Daydreamer

"I care neither for the past nor the future.
The present is already trying to kill me."

- Commentary, Tales of the Transmitted Strange

...

Sevran was an old man now. His hair and beard had turned the color of winter frost.

Thirty years of rotting in the dark had drained the color from his skin and the marrow from his bones. The very comrades who had sworn allegiance to his revolution were the ones who threw him into chains. Now, walking the cobblestones of the city he had once built with his own hands, he possessed nothing--no throne, no followers, no home.

He sought shelter at an inn. The innkeeper took one look at the slave brand burned into the side of his neck, spat on the threshold, and slammed the door.

"No room for your kind here. Move along."

He knocked on a cottage window at the edge of the street. An old resident peered through the cracked glass with eyes full of fear and contempt:

"Go away. We don't invite curses into our house."

Sevran lowered his head. He was used to it. He thought about going back to the prison, hoping to be let in to sleep--but alas! A prison is not a hotel; no one gets in without being tortured, and he had already been through that. That place had also taken the most precious thing from him. This old body of his could not withstand those beatings anymore.

He walked out of town, to a dog kennel by the road, but even the dog chased him away and bit him.

He kept walking through the fields, hunched against the cold wind. He looked into the distance--there were no stars at all--and for the first time, he felt the eternal loneliness of being human.

Just as he had lost all hope, there was a church. It looked abandoned, ruined, but no one stopped him from entering, he decided to spend the night here. It seemed the roof had collapsed a long time ago.

He found a stone slab to lie on, spread his coat beneath him, and took out an old book to use as a pillow. He told himself that if he could find thicker books in the future, he could read them longer and sleep more comfortably.

"Why am I dreaming about that day again?" he thought to himself. The day he had struck down his own friend. That ruin must look something like this. He had dreamed a dream a week ago, and this time too, he had woken mid-dream. He felt no regret, because a decision once made could never be changed, and regret would not improve his mood either. He took a sip of water--not wine, because he believed alcohol was a bad thing.

He believed that humans had no ability to choose their own fate, and concluded that everyone believed in the greatest lie in the world.

...

He dozed off for a while. When he woke, the sky was still dark, but beside him, about an arm's length away, an old woman was sitting.

He was not startled. He was too old to be startled.

The old woman was small, hunched-backed, wrapped in an ash-gray shawl. Her face was wrinkled like the bark of an old oak tree, but her eyes were strange--clear, translucent, as if they did not belong to such an aged body. She sat on the stone floor, both hands resting on her knees, looking at him with a calm gaze, as though she had been sitting there for a very long time, or had never sat down at all.

Sevran propped himself up on his elbows, half sitting.

"Who are you?"

"You didn't ask who I was when you walked in here? This is my home."

Sevran looked around. The crumbling walls, candles that had gone out decades ago. The collapsed roof, vines crawling through the broken window frames.

"Your home is a pile of ruins."

"That's right," the old woman said, her voice showing no offense. "But ruins are still home, if someone still lives in them. And I have been here longer than you think."

Sevran lay back down. He was no longer afraid of anything. Thirty years in prison had taken his fear, just as it had taken everything else.

"What do you want from me?" he asked, his eyes looking up at the black sky through the hole in the roof. "I have nothing."

"I know," the old woman said. "I don't need anything from you. I only want to ask you one question."

Sevran closed his eyes. "Ask."

The old woman was silent for a moment. Then she spoke, slowly, as if each word had been weighed before leaving her lips:

"If you could choose another life. Not this life. Not this body. Not the name Sevran, not the slave brand on your skin, not thirty years in prison, not the coup, not the friend you struck down. Another life--one where you could save the people you wanted to save. Would you choose it?"

Sevran opened his eyes.

He looked at the old woman. Looked for a long time.

Not because the question was unexpected, but because the old woman had just said the very thing he had never spoken aloud. The friend he had struck down. No one knew about that. No one could know. He had never told anyone. And that little girl too--the one he couldn't save back then--did she know about her as well?

But he did not ask how she knew. He had lived long enough to understand that some questions need no answers.

"Another life," he repeated, his voice flat. "You speak as if I have the right to choose."

"You do have the right to choose," the old woman said. "Tonight. Only tonight."

Sevran sat up fully. He looked at the old woman. Her eyes were still clear, unblinking.

"What is the price?" he asked without hesitation.

The old woman tilted her head. "One-third of the lifespan of your next life. If you were to live to ninety in the next life, you would only have sixty. If you were meant to live to seventy, you would only have forty-six years and eight months."

Sevran was silent.

He looked at the three fingers she held up. Then he looked down at his own hands--calloused, cracked, scarred, trembling. Hands that had held a sword. Hands that had betrayed. These hands could no longer hold a glass of water without spilling it.

"One-third," he said.

Sevran stood up. He walked a few steps away, to the ruined wall. He placed his hand on the cold stone. He looked outside--the black field stretching to the horizon, not a single light, not a single human sound. Only wind and darkness, and the eternal loneliness he had felt earlier.

He thought.

Not about whether he should agree or not. That question was too simple. What was left in this life to hold onto? No one was waiting for him. No one remembered him. No one forgave him.

One-third of what? Of a life he had never lived. Of a future he could not imagine. He didn't know what the next life would be like. Maybe he would be a child who died young. Maybe he would be an old man dying in solitude, once again. Maybe he would betray someone again. Maybe he would be betrayed again.

But maybe he wouldn't.

That was the only thing that mattered. Maybe--maybe he could save that person. He turned back. The old woman was still sitting there, motionless, as though time could not touch her.

"I have one question," Sevran said.

"Go ahead."

"If I choose another life... will I still remember? Remember what I've done, or at least, the purpose of this life?"

The old woman looked at him. For the first time, something changed in her eyes. Not pity. Not contempt. But recognition. As if she had just seen something worthy of respect in the old, ragged man before her.

"You will remember," she said. "Like a dream--fading, but never entirely gone."

Sevran nodded.

He didn't need to ask more. He had lived his whole life in regret--no, not regret. He had already said it. He did not regret. A choice once made could not be undone. But he carried it. He carried it like carrying a boulder on his back, carried it through all nine of those days when he had not spoken a single word, and now, in this dark night, on the cold stone floor of an abandoned church.

If he could carry that boulder into another life--lighter, or at least, different--then one-third of a lifespan was too cheap a price.

"I agree," he said.

His voice did not tremble, did not hesitate, did not show excitement. It was simply an acceptance, calm, as if he had just agreed to drink a glass of water.

"Are you sure?"

"I was sure before you even asked," Sevran said. "I only needed to know the price. I have received too many things given freely in my life, and every one of them was a trap."

The old woman nodded slowly.

"Good."

She stood up. She was smaller than he had imagined--only reaching his chest. But when she stood, her shadow on the ruined wall was long, very long, as if the source of light came from somewhere farther than the moon of this continent.

"Lie down," she said. "Rest your head on your book. Close your eyes."

Sevran obeyed. He lay down on the cold stone slab, placed his head on the old leather-bound book, its cover worn smooth. The old woman knelt beside him. Her hand rested on his forehead--cold, but not the cold of the night wind. The cold of stone, of underground water, of things that had existed long before humans learned to name them.

"Sleep," she said. Her voice was different now--no longer the voice of an old woman. "Sleep, Sevran. When you wake, you will no longer be here."

Sevran closed his eyes.

He felt his eyelids growing heavy--not the ordinary drowsiness of a body tired after a day of wandering. Something deeper, heavier, as if someone were pulling him down through layers of earth, through strata of stone, through memories.

For the first time in thirty years--or perhaps for the first time in his life--he looked at peace.

The old woman withdrew her hand. She looked at him--at the aged face, the white hair and beard--then she stood. She brushed the dust from her knees, as if she were merely an ordinary old woman who had stopped to rest by the road.

She looked around the abandoned church. The crumbling walls, the broken altar, the vines crawling through the shattered windows. Her gaze was full of nostalgia.

"My home," she murmured. Then she smiled. "At least tonight it served its true purpose--sheltering someone."

She turned and walked through the doorway that no longer had a door, stepped into the darkness.

And the darkness swallowed her, as if she had never been there at all.

Sevran slept, sinking deep into dreams.

The wind still blew. The grass still swayed in the field. There were still no stars. But in his sleep, there was a dream. Not a dream of the coup. Not of the friend. But a dream of a green field, and a little girl running through it, and the child turned back to look at him, and smiled.

He did not remember who the child was.

But he knew, in the dream, that he would meet her again.

I will find you, his soul promised.

Then, the world shattered.

He opened his eyes--not to moonlight, but to the thick, metallic stench of slaughter.

The air was heavy with hot iron. Blood coated the marble plazas, dripped from the steps of the imperial palace, and pooled deep in the flagstone runes. Towering obsidian pillars rose from the perimeter like the ribcage of an ancient leviathan, pulsing with faint, dying luminescence.

It was the smell of real blood.

Sevran stood in the middle of the capital.

Not the capital he remembered building in his past life, nor the peaceful nation he had once dreamed of. This was another existence entirely, one where he had drenched three continents in blood just to force open the gates of hell.

The corpses lay strewn about, piled atop one another, scattered like harvested wheat thrown carelessly across a field. Royal guards still in full armor. A child--he didn't want to look at the child, but his eyes disobeyed--a child lying face-down, hand still clutching a wooden stick. All dead. All with eyes open.

They rose in the middle of the plaza like the ribs of a giant monster, carved with characters he could not read--no, he had been able to read them. In this life, in a memory that did not belong to him. Those characters glowed faintly, like embers about to die, like the souls of the dead still clinging to stone.

And at the center of the plaza, he saw them.

A dragon.

It lay on its belly, wings broken and folded, black scales peeling like burnt bark. Its neck was nearly severed, black blood--not red--flowing out in streams, soaking into the stone floor. Its eyes were still open. One golden eye, vertical, staring straight at him. Staring but not seeing. Staring but long dead.

Beside it, the old king lay on his back, crown rolled away, robes torn. His chest was hollowed out--not by sword, not by spear, but by something pulled out. As if someone had reached into his chest and taken something more important than his heart.

No one else was around.

Not a cry. Not a scream. Not a breath. Only him, and the corpses, and a silence heavier than any shriek.

Sevran stood amidst the sea of dead.

He did not understand. He did not want to understand. But his legs would not move, and his eyes would not close, and memory began to seep out like blood from an old wound.

Then it happened.

The blood began to move.

It was the ritual.

Before he could process the horror, the blood began to defy gravity.

Droplets of red and black rose like inverted rain, floating toward the crimson heavens in spiraling torrents. Millions of streams converged into a gargantuan summoning circle that spanned the entire sky above the capital.

From the swirling vortex, a voice like grinding stones echoed down:

"Traitor... You dared to break the pact."

The voice of Vabel, the arch-demon, roared in fury:

"I curse you! I curse you until the heavens fall, until the earth rejects your bones, until your name is wiped from the annals of all living tongues! May you wander the infinite dark until you beg never to have drawn breath!"

The smoke vanished into the circle. The sky flashed blinding crimson, and the blood evaporated into steam, leaving only a deafening, suffocating silence.

Silence.

But the corpses were still there.

Sevran had no time to understand.

He had no time to open his mouth, no time to ask "What agreement? What have I done? Who am I?"--when the pain struck.

Not a headache.

A lifetime.

It flooded into him like water bursting through a broken dam--not one stream, but two. Two lives, two sets of memories, two people, all at once, all in the same instant, all screaming inside a brain that had no room to hold them.

And he remembered this life. In that cascade of memory, he found his way back to those heretics, killed all but one, and discovered how to communicate with demons. Each demon, a different price. And he had deceived Vabel--the very smoke that had just cursed him. He himself had commanded it to slaughter all three continents.

Millions of lives. Humans, dragons, spirits, other races--all of them. All just fuel, just wood thrown into a furnace, just ink to draw a magic array. To summon an ancient demon.

He tried to vomit, but his body did not obey. It simply stood still and continued looking up at the sky.

And then, in that cascade, he saw a blurred figure. No face, no name. Just a silhouette standing at the end of a corridor of memory, turned away from him. And he was running toward it, running, running, but the distance never shortened.

He did not remember who it was.

But he knew--knew by something deeper than memory, deeper than reason, deeper than the soul itself--that this was the person he wanted to save. The person he had to save. The person who, if he could not save, made everything he had done, every pact, every sacrifice, meaningless.

He had failed to save her in the previous life.

He knew this. Not now. But then. When he watched that figure fade. When he reached out and could not touch. When he heard words in languages he did not understand. He did not remember the name. He did not remember the face. He only remembered the sincerity the little girl had shown him, and the feeling of absolute, irreparable loss.

That was the greatest regret of his life.

...

While Sevran drowned in suffering, in memory, in nameless torment--the ritual completed.

He felt it before he saw it. The air changed, heavier, as if the world had taken a deep breath and held it.

Then the demon appeared.

It did not tear through space. It simply was there, as if it had always been there and he had only just become capable of seeing it.

It stood two heads taller than him. Its shape was almost human, but wrong. Its skin was pale white, covered in strange markings. On its face, there was only a mouth. And on its head, half a crown. The other half was broken, or taken, or had never existed.

Half a crown.

Sevran remembered.

He remembered this demon. It was the first demon he had encountered when he came to this world. But... He remembered that the heretics had summoned it with three animals. But now, the array was drawn with the blood of thousands of creatures. The price was different. The scale was different. So what was this thing?

The demon approached.

And Sevran's body reacted.

Not him. His body. As if it had a will of its own. As if it was accustomed to this. As if it had lived for this, many times, in a life he was now recalling.

His body stood straight, hands at his sides, palms facing outward--the posture of acknowledgment. His eyes looked directly at the demon.

Sevran did not command his body to do this.

He merely watched. Like a passenger on his own ship. Like a ghost looking down at its own corpse. Like a reader who cannot put the book down.

The demon stopped three paces from him. Then it spoke--not sound, but pressure, as if the air itself compressed into words.

"You summoned me?"

Sevran's body opened its mouth. Not him. It opened on its own.

"Yes."

The voice that came from his mouth was not his voice. It was deeper, as if the voice of someone long dead were borrowing his vocal cords to speak.

The demon tilted its head. The half-crown shifted slightly.

"This sacrifice far exceeds anything those before you have ever done."

It raised a hand--a hand with too many fingers--and gestured around them.

"You have sacrificed all three continents of this world?"

Silence. Sevran's body did not answer. But the demon did not need an answer.

It knew. It always knew.

"I can grant you one wish."

Sevran--the real Sevran, the Sevran trapped inside, the Sevran watching through eyes that were not his own--heard the question before his mouth spoke.

He knew that question. He knew it with both lives, with every memory that had just flooded back.

His mouth opened.

"Can you resurrect the dead?"

The demon was silent.

Not the silence of thought, the silence of one who had heard this question too many times, from too many people, across too many centuries. The silence of eternal weariness.

"I cannot."

In Sevran's mind, he felt--not hope shattering. Humans must always ask, even when they already know the answer. That is the tragedy of humankind: they cannot accept the silence of the universe, so they ask, and ask, until the answer kills them.

The demon continued:

"I can reverse time. But in your case--"

It paused, as if looking directly into the soul within him. Not this body. But him, the one observing this event. As if it were looking at a kindred spirit.

"Time may be unraveled, but that soul's demise was carved into the cornerstone of destiny by your own choice. Law cannot be undone, not even by my kin."

Sevran wanted to scream: "Then what's the point? If you can do nothing, why did I summon you?" But his mouth would not open. His body would not allow it.

It was waiting. It knew what came next.

The demon spoke:

"There is only one way to help you resurrect the one you desire. You must sign a contract with me."

It raised its hand. In the air, a document appeared--not paper. Law. Sevran saw it, and he understood. Not by reading, not by deciphering. By instinct, by soul, by the thing humans possessed before they had language.

That contract could kill the demon if it broke its word or deceived him. Deeper than the demon's own existence.

"Rest assured," the demon said, and its voice was almost--almost--gentle. "This contract is perfectly fair. You can see that it can also kill me if I do not uphold it. I do not deceive you. I have never deceived anyone. That is my rule."

"What is the condition?"

His body spoke. Inside, he too wanted to know. He needed to know.

The demon tilted its head. The half-crown swayed gently.

"You must sacrifice more for me. Any living creature will do. But to achieve that, at minimum, it must be an entire Third Stratum."

It paused and looked at him.

"But you do not have that much time."

It was silent for a moment, then said:

"You must go to the Demon Realm in Lower First. From there, kill other creatures. Including demons, including me, including the gods, if you are strong enough."

Sevran felt--not fear. Exhaustion. The exhaustion of someone who had walked too far, paid too much, lost too much, and was now told he must walk further. It was never enough.

Never.

The demon continued, its voice calm:

"With this sacrifice of yours, I can fight for you for about one month. But after that, you must gather the souls of others yourself and use your own power. I will not intervene."

One month.

Was it enough? He didn't know. But he had no other choice. He had never had any other choice. Had he?

Before he could make his decision, his body spoke on its own again:

"...I understand."

The demon nodded.

And Sevran's body moved.

Not because he commanded it, but because it knew. As if it had done this hundreds of times, thousands of times. In every life, in every world, in every existence.

He knelt, fingers touched the stone floor, and he drew.

Not with ink.
Not with blood. With will, with law, with what the demon called power but what he simply called despair.

The array appeared beneath his hand. But every line was reversed--completely opposite to the summoning array from before. If the summoning array spiraled inward--pulling the demon from the void into reality--then this array spiraled outward.

Sevran finished drawing, he stood. The array beneath his feet glowed--not red like blood, but cold white, like the emptiness after everything has been taken away.

The demon looked down. Then looked at him, and it smiled.

The smile of one who had witnessed something unexpected--something that, after trillions of years of existence, it still had not grown tired of seeing.

"A counter-summoning, then." Its voice was light. "Very clever."

It stepped into the array, standing at the center alongside Sevran. The half-crown on its head caught the white light, reflecting it onto the ruined walls, onto the corpses, onto the starless sky.

"Very well. It will be a pleasure to work with you again for the next month, human."

The array blazed.

Sevran felt his body being pulled--the world was sliding sideways, and he and the demon stood still while everything else moved.

His vision remained. He still saw the plaza. Still saw the corpses. Then they vanished. The array went dark. The white light disappeared. And the plaza returned to silence.

The corpses vanished. The pillars vanished. All the blood vanished, as if it had never been. As if no one had ever died. As if their existence had been nothing but a dream of stone.

But no one else appeared.

And Sevran--the real Sevran, the Sevran inside, the Sevran with no body to feel--slowly lost consciousness.

...

He sank back into a long sleep. In it, he continued to dream ten thousand different dreams, ten thousand different lives, but he never achieved his purpose. In all those worlds, he was alone at the summit, and then he would dream another dream...

...

...

...

He dreamed for a very, very long time. Until, at some point, the dream grew so dark that he could no longer open his eyes.

And then, through the freezing black ash, he heard it--a raspy, gravelly voice like pebbles grinding against one another, words from the very first days he had met that fragile soul, a language he had never understood in life, yet parsed with agonizing clarity in death: