Clouded is the Eye

By: Delphinus Posted on: November 30, 2007

The sun clove brazen wedges over the pale-bearded Sangre Plains, nestled as it was within the ides of Valnuary. Midsummer's keen intensity buzzed with idle glee, content in its own simplicity, and there hung above the grasslands a wavering heat that brought life buckling and lazing beneath its heavy mantle. Cicadas droned; ruminants grazed; and somewhere, ensconced amid the towheaded waves of grass, a young traveller of no more than twenty faltered upon his feet.

Slumping to his knees, the man exhaled heavily as he fell supine below the tall grasses; and the vultures above, for all their carrion-hewn fever, knew better than to circle. Stray locks of chestnut fell ragged over his pate, cloaking his vision. He fully expected to return to his recurrent reverie of late, a private Limbo of frozen, sickly clouds ushered in upon a bated atmosphere thick with fragrant smoke; where, beneath an archway of crushed velvet, he would lay helpless and prone in expectancy of waking hours.

The man's chestnut-crowned head slumped and his muscles lolled, but he neither slept nor lapsed in awareness. For a seeming eternity he lay upon the crushed, springy straw and earth, grasshoppers and mayflies winging nonchalantly over the pollen-thick grasses. Only his own heart, its measured, steady tempo beating a subdued tom-tom, stood out against the formless white noise of the summer prairie.

"Sir! Sir there!"

The traveller made the slightest vain attempt to shift toward the distant sound, rucksack biting uncomfortably into his back and shoulders. There, carried upon the wind was a voice - a girl's voice - muted by the reedy susurrus of the enveloping grasslands. Would that the vultures were taunting his misfortune, he mused, seizing upon his mind in what he assumed was noontide heat.

"Are you all right there, sir?"

A soft-edged Petran drawl. Blunted. Gaining in intensity.

"Sir?"

A face.

The man's eyes strained to dissociate the form above him from the marbled white and blue sky. There knelt over his face a fetching waif of a woman, dressed in a simple, earthen-hued bodice and blouse, with dark auburn curls that shone strawberry beneath the smiling sun. Her large hazel eyes gazed down upon him, fraught with concern, and she pressed the mouth of an oaken vial to his sweatless lips.

A new voice rung out from somewhere beyond his vision: a man's voice. As a third joined the conversation, muted though it was, it dawned upon the traveller that his consciousness was faltering once more. His vision began to swim, clouds and sky halting within the celestial vault, and he felt rough hands hoisting him above the grasses to ferry him through the acrid, smoky air.

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The traveller thrust himself upright, emerging from his slumbering stasis as a drowning man might burst from the surface of a lake. He was sitting upon a bed within a rustic, simply furnished bedroom, with tall single-pane windows, barren floorboards, and a polished kawhe table that held an open vial. The bitter aftertaste of a frost elixir lingered upon his tongue. At his bedside, a young woman inclined her auburn-cloaked head politely.

"You'd be my saviour, then?" the man spoke with an air of finality as his nerves settled. "I am indebted to you, if so."

The girl nodded. "Treiya by name, sir. This is my pa's homestead, and he carried you in with my brother. Mightn't I pry as to what your name is?"

"Gell... Gellan," came a sputter of a reply. The word sounded foreign to him, and produced itself autonomously.

"Mister Gellan, then," the girl continued. "'Tis a small wonder you did not succumb utterly to the heat." She heaved an admonishing sigh. "You weren't sweating. That means heatstroke, you know.

Gellan looked about wearily, his expression addled and half-cognisant. "Wasn't I?" His mind's eye was fixated upon the alarming unfamiliarity of what he assumed to be his own name.

Treiya nodded, vexed by the man's apathy. "And what might've brought you out into the Sangre, if I could be so bold?"

"I don't recollect." Gellan realised the underlying revelation in his own words with mounting dread. Something had pillaged the chapel of his memories, ransacked his most sacred of sanctuaries and left it to moulder in empty condemnation.

His distress did not go unnoticed. The farm girl smiled warmly and assured him, "You can stay here as long as you like, until you regain your bearings. This is the guest room, as fortune would have it. You'll have to talk to my pa - he'll likely ask only that you fill your own share of the chores as they require mindin'."

The man made an attempt to sit upright. He vacillated, and then slumped backward once more.

Treiya laughed melodically. "Tomorrow. You'll start work tomorrow. For now, rest."

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Seasons came and seasons went: first as autumn stole away with the land's viridity, and then again, as winter's nimble grasp plucked the last withered shells from the trees. During the day Gellan worked the fields, made repairs, and tended to whatever else the farmstead was found in need of. In the night he slept fitfully, ever fitfully, waking and lashing out against restraints that held him fast within the confines of his own dreams. His paralysis and related stress were such that he came to dread the night, though always with a vain hope reserved within his heart: one night he would break free of that red velvet archway, and take for his own the insight that lay beyond.

As the days marched on, it became clear to both Gellan and Treiya that a mutual fondness was burgeoning. Though propriety and uncertainty stayed their hands to any undue degree, the two began to unconsciously synchronise their long-term plans. Treiya had made arrangements with a chamberlain abroad, and was setting off to work at the Deautrive estate in Cyrene the following autumn. Gellan would accompany her, for he hoped to troll the Cyrenian records in pursuit of legal documents that might trigger some memory etched within the deeper archives of his mind.

Spring arrived at long last, and with it the lion's share of farmyard chores. Gellan tilled and sowed crops upon the barren fields as was necessary, relishing the same earthy, ascetic lifestyle as any other day, and he rested his body and mind as any other night. His eyelids flicked shut as clouds began to form within his mind's eye.

"Hey mister!" a shrill, whispering voice called from somewhere outside. A sharp rapping, as of knuckles on glass, interrupted his banal descent into the land of dreams.

Gellan rolled deftly out of bed and leapt to his feet, producing a folded steel machete from beneath his goose down pillow. He crept cautiously to the window, squinting as his eyes adjusted in the dizzying shadow.

The cherubic face of a tiny girl-child gazed at him from the moonlit yard outside, blue cervine eyes framed in ringlets of shining gold. "Mister!" she whispered with all the urgency expected of one so young. "We've been lookin' for ya! You're missing something!"

The man lowered his weapon, utterly nonplussed. "Missing... Wait, what? Who are you?"

Tugging at her ruffled white frock, the girl fidgeted impatiently. "Gotta ask the guy for your stuff back!" She tapped the side of her temple with a delicate finger, jarring loose the butterfly that had alighted upon her hand. "This stuff. We've been looking for you since you ran off! I know you lost it, and I know he's got it. You prolly ran off here to look for it, but you shouldn't have run off at all!"

At that moment, what little hope the aimless dreamer had reserved came welling upward in a surge of adrenaline. He slipped into his boots and overcoat with haste, his heart clopping elated horse-trails within his ears. The machete he lodged firmly between his belt and trousers, much to the little girl's outward dismay, and he slipped innocuously through the tilted window pane into the yard beyond.

A light, metallic jostling sound alerted Gellan to the presence of a knight, clad in dulled fullplate, cowering and glancing about sharply behind the rhododendrons. "Gads, mate, you're not s'posed to be here!" he whispered shrilly. "N-none of us are. Not s'posed! This is horrible. We have to get back."

Treiya crept out carefully from around the corner of the farmhouse, looking disheveled. "Back to where?" she inquired. All heads turned toward her; the knight nearly toppled over. "I heard whispering," she admitted sheepishly.

"The Mesmerium!" the shaking knight yelped. "We have to go back to the sodding Mesmerium!"

The little girl nodded emphatically, partially unravelling the blue ribbon set within her hair. "It's true, we do! That's where you left your stuff! C'mon!" She tugged eagerly at Gellan's hand.

Gellan glanced confusedly at Treiya, whose expression reflected the same. Wordlessly, they set off.

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Moonlight spread diffusely over the open, rolling weald, pinpricks of light blotted and dulled as though filtering the stars through a heavy woollen blanket. Empyrean hammers had drawn felt-limned gashes through the mantle of clouds above, and the celestial vault hung open through its nephological wounds. Soon, the red-gambrel barns and whitewashed farmhouses of Petra dipped below the horizon and out of sight. Gellan mulled silently over their motley band - a pluckily optimistic child, a blanched and fearful knight, a Petran farm girl, and an amnesiac whose nights were condemned to the more rote extremities of the Dreamrealm - but in truth, the long and winding Prelatorian had seen far stranger things in its day.

They wandered for hours, the steady scrape of armour grinding noisily over the roadside cricket-song. Finally, Gellan spoke. "So this person... He'll be able to help with my memories?"

The girl nodded emphatically, a cheery smile painted from dimple to dimple.

"And you and the knight," he continued. "Where did you two come from?"

"Same place you did, silly! The good sir knight already told ya that." She curtsied politely in the knight's direction, eliciting a sudden flinch from the armoured man.

After a time, the great jagged blot of the Aureliana Forest loomed into sight, black marble ruins squatting at its edge beside the Urubamba rapids. The girl skipped alongside a cracked monolith and plopped herself upon it, giggling as she watched a translucent butterfly alight upon her right palm.

The knight halted dead in his tracks. "Right, this is as far as I'll venture. Not mingling with that angry lot again! No sir, no thank you," he proclaimed with an air of incredulity. Blinking through the visor of his helmet, he removed his gleaming longsword and handed it to Gellan. "Take this, mate. I'm not gonna need it."

Gellan frowned, concern evident upon his features. "And just why would I need it?" He replaced the machete in his belt with the knight's blade, handing his former armament to Treiya.

Sticking out her lower lip in a pitiful pout, the girl shot her knightly friend a withering look of disapproval. The knight yelped in surprise. "You won't!" she exclaimed. "None of you'll need to fight at all!"

As the knight rolled his eyes and sat shivering upon a block of marble, his back pressed firmly to the stony wall beside him, the three remaining travellers descended the decrepit, musty stairwell leading into the abandoned bowels of the Mesmerium. Dewy cobwebs glinted and winked idly along the twilit passage, following the stairway as it terminated in darkness. At last, the three came upon a great subterranean windmill of becalmed, whitewashed planks and ornate floral trellises.

The child pointed a tiny hand at the windmill's luminescent arch. "He's in there," she whispered.

Gellan crept silently toward the windmill with longsword gripped firmly in hand, his eyes darting about in the darkness. There lumbered within the mouldering structure a hulking abomination, pale, rubbery flesh drawn with vitreous slickness over its noxious hide. It supported its long, tubular trunk upon two muscular arms complemented by a myriad of sucker-encrusted tentacles. The creature's deformed head bore three glowing eyes in a triangular formation, and in the centre bulged an uncut sapphire.

"That's him!" the girl whispered emphatically. "That's the guy! See? He has it on his forehead!"

Gellan shot an accusatory glance over his shoulder. "That's not a guy! That's not even a person, it-"

A sinewy, mucus-slick tentacle shot forth from the tenebrous doorway, wrapping itself around his waist. The man cried out in surprise as he found himself plummeting backward into a well of darkness. "Please don't fight! The path of war is the path of folly!" the little girl's cry echoed from the caverns of the Mesmerium outside. Treiya gasped suddenly, pushing closer to the structure in a desperate bid to help.

Gellan raised his gleaming longsword bellicosely, preparing to drop his arm in a broad swath across the fell dream horror's head. The creature preempted him, however, and a pair of rubbery tentacles snaked out with lightning speed to snap the folded steel in two. A piercingly high note rang out through the chamber, cutting sharply through the air, before the weapon's keening swan song was muffled beneath an avalanche of blubbery flesh.

Treiya tossed her machete toward Gellan's grasp. The man reached wide for the flailing weapon, prompting a mass of cilia to spring out and cling fast to his wrist; the machete rebounded harmlessly off of the rubbery tentacles and clattered to the floor. There he watched, helpless as a sinewy, sucker-encrusted appendage lashed out and twined itself around his head. The tentacle pulsed and throbbed against his skull with a lurching undulation as it drained his life energy bit by precious bit.

Dazed and reeling from the assault, Gellan struggled against his captor's bindings once more. To his surprise, his arms passed through the nightmare horror's tentacles as though water. He raised his palms to his gaze: ethereal, and fading with each leeching slurp. Without thinking, he thrust a hand into the centre of what he determined to be the creature's chest and willed corporeality to his fingertips with the fullest of his mind's ability. Fingers caught on slippery, rubbery innards and ichor, sloshing coldly around his grasp. He withdrew his arm with a violent, singular motion, and the creature howled an otherworldly scream of torment as its viscera were drawn forcefully from its body. Soon, it was still.

Gellan shook free of his bindings with a shudder, paying no heed to Treiya and the young girl as they crept into the windmill's rusted, gear-studded interior. He wiped the foul ichor upon his trousers. "Girl... What happened just there?" he asked. "I began to disappear for a moment."

The girl giggled and tilted her head. "Silly man! That's what happens to all of us dream apparitions when the horrors get to them!"

Gellan blinked and looked about blankly, mulling over the revelation. "I'm... a dream."

"Of course you are!" the little girl said with no small amount of juvenile frustration. "We all are! We came outta the Dreamrealm, don't you remember?"

"Of course I am," Gellan echoed. "That makes sense." He could make little sense of any of what had transpired, in truth, and his mind rebelled against the disjointed product of some passing flight of fancy. A nauseous knot built in his stomach - whether from mounting apprehension or the dead dream-creature's physical toll - and he doubled over, slumping to his knees. Suddenly, he espied the sapphire embedded within the dead creature's forehead.

"Aren't you going to take it?" the girl asked innocently. "It's yours, isn't it?"

Gellan and Treiya exchanged nervous glances. He knew little of what would happen once he took that innocuous gem, but there a deep-seated need beyond his conscious thought. The deepest wells of his psyche cried out in longing for what had been purloined.

With a singular motion, his fingers dug deep into the horror's skull and pried the glistening sapphire free of its rubbery prison. The sapphire became a shimmering beacon of indigo, floating upward from his grasp before disappearing into his own forehead. "It's flooding back," he said with a faint smile. His form waxed incorporeal. "All of it. You're not going to bel-"

Treiya cried out in horror. Gellan flickered and was gone.

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Treiya stepped neatly from the carriage with an air of propriety, mustering up what little noble bearing she could. She tightened her shawl in an attempt to stifle the Cyrenian autumn chill, making her way up the stony steps to the Deautrive estate as primly as possible. The broad oaken door stood ajar, and she stepped across the threshold nervously.

Grand oaken balustrades swept upward along the side-stairs, ushering marble steps into the loftier reaches of the manor. Oak panelling bordered the stately stone walls, and the manor's ceilings were painted in a faded fresco depicting soft, fluffy clouds frozen in transit. She strode across the lobby and into what appeared to be Lord Deautrive's study.

Mounted upon a table set against the far wall of the study was a large glass display case not unlike a coffin, with a thick red cloth of crushed velvet draped ceremoniously over its lid. The ceiling bore the same faded cloud fresco that figured so prominently elsewhere in the manor, and the spicy redolence of incense hung thickly in the air. There, seated at a desk against the western wall, was the chestnut-haired form of a young noble.

Lord Deautrive turned his head in greeting to this, his expected visitor, but blanched suddenly as his eyes and hers made contact. He felt her presence jutting forth from the tenebrous shrouds of his psyche, bulging awkwardly within his mind like the thrice-buried suggestions of a fell Serpent. There was an aspect to this farm girl that becalmed his otherwise implacable nerves, and the young noble found his own helplessness deeply unsettling.

"Pardon my reticence if you would," he said with a stammer as he came to his feet. "The, ah... The majority of the house staff is on paid leave. As thanks for my... extenuating upkeep. I've been unwell recently, you see." Mustering the barest of awkward politesse, he attempted a bow. "Gellan Deautrive," he introduced himself, "and I have been eagerly awaiting the new chambermaid's assistant to rescue me from this mess. You'd be my saviour, then?"

The girl gave a simple nod, answering his civility with a curtsy and a smile. "Treiya by name, sir." She glanced out the window. The stars shone quiescent and unimpeded in the clear night sky.