"Master Bentis, look! A new dreamer!" Nightwing smiled at her friend and mentor as he walked up the stairs to the Fountain of Wishes, "This is Termish. It's only his second Dream."

 

Bentis smiled to Nightwing, Skandren and the young man with them and said, "Welcome to the City of Dreams, Termish. I'm sure Nightwing and Skandren have been making you welcome."

 

Skandren nodded and replied, "We've been hunting and we've just been telling him about the history you found, Master. Have you found more to tell us?"

 

Bentis nodded and settled himself on the rim of the Fountain of Wishes, "Indeed I have, my friends. Termish, if your shard is like all the rest that we know of, Dreamers are no longer admired but reviled and even hunted. But as Nightwing and Skan have been telling you, it was not always so. We've lost much of our history since so few of us Dream anymore, but I've been searching for records in the library of my abbey. I found two more parchments, very torn and fragmentary. They describe quite an early period in the history of the Dream, I believe."

 

Termish nodded and sat on the terrace with the other students, waiting to hear the tale.

 

As Bentis opened his mouth, the portal chimed and a tall woman entered the room. She strode quickly up the stairs and nodded slightly to the group sitting there.

 

"Good dreams to you, Alkinia," Bentis said politely, bowing from his seat.

 

"Hello Bentis, Nightwing, Skandren," replied Alkinia, "I don't believe I've met you, young man."

 

"I'm Termish, ma'am. Just started dreaming the other night," replied Termish.

 

Alkinia nodded and took a seat near Bentis on the rim of the fountain, "I suppose you've dug up some more musty old history?"

 

Bentis nodded and began to speak, "Some while after the great Dreamwrights had wrought avatars and many parts of the City, a newer breed of Dreamer began to enter the Dream. These younger Dreamers began to question the purpose and nature of the Dream itself. Two major schools of thought emerged: Freesoul and Illuminate. These beliefs are still important today, Termish. Illuminates believe that the Dream is in some sense a real place to which their souls travel. They believe this means that events in the Dream can have real effects on their waking worlds. Freesouls, on the other hand, believe that the Dream is only a Dream, a place of the mind and imagination which can have no effects on the real world outside of those wrought by their own minds."

 

Alkinia snorted, "How anyone can look around the Dream and not realize it's a higher plane is beyond me. And of course it has real effects on the waking world. Why else are we persecuted now when dreamers were once regarded as prophets and seers?"

 

Bentis replied, "Myself, I think that it happened because of ideas that Dreamers brought home with them. "

 

"On my shard they say that Dreamers got above themselves and tried to dictate to the Counts how they should run their lands," observed Nightwing, "That surely sounds as though it was ideas rather than a physical effect."

 

"But on my shard, there are tales of an illness spread by Dreamers," said Termish, "and how could an illness be something strictly of the mind?"

 

"Perhaps there was a sickness that people only blamed on the Dreamers," suggested Skandren. "It often seems that when people want someone to blame things on, they look for someone different. There was a boy in my village who had the name of troublemaker and so he usually was blamed for things, even when he couldn't have done them."

 

Bentis smiled at his student and nodded his head, "That may well be true, Skan. And I fear we do not have enough information to solve the problem."

 

"Only because you reject the information we do have!" exclaimed Alkinia, rising to her feet and stalking down the stairs and out the portal again.

 

Bentis shook his head and watched Alkinia stalk out. He said, "I'm sure there were many discussions like ours in the great days of the Dream. But there also arose more heated and violent discussions. My parchment records that there was something called the Totality Summit at which Keminar of Faraway and Trinxan the Illuminated fought a great duel in the Amphitheatre of the Sphere."

 

"Who won, Master?" Termish asked, his eyes kindling at the thought of great champions battling.

 

"The parchment is badly torn and I cannot read any more of that piece. The next parchment records that the duel did not settle anything permanently because groups of dreamers began to fight with one another. There was no death in the Dream, so many of these Dreamers abandoned all restraint in evoking arts and using their blades on one another. Mohteq the Elder formed the Order Patrol to try to suppress the open fighting between the Freesoul Knights and the Illuminated Front, but it was too late.

 

"The feuds grew and multiplied and Dreamers grew in abilities until no corner of the Dream was safe and peaceful anymore. Threshold was the scene of almost constant combat as the factions fought to take and hold the various rooms."

 

"Threshold?" asked Nightwing, "Was Thresh not a sanctuary back then?"

 

"It seems not," replied Bentis, "The parchment says quite clearly that there was fighting within it."

 

He continued, "Then one of the greatest achievements of the Dream happened at one of the worst possible times. A group of Dreamwrights had begun to experiment with manipulating the essence of the Dream into other forms. One of the greatest of them, Poantes of Vorsage, created the first talisman of power: an "elemen." He learned how to forge an item out of one of the elements of the Dreamstate in its purest form. Using these elemens, Dreamers were able to restore themselves much faster than they had ever done before.

 

"Another of these Masters, Aybol the Determinus, perfected a means of capturing in a talisman the evoked energies of an art, thus forging the first alterors. Others of their associates learned to forge items with other effects and abilities. These Dreamwrights who specialized in the creation of items became known as Dreamsmiths.

 

"The new talismans had an enormous impact on the Dream. Now, powers that once took months to master were available in talisman form to anyone. Arts that had been the prerogative of specific foci were now available to Dreamers of all foci.

 

"At first, the Dreamsmiths tried to limit the production of items. Many refused to supply them outside their own clans and factions. However, Markosh the Dreamsmith developed a process which he called "spawn-shaping." He treated areas of the City which possessed specific energies and created "essence fonts" which regularly spawned an endless supply of talismans of power. Markosh jealously guarded his process and the secret of creating essence fonts died with him.

 

"With talismans freely available, groups of dreamers began to hoard the best of them. The first faction to accumulate a significant surplus of items was the Srechethan Kabal, a shadowy group which had always coveted complete rulership of the Dream. However, their opponents were numerous and quickly armed themselves as well.

 

"The Battle of Sunroof Cavern opened a new phase in the Dreamer wars. No one was safe anywhere in the City. Dreamers collapsed their enemies on sight. There was no death in the City, but a Dreamer's power could be eroded by multiple collapses. With this objective, the warring factions attacked one another endlessly in their attempts to dominate the Dream."

 

Nightwing shivered, "I'm glad I didn't dream in that age," she observed, "It sounds a terrible time."

 

Termish smiled at the young woman, "Aye, but what a time to be a warrior! Are there tales of the great battles, Master?"

 

Bentis shook his head, "Not on these parchments, young firebrand. The second of them ends here. I will continue to search for more. I've persuaded my abbot to allow me to travel to other libraries in search of more saints' lives. We will see if other abbeys also preserve memories of the Dream."