Page 6 of Never the Roses

The price that the Hendricks Academy for Sorcerous Pursuits paid for Oneira had been plenty to rebuild the castle with sufficient left over to add significant improvements. She remembered that, too, though her young mind shouldn’t have been able to grasp that discussion, or perhaps she’d filled that in later, with her mature understanding of debt and finance. Somehow, though, she recalled one part of her standing aside and thinking,so this is to be my life, even as she sobbed, wailing without words and reaching for her mother from the prison of the stony arms of an academy nurse.

They’d taken her away to the private academy—the very best of all the academies of magic, public and private, though she wouldn’t understand that either until much later—and surrounded her with trained oneiromancers with the skill to keep her out of their dreams. At least, until she outpaced them in ability. They renamedher Oneira, in honor of her nascent talent, so rare in its sheer potency, and in anticipation of the force of magic she’d become.

She didn’t remember what name her parents had called her.

That massive initial price paid to her family was the first debt on Oneira’s ledger and only the beginning of the eventual enormous amount of money she owed the academy by the time she graduated. That debt included over two decades of room, board, and—especially expensive—private tuition. All magic-workers were identified as children, bound by blood geas first to the academies who bought them, then to their eventual clients. They all spent the first few decades of their careers working off the price of their education, and Oneira had started out with more than most, thanks to paying for what she’d done to the ancestral family home.

In her favor, she was also the best of her generation and quickly developed a reputation as the most fearsome sorcerer in existence, except perhaps for Stearanos Stormbreaker. He possessed an enviable flexibility in his talents, but she exceeded him in power in her sole competency. The fees she was able to command helped to gnaw away at what she owed—then to Queen Zarja, who bought her contract to have her own anti-Stearanos to guard the Southern Lands—but the system was stacked against her. The world operated on the labor of everyone paying off the debts incurred by their education, magical and otherwise. Those who’d bought their way free in any profession were few and far between. It served no one in power to have the lower classes accumulate personal wealth.

Thus, even her wages from Zarja and other would-be tyrants who hired her to win their petty squabbles hadn’t been enough to free Oneira anytime soon. And she’d been desperate to be free, so she took the job at Govirinda, not realizing she’d deal herself the worst and final blow by doing so.

Oneira set aside those old memories and concerns, uncertain why they’d bubbled up in that moment, except that they seemed to be part of the idea she was assembling, hanging each scrap of thought upon a scaffolding that as yet promised no answers.

As always, reaching into the Dream felt like slipping her hand into an old and familiar glove, like moving into a place more familiar than reality. She’d certainly spent enough time in that self-enclosed world that was independent of the dreaming of people, in the way that the ocean is independent of the shore. The ocean waves end up on a beach somewhere, touching before receding again. Thus, just as any shore may be reached by the water, anyone’s dreaming mind can be accessed from the Dream.

Oneira floated through the Dream, at first only mentally, leaving her body behind. She engaged much more fully than when she simply reached into the Dream, searched for an object, and extracted it, but less than if she’d entered the Dream physically. She needed no portal for this, only a lowering of the barriers she normally held in place against the Dream’s seductive call.

Enfolded in that embrace, one she knew from her earliest memories, preceded only by the loving arms of her parents and enduring long after, she felt whole and not at all alone. She knew the landscape there better than any in the living world. It felt like coming home to walk those undulating paths again, enough so that she wondered why she’d denied this to herself. But then, she was a different person within the Dream, one who possessed fewer qualms and sensibilities, which was part of the problem.

Within the Dream, nothing felt exactly real. It was only when she reentered the waking world and witnessed the impacts of what she’d wrought from inside the Dream that the consequences of her actions drove home with bone-melting reality.

But that wasn’t what she was doing in the Dream now, she reminded herself before her heart could quail. Nothing from this place of infinite power would be extracted through her to create nightmares to plague humanity, no night terrors unleashed. She only walked the Dream, at one with the flow of it as her mental feet coasted the waves. Sometimes, standing on the cliff point just outside her walls, gazing over the endless sea, she imagined stepping out onto that water and walking the surface in exactly this way. In her darker moments, she’d nearly tried, even knowing that would lead to drowning. Only the thought of her bier stopped her. She’d gone to so much trouble to perfect that spot that she couldn’t bear to lose the moment of finally laying herself upon it and letting go…

But not yet.

She had an answer to seek and a question to pose, so she surfed the tossing waves of the Dream. Beneath her feet, the vast depths of the entangled dreams of all living creatures surged and billowed. This was how most people experienced the Dream, as part of the contiguous sea created by themselves and everyone else in the world. Every time someone dreamed, they added to the pool, and the dream creations remained behind. Some settled to the bottom, forming the nutrient-rich floor that sprouted new stalks that swelled and burst, scattering seeds to inform and turn the direction of new dreams. Others lived on, sharking through the collective, invading nascent dreams or consuming them.

With her sorcery, Oneira detected the minds in the Dream, those people actively dreaming, mentally tiptoeing over their heads, touching just enough to ascertain their identity and physical location. It was a delicate art. Not enough contact and she’d glean too little information; too much and she’d affect their dreams. People tended to draw toward them the wandering elements of theDream that they most needed, but an oneiromancer interfered with that natural process.

Most oneiromancers—the kind who brought good to the world—operated as healers, helping dreamers attract those seeds and elements that helped purge old traumas and repair wounds. Usually people hired them to banish nightmares and night terrors, two very different phenomena.

Regardless, that sort of dream-healing oneiromancy worked best at lower levels of power. As Oneira’s sorcery was the magical equivalent of a burning sun at high noon in the desert, she simply wasn’t capable of that level of precision. She left scorched earth behind her sorcerous touch, as all the world knew, either by direct experience or the tales told and retold. As Govirinda would know, if anything had been left alive there. Oneira was a destroyer, not a healer. No one wanted her in their dreams. So, she trod carefully, touching just enough to glean a sense, never enough to affect the dreamer.

In this way, she moved through the world at large, leaping great distances with no more than a thought, as the Dream has no physical reality. This is why dreams shift so suddenly, moving from place to place seamlessly.

It took little time for her to find the mind she’d sought without consciously making the decision to find him. Perhaps because he’d just been in her thoughts. More likely because, according to rumor, he was the possessor of the most extensive library known to exist.

Stearanos Stormbreaker. Sorcerer of the Northern Lands. The nemesis she’d never met. The one sorcerer in all the world who could potentially defeat her.

The fact that Oneira and Stearanos had never met was, by itself, the stuff of legends. Much had been made of the possible conflict of giants, ballads composed speculating in the most florid terms what a duel between them would be like and which of them would win. They possessed different skills, their greatest powers lying in very different areas, so the stories spun about the potential war between them depended heavily on the arena of the conflict. Most of those tales culminated in mutual destruction, which Oneira had cynically decided expressed the wishful thinking of a world wiser than the nobles that held their leashes.

Oneira spent no more time touching the dreams of the sorcerer than she had with any others. Just enough to ascertain she’d found the right mind, which didn’t take much, as even his dreaming self shimmered with magic, restless power, and the violence of countless wars. She recognized something of herself in the fragments of undying memories crowding his dreams, the remembered horrors attracting the scavengers of the Dream who lived to feed on pain and misery.

These things would exact their price, one way or another. She might’ve felt pity for Stearanos, but she knew how richly she deserved the punishing nightmares dealt by the Dream. He would be the same.

Instead of lingering out of the pleasure in his suffering one might expect her to have for her enemy, or even some misguided sense of camaraderie, she used the sorcerer’s connection to his mortal body to ascertain that it was an hour or so before dawn where he slept, a powerful time for dreaming, which meant a powerful time for her.

With a gentle caress of her power, she ensured the sorcerer would remain asleep, along with all the denizens of his immense palace, from the housekeeper down to the mice in the walls. Connecting to her own physical body again, she rose to her feet and sketched a portal in the veil that separated waking fromdreaming. The outline shimmered with iridescence, opening into the landscape few ever saw with mortal eyes. Wielding her skill with casual ease, she did what she would never have dared while the queen still held her leash: she cleared a pathway for herself, pulling her physical body through the Dream, and stepped into the library of her nemesis.

5

Few oneiromancers could physically step from the Dream and into a specific room. That was part of what made Oneira the best of her kind. Not only could she find a specific dreamer and go to their physical location, she could then survey the general area and move to a nearby place of her choosing.

The ability had made her a devastating secret weapon. None could ward against her arrival, as everyone dreamed. Some of those unfortunate enough to be her enemies had attempted countermeasures, usually enchantments to keep themselves and the people around them from dreaming, but that sort of thing backfires quickly.

The Dream doesn’t like being suppressed, and it’s a force more powerful than any human sorcery, even Oneira’s. Such spells lasted only a short time before the Dream found a way through, like a rain-swollen reservoir eroding a leaky dike. If they tried to keep people from sleeping entirely—which some leaders did, thinking having everyone awake and working would bring additional value—the Dream eventually swept into waking minds, invading reality in disastrous ways. Oneira had taken advantage of situations like that more than once, riding dreams into the waking world. An exhilarating ride.

But using their own dreaming against innocents, time and time again, had led to her crisis of—if not conscience, as it could be argued she didn’t have one, then—such deep moral misgivings that she’d done something even more terrible to escape it all. Shewas aware of the inherent contradiction, though it hadn’t bothered her at the time.

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