Chapter 13: The Dream

Ti Mo dreamed of a room that had no doors.

Not a room, really. A space. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. No corners. The walls curved into each other like the inside of an egg. Or an eyeball. Ti Mo was not sure which metaphor was more unsettling, so he chose both and let them fight it out.

Scrolls hung everywhere. From the ceiling. From the walls. From hooks that had no hooks, attached to surfaces that had no texture. They swayed in a wind that did not exist. They rustled with a sound like whispering, except the whispers were in a language he had never learned and somehow understood perfectly.

"Not this again," Ti Mo said.

His voice did not echo. The white ate sound the way it ate color. Greedy. Complete. A glutton for sensation.

He walked among the scrolls. They were warm to the touch. Not paper. Something softer. Skin, maybe. Or memory. Or the texture of a promise kept too long.

He picked one at random. Unrolled it.

It was blank.

Not empty-blank. Waiting-blank. The blank of a page that knew it would be written on eventually and was content to wait.

"Boring," Ti Mo said. He dropped it.

He picked another. This one had writing. His own handwriting. He recognized the strokes, the slant, the particular laziness of his line endings.

It was a story.

A village. A field. A man who woke with wheat in his mouth and no memory of arriving.

Ti Mo stared at it.

"Oh," he said. "That is unsettling."

He read further. The scroll described Three Rivers. It described Wen, and the archive, and the color-coded shelves. It described Wei Lin climbing a drainpipe. It described Bai Zhi sitting on a grain sack, eating a dried plum.

The scroll described yesterday.

Ti Mo rolled it up quickly. Too quickly. The scroll resisted. It wanted to be read. It wanted to be known.

"No," Ti Mo said. "I am not reading my own life. That is narcissistic. And tedious. I already know what happened. I was there."

He walked deeper into the white. The scrolls grew denser. They brushed against his shoulders like curious animals. They smelled of ink and pine and something else. Something cold. Something that reminded him of the moment before waking, when the dream was still real and the real was still a dream.

In the corner where the curved wall met the curved floor, a single scroll hung apart from the others. It was smaller than most. Its paper had yellowed to the color of old bone. Dust coated it thickly, as if no hand had touched it in centuries. Ti Mo looked at it. He did not know why, but he did not want to touch it. He looked away and kept walking.

He found a scroll that was larger than the others. Thicker. Older. The surface was cracked, the edges worn soft by handling.

He did not want to open it.

He opened it anyway.

His hand moved without his permission. That happened sometimes. His hands knew things his mind refused.

The scroll showed a figure. Drawn in ink. Black robes, silver embroidery, hair going white at the temples. The figure held a brush. The figure looked tired. The figure looked bored.

It was him.

Not a description of him. A drawing. A rendering. A character on a page.

Below the drawing, there was a single word. Not in any script he recognized. Not in any language he had learned. But he knew what it meant.

"Author."

Ti Mo dropped the scroll.

He woke up.

The archive was dark. The lamp had burned out. The only light came from the window, where moonlight fell in a silver rectangle on the floor.

Ti Mo sat up. His mat was damp with sweat. His brush was clenched in his hand. He did not remember grabbing it.

He looked at his other hand. The palm was clean. No ink. No marks. Nothing to suggest that the dream had been anything other than a dream.

"Stupid," he said aloud.

His voice sounded strange in the dark. Too loud. Too present. The white room had swallowed sound. Reality vomited it back.

He lay down again. He closed his eyes. He tried to return to sleep.

The white room did not wait for him. It was patient. It had been patient for longer than he had existed. It could wait longer still.

But Ti Mo felt it. A pull. A gravity. The weight of a place that wanted him back.

"No," he whispered.

He opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling. He counted his breaths until the pull faded.

It did not fade completely. It never did.

At dawn, Bai Zhi found him awake. She did not comment. She simply handed him a cup of water. He drank it. It tasted of clay and river mud. It tasted real.

"Bad dream?" she asked.

"Boring dream. Dreams are boring. They recycle the same images. My mind has no imagination. It disappoints me."

"What was in it?"

"White. Paper. My own face drawn by a hand that was probably mine. Nothing interesting."

Bai Zhi nodded. She did not push. She had learned that Ti Mo's lies were more informative than his truths. When he said "nothing interesting," he meant "something I do not want to talk about." The distinction was clear to anyone who paid attention.

Wei Lin arrived at midmorning. His sigil-lenses were still working. He could still see the circles around Ti Mo. He had stopped mentioning them. Ti Mo had stopped telling him to stop.

"You look tired," Wei Lin said.

"I am always tired. Tired is my default state. Alertness is an anomaly."

"More tired than usual."

"Then I am more usual than usual. Congratulations on your observation."

Wei Lin smiled. He had learned to read Ti Mo's deflections. He found them comforting. A man who deflected was a man who cared enough to hide. Complete indifference would not bother with sarcasm.

Ti Mo returned to his records. He wrote a name. He wrote a date. He wrote neither well nor poorly. He wrote with the mechanical precision of a man who was thinking about something else.

The white room lingered at the edge of his attention.

Not a memory. Not a threat. Just a place that was there. Waiting. Patient.

Ti Mo did not like patient things. They reminded him of obligations.

"We are leaving," Ti Mo said.

Wei Lin's brush stopped. "Leaving?"

"This town. This archive. This corner. I have learned what I can. The rest is repetition. I do not do repetition."

"Where will we go?"

"I don't know. Somewhere with fewer records and more napping opportunities."

Bai Zhi looked up from her inkstone. "When?"

"Tomorrow. Or the day after. Or when I feel like it. Deadlines are for people who have schedules. I have moods."

"I will pack," Bai Zhi said.

"You have nothing to pack. You own my robe and three dried plums."

"Then I will be ready quickly."

Ti Mo almost smiled. He caught himself. He returned to his writing.

The decision was made. Not because of the dream. The dream was irrelevant. Dreams were the garbage of the mind, the debris left by thought.

He was leaving because Three Rivers was finished with him. Or he was finished with it. The direction of the finishing did not matter. Only the result.

He wrote one more name before standing.

The name was Wen's.

Not on a record. In the Guest Registry. Ti Mo did not know why. He simply felt that Wen belonged there. The old man had fainted, reorganized, and accepted the impossible with a grace that Ti Mo found mildly admirable.

Admiration was dangerous. It led to attachment. Attachment led to inconvenience.

Ti Mo closed the Registry.

He would leave before the inconvenience grew teeth.