The Interpretation of Dreams

Checkers

Checkers never gave much thought to her dreams. Dreams were one of those funny things that all thinking creatures seemed to have, but Gliders tended not to remember them, or dismissed them are irrelevant or irrational.

Her first vivid dreams came when she was a girl. They were about her mother, coming to visit her family. These were on the whole nice dreams, with her mother visiting the family and assuring her that everything was going to be all right, as if she had never died. It took her a few minutes after waking to understand that things were otherwise, and she was a disappointed again, but she would still rather dream that kind of dream and suffer the disappointment afterward.

The next recurring dream was influenced by a play that she once saw, that of George the Glider and the Great Dinner. This was a dream that Checkers would rather not have experienced. In the dream she was shivering in the snow, hunkered down against a wind. Through a window she could see a cozy fire, and her classmates enjoying beef, fruit, coffee (she could just smell the aroma), and obviously enjoying each other's company. And for some reason, she was not allowed in. Unlike George, she never got to experience the good part of the tale. This took place in her late teenage years, when the specter of ostracism hung over her.

After the ostracism, she remembered little. Most of her dreams were much like her waking life - tracking, hunting, cooking, and above all, hiking. From time to time, she would dream of being back in Electric Pass, a little girl happily tracking a frattercat or stealing an afternoon to read one of the dusty books of ancient lore in somebody's library. These were helpful dreams, helping keep the tie to her homeland alive, and her spirits up.

There were two other recurring dreams. Before the voyage across the Ocean, they were rare, but after she had crossed, she had them at least once a week. The first was a common Glider nightmare, actually. It was the one where she was flying across a great lake, or an ocean, and she cannot see any place to land. Her wings ache, and her stomach growls, and she feels weak, but she has to keep going, or else she will drown. Psychologically the dream is easy to explain: the Glider who dreams this is under stress, feeling that the task or responsibilities that they are undertaking are more than they can handle. Given the monumental task that she was undertaking, and the difficulties that occured, it is not suprising that she experienced this.

The second one was a dream that no other Glider had dreamed, due to their cultural conditioning. In this dream, she is dressed very colorfully, in fine fabrics. She is in the company of four other Gliders. One resembles Robin Goldenrod, although he looks older, somewhat like his father, Pinnacle, or his grandfather, Sylvain. She does not recognize the other three, but they appear to be Burgesses. (In Glider society, a Burgess is an elected position, and they are usually chosen from one of the leading families.) She does not exchange words with them, but she stands up, and walks onto a stage. The audience is composed of them, the thinking animals that have plagued her people over the centuries. She goes up, knowing that what she says is important, and will free her people from the fear of extinction. But she always woke up before she gets to the dias, and never can remember what it is she was going to say...."

Her memories, her hope of rejoining the community, and her sense of honour were all that she had left after losing everything else. She entered the caves with little real hope, but at least the quest, one way or another, would be over. The old man, now revealed to be the dragon, did something to her, apparently. Almost like freezing time. It seemed like only a few seconds, but he provided Lord Fred as a companion, almost as if he had been conjured. Magic user fraud, of course, but she had not had time to figure out how he did it. And oddly enough, Lord Fred was a comfort to her, He was an ungraceful brute, like most of his kind. Underneath it all, though, he had the heart of a gliderim, as he showed in the fight against the wallhugger.

The Dolomite book was a wonder to find. The dragon, if he knew of it, did not seem to recognize what it was. If he were like Fred, he might not have seen the red writing, and only seen blank pages.

And then the strangers came in... and then the explosions ... and a bunch of surreal scenes. Could this be a dream? That would make as much sense as anything else, but there was no way to tell. It seemed very real, and very unpleasant. Fred and the other lady turned into tengus. She took the form of a smaller version of those brutes, but she knew that she was really a Glider, even though she had obviously been mutilated somehow, with her wings amputated. It was like a couple of the old stories that used to be told to Glider children, fairy tales that even they would not believe. She had been under a lot of stress.

She caught her breath. While the others were standing around, with some apparently concentrating on the tengus, she thought about her situation. She had to proceed as if this were reality; if this were a nightmare, she would wake up eventually. First, she wanted to get back to being a Glider. She felt that it was likely that she was going to die; the powers here were more than she could understand. And dying as a Dark Elf or whatever they called this was not the way she wanted to go. Until she could figure out how to change back, she would simply not look at herself, nor the other "dark elves." Next, there was the mystery of the "link of the dragon." It seemed that at first that she had a horrible dilemma. Allow the whole world to die, or just sacrifice her people? Well, given the choice, she would save her people, then the others, then herself. There was no dispute there. But it was probably the choice the beast wanted to lure her into. There had to be a better alternative. And all this sounded like a bunch of superstition and hocus pocus to her. Realistically, what was more likely? That this "link" was true, or that the enemies were trying to sap her will to fight? Unless she saw compelling evidence that the safety of her people depended on the dragon (what a thought!) then she would plunge ahead and kill the dragon. That, at least, had not changed. (But why was there a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach when she thought about this, even though it was logically not probable?)

Relegating that unpleasant feeling to the back of her mind, she turned to more urgent matters. She could still wield a spear. But on whose behalf?

What of the strangers? Fred was gone, as far as she could tell. And she had experienced little good from anyone else. Someone turned her into this, and could not give her a straight explanation. A bunch of baloney about magic and becoming a changeling. Still, these strangers declared that their purpose was killing the dragon. She was in favour of that, more than ever now. Just who should she trust?

1. Checkers agrees to accompany the Champions on their quest.

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