Carabas

Answering a queen's summons, I kneel before her throne and wait. Eventually, I realize she's ignoring me. Just wanted to see me kneel. That's fine. I think of an old mentor, a meditation style holding one position for hours, and settle in to be here for a while. I can hear her advisors talking to her, two nervous men with high voices pointing out that I'm waiting, using a title for me. But I'm aware she's angry about her son.

When she finally acknowledges me, she says she wants something I'd once promised her. I tell her she's welcome to it.

I've convinced a man to throw himself on the king's mercy. A friend had been offering to get him to safety, he knew some people who could help with that, and the man had been considering it; but I'd spoken to the king and I promised him it would work out, so he stayed.

But now that we're actually standing before the throne, the king decides to have him executed. This was not the deal. This brat, spoiling things on a whim; part of me is furious, but part of me just finds this whole situation ridiculous, that these humans allow themselves to be ruled by a man like him. I imagine speaking out, see an image of it, but in reality I say nothing, just wait for the audience to end. Now I'll have to try to sneak the man out. I should have just let him run while he could.

Talking with others, there's something we need from the palace which we haven't been able to locate. Someone points out that there's a private wing that contains the royal suite, but also other rooms of unknown purpose - process of elimination, what we need must be there. We agree to make that private wing our destination for now, and someone makes a joke about how we can wave at the timeline of our original plan as it passes us by, we've gotten so far off course.

A woman's landing a griffon. People come to meet her, and as she talks to one of them she's going to her bag and attending to her armor, getting out gloves and a helmet that weren't practical to wear while she was riding. She's talking about the things that need doing, acknowledging that some of them might be impossible at a small outpost like this, without the easy access to resources you get in the cities. And there's an animal strapped to the back of the griffon, restrained to keep it from hurting itself during the ride, in need of medical attention. They're next to the stables, but the griffon's too large for that - once everything's unloaded, it curls up on the ground like a cat, beside a tall fence.

That woman and the man she'd been talking to are walking past me into a circle of armed enemies. Someone in the crowd says, "It is the corruption against the corruption." They sound surprised. I'm ostensibly on the crowd's side, but I arranged to bring these two here tonight, and I expect them to kill the man who leads this little group, currently sitting on a kind of throne. Although I say nothing, I see him watching me and I can tell he understands my intention - or more likely he's imagining some grand paranoid plan; but my plan here is very straightforward, just his death. I'm aware he and I are a minor nuisance for these people I've brought here, just something to be dealt with on their way to something else - I have a vague association with the moon - not at all the grand schemes he's been imagining.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a city and taking the opportunity to meet with an old friend who was reassigned here recently, a promotion. She works in a form of law enforcement. She's talking about the changes on the island where we last saw each other, talking about the ongoing conflict there. She says the forest has been burned down, so they'll have no more place to hide. There's no more way to get past the patrols skating over the water - I have a mental image of a ring, a platform floating on the water, encircling the whole island, with the port itself as the only opening.

She describes all this as if they're good things. Time was, she'd be helping me get my people out of places like that. She's met the man who leads the people in that forest - his people aren't mine, but their situation is nearly identical. But I'm thinking, I shouldn't be surprised - the last time she helped me, something happened that frightened her. It's why she stopped working with me. My people weren't at fault, but I'm not surprised that she'd take that fear out on them. But listening to her now, talking as if my people should be locked up, it's like she's forgotten I'm one of them.

FMA. I/Mustang left the military a while ago; right now I'm looking out a door at the rain. I see a memory of similarly looking out another doorway at the rain, standing at the door to a balcony on a tall tower, and then retreating back inside to adjust my plans. In the present, I put on a hat with a wide, floppy brim and head out into the rain.

As I'm walking up a mountain road in that rain, I pass an old man driving his truck down the road. We wave to each other like we do every day. I'm thinking, as a soldier who was for all intents and purposes an embodiment of fire, I was useless in the rain, so it held a different significance. But as a person - I'm thinking of both me and the old man in the truck - you just put on a hat and go to work, rain or not.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in the same mountain range from yesterday, traveling alone at the moment, standing just inside the entrance to a cave. I've come to a very old friend to ask him for his help. He's not happy to see me. He's sitting in a sort of stone throne and saying slowly, emphasizing every word, "I am not well."

I can see that. He wears this silver circlet that sort of glows, a contrast to his dark hair and coat; looking at how faint that glow is, I'm thinking that there's barely anything left of him. Nonetheless, there's enough of him left to do what I need done.

There's a monk who needs to buy a certain rare, extremely expensive book, and he intends to raise the money by selling off a different rare book. He can't do this himself, so he sends a fox demon to take care of it. She can't read the script it's written in, but she compares the characters he wrote down for her with the characters written on the covers of his books, and she eventually finds the right one and takes it to a fair that's going on. There are many specialists here who'd give her a good price for the book, but she goes to a bookseller she recognizes, a place she's been to many times. This man doesn't know the values of things, so he gives her very little for it - it's the equivalent of buying a book for a dollar when it should be worth millions.

The monk's disappointed - not in her, but because the book's gone and he'll have to start over in terms of raising the money. The fox demon gets annoyed at him for what she perceives as insulting the bookseller - she thinks the bookseller is a very good man, since he's sold her many novels for very little money. The monk is thinking about how much he looks forward to the end of his life, except that he's concerned about how she'll survive.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm speaking German with a man who'd promised to (acquire or translate or something similar) a certain book, but now he's fleeing and has to go back on his part of our deal. I don't really mind.

Two paired images of people on thrones. The first is a blonde woman dressed in gold robes, surrounded by abstract shapes woven out of gold wires, on a balcony overlooking beautiful green fields, rivers, wide blue sky. She's saying, amused, that although she was meant to be associated with style and worldliness, instead "I'm merely back in the desert, healing women at an oasis."

The second, a sad and tired-looking long-haired old man, first in a dark wooden room full of cabinets and herbs, then overlooking a mountain. A pair of ravens leave him and fly up the mountain over a trail, croaking - grey stone, grey skies.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Two fragments:

I'm trying to convince the radio to put out an important broadcast to keep people out of the (either Dallas or Houston) area, it's an emergency, but they refuse to disrupt the normal services.

A man saying to me, "You're afraid that this is the real world. It is. I trust you."

A Takarazuka production of Elisabeth with a new scene, in which Death is kneeling before young Elisabeth on the throne, kissing the underside of her wrist. Both of them are dressed in red; at the beginning of the scene, Death had been disguised in long red robes.