The Archmage: Chapter Twenty-Four

“In dreams?” I asked, raising an eyebrow while keeping my face a mask.

Internally, I was kicking myself. I had no idea how locking information behind a seal like that would work, since I’d never really looked into mind magic outside of the applications I’d stolen from house hawthorne, and getting a mind bubble to protect myself, but it was definitely possible.

It was just the idea. Putting it in a dream was such a simple idea, and yet it had never even crossed my mind, and I felt inordinately stupid for it.

“What do you think slipping is?” the hag said with a dry chuckle. “The power to slip ideas into the minds of others while they sleep.”

“How?” I asked, then immediately answered my own question. “Ah, it would be the dreamscape aspects that let you enter uninvited, wouldn’t it?”

The hag just gave me a mysterious smile and crooked a finger forward, as if telling me to lean in so she could tell me a secret.

“I’m not that much of an idiot,” I said, shaking my head.

“You can’t blame an old woman for trying,” the hag cackled. “But fine. You need to know how to slip things into dreams, aye? I can show you, but you’ll need to mix the dream magic with the change magic if you want to get it done properly.

“Then let’s make a boon. I need three things from you – the knowledge of compressing information packets, slipping them into dreams, and a sample of your Aura, so that I can get the rituals done.”

“A high price,” the hag said, eyes narrowing. “Especially the last.”

“And a price we can pay for,” Osheen said, giving the old hag a look that somehow managed to mix together supreme confidence in his abilities and insulted that she thought that we couldn’t.

“To begin with, how about we define the sample of aura,” I said. “I’ll give you a sample of mine in return, and we’ll both swear limits on using it. I won’t use yours for anything other than the casting of these arrays, and you won’t use mine unless I use yours unless I break those rules. Neither of us can gift, barter, bargain, trade, or allow yourself or anyone else to access, cast with, or use the sample in any way, and we’ll return each other's samples once my rituals are complete.”

The hag nodded along as I spoke, then gave me a crooked attempt at a smile.

“That certainly does help lower the cost, aye. But why should I only be able to use yours if you use mine wrong? You could use my power as a focus for a curse to strike me down in a single blow, and I would have no assurances against it. Allow me to build defenses against you.”

“So you can turn around and sell those defenses?” I scoffed. “No. A mutual non-aggression pact for a year and a day. That will give me time to work, and you some protection.”

“Those are acceptable terms for the usage of aura,” the old hag said. “What would you pay me?”

“You may be a dreamer, but you’re a faerie too,” I said. “And thus, suffer the weakness to iron. I’m prepared to give you ten talismans. Each one will ward you against iron, even if it’s shot by a human battlemage or gun. The ten together could stop a magically enhanced cannon shot.”

“One hundred,” she said.

“Nonsense. You’re not even a Lady, and that’s almost what I paid a Queen.”

“I have power no Queen of Faerie could ever have,” the hag said. “One hundred.”

“Twenty,” I said. “You may have the power, but you’re teaching me two spells and providing the method to use them.”

“Fifty,” she said. “You couldn’t do this without me.”

“Oh, is that so?” I said, then glanced at Tara. “Hey, Tara. Do you happen to know if Seth has any contacts within the Dreamscape?”

“Not Seth, but Armond does,” Tara said. “He has had many dealings with them. Even been offered telepathic speech boons, but refused them.”

“Excellent,” I said, then activated my cloak, focusing on the planar lock, faerie lock, and dreamscape lock, slamming the planar interference at the hag like a sledgehammer.

I didn’t hit her with everything at once, because that would have banished her, but I made sure my initial hit was enough to discorporate her form for a second, then applied a steady pressure.

I turned to leave, and heard the hag shout “wait!”, then turned back around.

“Yes?” I snapped, letting annoyance fill my tone.

“Twenty-five,” she said. “Twenty-five, only twenty-five. Thrice said and done.”

“Deal,” I said, easing up on the spells, and then walking over. I extended my hand through the shimmering  barrier, and she shook it, then leaned back.

“I will speak to you in your dreams tonight, and every night hence, until you have learned the magic,” she said.

I reached into my bag and counted out twenty-five sheets, then handed them over to her. She took them, and they vanished away into her robes. A moment later, she handed me a pearl of purple Aura, and I nodded.

“Excellent.”

There was a flicker of purple, and she was gone. I let out a relieved sigh and shook my head.

“I don’t like playing hardball with them,” I said. “In a way, I wish it didn’t work.”

“Scam the rich for all they’re worth,” Tara said, laughing slightly. I snorted, but felt a touch of concern creep in.

That night, after Osheen and I had an excellent dinner of beans and rice, with sausages in his half, I dreamt of being in a forest.

I walked through the leaves and shadows until I found the beautiful woman that acted as a glamour for the hag sitting by a pool of water. Her reflection, however, was that of her true form, rotting and old.

“You know that won’t work, right?” I called out, and she turned.

“This was my original form, you know,” she said. “I truly was this pretty.”

I said nothing, not sure how to respond, and she sighed before allowing the glamour to fade.

“Very well, Mortal King,” she said. “Watch and learn.”

She sat on the stone, staring into the pool of water. I wasn’t foolish enough to start demanding she show me runes – she wasn’t going to waste my time doing nothing.

Probably.

Almost certainly.

It couldn’t hurt to play along, at the very least.

I sat on a stone near her and stared into the pool, and then I Saw.

For a moment, there was only our reflections staring back at us, but as my temporary teacher touched the surface, ripples moved through the pond. The image warped, and when it settled again, it had changed.

“The divination. You will be using the sympathetic link and mind magic to find this,” she said.

A woman I didn’t know ran through an endless corridor, followed by a man who I didn’t know. Given that they wore matching wedding rings, but that he was holding a knife and chasing her, I thought I could make some guesses about a not-so-healthy relationship.

“Mortals love to say that all dreams have meaning,” the hag said. “This one does. An obvious one, I would say.”

She tapped the pool again, and the image changed. This time an army of what looked to be brussel sprouts wearing leather armor and wielding floating spears marched into battle against an opposing army of cauliflower in iron armor.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“A toddler?” I guessed. “Unhappy about vegetables?”

The hag let out a sharp bark of laughter and shook her head.

“No. The man dreaming this ate a mix of those two vegetables for dinner several days ago, and was reading about an army battle in the early age of iron ten years ago.”

“How is that meaningful?” I asked.

“It isn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Dreams don’t inherently all have meanings. They’re the scrambling of the mind to fill the void. But while dreams don’t all have meaning, all dreams have power.”

She held out her hand and punched it into the surface of the pond, yet no ripples moved out. Purple light swirled out of her fist, and the scene started to change. The sky went dark as a storm rolled in, and lightning began to flash, bolts hammering down and killing off brussel sprouts and cauliflower alike.

“This man fears lightning. His mother was killed by an errant lightning strike, and he nearly died from holding her hand.”

She laughed, and the image began to spin as fires spread through the dream, then pulled her fist from the water, holding a sphere of blackish-red energy.

“This will trade well with demons,” she said, chuckling and adding it into her robes. “Dreams have power, and one and all, they open a gate. A small one, but an intersection between the Dreamscape and the mortal world. This is a property that, so far as I can tell, is unique to the Dreamscape. Others may require summoning arrays or ley lines, but not here. All that is required is a dream.”

“What about people who don’t dream?” I asked.

“Everyone dreams,” she said. “Every animal with a mind dreams while they sleep. They may not remember their dream in the waking world, but they dream nevertheless.”

I tilted my head. I’d actually not been aware of that.

“The creation of the unlocking is simple,” she said. “You make the activation be the opening of the gate. This should be simple enough to do, since you have a sample of power from this realm.”

She tapped the surface of the pond and it froze over. Runes in a language I didn’t recognize, but I did understand, began to sprawl themselves out on the surface of the ice.

They were sharp and crystalline, while also being smooth and curling. They had elegant flourishes and were plain. They were flat and emotionless, but they also cried out with enough emotion to make me want to cry.

The spell was a paradox in a thousand ways, and I didn’t understand it, but I understood it perfectly.

“Language is an imprecise tool,” the hag said. “Dreamscape magic rarely relies on such things. It might appear as a language to you, if you think in languages. If you don’t think in language, then it will likely just appear as an understanding.”

“How… How do I incorporate it into my runes?” I asked. “I don’t… I can’t…”

“Your language will limit you. The moment you draw a box, a single word, it becomes a limit. But you will do the best you can. This magic as you see it cannot, does not, appear in the mortal world. But it is everywhere in the mortal world. You don’t need to capture all of it. Just enough to get the spell right.”

The lake went flat, the spell wiped away, and the hag touched my hand.

“You try,” she said.

I touched the ice, and felt it act as a conduit for my mind. I began designing a spell in my head, and the ice began to shape itself. I tried to capture the uncapturable, and I thought I’d done fairly well, but when I finished, the hag simply shook her head.

“That spell won’t be efficient enough to work for your purposes. Try again.”

And so I did. Over and over again, throughout many nights, improving the spell, condensing it down, and trying to capture it in the scripts of ancient Paerús and old Bradlewyr.