares to those who truly deserved them.
One of the first of these missions – the one he remembered most vividly – was for a young girl. He had given the seeds to children before - unsuspecting, innocent children who had done nothing unpleasant at all – but this one surprised him, because for the first time, he thought of not giving her the seed at all.
Her dreamstate was soft, hazy. Growing. There was no color at all. No emotions to sour, nothing to spoil. The seed could not grow without a ground.
He ran his fingers through the fog, and they came away sticky with nothing. Curious, he found a small seed – one that would cause almost no harm – and placed it gently in the haze. It dissolved into many glinting specks of black dust. He smiled. It had worked.
But the girl's dreamstate had not changed. It was still white and grey, empty. He tossed a larger seed, to the same result. Nothing happened at all.
Frustrated, he formed in his hands the largest seed he could muster, as wide as his shoulders, and thrust it into the girl's dreamstate.
It simply absorbed the seed. Nothing changed. He could sense her breathing in the Corporeal world – steady, peaceful.
Resigned, he passed out of the dreamstate. He had done what was asked of him, and now it was time to move to the next mission. But he never forgot the way the dreamstate stuck to his skin.
Again, it clung to him in the same way. He shuddered, tried to erase its familiarity, but nothing changed at all. Gasping, eyes wide open in shock, he looked up. The woman disintegrated, and the girl looked at him.
He hid himself in another dreamstate that just happened to be floating past – but the girl's caught him and pulled him back. He was face to face with her again.
"What do you want?" Her voice came from everywhere and yet was a whisper in his ear.
"Your Gift," came another voice. Grimmus stood behind the Nightwalker, a spot of dark against the white softness of the girl's dreamstate. Slowly, it floated towards them. "You are a danger if left unchecked."
"Will you take it away?" Her voice became small and meek, and little ribbons of fear-yellow wound through the dreamstate. The Nightwalker stroked their twisting forms with wonder.
Grimmus chuckled, a sound of metal on metal. "No. You will become it."
And then somewhere inside the girl, in her deep subconscious, something must have consented, because at that instant she began to change. A cloak of white cloud grew on her shoulders, a hood curled over her head. Her face disappeared into white. Her body lengthened and turned translucent, so that only the barest suggestion of it could be seen from any angle.
"You are the Seamstress," said Grimmus.
She bowed.
