Chương 99: Chapter 32: The Oneiric World

Selena followed the direction implied in the grotesque gesture of Valerian, traversing serpentine paths and semi-hidden passages among the cultivated undergrowth, until arriving at a door of solid coral, worn and without any plaque, embedded into the side of an observation tower apparently in disuse. It was the master's office. Before knocking, there was already a note pinned with a rusty iron pin to the wood.

The calligraphy, convoluted and nervous, read:"Crimson, the first dilemma (a small one, to warm up) is to find on which leg the book is. With love, V." Selena whispered an oath between her teeth, an echo of the frustration that was already a habitual companion. She pushed the door, which gave way with a plaintive creak. The interior was a physical and palpable extension of the chaotic brain of Valerian.

It was not the studied disorder of a scholar, but the active collapse of a mind that threw ideas as if they were smoke grenades. Books lay open on the floor, their pages folded in obscene corners. Piles of parchments rose like precarious towers, some crowned by forgotten teacups with mold in their interior. Tables of different sizes and styles competed for space, all covered in a stratum of papers, dust, strange instruments of measurement and remains of dry food.

The air smelled stale, withered herbs and a slight metallic note, as if it were the acrid smell of a too-rusted metal. With annoyance giving her a mechanical precision, Selena set herself to the task. She knelt next to each table, checking each carved or turned leg, scrutinizing the corners where the dust formed cities in miniature. Nothing. There was no book at all, nor note, nor clue. After the fourth table, a silent anger began to boil in her chest.

Valerian was not only a jester, he was a tyrant of someone else's time. With a sigh that was more a contained grunt, she abandoned the floor and dedicated herself to scrutinizing the bookshelves. They were so packed and disorganized that finding a specific title was like looking for a needle in a haystack. She passed her fingers over the spines of leather, parchment and wood, reading titles at random: "Seismic Chants of the First Days", "Treatise on the Melancholy of Stones", "Bestiary of the Imaginary".

Nothing that resembled"The Oneiric World of the Bandaged Mage". It was then, when already the frustration threatened to turn into pure rage, when her gaze fell on the only piece of furniture that seemed to have a defined purpose: a monumental desk, carved with creatures of erratic shapes in attitudes of agony. The central drawer was slightly open. Selena opened it completely. There, upon a pile of broken wax seals, frayed feathers and pieces of charcoal, lay the book.

Its spine was of a dark leather, without inscriptions. Upon the cover rested two superimposed notes. The one on the bottom, in the same handwriting of the door, said simply: "leg". Upon it, another, with a drawn arrow pointing to the first, clarified: "some table". It was a joke within a joke, a layer of deliberate absurdity. Selena took the book, feeling its moderate weight, and pressed it against her chest.

There was no triumph in the gesture, only the tired relief of having overcome the first trivial obstacle of a master who turned even the errands into labyrinth. Without looking back at the chaos of the office, she left, directing her steps back to the relative peace of her room in the Cloister of the Forest. The fresh afternoon air, laden with the aroma of humid earth and bark, was a balm after the dusty confinement.

Once seated at her desk, a piece of light wood and simple lines that was an oasis of order in her life, she asked Fjora, with a gesture, to bring lunch for the three of them. The warrior nodded with her habitual silent efficiency and slid out of the room. Only then, with the afternoon sun painting golden rectangles on the floor, Selena opened the book of the bandaged mage. There was no florid preface, nor dedication to a patron.

The introduction began with a dry, confessional prose that spoke of cycles completing themselves:"The compendium written here is the very life of a mage, written when at his forty-five years he is already sufficiently old to notice the shadow of his death shortening. My legacy, far from curses or grandiloquence's, will be a chronicle of interpretations, the fruit of many years of experience paid with the same coin that all of us know.

The Halom is the connection that deciphers dreams, and although chaotic, fragmentary and confusing as thought itself, it is of an existential value incalculable for every mage who prizes his own destiny or that of those he loves. For life, for us, is not only contemplation or vain desires. It is, in its deepest core, the capacity to glimpse the undeniable destiny woven by causality. And the coin of payment for that glimpse… is the same curse with which we carry.

It is for this reason, and for deeper reasons that I present in the ultimate instance in this book, that the future, war, sickness, the everyday, love, pain, loss and happiness, all of it combined, creates what society calls 'reality'. But that which we who are the cursed, those of us who have whispered to the Void… call Halom." This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. The reading was interrupted by the return of Fjora with a wooden tray.

They ate in silence, the simple act of chewing fresh bread and a stew of legumes being an anchor in the tangible world. Samira, as always, observed with that calmness that absorbed everything. When the night began to show its first blue fingers through the window, Selena lit a tallow lamp. The small flame, dancing and smoking, was her only companion when she resumed the reading, submerging herself more into the methodical mind of the bandaged mage.

"The first thing of all," continued the text,"is that the mage must accept, with a humility that borders on desperation, that the Halom is not omnipotent. Many, in their anguish, want to use it to escape destiny, to twist the thread that is already woven. But what this servant has noticed, after thousands of visions and their corresponding fulfillments, is that the destiny that is seen in the true dream is the correct and immutable one. Those who swear to have changed it… delude themselves.

They did not alter destiny; they only fulfilled, without knowing it, the path they had already seen. This is one of the great tragedies of our gift: it shows us the prison, but it does not give us the key. However," and here the prose softened slightly,"it is also comfort. Because that illusion of agency, that belief of man that he can carve his happening… is in itself a powerful driving force. It is what makes us get up every morning, despite knowing it."

Selena turned the page, absorbed by the mournful but lucid tone of the author.

"The mage obtains this true vision not from the world, but from the Void. Which your servant, after years of study, likes to define less as a 'nothingness' and more as 'the Unknowable'. The Void, curiously, cannot be seen in the Halom. It is the blank canvas, the silence between the notes.

From this paradox is born the first law that I have discovered in twenty-seven years of long study of painful rebounds, of failed spells, of bad interpretations that cost tears and blood, and of polishing the method until the failure is almost insignificant." The following words were written with a darker ink, almost engraved into the parchment, like an epitaph or an oath:"The Void has no future nor past. It is Everything at once."

Selena closed the book gently, not with a slam of horror like with that of Eliud, but with a pensive slowness. A strange sensation, almost of intellectual vertigo, invaded her. It was not the visceral terror before the confession of a tormented founder. The bandaged mage was something else: a scholar, a scientist of the arcane, who had dedicated his life to subjecting the chaos of dreams and the Void to a method, to a law. But that law…

defining the Unknowable as something that lacked linear time, that was "Everything at once", was an almost incomprehensible concept. In her mind, in the deepest part where the man of the earth had his echoes, she knew that the dimensions were three, plus time as a river that flowed in one direction. To imagine an existence where future, past and present melted into a single point, where causality was not an arrow but a sphere… was abysmal.

To arrive at that conclusion had not been a flash of illumination, but the fruit of decades of meticulous observation, of error and correction, of paying with fragments of his own life for each data, for each glimpse. The bandaged mage had not been a warrior or a king. He had been an explorer. And he had mapped, at the highest price, a territory of the mind and of reality that made one's hair stand on end. Selena left her hand upon the cover of the book, feeling the echo of that fanatic dedication.

She understood, now, that the path of magic was not only paved with blood and agony, but also with a monastic patience and curiosity so fierce that it devoured the very one who possessed it. Tired to the point of exhaustion, not only of body but of the constant intellectual and emotional dance, Selena threw herself onto the bed without even undressing completely.

With her boots still on and the green wool dress wrinkling beneath her, she crawled under the pile of wool blankets and furs that warded off the humid cold of the Cloister. Sleep took her like a thief, swift and brutal, dragging her into a pit of dreamless darkness.