So he came in kindness, with the food she so obviously needed, and with an openness that itched because of its premeditation. He certainly hadn’t anticipated losing himself in story and conversation. It had been so long since he had truly spoken. For nigh twenty years, his words had always skipped without sinking.

“I’m not even sure when it began happening, let alone why,” he said, pausing to draw a palsied breath. “The Dreams began to change … in strange, little ways at first. Mandate Schoolmen claim to relive Seswatha’s life, but this is only partially true. In fact, we dream only portions, the long trauma of the First Apocalypse. All we dream is the spectacle. ‘Seswatha,’ the old Mandate joke goes, ‘does not shit.’ The banalities—the substance of his life—is missing … The truth of his life is missing.”

All the things that were forgotten, he realized.

“In the beginning, I noticed a change in the character, perhaps, but nothing more. A slight difference in emphasis. When the dreamer is remade, won’t the dreams change also? Besides, the dread spectacle was simply too overwhelming to care all that much. When thousands are screaming, who pauses to count bruises on an apple?

“Then it happened: I dreamed of him—Seswatha—stubbing his toe … I fell asleep, this world folded in on itself the way it always does, and his world rose into its place. I was he, crossing a gloomy room racked with what seemed to be thousands of scrolls, mumbling, lost in thought, and I stubbed my toe on the bronze foot of a brazier … It was like a fever dream, the ones that travel like a cart in a circle, happening over and over. Seswatha stubbing his toe!”

Without thinking, he had leaned forward and clutched the tip of his felt-slippered foot. The leather was fire hot. Mimara simply stared at him, her eyes placid above fine-boned cheeks, looking for all the world like the past, like her staring out over the smoke of a harsher fire. Another abject listener. Either she remained silent out of irritation—perhaps he had spoken too long or too hard—or she kept her counsel, understanding that his story was a living thing, and as such could only be judged as a whole.

“When I awoke in the morning,” he continued, “I had no idea what to make of it. It didn’t strike me as a revelation of any kind, only a curiosity. There are always anomalies, you see. If this were Atyersus, I could show you whole tomes cataloguing the various ways in which the Dreams misfire: the inversions, substitutions, alterations, corruptions, and on and on. More than a few Mandate scholars have spent their lives trying to interpret their significance. Numerological codes. Prophetic communications. Ethereal interferences. It’s an easy obsession, considering the suffering involved. They convince nobody save themselves in the end. As bad as philosophers.