She had dreamed of this tower before. In the nights of Culling, when the Whispers first rode the winds through the street of Sambredo, she had slept uneasily and dreamed of this ancient, crumbling room.
In the days and weeks that followed she had dreamed of it again, and again. The cobwebs that floated light gossamer strands of light, swaying with the smallest movement of air. The shafts of sunlight, and moonlight, entering from an unseen window high above and igniting motes of dust as they shifted in the air; painting runes and then words, and then sentences with their twisting grains of memory that she couldn’t quite read.
And the pages. Always the pages, hanging just out of reach, illuminated by the shaft of light but always out of reach.
Each night she felt as though she stepped closer to the room, as though she reached across time and place to this tower that was calling her and the knowledge it must contain to fight the Whispers. She had done it before. Moved through the world of dreams, but never with such purpose, such need.
There had to be an explanation for these Whispers that killed entire cities. A way to fight them though no army, mage or priest had been successful. But this dream, full of its symbols from the past and forgotten knowledge, had to hold the answer.
Slowly, carefully, she stepped onto the ledge that stretched into the open shaft of the tower, moving towards the papers. As she walked across the emptiness the pages began to move, rotating and and shuffling as though ordering themselves, forming a book for the ease of her very human comprehension. Coming to the end of the ledge she reached out, her hand touching the shaft of light. And just as her finger touched the paper that glowed in the light, she woke up.
– Flashfiction
