Dream, Halkem (Theophany)
Halkem sleeps as he always has since becoming a vampire - motionlessly, yet tormented by horrible nightmares of blood and murder and corpses piled high. At one point he walks through an endless graveyard, tombs and gravestones stretching from one sunless grey horizon to the other, digging up and opening coffins with his bare hands, fingers bleeding from digging nails out of wood. Each coffin contains people he knows, soldiers both alive and dead that he once fought with, family members, friends, drinking companions, merchants, everyone right down to the little girl with one eye who swept the street corners on his block in exchange for a tin piece. All have had their throats ripped out, and thick crimson blood coats Halkem's hands and arms. His boots grow slippery with gore, and as he scrambles to the next coffin, and the next, he constantly falls in the red-stained mud.
Finally he throws open a coffin lid and a cold gust of wind, carrying flakes of snow and ice, rushes up from the casket. The wind carries on it a strangely familiar combination of smells - salt, stone, gingerbread, beer - that reminds Halkem painfully of Cislunar, of home. He reaches into the coffin, and his fingers close on a golden ball with the mark of the Sunrose imprinted on it. The ball suddenly grows cold and its etched gold turns into a blank, mirrored surface.
There is a face on that silvery surface. At first Halkem thinks it is his own, until he remembers that he is a vampire, undead, unreflecting. The face is his sister Lyra's, and it is filled with horror. Then the face melts and the image changes to a cold, snow-filled street. The houses on either side are dark, with narrow windows and doors and thin, shuttered towers covered with grey stone eaves - Cislunar. Two figures walk through the snow, and Halkem "sees" that they are dead. Wherever they step, the snow turns red. Suddenly they look up, their eyes meeting Halkem's, and Halkem is certain that they are actually looking through the mirrored ball back at him! One he remembers having seen before - a male, green-eyed drow wrapped in a huge black cloak, the same one the Black Rose Company fought and killed in the Unders. The other he has never seen before - a male, green-eyed hadjjin warrior with spike-covered armor and a longsword strapped across his back, the hilt just jutting over his right shoulder. The hadjjin snarls and lifts a hand. There is a thunderous sound, like dark wings fluttering behind Halkem's head, and the image vanishes.
Halkem blinks, staring at the apple in his hand, and then carefully sets it back down in the coffin - it is mortal food, useless to him now. Sighing, he begins digging up the next coffin, blood and mud embedded under his nails.
The effort lasts all night, and Halkem awakes still feeling that strange sense of urgency and imminent danger.
