- Chapter 043 -

  Unresolved Strangeness

  "Thank you, Jenny," Mark said, his voice filled with a genuine gratitude that surprised even himself. "These are... exactly what I needed." He ran a hand over the sturdy, leather-bound law book. He had the resources, he could now start to understand the board the guilds are playing on, and himself a pawn on.

  "But that wasn't the only reason for my visit," he added, a new, more focused energy entering his voice. He met the librarian's kind, patient gaze. "There are a few other topics I need to research, if it's alright for me to check out a few more."

  A warm, amused smile lit up Jenny's face. "My dear Mark," she said, her tone a gentle, reassuring melody, "this is a library. Its entire purpose is to be borrowed from." She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod, her expression turning a fraction more serious. "Our only rule is that the knowledge be returned in the same condition it was taken. We've had... incidents with damaged texts in the past."

  Mark thought of the blood-stained medical tome he had last seen in Tori's hands and decided not to pursue that particular line of inquiry. Instead, he reached for the cloth bag hanging from the back of his chair.

  "Speaking of which," he began, his voice taking on the tone of a man reporting a critical problem. He pulled out the heavy, black-bound book on Istos and placed it on the table with a solid, definitive thud. The silver title, Istos: The Lonely Collector, seemed to gleam with a defiant, mocking light.

  "I can't read this one," he stated simply. "I think something is wrong with it."

  Jenny took the book from him, her practiced hands handling it with a familiar, gentle reverence. "Ah, yes. The Lonely Collector," she murmured, her fingers tracing the bright silver letters of the title. "A fascinating, if somewhat... romanticized summary of our great Guardian's work." She looked up at him, a small, nostalgic smile on her face. "He has had many titles over the centuries. The Absent Groundskeeper, The Imp of the Stars... it all depends on who you ask, and how their last interaction went."

  She placed the book flat on the table and opened it to a random page. And then she paused.

  Her warm, friendly expression faltered. Her head tilted, that familiar, distant look of one listening to a silent voice entering her eyes. Mark watched, a quiet observer of the invisible conversation. The silence stretched for a long, heavy moment.

  Finally, a slow, profound understanding seemed to dawn on Jenny's face. She let out a soft, almost imperceptible sigh, a sound of weary, cosmic resignation.

  "My apologies, Mark," she said, her voice a quiet, formal murmur as she closed the book. "The text is not damaged. It is... warded." She met his gaze, her kind eyes now filled with a deep, professional seriousness. "My Mistress informs me that this particular edition is protected by a rather old and potent piece of ritual magic. One that ensures its contents can only be read by those who have a specific, demonstrated need to know the information within."

  She pushed the book gently back across the table toward him, her expression a mixture of apology and quiet finality.

  "It is probably for the best that you hold onto it for now," she said, her voice dropping to a confidential whisper. "I do not believe this particular volume would be... suitable for our public shelves, in any case."

  Mark took the book, the unreadable volume feeling less like a source of information and more like a locked box to which he didn't have the key. Another mystery, another time. He tucked it back into the cloth bag behind his chair, adding it to the growing, mental list of unresolved strangeness becoming his new life.

  "You mentioned other topics?" Jenny asked, her voice a professional prompt that pulled him back to the present.

  "Yes," Mark said, his mind shifting gears. He had the practical. He had the political. Now he needed the personal. "Dreams."

  A flicker of surprise, followed by a warm, knowing smile, crossed Jenny's face. "Ah. A fascinating and deeply complex field of study." She gestured in the general direction of the main hall, where the quiet murmur of Tori's first-aid lesson could still be heard. "Our own Tori Valerius is probably one of the most knowledgeable sources you could ask for on that subject."

  "I intend to ask her," Mark confirmed with a slow nod. "But it's not the... mechanics of 'Dreaming' as a magical skill that I'm after." He paused, trying to find the right words to articulate a concept that had no equivalent here. "I'm looking for anything you might have on what we'd call lucid dreaming. The art of becoming aware that you're dreaming, and shaping the narrative yourself. And," he added, a new, more speculative thought occurring to him, "anything on the interpretation of dreams. Their meanings. The symbolism."

  Jenny's brow furrowed in genuine, professional concentration. She was no longer the friendly shopkeeper of knowledge, but the master mentally scanning the great catalog of the library's vast holdings.

  "Lucid dreaming," she repeated, the term foreign on her tongue. "The art of shaping the narrative..." She was silent for a long moment, her gaze distant as she mentally scanned the shelves of her domain.

  "I'm afraid that's not a subject that has crossed my path," she said finally, her voice a quiet regret at a request she could not fulfill. "The concept itself... it sounds remarkably similar to what some of the old Tethys ritualists used to call 'soul-space shaping'. The idea of consciously molding one's own Liminal Space outside of a Trial." She shook her head, a gesture of academic dismissal. "But that was always considered a... theoretical dead end. A path of failed research. Interesting, but ultimately impractical."

  She saw the flicker of disappointment on his face and offered a small, conciliatory smile. "However," she added, her professional pride clearly piqued by the challenge of an unknown subject, "that does not mean the knowledge doesn't exist. My authority is absolute within these walls, but the Collective is a wide place."

  She stood, her demeanor shifting to one of quiet, efficient action. "I will send an inquiry to the central archives in Titan, and to the other major city branches in Mimas and Rhea. If any texts on this 'lucid dreaming' or on the symbolism of dreams exist anywhere in our records, I will have them recalled here for you."

  Mark gave a grateful nod. It was a delay, another item on his project plan pushed back pending further information, but it was progress. The problem of his haunted nights now had a potential, if distant, solution.

  Just as Jenny was making a note on a small slate by the table, the tapestry-covered doorway swung open. Tori walked in, a look of soul-deep exhaustion on her face. The lesson was clearly over.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She offered Jenny a tired, professional smile. "That's them sorted for another week," she said, her voice a flat, weary monotone. "No one fainted this time, so I'm calling it a small success."

  Her gaze then fell upon the stack of heavy, text-filled books on the table in front of Mark, and a flicker of her old, familiar snark returned, a well-worn defense mechanism against her own fatigue.

  "Well, well," she quipped, a ghost of a smirk touching her lips. "Look at you. Finally graduated from the picture books."

  The comment was a small, almost reflexive jab, the kind of casual, professional needling he'd heard a thousand times in his old office. He didn't rise to it. He had a plan, and she was a part of it.

  "Actually," Mark said, his voice even and direct, "your timing is perfect." He met her tired, surprised gaze. "I was hoping you might have a few minutes. I need to talk to you. About dreams. And nightmares."

  He then turned to Jenny, who was watching the exchange with a quiet, knowing amusement. "If it's not an imposition, Jenny," he asked, "could we borrow this room for a little while?"

  Jenny's smile was warm and accommodating. "Of course, dear," she said, already moving toward the door. "Take all the time you need." She paused on the threshold, a thoughtful, academic glint in her eye. "And just in case," she added, more to herself than to them, "I'll go and find that old text on soul-space shaping. It might provide some useful, if theoretical, context."

  With a final, encouraging nod, she slipped out through the tapestry, leaving Mark alone in the quiet room with a very surprised, and suddenly very wary, Tori.

  Tori hesitated for a moment, clearly caught off guard by the directness of his request. She looked from Mark to the empty chair, then back again, a silent, internal debate playing out on her face.

  "I didn't actually say yes," she stated, her voice a little tight as she walked over and sat down, a clear sign that her professional curiosity had won out over her reluctance. "But I have about an hour before my next shift at the infirmary. So, talk."

  She folded her arms, her posture a defensive, clinical barrier. Before he could even begin, she fixed him with a stare that was both intense and deeply, profoundly serious.

  "But let's be very clear about one thing," she said, her voice dropping to a low, non-negotiable tone. "I have no interest in 'poking around' in your head. Not after... what happened during the surgery." A flicker of remembered horror crossed her face, a raw, unguarded expression that spoke volumes. "Whatever is going on in there... I would prefer to stay out. Permanently."

  The vehemence of her refusal, the genuine fear in her eyes, was a stark reminder of the trauma she had walked in on, all with the intentions of attempting to distract against the pain of the surgery.

  "I agree," Mark said, his own voice quiet but firm. "That's my preference, too."

  The quiet of the reading room settled around them, a stark contrast to the turbulent, internal landscapes he was about to describe. He began slowly, the words feeling clumsy and inadequate. He told her about the ghosts.

  He spoke of the familiar, rainy streets of a city she had never seen, of the low, electric hum of a tram on its tracks. Concepts he had to pause and explain, describing it as a smaller, city-bound version of their Great Cog railway. He told her about the phantom smells of wet pavement and exhaust fumes, the distant, mournful cry of sirens of an ambulance, the raw sensory ghosts of a world that was no longer his.

  "They're not... nightmares," he tried to explain, struggling to find the right language. "There are no monsters. No threats. They're just... memories. But they're not mine anymore. They're just echoes, and they won't let me rest."

  Tori listened, her usual, snarky defensiveness replaced by a deep, professional concentration. She didn't interrupt. She didn't judge. She just absorbed the data, a healer diagnosing a wound she couldn't see.

  When he finally fell silent, the quiet of the room felt heavy with the weight of his confession. Tori was silent for a long moment, her brow furrowed in thought.

  "You're right about one thing," she said finally, her voice the calm, analytical tone of a specialist. "Those aren't dreams. Not in the way a Dreamer would define them." She met his gaze, her expression serious, clinical. "A dream is a narrative. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if it's a chaotic one. What you're describing... the sensory fragments, the disconnected moments... those are memories. Raw, unfiltered echoes of your past, bleeding through into your sleep."

  "But you look... rested," Tori observed, her professional curiosity overriding her earlier, cautious distance. Her eyes narrowed, not with suspicion, but with the focused, analytical gaze of a puzzle-solver. "Something's working. And the fact that you can differentiate between the two states, that you can shift your awareness from a memory-state to a dream-state so cleanly... that's not normal, Mark. Not even for a trained Dreamer."

  "Practice," Mark replied with a weary shrug. "But it's not really helping. It's just... managing the issue, and I don’t know for how long."

  Tori's glare was immediate and sharp. "Practice," she repeated, the word a flat, dismissive echo. "That's not an answer. That's a deflection. How?"

  He let out a slow, tired breath. He had wanted to avoid this, the slow, frustrating process of explaining a concept that had no apparent equivalent here. But she was the specialist, and she was attempting to help. She deserved the data.

  "It's lucid dreaming," he said, the term feeling strange and clinical in the quiet, book-lined room. "I mentioned it to Jenny. It's a skill. Something I spent a lot of time practicing back home. Mostly," he admitted with a humorless smile, "out of boredom."

  He saw the familiar, skeptical confusion on her face and pressed on, trying to build a bridge between their two realities. "I taught myself to recognize when I was dreaming. And once you know it's a dream, you can... change the direction. Build your own world." He thought of the silent, star-dusted cosmos of the night before. "I spent last night creating star systems and star scapes just to get a few hours of quiet. But I don't know how feasible that is, long-term. It feels like I'm just building a bigger wall to hide behind."

  Tori stared at him, her expression a mask of pure, intellectual bafflement. The concept seemed to buckle against the very framework of her understanding. "A starscape?" she repeated, the words laced with incredulity. "You just... created a universe? How would you even know where to start?"

  The question was so vast, so fundamentally unanswerable in the context of their shared reality, that Mark could only shake his head. "That," he said with a tired, dismissive wave of his hand, "is a much longer, far less relevant conversation. Trust me."

  She seemed to accept the deflection, her mind already moving on to the more immediate, practical implications. "You're right about one thing," she conceded, her voice regaining its clinical, diagnostic edge. "It is just a wall. A very impressive, and frankly, impossible-sounding wall, but a wall nonetheless."

  She leaned forward, her expression turning serious, the healer replacing the academic. "These memories... this 'bleed', it's a symptom. It's trauma. The loss of your entire world, the physical injuries, the constant threat... your mind is trying to process it all, and it's failing."

  She met his gaze, her own eyes holding a flicker of a shared, unwelcome understanding. "You can't just build a wall and hope it goes away, Mark. You have to face it. You have to find a way to reconcile with it. Because if you don't," she finished, her voice a low, quiet warning, "it will consume you."

  Tori glanced at a grand, ornate clock on the far wall, its golden hands sweeping silently across a face of polished obsidian. "I have to go," she said, her voice a return to its usual, professional briskness. She pushed her chair back and stood, the brief, intense consultation clearly at an end.

  "But I'll be by your house later this evening," she added, pausing at the tapestry-covered doorway. "For your check-up." She gave him a look that was part clinical assessment, part a promise of a conversation not yet finished. "We'll talk more then."

  And with that, she was gone, leaving Mark alone in the quiet, book-lined room with her final, chilling diagnosis echoing in the silence. It will consume you. He had a plan for his body, a plan for his political survival. He was beginning to realize he had no plan at all for the ghosts that haunted his mind.