The Great Game 🎲 Vicino Concordia & Fallar Discordia

In the Ephemera Caffè

The Hanging Gardens, Vicino Concordia

In the Ephemera Caffè there are seven dream portals overlooking the Hanging Gardens. Talfar of Breen is careful to arrive just before the 10 o’clock morning classes, so that the most earnest students, addicts of the portals, would be rushing off to class, thus leaving several of the portals momentarily free. Talfar chooses the one on the far estern end, since it won’t be inundated with sunlight for several hours. This allows Talfar to let the full ambient light of the Gardens flow into the portal, without being overwhelmed by it (it was a common Vicinese expression that too much darkness hides the truth, but too much light blinds the eyes). The far estern portal is, however, like the other six: the Garden-fresh currents of air sweep into the portal, bringing with it a faint citrus mist. There’s also an undercurrent of minsaf, slightly intoxicating, straight from the spores of the giant Minifir Tree.

[In progress]

The dream portals are, as the name suggests, strictly for dreamers. And by dreamers the Vicinese didn’t mean the inhabitants of the Blue Dream (although they were experts in dreaming), but rather anyone who allowed themselves to be fully open, not just to what the received wisdom was, but to whatever wisdom there might be, anywhere. The portals linked would-be poets, architects, scientists, and philosophers to the farthest stretches of the Kraslika, from the ecstasy islands of the Pink Sea to the Slash Houses of the Frozen Skiff; from the Waste Lands of the Yellow Sky to the Plot Chambers of the Black Pulse. By linking with the harshest of environments, it was hoped that dreaming could set the individual free wherever they and whatever their circumstance. The motto of the dream portals was, Some things may be impossible, but not when it comes to dreams.

The dream portals were at the end of a fifteen-foot corridor that projected like a small branch into the fine mist of the Gardens. The branches of the Minifir Tree wrapped around the portals, cradling them in the infinite possibilities that the ancient tree made possible. The roots went six thousand meters deep into the Great Water Table that lay beneath the capital and flowed in and out of the Great Sea. Because the Hanging Gardens was adjacent to the Golden Hill, the roots of the Minifir were intertwined with those of the Starling trees which climbed the slopes and projected their arcane song into the heavens. 

Talfar of Breen took a sip of clarety, which tasted like a rich Bordeaux and had an effect similar to a strong cappuccino fortified with a few drops of laudanum. The primary function of the drink however was to help the nervous system absorb the spore patterns released by the Minifir.

Talfar was a world-stalker, which meant that his job was to stalk the Kraslika, assessing the strengths of the forces that bound its diverse worlds together or tore them apart. He dealt in unions, glues, sutures, fractures, tensions, and catastrophes. While his counterpart in the Black Pulse, the world-shaker, delighted instinctively in fission, he yearned for fusion. He got anxious whenever one world was in opposition with another. This meant of course that he was in continual anxiety, since there was no greater and no more universal opposition than that between the Black and Purple Pulses. Yet that particular anxiety was part of his being. He had learned since his early schooling on his home planet of Breen that this opposition was basic to the very structure of the Kraslika itself. He even tried to agree with the prevailing wisdom that such an opposition was necessary. Yin and yang, love and hate, chaos and order, these were all part of a Greater Order. All evil was universal good. Or so he kept trying to tell himself.

But he didn’t feel it, at least not now, when the incandescent cliffs of the Great Sea swam into his ken, the Starlings warbled love-songs to easeful death, the Queen-Moon was on her throne, galleons set sail under red skies, clarety bubbles winked at him from the brim, and a citrus scent refreshed his senses and brought him back to the beauty of Vicino Concordia.

How could he even imagine that evil had a place in the Kraslika when the Minifir worked its magic on his nerve endings, infusing his purple blood with patterns so fine that he couldn’t tell the difference between the natural direction of his own thoughts and the curvatures and re-directions of the spores that the Minifir projected into the air. 

The dream portal was also a holoportal, which allowed him to transport himself to any world he chose, all with the assurance that he was, beneath whatever scenario he entered, still safe, still cradled by the supple, strong boughs of the Minifir. Never had the Great Tree allowed a dream to crush a dreamer.

Talfar set down his cup of clarety on the console, and slowly entered the co-ordinates. The map zoomed out, so that he saw the immense city of Vicino Concordia, the planet of Vicino Prossima, the solar system and the stars shrink into a tiny violet dot in a vast field of black. A violet oval shrunk to the size of a discus, thrown into the dark, as the Nordbelt met his eyes — the Pink Sea, the Blue Dream — and the midbelt, violet flashes and reflections of copper, and then everything went black, at least until his eyes got accustomed to the midnight blue peaks and the cobalt gulphs. He could see his destination as he hovered outside a fiery castle and flew in a window that that been left open for him. In his study next to a roaring fire he saw his old friend, Farenn of Caldemar.

The Cobalt Cove, Fallar Discordia

Farenn was, as usual, thorax-deep in his indexes, prohibited, fictional, and otherwise. His den was so cloaked from scrutiny that even the Information Directorate had given up trying to breach its arcane encryptions. This was of course frustrating to the ID, as it was accustomed to sounding everyone else’s depths, frustrating their schemes before they were even conscious of the breach.

In his peripheral vision (which consisted of three circular rows of optical cones) Farenn saw that something was materializing in what he called the cobalt cove. This cove was so deeply cloaked and encrypted that even if the ID managed to get into his den all they would see was a midnight-blue wall.

As soon as his cones detected a slight reddening of the cobalt, Farenn knew the colours would soon shift to dark purple and he would once again see his old friend Talfar of Breen.

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Next: 🔥 The Monster in the Manor

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