Sat with one knee drawn up and the other leg swinging loose, he curled his toes over the edge of the cold, steel table. He felt the blood squelch where it had begun to coagulate under his bare heel and lifted his hip flask for a slow mouthful of the contents. The heat of the liquor was even more pronounced than usual, the frigid temperature of the morgue with its gently humming wall of body lockers putting an ache to stiff, work-worn joints.

The fume hood drew away the rancid stink of his evening?s work, the results of which were liberally painting the slick, white tile in vivid splashes of red. It glinted under the fluorescent overheads like fractured garnets. It clung to the instruments alongside slender ropes of tissue and membrane. Person parts now unidentifiable, and as much of it clinging to him as his surroundings.

?I hope you enjoyed that,? he confided softly, ?because I sure as hell did. Vale, subject two four one.?

The little recording device beside him sat whirring gently, collecting sound. Earlier, it had swallowed up the agonised voice of a dying man, ready to be delivered to his client for entertainment purposes. They?d have preferred video evidence, they told him, but he steadfastly refused to be filmed, and he?d won out due to the recommendations he?d come with. Quality work, that?s what you?ll get from him. If you want them to hurt, he?s your man.

?I?m your man,? he echoed the memory, once he?d depressed the stop button with a soft click

He lifted the flask again, this time to salute the blaze, barely visible through the little round pane of reinforced glass. Burning the leftovers was a long process, and even with the heat of the incinerator, the thicker bones would need to be ground to powder. Dull work, but he?d had his cheap thrills already. He?d gorged on the severed soul-stuff that had come free of the flesh when it died, toying with it the way a cat might with prey it wasn?t truly hungry for, rolling and stretching and batting lightly with paws softened by sheathed claws.

He half wanted the desert man there for a fine finale, a careless, clumsy culmination of self-indulgent violence, but the other half knew better. Too much catharsis when he?d more work to do would only lead him to hedonistically wasted hours. Even without the sky to look up at, he knew that sun up wasn?t far off, and he didn?t like to handle business at dawn. Neither would she.

A sigh heaved his chest, all flat, lean muscle, deeply scar furrowed, a bloody handprint flaking away from skin Mediterranean dark, then he slipped down off the table and onto the sloping floor. Cleaning up could wait. His contact would not.


--------------------------------

He found Mira at Fortune?s Way, stood beside the fountain at its far end. The broad, circular basin was a mosaic of tiny ivory, bronze and gold tiles, littered with coins. People?s wishes. She was sat on its edge, shamelessly dipping her hand under the water to pluck them out, examining the profiles in high relief on the metal. So many different currencies, but she threw them all back, the bangles clinking around her narrow wrists.

She paused to take a deep drag from her smoke when she saw him coming, then with a shiver beneath the heavy leather of her jacket, she rose to greet him. Just a teenager, no more than seventeen, gangly in that long legged, knobbly kneed way, but dressed provocatively to suit her profession. Fishnets and a dress short enough that it didn?t quite cover everything from the rear view. Thin silk, tattered at the hem, smoke stained, sex stained, smudged with ash and mascara. Boots that might have been biker if they hadn?t been heeled high enough to take an eye out.

?Didn?t think you were coming,? she told him from behind her veil of blue-grey smoke, the cherry flaring bright as she inhaled again. Her voice was a dull monotone. Sounded dead. But her thickly kohl ringed eyes were anything but dismissive or dim. They were a startling blue, and her gaze was level and unblinking.

?Am I late?? he asked her, prowling around the spill of orange streetlight to meet her beside the fountain?s edge. A soft quork of a sound above drew his gaze away for a moment. A murder of crows were at roost in the trees a few feet away. Puffed, black balls of feather huddled against the night.

?No,? she smiled, and stepped in to press against him, curling her fingers into the front of his coat. There was no weight to her. She was just as lacking in extraneous flesh as he. ?Just pretend for now. In case someone comes looking. I have to make it look like I?m working, okay??

He knew how it worked and didn?t protest. Instead he lifted a hand to gently guide a lock of wind tousled brown hair back behind her ear.

?You are working,? he informed her, laconic. ?You?ll show me where he stayed??

?Sure,? she replied, the leather of her jacket creaking as she shrugged. She flicked the butt of her cigarette backwards and into the fountain, and it expired in a soft hiss. Winding her arm through his, she led him away across the cobblestones and deeper into the city. The girl didn?t press him for conversation. Smart little thing knew when it was better not to know, but he had questions for her, and couldn?t let opportunity slip by without asking.

?Did you give a sh** about him?? He frowned, wishing he had Sam?s heat to share, instead of the feeble warmth his body put out.

?Do you think I?d be taking you if I did?? she countered with a wry glance his way. The point was blunt enough that he didn?t doubt her honesty, but she went on anyway. ?He paid well, he didn?t rough me up, the place is clean.?

?A real gentleman,? Mesteno murmured, biting back a droll comment about how few of those Rhy?din seemed to harbour.

?Sure,? she replied nonchalantly, and he wondered if she was just fond of the word, or truly couldn?t have cared less about the discussion. ?I recognise you from the photos he had. The hair,? she smiled, reaching across to catch his between her fingers as if they were scissors, ?it?s hard to forget.?

?And what were you doing snooping in his photos, Mira?? he asked her, noting that her smile was no more innocent than her profession. She had her secrets, wasn?t downtrodden by the sex trade she worked.

The girl steered him around a corner, and brought him to a sharp halt in front of a modest looking apartment building. Little balconies with wrought iron railings. Small but respectable. She was looking up, towards the top floor with her blue eyes full of starlight. ?I wasn?t snooping. He?d go talk on the phone for ages. Didn?t care if I wandered around. They were just there on his desk.? She tugged at his arm again to draw him onwards towards the door that led into the lobby. He half expected to have to pick the lock, but she brought out a narrow piece of plastic - a key card - and whisked it through to open up for them. ?He didn?t like having to come down for me,? she informed him, before shoving her way inside, to hell with waiting for him to open it for her.


-----------------------------------


Alistair had been precise and uncompromisingly English, his manners not contrived but perfectly spontaneous. When Mesteno hadn?t been threatened by him, or double-crossing him, he?d actually liked him. Killing him had not been something he?d plotted, nothing more than an unfortunate, unpredictable turn of events in fact. Now he stood in the man?s bedroom, eyes searching, while Mira danced barefoot in the living room, bulky headphones clamped over her ears and eyes closed as if she were on some private high.

There was little in the way of anything personal. No pictures on the wall, no ornamentation that wasn?t practical, and even the bed itself was shunted to the side, leaving more space for the piano black desk and the cabinets towering to either side of it. The high backed leather chair was the only piece of furniture to show any wear, a depression in the seat that left Mesteno picturing him sat there for hours, puzzling over work. Work that his colleagues would have approved of though, or work he was doing on the sly, collaborating with Rhy?din?s dangerous, living refuse? People like him.

There was no computer to access - Alistair being smart, because saving his work to one was almost an open invitation for someone to hack his files, in this city - so Mesteno set to work on the cabinets, coaxing open locks and rifling through the paperwork with hands gloved. Patience had never been one of his virtues, and the longer he went without finding anything of relevance, the more pronounced his agitation became, until he had to pull away, snarling like a wolf just to breathe, brush himself off and begin anew.

?Found what you were looking for?? Mira asked him, knuckling a cigarette again, jacket discarded somewhere and kohl artlessly smudged around her eyes. He caught a glimpse of what Alistair had found so attractive about her for the briefest of moments, then she broke the spell by moving from the doorway, approaching him with that smile again.

?No,? he replied flatly, ignoring her until she closed her hands over his shoulders and leaned down to match his crouch, flashing more flesh down the neckline of her dress than was decent. His temper flared again, and he was reaching to pry her fingers away, frowning until he saw her tip her head, indicating away from the desk.

?I had a lot of time to wander,? she reminded him.

Alistair?s hiding places were unconventional, discreet, and Mira could have played the braggart rightfully if she?d been the sort to speak no more than a handful of words. Mesteno wondered if the Englishman ever had an inkling that he?d underestimated the girl, found himself recalling her at the fountain examining the coins for no other reason than curiosity, and hooked an arm about her sharply boned shoulders to squeeze gratefully.

Mira allowed it with a carefully crafted smile. Approval meant nothing to her. She stayed while Mesteno absorbed the contents of Alistair?s work, voraciously examining the photographic evidence - dozens of shots! - he?d never even mentioned.

There he was at the canals, blissfully ignorant of the camera, while a distant figure trailed behind, nondescript and blurred. Another photo, this time where he was out of focus and the man in pursuit?s features were more sharply depicted. Familiar. Another series from the docks, and another in the Market Square, though it was not always the same man. Here, a woman instead. And there, the large man with only one eye, not nearly so inconspicuous as his fellows.

?He looks like you,? Mira?s voice from over his shoulder, legs in their torn fishnets crossed at the ankles and arms folded.

?The f*** are you talking about?? he asked her, unintentionally sharp. He?d almost forgotten she was there. Too damn quiet.

She pointed with a finger tipped with a darkly painted nail, the polish chipped. ?Him. You don?t think so??

Incredulous, he stared at the shot she?d indicated, lifting it from amongst the others to examine the features of the one eyed man. Dark red hair faded with age, tall and built big, but the angles of his face were heavy at the jaw, pronounced at the cheekbone. A certain cruelty to his mouth which hinted at a parity, even if the fullness of his own lips did not match the narrow lines of this stranger?s.

?Don?t you think?? Mira asked him again. Damn that smile!


http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y61/ellizardo/Mira3.jpg

There is a fleeting moment in a dream where you are between asleep and awake, where the difference between fantasy and reality is a gray line. It can be hard to decipher what is real and what is not. Our Sadist was becoming quite good at that, which couldn't possibly be any good at all.

She'd found a note as promised, day and time, and slipped from the loft to a room in a place, someplace forgotten. Sleep did not come easy.

Sleep had arrived for him after a healthy dose of liquor. The gently soporific effect combined with the lulling, June heat had been all he needed to alleviate the day's tensions to the point that he could drift off untroubled. He lay on his side on a matted, sheepskin rug. It was the only thing in his living room, aside from books stacked tall - ancient, crumbling things in the Latin tongue - and sheet music screwed angrily into balls, cast aside when his inspiration had failed him mid-composition.

A short distance away, a sleek, white cat with eyes like pale winter skies observed with malaise. If ever an animal had a sixth sense...

Lucid dreaming forgotten for this particular encounter, his mind tumbled towards blackness, with only snatches of dream-images surfacing on his descent. For a Dreamwalker, that must be terribly confusing. A headlong plummet towards nothing.

Nothing had a way of finding her. They'd become fast friends as of late. But nothing tends to fall apart into pieces sometimes, fractured images too scattered to place back together. In dreams like that, the wrong step was dangerous. But the path he'd left for her was there, tainted with the smell of alcohol. Here, in this world, it affected the mind and the chain of events and the meaning behind the words. Not all is as it seems. So, she could only wait until Mesteno's mind landed after the fall.

It seemed an eternity that he tumbled, willingly drawn into an unfathomable abyss. It was warm however, not the breath stealing, frigid rush of air which made falls so terrifying, and there was no impact to shatter him when at last he landed in the blurred outlines of a world yet to clarify.

It's edges and colours remained foggy, the sounds dimmed as if behind a glass screen. What materialised was a familiar world; a narrow alley in Rhy'Din's docks, a clear stretch of sky visible above between the rooftops of old warehouses leaning towards one another. Small, dark figures huddled amongst refuse, beneath newspapers and against one another. Some were too still to be living. The winter had taken them. Far away at the other end of the alley, a pack of dogs were tearing into one such specimen, squabbling over flesh lacking any malleable qualities. Rigor mortis. No decay set in to soften. Not yet.

Alleys had a way of hiding secrets. If there were any ever to had, this was the place to lay them. The stench of low tide blended with the smells seeping from the walls and the ground making confusing scents and covering them up. Paper rustled with a breath that snuck in, though the sound was filtered behind that invisible screen.

That movement of air also took a few black-blue gatherings of hair with it, teased from the shoulder of the Dreamwalker who was pressed back against the wall of one of the buildings. She avoided the dogs and their last supper. At least it wasn't raining.

No rain. But where the ground was pockmarked with hollows and gullies, rainwater had gathered into stagnant puddles. The moisture glistened on the brickwork, moss and clinging, tenacious plants were growing into the mortar, and a steady drip, drip from broken guttering overhead seemed to have been remembered more clearly than the sounds of the hungry mutts in the distance.

Amongst the many huddled on the damp, numbing ground, were a familiar pair. A doll of a child, so tenderly young, tucked in close against a youth in his adolescence. Thirteen perhaps, but tall. Tall but slender as willow limbs. Starved. Hollow cheeked. He'd curled his abjectly thin frame into a concave barrier to keep the chill creeping up the alley away from the little one he guarded. They both lay with their eyes wide open, unwillingly awake. Too cold to sleep.

Everything else was smothered except the dripping. A constant beat, one-two...one-two...one-two...into the puddle blow; like the restless fingers that tapped the same on the wall behind her. It spidered out in to thin rivulets that spread like fingers seeking to create a city. Eyes were the window to the soul some said. Two sets of too wide ones stood out from the shadows and darkness. Recognition was slow, the path here had been less than...appealing. They weren't but ten feet from her own, just across the narrow gap. Did they remember?

When Aoife had met the child before, the dream had been lucid. Mesteno had sat there in the basement, swarming with terrified children, but he'd not been one of them. And now, unprepared and with an utter lack of control over where his subconscious chose to take him, he didn't even realise that they were being observed. Aoife might have been a shadow upon the wall. Another huddled figure. The reaper come to take him...and didn't he look ready?

While the little girl tucked against him watched the night with fierce defiance in the soft features of her face, her exhausted guardian looked as if he might not make the night. As if all he'd left to give her was what warmth his malnourished body produced.

"I hate you," the girl spoke, the resentment in her tone a childish accusation meant to sting, rather than any true sentiment.

Mesteno, behind her, did not so much as flinch. It was a whip he'd become numb to.

She hadn't seen him this young in a while, but it didn't take long to place those eyes where they belonged, in the face of a soon to be Sadist. The little girl though, last she'd seen, had been the picture of calm among the many that rushed at exits echoed by the whimpers of fear. Like she knew, and she had because she'd spoken those words of truth to Aoife when Mesteno had disappeared among the shadows. She learned young, that girl, to taunt the boy into responding. She murmured from her shadows through the space that separated them.

"Hate is quite a burden to bear for such a young girl. It injures the hater more than the hated."

The boy's eyes rolled to fix upon Aoife. They'd none of the nocturnal gleam they possessed in the here and now, but they were the very same amber-gold. The shrewd intellect had been stamped out by the glassiness of fatigue, even his blinks lethargic. No recognition.

Here Aoife was only a stranger, and yet her words interrupted a memory, threatened to bring the cogs of it screeching to a halt as the subconscious struggled to make heads or tails of the intrusion.

"I hate you," the little girl repeated, a deja-vu instance, surreal. Like a section of film replaying itself for the benefit of its audience. "I want to go back!" If she'd not been curled up, her little foot might have stamped so demandingly.

In a dream, the mind functions more quickly, therefore everything seems to feel more slow. The world is built by the Dreamwalker and the dreaming, but the dreamer's mind populates it. The subconscious recognizes when something doesn't belong; a foreign nature. Aoife did not belong here, the mind of the boy did not know her and would never remember. She swept the area with a look, wondering how she was supposed to help him when he wouldn't even know what he needed help with. The edges of the dream flickered turned into smoke and hovered like mist.

The girl quietened again, the beginnings of what had become a world class tirade, a miserable pursuit and eventually, a sickening finale resulting in her demise stalled by Aoife's interference.

The Dreamwalker's control of his mental landscape seemed to return some vitality to the boy, who watched the drifting smoke as if he expected some new nightmare to be spawned from it. The little girl seemed to fade by the tiniest of increments. The dogs ceased their snarling.

"Who are you?" The boy asked Aoife, speaking in the voice of the man he would become.

Sounds moved, shifted, and crashed. Remember those invisible walls? Like glass, they blocked them into that narrow space, a barrier meant to ease the unease of the mind. Concentration was key.

"A guest." She spoke as if she was invited to a ball, though there was no glitz and glamor to show for it. Her ease from the wall left an imprint there, right in the air that surrounded and the shadows that cooed. It held itself, a mold cast, before melting down into a splotch of gray, of the nothing that once was. She moved across, careful eyes and equal steps; she was barefoot. A glimpse of movement had her crouching down next to the waifish pair, the pretty little doll nothing but a shell of an outline. "Will you let me in?" A whisper to the boy, as if there were others to hear the words.

The world seemed to narrow, caving in so that the alley had seemed wide by comparison, a great yawning space. The teenager wound his arms tight around what had been the little girl. What had become nothing more than dirty blankets. He didn't seem to sense the loss of her though; that she had been there at all did not register. He sat up as Aoife left the wall behind and the world beyond her, around them became a swamp of flat, non-colour. The sleeper's mind was too deeply submerged to make any sense of what had happened to the dream. Reflex ruled here, and Aoife did not look like any of the terrible figures from his past. She looked little older than a girl herself. Mutely, he nodded.

Remember that smoke at the very edge of the scene? The edges crept inwards, listening. Waiting. Aoife balanced on the balls of her feet, elbows on knees and hands dangling between, swaddled by took long sleeves. Always too long. "Where does she want to go back to?" Questions and answers co-mingled. The dream would know which was the right one.

She? He glanced down at the bundle of rags in his hands, the lack of her, and seemed to curl in on himself as if to escape something dark and awful. Whether it was what lay in front, or what he'd dragged her away from, both prospects terrified him. Both were things he clearly recalled, not missing patches of memory.

He shook his head, trembly as a fledgling tumbled from a nest. The smoke around them drawing close drew his eyes away from her, watching, and some scrap of his mind intrinsically linked to his 'work' shaped them into forms with more substance. People, animals, a riot of nonsense to distract from where the girl had wanted to return to.

She couldn't promise him that they wouldn't go there. The subconscious was a powerful thing and took control away from her like it was nothing but a fought over toy. He was playing with it, testing the edges and she had the inkling of a thought that he didn't even know. It wasn't the place itself he'd forgotten. A different route, perhaps. "Who is she?"

Her inkling was correct. Her questions panicked him into further distraction-making though, and he fumbled up off the ground that was so perfectly lacking in definition now, the blankets falling about his feet to melt away into the grey nothing.

"She...who do you mean? There's no one here. Where are we?" For he'd no way of identifying it now. There was no memory to match this. So rarely were his dreams of things he had not experienced, and finding himself in one, albeit unknowingly left him looking ready to bolt, even if those feeble limbs looked so slender that they'd snap with the effort.

She was slower to rise. How ironic it was, the situation they were in. She, the one who skittered on the edge of panic most of the time was the one approaching it from the opposite direction. The edges he toyed with were closing in. The docks shivered into nothing and the sky was a smoky haze. Her hands feathered to her sides, limp and unthreatening, as if Aoife could ever be threatening.

"In Rhy?Din. How did you get here?" She pressed a hair closer with nothing but a lean, a subtle shifting of her foot.

"Rhy'Din," he whispered as if he related the word to relief. For Rhy'Din he knew, and had known for his entire life.

I've never been afraid of the highest heights,
Or afraid of flying high,
I've never been afraid of the wildest fights,
Not afraid of dying...

But now I want off this ride cause she's scaring me,
And I don't like where we're going,
I need a new funfair, cause she's scaring me,
And I don't like where we're going.

- Example

It was another of those stiff, uncertain moments where memory wanted to refuse the interjection. When that deja vu moment in the alley with the little girl had occurred, the repeat of words as if to obliterate Aoife's comments, Mesteno had been more deeply ensconced in his recollections. Now he was panicking, seeing things which had been spell-obscured for years, and the Dreamwalker's presence was a familiar one. Almost something to strive towards for safety instead of a presence to flee from.

Except...she was there asking for the scalpel. The threat of it, small and gleaming in the strange woman's hand suddenly became more sinister, and he lurched violently beneath the two men, rousing them into grappling with his legs and wrists. He thrashed and twisted until it felt as if the bones should have dislocated, splintered, but their hold upon him was as sure as iron manacles, and his mind was accepting the possibility of Aoife putting the scalpel to him.

The woman offered it over, blank eyed to the Dreamwalker, her face a blurred, ill defined mess in the shadows.

The Sadist swore, raged like an inferno, but all his violence and cursing was ineffectual in dream land.

Everything ceased to exist for her when the woman willingly handed over the scalpel. Funny how fingers that danced to silent music never even twitched. She was a still frame. When her fingers closed over the handle, the edges of the dream flickered like dying fluorescent lights struggling not to wink out. In this world the scalpel was real and it was in her hand.

"Tell me what to do." She hadn't looked at the thrashing Sadist yet. The swan's song the blade promised was too sweet.

"The ward must be placed," the woman replied smoothly, evenly, untouched by the noise of the furious young man struggling beneath her comrades. Memory kept her voice as it had been when events had happened in the waking world. When he'd been stretched flat and limp and unresisting, "or the search will find him. They're too close, so it must be done now."

The woman drifted over to the men, and gestured that they should turn their captive, a job they achieved easily despite his eeling in the straw. The larger man with the eye patch sat heavily on the small of his back, effectively pinning him, while the woman knelt by his ankle, taking scissors from her basket to cut up the back of Mesteno's jeans to the back of his knee.

"Here," she told Aoife, placing her palm over the back of his calf.

Between thumb and forefinger, the blade rolled back and forth and each time it caught the glow of the artificial light, it threw silver kisses at her. Promises. The distraction was her vice and she offered the woman nothing but the flick of a glance and a subtle shifting of her body. "Why do they search for him?"

The reply was silence. This was not something which had been disclosed during Mesteno's incarceration, and as such the woman had no words to tell. She only knelt there dully, holding her palm to the tawny skin of Mesteno's calf.

As for Mesteno, he was laying there like a man exhausted, only his eyes hinting at the danger still lurking behind the momentary calm.

When silence was given for the question asked, she slid her eyes from the line of the blade to trace the curves from Mesteno's ankle to calf. The space around them seemed hushed, not even the straw sighed when she shifted and stepped to stand beside the woman.

A murmur of movement and she was crouching too, balanced on the balls of her feet. She reached and placed a finger on Achilles' weakness and traced a slow line up that dark skin. "A ward. What kind of ward?"

The pause lengthened, as if the woman might not answer, but it was the handsome man, the one who'd done all the protesting outside of the stable and now pinned the Sadist's wrists who spoke up first.

"I still don't understand what this'll achieve," he complained to the woman, as if Aoife did not exist. "The magics are so old they'll probably see through them straight away."

Some vitality seemed to return to the female at that point, hand drifting away from Mesteno's limb.

"It's because it's so old that it will work, you fool," she snapped with underlying impatience. "They'll be trying to detect the signature of more powerful things. Of him...and when they don't, we may just get lucky. They may move on. I can't think of any better way to keep him hidden, can you?"

When the woman removed her hand it was replaced with another, another that felt all too real. A familiar touch, cool, but not cold. Like a breeze on a hot day that teased the skin and reminded it of memories. Their conversation only splintered each question she had into three more. So many paths to take and no bread crumbs to follow. As if they were the only two in the room, Aoife leaned closer to the woman, secrets between girls.

"Hide and seek. Why must he hide?"

The more Aoife spoke to the woman, the more real she seemed to become. Less an apparition and more a fleshed out female of long, curling hair and almandine eyes. Not exquisite by any measure, but striking enough to be attractive. She did not seem to see the way Mesteno flinched under the weight of that colder palm, as if he expected the bite of metal.

"Because he woke. Ignorance kept him safe. Now, every time he does it, it's like a beacon to them. Now it isn't safe to merely be so far away. Cut...here, the first line." She traced the path with the tip of her finger. "Come, do it quickly."

"He woke." The woman's finger was a figment, a sight of touch. Aoife followed the path with her own then as if testing the skin. How deep did she have to go? "Was he sleeping?" Again that line was retraced, this time with the tip of her nail. "Why do they answer when he calls?"

"Liber artis cum mortuis loquendi," the woman spoke without hesitation. Perfect Latin, the accent very much like Mesteno's. Perhaps even stronger, very little like the ecclesiastical. "They will take him back, and then we will have failed. We will have failed, do you hear me? We have to protect him, even if only to save our own necks." More vitriol here, for the man who spoke.

The one eyed man observed, but said nothing.

"Why did he leave?" Up and down, up and down. She kept tracing a fine line on his calf with her nail. The skin was red. Latin meant nothing to her, the words floated up and popped like bubbles, insignificant. The scalpel was still there, still an unseen threat as Mesteno was face down. When did she have it now?

"No one knows. He was safe. Then one day gone. Seven years old." The woman's speech was becoming more fractured. A hint of uncertainty had entered her voice, which might as easily have been due to Mesteno's memory of her, or his own suspicions bubbling up to be spilled between her lips.

"Let me go. Get the f*ck off me." he was growling, cheek against the straw and squirming renewed.

"Cut!" Insisted the woman, suddenly alarmed at this recurrence of fight in him.

Uncertainty was contagious. The woman's form, so real the more they spoke, started to shift and fade, like the dream itself was threatening to fall apart. Cool fingers wrapped around Mesteno's ankle, so gentle in its press to keep his leg still. Aoife eased onto her knees, one on each side. Maybe just one, to keep the woman's calm and...and there it was, the burn of a kiss from a blade against flesh. She was so good at it, ask her. Nothing more than the thinnest of lines, straight and narrow along that tawny skin. Memories didn't share physical pain, they only remembered. This time though, crimson red, warm and real the smallest of drops welled up though not enough to weep.

"Why can't he go back?" Perhaps now, now the woman would be happy.

The pain was expected, and yet to actually experience it in the unreal confines of a dream, shocked the dreamer. The razor keen edge of the blade split skin, bit deep enough to spill blood, and the delicate, white-hot line of it made him bellow protest.

Back in the little cabin amidst the tangle of woodland that Mesteno called home, he groaned where he lay sleeping upon the sheepskin rug, one leg lashing out in a spasmodic kick which almost struck the little white cat who'd come slinking nearer.

The dream shook around them all as if the walls might not fade, but actually come caving in and crush them all. Waking was near.

"Because he is a relic," the woman replied. "They always hunt the relics when they are born, and what is there to go back to? Amhinata lays in ruin. Ruin and rubble and corpses."

Poor Dreamer, it was very likely he wouldn't be happy when he woke and found a gift from the Walker. Again, distraction pulled her into a place where white walls were canvases made only for red paint. The scalpel was forgotten when blood made bright color in the grayscale of the dream.

"Do they want to hurt him?" Hurt like she did? Nothing spoke of hurt when she ran the pad of her thumb up the line she just made, smearing blood to the sides. So proud.

The sleeper bled. It soaked into his jeans, staining the denim darkly. The cut lay precisely where the pale ridge of a scar was. An intricate pattern in the flesh that Aoife's new 'friend' had placed there years before. Mesteno might not be pleased about receiving injury, but what he remembered upon waking would be invaluable.

"Hurt him? They will take him down the black road."

"We should just kill him while we have the chance," the man insisted vehemently. "Then we wouldn't have to worry about him being found. The next in line wouldn't wake for another twenty years, and we'll be too old by then to care."

"Shh..." For all of them and the man on the straw littered floor. It was like a song, a lullaby meant to soothe the subconscious. "It's all right now." Her smile was something else, a secret thing that the man who sat on Mesteno would never see.

Aoife turned and rested her chin on her shoulder staring at the woman crouched next to her. "You can go." Cupid's bow lips puckered into a pretty, little heart to funnel a breath towards her.

Soothing was a good thing, and considering the strength of his panic, Aoife couldn't have chosen a better moment to apply that soft, hushing sound. He might have doubted her words, but his pulse slowed, the grasp on his limbs slackened, and the urge to kick and buck became less intense, less necessary. Mesteno lay still in the straw.

The woman stared at Aoife, eyes blank as if the instruction had somehow failed to compute, but she collected up her basket, leaving the scalpel in Aoife's slender fingers, and rose to wander away soft footed through the doorway she'd entered by.

Frame by frame, she moved, inched her way on knees up, up the legs to which she'd just held one down. She reached out to run two fingers down the back of the man who sat on Mesteno's. "You can go too." Her words were too quiet.

The large, one eyed man glowered at her, though it seemed more a permanent feature of his face, some unchanging and obdurate malaise than personally intended. After a moment, he rose too, and followed after the woman.

That left only Mesteno, growing more placid by the moment, and the handsome man who kept hold of his wrists, the one who'd spoken so frequently in an effort to dissuade.

"I know you," Mesteno was mumbling, leg still bleeding, eyes dull as the lullaby quality deepened.

Such a bold little thing she was when she took the place of the one eyed man, settled herself right there on sway of Mesteno's lower back. Her hands rested on her thighs, one still held on to the scalpel with such tenderness. She stared at the man holding a set of wrists, the picture of impassivity.

"Will you tell me a secret?" One shared between friends. One of those.

Had he been awake he'd have been indignant that she dared. Had he any fight left in him there in the dreaming, he might have been railing at her furiously. But Mesteno only lay there, his golden eyes glazed and heavy lidded as the world around them began to waver further, all the lines beginning to blur and the straw becoming more like a soft, diffuse glow from the light from the torch, instead of seperate strands.

The man - middle aged, past his prime but still worthy of attention, peered at Aoife across the stretch of his captive's back. "What secret?" he asked her, without a hint of suspicion. His voice was a pleasant baritone, easy to hear when not raised in irritation at his female companion.

It was as if she'd forgotten who exactly it was she was sitting on. Not like her weight was anything significant to keep him grounded. It was somewhere to perch, a handy spot closer to the man with the handsome face.

"Your name. I promise to keep it safe." Idle fingers, covered in blood, find a strand of red on Mesteno's back and start to toy with it. "I'll never tell."

And Aoife was such a sweet faced little lady, was she not? The man had nothing to fear from a face like that. He smiled at her warmly. It was an expression that had not been dreamed up. One that Mesteno must have seen before. "I'm Ben," the man replied easily.

From the straddled young man in the straw, there came a sudden murmur. Monotone.

"Ben. Okay Ben. You talk too much..."

He remembered. And just like that, the dream unravelled, the shock of recollection and the throbbing pain in his calf sitting him bolt upright, the cat startled and hissing as her owner scrambled across the floor to press his be-ringed spine to the wall.

Aoife had asked the right questions.

"Names have power, Ben." Was all she said before the threads of memory slipped apart and she fell through and down, landing once again into herself.

It was as if breath had been forgotten, her lungs drew deep and cried with the release. And where miles away a Sadist scrambled for the real, the Dreamwalker rolled onto her side and tucked her arms close. A brick wall was good enough to stare at. The scalpel was left behind in a dream.