ALL RIGHT. At this point, some of you might be confused.
If so, you’re in good company. Because all of this confused the hell out of me when it began. Let me go over it again, laying out the threads as I’ve been able to gather them. Together they might present for you a tapestry of understanding.
Seventeen hundred years before our story started, a machine was activated at the great Torish festival of the spirits. Not the tiny machine you’ve seen; that was a prototype. The real machine was something far greater. Scholars had crafted it to stack stones, attract spirits, and then use them as a power source.
They’d miscalculated, however, because the machine saw all souls —not just the spirits that lived beneath the ground—as a viable power source. When first turned on, it was hungry. It needed strength to follow its instructions to stack stones, and it wanted an overwhelming amount of power to jump-start its work. No spirits were available. So it instead reached out and seized the nearest sources it could find: the souls of the people of Torio.
Let this be a lesson. When you Awaken a device like this, be very, very careful what Commands you give it to follow.
This machine immediately began feeding on them, destroying their bodies and harvesting their Investiture. The result was the shroud, sprayed into the air, left to rain down and blanket the land. A dark miasma literally crafted from the dead, everyone’s Identities evaporated and transformed into this dark force. Imagine it like…the tar that decomposed bodies sometimes turn into over many years of incredible pressure. The shroud is that, except souls, left as refuse from the machine’s initial activation.
A soul cannot be destroyed; it can only change forms. The machine, then, didn’t use people up so much as transform them.
They lingered as this blackness, a churning soup made of tens of thousands of souls subject to the machine’s domineering will, held in eternal bondage to something they’d created.
Delightful, eh? Progress, it is said, always disrupts one industry or another. Well, in Torio, progress took a running leap—and instead of just disrupting industry, decided to disrupt the entire planet.
Permanently.
Before long, the machine burned through the relatively weak souls of humans and moved on to the spirits themselves. Drawn by the machine’s incredible stacking abilities, the spirits were handily trapped by its power. It eventually gathered each and every remaining free spirit in the land. They finally satiated it, providing a more… vigorous power source. That was its purpose, and the thing fulfilled it with excellence.
Unfortunately, there was almost no one left to appreciate it.
Only wandering refugees who survived the machine’s initial activation—nomads from the edge of civilization. Lucky survivors who eventually came across the results of the machine’s efforts: hion stubs provided in some of the former locations of Torish towns. The blood of enslaved spirits, hidden away, the source of this power never understood.
PAINTER STEPPED ALONE up to the shroud, holding his painter’s bag with sweaty fingers, watching the shifting darkness. This was the
west side of town—where the nightmares would come. It was near his patrol route—the place where Yumi had once pushed back the darkness ever so briefly.
When the nightmares arrived, they would find only him. A single painter.
He trembled, knowing how it would play out. A rush of dark things surrounding him. If he worked frantically, perhaps he could lock down one of them before he was killed. Perhaps even two or three. Then they would rip him apart. Leave him in pieces, like in the stories of what had happened to the painters of Futinoro.
After he was dead, the nightmares would descend upon the unsuspecting city. Rampaging. Maybe…maybe the Dreamwatch would recognize what was happening. Maybe they’d resist. But…but after meeting them, he had to acknowledge how frail a hope that was.
How many people would die tonight because he hadn’t been able to
persuade the Dreamwatch?
He bowed his head.
Then thought, What am I (lowly) doing?
This was stupid. There was another way.
Yumi’s way.
YOU STILL HAVE questions, don’t you?
All right, let’s delve a little deeper. Let me show you a few events again—but this time through the eyes of someone other than Yumi or Painter. Someone who had been involved in both stories from the beginning.
Here I must admit to you that I’ve lied about one crucial item.
Remember how I told you I’d been hearing voices, seeing flashes of images—sometimes as full pictures, sometimes just as lines that quivered in my vision? Glimpses of events as they unfolded through Painter’s or Yumi’s eyes? Well, that part is true, but it wasn’t the whole truth.
There’s a third person whose eyes I’d been seeing through.
Liyun.
In fact, for me, this story began with her. Baffling flashes of her life. (I think that the spirits were watching Liyun in particular. Then some
irregularities about my…specific nature tapped into the Spiritual communication, letting me see what was happening.) The machine evaporated the population of Torio, feeding upon their power and spitting out the shroud as a byproduct. Well, as Yumi and Painter had both guessed (despite lacking all the information), there were some people the machine couldn’t harvest or control: the yoki- hijo.
They were superficially killed during the machine’s initial activation like everyone else. However, after a short time these fourteen souls pulled themselves free of the shroud and re-formed. They came back from the dead, refusing to be controlled.
All fourteen women were beings of incredible willpower. Highly Invested at birth by the spirits, they presented a legitimate threat to the machine. It could not harvest their energy and could not keep them contained in the shroud. The most the machine could do to them was siphon off a tiny bit of their memories.
So, to control them, it created prisons in the form of fake towns.
Servants, compelled by the machine, emerged from the shroud.
Buildings, plants, and vehicles were recreated from the substance of souls, and a careful perimeter was erected. The walls Masaka found?
Those projected (by making images out of the shroud) a perfectly realistic, yet fake landscape.
These places were fourteen nature preserves, you might say, each designed for a single occupant. The yoki-hijo were placed into these prisons, with their memories erased each night. Then they were given a single day to live over and over, calling fake spirits formed from the shroud.
A clunky system, yes, but it worked. For centuries it kept these extremely dangerous souls captive not by force of arm, but by pure force of mundanity.
Their keepers were the souls of those they had once known. Best I can tell, Liyun spent the last seventeen centuries or so living the same day over and over. She was exactly as presented. That was her, the actual person, the exact soul that raised Yumi. Released from the shroud, partially controlled by the machine, partially given self- governance.
Liyun was one of hundreds of souls forced into this strange half life.
Their memories were, of course, erased each day—but I think part of them understood that something was wrong. Because each night, while the yoki-hijo slept, the machine would let its will slacken. Its attention no longer on these servants, they would lose their shape and sense of self, becoming vague blobs of blackness.
Each night, during this time of slumber, some of these servants would break free. They’d stalk the land, ghosts without memories, on a prowling search for meaning. For understanding. For life. And like most unbound Investiture—like the spirits themselves—the souls of the dead were drawn to the imaginations of the living.
These nightmares forgot how to be people when not compelled directly by the machine. But they longed, lusted, for the lives they’d lost. Maddened by their state of half-existence, they’d sneak into cities, hunting dreaming minds with powerful imaginations. There, Painter and his kind would trap them into some semblance of physicality and banish them back to the shroud—where the machine, each day, would recycle them again and set them to work in its prisons.
This was Liyun’s life. The machine didn’t mind that she prowled at night as a nightmare; why would it? The job was done, the yoki-hijo contained. Theoretically. A curious aspect of machines, even ones partially Awakened like this one: They don’t plan. They don’t think about the future. Most machines can only react to the state of things in the now.
Therefore it didn’t, couldn’t, account for Yumi spending centuries perfecting her art. Yes, her memories were wiped each day, but something remained. Muscle memory. Skills that sank in deep, infusing her soul, like rum in a cake. Her skill couldn’t be separated from her; she had earned it.
So it was that on the day our story began, something remarkable occurred. Seventeen hundred years of repeating the same day, and something finally snapped. Because Yumi, her skill reaching a crescendo, stacked so well that she pulled a single spirit away from
the machine.
This changed everything.
That spirit, grateful for a moment of freedom, yet knowing it would soon be captured again, contacted her. Looking for a way out. At the same time, Liyun—unnerved—knew something strange had happened with Yumi. She went hunting that night as a nightmare, stronger than she’d ever been before. And the briefly freed spirit watched her, followed her, until she encountered Painter.
He wasn’t anyone special, at least on paper. Yes, he was of above- average painting skill, but that wasn’t what drew the attention of the spirit. Instead it was the fact that he saved the life of a young boy.
Turns out that was enough; the spirit found in him the soul of a hero. It wasn’t the boasts, the pretending, the superficial actions. It was the fact that when he could have just headed home to relax, he’d instead turned back. To protect the people of Kilahito, even when he didn’t feel like it.
You know the rest. Painter and Yumi linked. And Liyun? Her disquiet grew. She escaped each night, prowling Kilahito, searching for her yoki-hijo. She didn’t know who she was during these times— only that there was a Connection driving her to search for this young woman. She absolutely had tried to kill Yumi when she had found her after the carnival, and she might actually have managed it. This wouldn’t have solved the machine’s problems, as then Liyun would have absorbed all that power and become a danger. But it would have ended Yumi’s problems, technically—by leaving her dead.
You’ll have to forgive Liyun for the near-murder of someone she loved and was sworn to protect. She wasn’t feeling like herself at the time—in fact, she hadn’t felt like herself for seventeen hundred years.
YUMI SCRAMBLED THROUGH the town, frenzied, hunted.
Remembering that unyielding coldness from the night when the monster—Liyun—had nearly absorbed her. Yumi felt echoes of that icy death. Like she’d been submerged, sinking far, far, far from the heat and light.
The four scholars, no longer the least bit recognizable, followed her. Nightmares on the prowl, hideous creations from the dreams of people’s deepest torments. Shaped by fears, given substance by the terrible machine. She couldn’t outrun them. She couldn’t paint them,
not without tools. Would they respond to stacking? Would she even get a chance to put two stones upon one another before they reached her?
She almost tried. But then she thought of a better way.
Painter’s way.
She ran for the place of ritual, passing right through the fence. The sound of claws on stone chased her farther, to where the scholars had once kept their tent. Chained behind that spot, to give the tent shade, were several trees.
Yumi leaped for the first of them and pulled out the pin holding its chain to the ground. With a cry, she held on tightly to the tree, her eyes squeezed closed. Anticipating the arrival of the nightmares and the feeling of their claws on her skin.
When it didn’t happen, she cracked her eyes and saw four dark shapes on the ground below. Looking up. Having arrived just a fraction too late for the second time in their lives.
PAINTER FOUND HIS friends in their usual place at Design’s restaurant. He blessed his luck. This would have been a terrible night for them to go out for dumplings instead. He stumbled up to their table, then threw himself to his knees and bowed, his head touching
the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Stunned silence.
“I know it’s late for apologies,” he continued. “I realize I hurt you deeply. I…didn’t want to do that. Hurting all of you was the last thing I wanted. I just couldn’t think, couldn’t process what had happened until it was too late. And I foolishly kept thinking if I could put it off, I would be able to find some way to prevent you from suffering the terrible loss that I felt.”
He continued kneeling, listening to them shuffle, a pair of maipon sticks clinking together as a bowl on the table shifted.
“I know you have no reason to believe me ever again,” he said.
“You’re fully justified in ignoring me. But I’m trying to do better, and so I’m going to tell you the absolute truth. These last weeks, I’ve been
interacting with nightmares. They have souls. They’re people somehow, from long ago.
“I thought things were going well, but now… Now we’re in danger.
One of them told me, just a few minutes ago, that a hundred of its fellows are coming to Kilahito. To destroy it, like they did to Futinoro.
Because of me, and what I know, an army of stable nightmares is on its way to the city right now, and the Dreamwatch won’t listen to me.
“I’ve lied to you in the past. I’ve hurt you. But this is not a lie.
Nightmares will destroy everyone in this city unless we stop them. I’m begging for your help. So I don’t have to face them alone.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, head to the floor, tears dripping to stain the wood.
“You talked to a nightmare,” Akane said.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“And it said an army of other nightmares was coming to destroy Kilahito.”
“From the west,” Painter said. “It sounds ridiculous. But it’s true.”
Tense silence. Though other patrons continued to eat, it was like this one section of the room had been muffled. As if nothing there lived. As if he were still alone.
“Suppose we’d better go with you then,” Tojin said, and stood.
Painter looked up, his heart leaping.
“You believe him?” Izzy said, gesturing to Painter. “Really?”
Tojin shrugged. “What’s the worst that could happen, Izzy? If he’s wrong, we get a little embarrassed and have to come back and eat our noodles cold.” He looked at Painter. “If he’s right, and we don’t go, then what?” He took a deep breath, then offered a beefy hand to Painter.
Painter took it and was hauled to his feet.
“I agree,” Masaka said softly, from within her thick sweater-and- scarf shroud. “I think we should go. Just in case.”
“If there are a hundred nightmares,” Akane said, “then we won’t do much to stop them.”
“Takanda owes me a favor,” Tojin said. “We’ll bring him and his painters out to help. And Yuinshi always likes a good laugh—he’ll want to watch this. He can bring some more.”
“I suppose,” Akane said, “I could ask Ikonora to come as well. And she could probably gather a few… We won’t have a hundred painters. But maybe twenty or thirty.”
“Yes, please,” Painter said. He clutched Tojin’s hand. “Thank you.”
“The other night,” he said, “when the stable nightmare attacked…it turned away, for no reason, and fled. When it did, I thought for the briefest moment I saw you there.” Tojin smiled. “I realized my mind was playing tricks on me. Been thinking about it anyway, and it occurred to me that you’re the only one who ever took this life seriously.
“Maybe if I’d been a little more like you, I wouldn’t have fallen down and nearly been taken by that thing. I thought, maybe it’s all right to pretend you’re in the Dreamwatch, you know?” He shrugged. “There are worse lies to tell. Anyway, come on. Let’s see how many companions we can gather for you.”
