Dreams & Visions
By Nick Hayden
Copyright
2012 Nick Hayden
Smashwords Edition, License Note
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Table of Contents
The Vision of Prince Frederick
Read more at www.worksofnick.com
The Memory
It was a memory more precious than any other she had. It was worn and faded, frayed at the edges, but even extensive viewing had not distorted it. It had never had the feel of a memory, but of something else more elusive, something akin to a snatch of a dream or a scene from a book read in childhood.
Her memory was of lights and warmth and insubstantial shapes. It had no particulars, nothing real, only shadows of some reality, and brilliant lights, glowing like the sky on these cold, lonely nights. And warmth like a blanket, a fire, sleep on a dark morning when nothing is awake except the frigid wind.
The owner of this memory was sometimes less sure of her own name than of the reality of the memory. This frightened her. For if the memory was false, could she depend on her own existence? But she did not think on such things. She contemplated the memory, examining it endlessly, hoping to extract some clue or revelation from it. There was nothing. She gained nothing from it except a desire to continue forward.
She trudged through the snow, leaving only transient footprints, small and unremarkable on the white expanse. The wind covered the footsteps, and when she turned back, they were gone.
She was never quite sure how she arrived at any particular place at any particular moment. She could remember incidents, of course—a table with warm food; a tree behind her back as she watched the snow falling; bitter wind gnawing at her cheeks, her hands; snow melting around her toes; sunrises and sunsets; aching legs, bloodshot eyes; fires so warm she never wanted to leave; leaving; a horizon in the distance that never neared.
But now it was night. Half her life was night. Snowflakes drifted down like bits of clouds. The wind was falling asleep, burying itself beneath feet of snow and ice. It would rise again tomorrow, colder than ever. The land spread before her without distinction, and the blankness shone with light.
Stars peered from the sky, each one crisp and clear, a point so bright and precise that it must be newly born. Each was pure, unsullied, like the snow beneath her feet—and distant. The snow sparkled like the stars, but that was because it was the stuff of stars. Fallen stars.
~~~
She stopped, though she knew she should not. If she stopped, she might never begin again. She stood still, bundled thickly against the cold. Her true form was hid by those things necessary for survival in this harsh world. She uncovered her face and took a deep, burning breath.
Her eyes were a light blue, the shade of snow at gray dawns. Spots of red appeared on her cheeks, at the tip of her nose. She pulled off her gloves and placed her pale hands against her cheeks. The warmth felt good, comforting, even if it was her own, even if she could never win this battle against the chill herself.
She realized again how empty the night was. She turned, looking about her anxiously, but no one was there. She hoped, somehow and always, that someone would come and carry her away, so she could stop trudging, so that his body might warm her.
She slipped her gloves on and raised her head to the sky. That was the real reason she had stopped. Not to look for things she would not find—though even that had some part in it, she admitted to herself—but to look at what she knew she would find.
Greens and reds and blues and golds lapped slowly against stars like ocean waves, a pool of rainbows in the distant sky, near the horizon. Waves spread from the center slowly, slowly outward, and crashed against the blackness of night. It was a mesmerizing sight, and inexplicable. Frightening.
She didn't know why, but whenever she watched the lights above, her heart beat faster and her hands began to sweat. She could not look for long. She wanted to turn away and run. She felt small, a single flake among the winter of the world; she would melt if she looked too long.
But she always looked. The colors were strange, celestial, too bright and too slow. Nothing in the world equaled them. When there was no moon, the snow mirrored the colors in pale reflections, and she could watch these for hours. It was distilled; she could almost grasp it when it sparkled in the snow. Above, the sight was terrible. Below, shielded by the vast distances of air, it was beautiful.
Her eyes snapped from the colors to the ground. She stood for a long time staring at the snow. Her limbs grew cold. She could no longer feel her face. Slowly, as if waking, she covered her face and took a step.
After one step, the others came as a matter of course.
~~~
One day she found herself in a village of lumpy white buildings. The buildings had been spotless wooden boxes once, but snow covered everything eventually. The villagers tired of clearing it away. They let it remain wherever it did not interfere too directly with life.
She entered the inn. There were few enough travelers wherever she went, but every village had an inn. The guest rooms were an excuse for a common room; the villagers needed somewhere to gather, somewhere with a fire to warm them and company to enjoy the warmth with them.
She pulled a chair near the fire and sat. Slowly, one article at a time, she removed her protective clothing. First came the mask, then the gloves, then the boots. The hood, the scarf, the outer coat, the outer pants, the inner coat. She let her hair down and shook her head violently to untangle it. Snow and ice flew from her. A puddle formed on the floor.
She could feel warm air, as she seldom could. She felt it in her throat when she inhaled. There was a draft somewhere, but she loved it; it made the warmth sweeter, fiercer.
"One of life's great pleasures."
She turned her head to find a man looking at her from a nearby table. He had a thick beard and dark eyes. He had neither food nor drink at his table, nothing to show why he sat there. She thought that perhaps he liked the fire as she did.
She nodded in reply to his statement and turned back to watch the flames.
He spoke again soon after, in a tone of understanding. "You heading to the Top of the World?"
She watched the flames, the strange dance of a force that had no real substance but moved in ways she thought she should understand. Like music, just as formless and just as powerful.
"I guess that's where I'm heading," she answered. "Unless something changes." She glanced at him. "How did you know?"
"You're not the only one going that way."
She chewed her upper lip. She had not known there were others, but it did not surprise her. It seemed natural. "What's there? Do you know?"
He chuckled. "If I knew, I probably wouldn't go. It's the mystery that intrigues me. Oh, sure, there are those who go simply to prove there's nothing there and those who go because they see everyone else going and those who go because it's their 'destiny,' but in the end, does it really matter why we go? It's a challenge to get there, so it must be worth doing. It's a matter of pride."
She did not say anything immediately. She did not say that it was her destiny, because she would never have used that word but that was the idea of it. She thought of it as her fulfillment when she could think of it in words at all. What she said was: "I've never met anyone else. Why doesn't everyone want to go?"
He leaned forward. "What is it like traveling?"
"Cold, so cold you want to give in to it. Cold and lonely. Miserable, but...." She was going to add beautiful and necessary, joyful and rich in expectation, silent—sometimes in terror and sometimes in peace—but he did not want to hear such things. He had heard what he had asked for.
"Exactly. Most people can't handle it. They give up and settle down. Which is good, because then you and I get to rest and sit by their fire."
She nodded again. He said nothing else, and she watched the fire and its undulating, restless motions. Snow sparkled, but fire blazed. It was a tamed star, a boxed dream, but still, for all she tried, she could not understand it.
~~~
The man at the inn was right. The further she traveled, the more travelers she saw on the same path. She still traveled alone, but she sometimes saw others in the distance, trudging along. Sometimes there were two or three together, but they never seemed to move quickly. She saw them arguing with one another many times.
The Top of the World, for its self-evident locality, was not easy to find.
In the Last Village—a sign proudly proclaimed the name because "last" gave the village a distinction over every other collection of houses in the world—she first experienced despair. There were men there who said that no one could reach the Top of the World, that they had tried and failed, that better men than they had tried and failed—that all who tried had failed.
"You don't know that!"
"No one like me has ever tried."
"You're lying. You don't want us to reach the Top. You're too scared to try yourself."
"I've traveled for thirty years. Nothing's stopping me."
She listened to the protests, to the confidence of the voices, but inside she felt a hole. It was trying to consume her memory, the only memory she believed was intrinsically hers, and when she grasped for it, it slipped from her fingers, heavy, bulky, shapeless. She remained silent in a room full of words and contemplated, for the first time, failure.
~~~
The Last Village was many days from the Top of the World, and these days were much colder than any that had come before. It snowed fiercely, and no matter how securely she dressed, snow forced its way into cracks and cold wind slithered through layers of clothes to bite the skin. She could see neither sun nor star. Day was a gray version of night.
She saw no one as she walked unceasingly forward. She could not see her path, but she knew she was following it. She thought it was the right path. She hoped it was. She had no way to tell. She could only continue forward the way she had chosen before the snow had overtaken her vision.
The cold—unbearable if she stopped—affected her memory. Its lights seemed dimmer, its warmth cooler, and she began to doubt that she had ever possessed such a memory. It must be an illusion, a foolish dream, a tale she had heard once upon a time. She dare not stop, for she would die.
She considered turning back. She could see nothing ahead. No one had ever made it to the Top of the World. She knew that. There was fire in the Last Village, a room and a bed.
She continued forward. She longed for the past, but her feet were moving for reasons she could no longer remember; she feared to stop them now.
~~~
The snow ceased.
She passed through the snow as through a final barrier. Behind her, it blew with the intensity of a cyclone, but here the air was still. She found herself in a cylinder of calm. Her feet were on a rising slope. She was very near the Top. She climbed the last few steps onto a plateau.
She looked up. The sky held neither the black of night nor the gray-blue of day. The ocean of colors floated above her. It consumed the whole sky. The colors felt closer than they ever had, but she knew she could never reach them. Miles of bitter air separated her.
It was unearthly cold. Flakes of ice dropped from her breath.
Her eyes caught something she had never seen, a ribbon of gold that stretched from the center of the colors down...down...down.... Her eyes followed the ribbon, followed it down miles and ages of emptiness until it reached the ground. There, in the center of the plateau, stood a ladder.
She rushed toward it with energy she did not have. She stumbled through the dusty snow, pushing through weak knees and a twisted ankle. The ladder was within her reach when she first noticed she was not alone.
It was a man. He gripped a rung in gloved hands; his feet were still on the ground. She could not see his face through his mask. No skin was visible except for the circle of his eyes, but she sensed that every muscle was tensed, that his flesh was taut in strain.
She watched him and time passed. He did not move. He never ascended a single rung. He stood there in silent agony.
He threw himself suddenly away from the ladder and landed on his back in a puff of snow and with a thud. She expected silence, as if he were dead, but there was not silence, but the sound of weeping. She knelt beside him, unable to give words to any of her questions or emotions.
"It's impossible," he muttered. Not to her, not to anyone, to himself. His tears froze to his face in small pellets. "I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!" This last was a scream; it reverberated across the plateau and echoed in diminishing parodies of his anger.
"Why didn't you go up?"
"The one who came before me said it couldn't be done. Said he had tried everything." The man was raving, but she listened. "He said he had been here for days. Said the ones before him told him the same he was telling me. Said...didn't matter what he said. I didn't listen, did I? I woke one morning and found him dead. Killed himself. Couldn't bear the failure. I had to bury him. That was yesterday…yesterday...I think it was yesterday. All the days are the same. All are just today. I'll never get there. Never. Never."