I suppose you could compare my Realm to a bee colony. Most Dreamweavers would hate me if ever I said that out loud. But we had a lot of similarities.
We lived in a place that looked like a hive. It was spherical in shape on the outside with a central core where the Lumus was stored and collected from during ration. I was not actually sure how big it was in dimensions, but it was pretty big. There were about five thousand harvesters and pilots alone, not counting the other members.
The Realm was subdivided into different layers and sectors to accommodate all of us. The middle was hollowed out where the communal basin could be found. It was a massive cylindrical tube that started from the ground up to the topmost floor. It was designed in a way so one could gaze out to the core at eye-level, no matter which floor you happened to be on. At the ground floor the supervisor’s stations formed a ring around the communal basin, where all the Lumus transfer and ration were distributed.
Then forming into a flower-like fashion, thousands of small cubicles held the portals where we did our assignments. The second layer of petals was where one would find the great hall — where meetings were held, the infirmary, the social hall, and the hallowed room for prayers and worship.
The living compartments of the Realm’s population could be found on the upper and lower levels. Below were the private compartments of the Council of Elders as well as the quarters used by the members of the Sentry. I’d never really explored those areas since the only times I’d been called down there was to be reprimanded for something I had done. I wasn’t that masochistic.
Then finally above were the numerous living quarters of the common people of the Realm, which sported hexagonal-shaped entrances to our personal compartments — another reason I’d said it looked like a beehive.
Like the bees, we had a queen. Even though I’d never actually seen our queen, we had one — apparently. She was said to be the source of all our magic and held the secret of our very existence that separated us from the human world. However, for her protection, her whereabouts were a well-kept secret by the Council of Elders, our Realm’s governing body. News of the queen and her messages were relayed by the Elders daily at ration time.
The Council of Elders were made up of five Dreamweavers. They had been around way, way before I’d come into being, and consisted of three males and two female Elders. All the rules and principles of our Realm may have come from the queen, but they were implemented by the Elders. Whatever the Elders said was law. No one questioned it or said otherwise.
Then there was the Sentry who served as our protectors and the ones who kept peace. Not that they needed to keep peace, since all the Dreamweavers were very peaceful. Voices would rise on occasions, but very rarely would anybody shout or scream out of anger. I wouldn’t knock a peaceful environment. It just seemed unnatural.
We had a number of healers who cared for us and nursed us back to health whenever we’d been exposed to nightmares or night terrors. I’d met several of them in my time.
And, of course, we had supervisors like Seferina, who collected and tended to the accumulated Lumus.
Then, last but not least, were people like Dmitri and me, harvesters and pilots. We were the working bees in our colony, and we collected honey in the form of Lumus to keep all of us alive. We always worked in pairs and were assigned to different humans during our rotation to avoid getting attached to our assignments. Four different shifts covered different human time zones. It was also a good way to distribute harvester’s interaction with bad dreamers, those who attracted nightmares a lot. I was a harvester, and Dmitri was my pilot.
