We were taken to an annex that was located in one of the inner spires I had seen from outside the castle. The interior was a spiraling staircase, but the room we emerged into couldn’t have been more than three stories. On the way over I had finally learned the two scrubbers’ names. Jossette Parsely and Trevor Baijo. Their personalities were complete opposites, one who took everything seriously and another who saw everything as a joke, but they manifested in the same way in that they would only chime in to interject their outlook into the conversation and otherwise saw it all as beneath their attention. At least that was my read since they continued to pay the rest of us little mind outside of their delayed introductions.

  To contrast them Professor Eric Chorleon hadn’t shut up since we left the throne room.

  “Douglass from Duskhovel is it? Then my wayward pupil must be your attendant. Could you tell him to stop wasting his life and get back to work for me first chance you get. I’m still sitting on his thesis for the application of elfsparks and I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  That was the first thing he said to me as we walked down the halls of the palace. I should have known from the insignia of the waking hour he wore, but he not only knew Rayngo from his scholar days but was his mentor to boot. This could have been my chance to finally put a name to the nameless scholar, surely, he must have known him if he was close to Rayngo, but I couldn’t bring myself to. If he hadn’t already broached the subject, it was most likely because he didn’t want to and it was only morbid curiosity on my part. Knowing his name wouldn’t change anything about him.

  “And then he just threw all the papers into the air and stormed off. It was a veritable snowstorm of documents, and I'll have you know I was leaping like a spry lad at the age of fifty-nine to rescue them all. After all, just what would I do if they were damaged? I wouldn’t be able to rewrite them. The boy surpassed me ages ago. My last duty as a scholar is to get his arse back in a chair so we can finally see some progress.”

  “Elfspark has to be a permutation of elfdust. It has a charged ring to it. He must have been researching a more volatile form of elfdust.”

  Every time Eric introduced an unfamiliar term Jossette would analyze its meaning. It wasn’t as if she always determined the correct meaning, but she had been close enough to impress the professor.

  “That’s right. Though it’s a little more complicated than…oh who am I kidding? I understand about just as well as you would. The only man in the world who could really explain it is busy tucking people into bed in a backwoods town.”

  “That backwoods town is my home you know.”

  “Then you know full well it’s located back behind the woods. I’ve seen a map before. But never mind geography, we’re here to discuss psychology. Go ahead and take a seat.”

  It was at this point we reached the end of the spiraling staircase and opened the door to a drawing room. Considering who we were following I was expecting a table covered in vials and obscure contraptions, but the only table in the room was covered in a large blue blanket that made it clear it wasn’t for dining. It was surrounded by seats that were cushioned enough that I felt you could use them for beds if you flattened them. He lit a candle in the center and despite the fact that I claimed it wasn’t a dining room he laid out some saucers and began preparing tea from a nearby cupboard.

  “Pssst Douglass, doesn’t he remind you of that funny old man he said he taught when he’s scurrying around like that?”

  “That funny old man is forty-four Karen and yes, he absolutely looks like a tall gangly Rayngo when he pours that tea.

  We were whispering, but in a manner that made it easy to hear us.

  “Well of course I do. That boy wouldn’t have been able to pour a glass of water if it wasn’t for me even if he could have analyzed its contents. I swear I taught him more about etiquette than I did about science.”

  “Well then, why don’t we forget all about this psychology business and you just tell us some more stories about Douglass’ good ol’ attendant.”

  Karen folded her hands on the table and beamed as if she meant this in all earnestness.

  “I would love to do that lass, but we really need to get focused. If we keep talking about my errant pupil, I won’t be able to think about anything but the possibilities of elfsparks.”

  “Then are we ready to get down to brass tacks? I didn’t want to kill the fun, but I’m not able to shake off the seriousness of being stared down by our nations king as easily as the rest of you.”

  Unlike Jossette, Trevor, and Karen who were all lost in their own little worlds and myself as well who was playing along, Matt’s countenance hadn’t budged an inch since we left the throne room. He was brooding and wanted answers. We all did, but I think he was the only one whose desperation was obvious. Thomas, on the other hand, wore a grim expression and wouldn’t speak or meet our eyes. He may have agreed in the end, but he clearly still lamented the turn we had taken.

  “That we can, and like I said we’ll be starting with psychology or at least a pseudo-science application of it.”

  “Pseudo-science?”

  “That’s right. Our subject is a fallacy, so we can’t rely on any proven theory, but luckily, we have an entire library’s worth of fringe science to study. Especially where the ether ways are concerned, do you have any idea how many crack pot ideas have been recorded in the annuls of history over the dream?”

  “Well since the ether ways haven’t been able to be defined by science, it leaves the possibilities for theory infinite. If anything, it’s surprising there isn’t enough crackpot theories to fill ten libraries over.”

  Eric slammed his palm on the table hard enough to shake the saucers despite how frail his hand was. He did start rubbing it immediately after so he probably hurt himself.

  “That’s it, you lass, are to retire as a scrubber and join us in Tembralvain. The one thing I hate most is to see intelligence go to waste.”

  “I’m flattered, but I’m quite content researching on my own in my free time.”

  “Researching on your own time? Do you know how many students I’ve tried and failed to teach just that? I’ll give you my waking hour. I’d trade one thousand of these paper weights for just one competent student.”

  “Could we please get back to the subject at hand?”

  “Very well, but I’m not letting this go.”

  “Pssst Douglass, do you think if we distract him enough, we can make him invent an absurd new back story for how we “changed”?

  “That’s right Karen, the elfsparks activated our dream eyes. Not only can we tell you that that queen was unfaithful, we can also tell you that the puppet dancer is the king in disguise.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “And would you two both cut it out?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll be good.”

  In truth I was as anxious as Matt, so I did mean it, but I was surprised to find a part of me was glad we forced Thomas to stifle a laugh.

  “Where were we at? Crackpot ideas, correct? The most famous of these was first postulated by the famous philosopher and painter Heluin Terace. The influence of his theory can be seen in his painting The Ghost Cycle, which you’ve most likely at least heard of if not seen. It depicts a procession of phantoms made of bright colorful lines flying in a circle through an emerald tube. The phantoms aren’t actually meant to represent ghosts, but instead…”

  “Is this a history lesson or a psychology lesson?”

  “No patience, just like all the youth today. Well since you want to jump right to the conclusion without understanding it, all you need to know is that he theorized that all of humanities consciousness was connected in the ether ways.”

  It held the remnants of our subconscious and brought us to each other no matter where we were located. I questioned what was so crackpot about phrasing it this way.

  “It doesn’t sound like an inaccurate description of the ways, so what is wrong about his theory?”

  “See we jumped to the end, and you don’t understand anything.”

  “Matt’s the one who rushed you.”

  “To put it right, he thought that it was our manifestations inside the ether ways that was the oddity. He claimed the lines and splotches your lot see every night are what we melt into when we enter the ways and that it all seeks to connect as a single essence, but since the entirety of our minds don’t enter the ways in sleep, they rebel and try to hold on to their tangible form. In this theory both yourself inside the ways and the filth are the same substance in a different shape, and he further goes on to say that the lines slip out because they’re parts of us we are not trying to hold onto.”

  I had never heard the theory before. It was chilling and it also didn’t sound impossible to me.

  “I see that look on your face lad and you can wipe it right off with your ignorance. The theory is full of holes. In the first place if the mind is purposefully discarding pieces of itself, then how do you explain repeat stains? For that matter why is what’s discarded so consistent between everyone. Real psychology isn’t that easy, and his model assumes it’s the individual responsible for the selection not the collective. And last of all how can you scrubbers, once again manifested as individuals, be the ones to set right the dispersion when you aren’t the source? Those are only the obvious questions you lot would understand. Heluin’s understanding of psychology was severely lacking even if he was a brilliant philosopher.”

  “Well, if the theory’s so obvious wrong how are we supposed to use it?”

  “That’s just the thing. It might look full of holes but it’s impossible to prove wrong. I stand by all my criticism but that’s only my interpretation. Around twenty years ago his school of thought saw a resurgence and while not many believe it verbatim, many have formed their own models of the ether ways extrapolated from his own. Those theories. We can use them. They would be readily accepted by a large percent of academia if we claim to have found proof and manage our fa?ade as evidence.”

  Put on top of that the very likely outcome where no one will fight against our lie as the king had predicted and suddenly this entire mess didn’t appear like a complete crapshoot. Listening to Eric, I felt like I could imagine a world where the king’s lie had been true even when I knew it was completely fabricated.

  “In particular we are going to focus on the work of Rufus Bargezl, a prick of a scholar and an all around scumbag, but one with an interpretation that’s perfectly convenient for us and conveniently is believed by most of Tembralvain. According to him, the discomfort felt by scrubbers when they are drawn into the “filth”, or for our purposes the collective unconscious, is not on account of their disgust at the contents therein, but from their aversion to being assimilated. He believes that if one were to temper their will, it would be possible for one to forgo resistance and integrate themselves into a massive shared dream that would reveal the bare innards of humanities consciousness to them.”

  Jossette folded her arms and hummed thoughtfully.

  “Would you, when assimilated, be able to focus on specific consciousness and for that matter would specific memories mean anything to you.”

  “I would imagine not, but theory is empty without experience in this regard. There is a tangent theory that claims this “assimilation” is just normal dreaming, but it isn’t relevant to our purposes. Instead, we are going to meet him halfway. Rather than training your will you were drawn in by high exposure and the result is not as complete as he believed it would be. You can melt into the collective, but you still retain your individuality allowing you to examine the dream as an outside observer.”

  It all came together far too nicely. The surreal tension of the obvious lie had been molded by hammer and chisel into the normalcy of speculation. Just how much could be paraded before scrutiny through academically toned imaginings?

  “With that in mind I have a bit of homework for you all tonight.”

  He pulled out documents from a cupboard and passed them out between us. I frowned as I read the contents and heard Trevor guffaw.

  “Oi professor, you working for the local paper now?

  As he said, the papers contained sketches of individuals and short accounts of various crimes or disturbing happenings in their lives in a way that mirrored a standard newspaper.

  “Tell me, are any of you familiar with the Undurocian game patch snapper?”

  “Oooo I know that one. Me and my sister still play it sometimes. It’s the game where you match picture cards from your hand to description cards as you flip them over.”

  Come to think of it she had been the one to suggest the cloud game. I considered stopping at a novelty shop later and picking out a board game, but then realized there was a good chance we wouldn’t be walking around the city for the next few days.

  “Just the one. Well, you lot will be playing patch snapper with these documents and the stains. Obviously, you can’t take them into the dream with you so I’d like you all to memorize them until you can manifest them in place of your mops. And with that we are done here for today. Ostentatiously, I’ve been giving you all a psychological examination so please keep that in mind. Well, unless any of you wish to stay and discuss dream theory, you’re free to go and I’ll see you again same time tomorrow.”

  To his disappointment everyone began to shuffle towards the door, but to his surprise one of us stayed behind after all once I had asked Karen to go on ahead without me.

  “Mr. Draemin, you have some questions for me?”

  “Yes, it’s about something I once read. An unnamed anonymous tome from Rayngo’s library.”

  I went on to explain the notes of the unknown scholar and Rayngo’s thoughts on them.

  “Hmmm well unlike Rayngo, I can see some viability to the theory, but as he said it is on the whole impractical. There would be too much death before any healing took place without any guarantee of permanence. With what little we know whose to say the correlation will not instead lead to an amplifying effect in place of immunization? But never mind that. I can’t give you any answers lad, but what I can give you are more crackpot theories.”

  Meaning anything he told me would be guaranteed to be even more unrealiable than the questionable data I was interviewing him on. Despite myself I was still curious and urged him to continue.

  “Well lets look again at the assimilation school of thought. With a few assumptions we can liken the spreading of uncleaned stains to a cloud of discarded unconscious. Perhaps then the decaying found in the localized real world is from that cloud pulling something into itself from the people and land around it, though this would require us to attribute either something spiritual to the land or tangible to the cloud of filth. Based on this incredibly flakey premise we can blame the proliferation of disease in both plants and animals to be caused by a weakening of their ability to fight off disease as the necessary factors are pulled from them. This would be supported by the reversing of the process healing the fly, but not the plant as you said. The fly can gain immunity to cilithema once its necessary factors are returned, but the plant withered because it doesn’t possess the ability to heal gildphia regardless of what’s returned. It’s not unbelievable since normal decay wouldn’t allow for this “return” even if it was responsible for destroying the immunity processes, but it's based on too many unreliable assumptions and a premise that already has its own glaring faults.”

  Under this theory the Scholar’s method was meaningless since the dream disease would only trigger diseases that exposure couldn’t arbitrarily cure. I wondered if I would have rather believed this theory between the two already unlikely possibilities. It would not allow for the unnamed scholar to be vindicated, but it would also mean denying the possibility that the disease could be cured.

  “I agree with Rayngo that you shouldn’t let the issue eat at you, but I can’t agree that it’s best not to think of it at all. Thinking is never wrong whatever you might do with it. So go ahead, consider and theorize for yourself, and if ever a novel idea springs to mind, be sure to come back and discuss it.”

  The merit of thinking. To me it felt analogous with willfully staring into the filth. Even these learned scholars didn’t know the true mechanics of what might be gained or lost inside them. And so, I wondered. Could it be that if I stared long enough into their depths, if I searched them rather than cleaned them, a brilliant smile might bloom on my face?