>>5212019It is hardly past midnight, you would wager, but you are further away from Hawksong and from Edwin of Engel than you normally are when you undertake an excursion. Conscious that you cannot remain in this realm beyond dawnlight without risking difficulty and danger, you allow Irinnile to take hold of you and to guide you on leather wings through the cloudy skies and past sparkling clusters of dream-filled human hamlets, back to the great pillar of sleepless hopes and anxieties that IS Hawksong. Even here, in this aspect of reality, it remains a shining beacon—‘the city on the hill’.
In the dreamscape, spaces are less literal, less physical, and travel is usually faster... But you discover that it is a difficult thing to move across great, dreamless expanses, far from mortal minds. The sparsely-traveled night-time highway is a particularly difficult stretch, dark even against your eyes and Irinnile’s, and thick like turbid water. Still, Irinnile half-flies and half-swims through it, and as you approach Hawksong’s outlying areas you find yourself able to breath freely again… And shortly thereafter, you are at your destination, buoyed on currents of human unconscious. You have eyes for only one ember in this blaze, though. You well know the way to the Engel Estate—you’ve walked it on foot, and flown you way to it in dreams, many a time.
Dawn is a scant hour or two away by then, but you know that time moves slowly here… And truly, even a moment to see Edwin again, to touch him, hold him… It would be worth it! You could find such comfort in even the briefest such moment, and you know he would, too. He is a worrier, after all—a gentle, protective creature. Knowing the climate you have plunged his people into, and with what HE believes he knows of YOU, you imagine he must be worried sick!
But… He isn’t home.
You and Irinnile hover above his bed, empty of his familiar, lanky shape. Nor do you see the pointed cap of the would-be wizard hanging on his bedpost, a sign that perhaps he awoke to go to the elaborate estate’s very modern indoor toiletry-room.
‘You don’t think…’ Irinnile begins.
The thought occurs to you, too. You recall hearing rom Fynn, Edwin’s merchant-mogul father, that Edwin had been spending a great dela of time with the Tower Staffer Paula, to whom you introduced him by way of a tripartite date… And, on at least one occasion, steamy threesome. You’d sensed affection for her in him since then, too—musings about what could have been, had he not been so wrapped-up in your much more chaotic world.
‘That son of a BITCH!’ Irinnile shrieks. ‘He can’t do this to us! Let’s go fuck ‘em both up!’
‘We’re miles away,’ you remind her.
‘Let’s at least give ‘em nightmare, make ‘em pay!’
