Dream, Halkem, 3 (Theophany)
Halkem slips into the nightmare-filled, comatose state that passes for a vampire's sleep that night (or day). Today, however, the nightmares fade, and Halkem finds himself standing in a grey field with an apple tree growing in the middle. It all seems very familiar. Curious, he reaches up and pulls off one of the crimson apples. A black form of a raven is imprinted in its red skin, and as Halkem holds it in the palm of his hand, the apple breaks open to reveal a rotten interior, cored with wormholes. Disgusted, Halkem lets the fruit drop, and as it hits the ground with a dull thud, a dog ÷ or perhaps wolf ÷ howls in the distance. Suddenly feeling uneasy ÷ and still haunted by that strange sense of deja vu ÷ Halkem turns to look for the hound, and sees a doorway yawning in the grey field behind him, revealing stairs leading downwards into the darkness. The stairs look like the very stairs that had brought him into the Underhalls he now travels as a vampire. The apple Halkem dropped ÷ now whole again ÷ rolls to the edge of the stairwell, teeters a moment, and then bounces down the stairs, looking like a child's toy. As it bounces, the apple's ÷ or ball's ÷ color shifts from red to gold.
Halkem hurries to follow the ball as it bounces down the stairs and begins rolling through the dressed-stone passages of the Unders ÷ the same grey stone, the same arching, gothic ceiling, the same lattices and buttresses that are so common in the Unders that he has almost stopped noticing them. The ball rolls down the passage, leading him. Halkem realizes that the black form of the raven on its skin has changed, melted, transformed into the sign of the Sunrose that has haunted the Black Rose Company since these adventures began.
The ball rolls through an open doorway, and Halkem continues to follow it. The door opens into a huge chamber dominated by four silvery humanoid creatures with lightning crackling around their limbs and torsos. They turn to look at Halkem, who pauses, uncertain. The ball starts bouncing, and Halkem sees that there are six alcoves in the great chamber, each with a golden Sunrose design embedded in the wall. The ball bounces toward the second alcove and touches the Sunrose, and vanishes. As it vanishes, Halkem hears the distant sound of children's voices, raised in laughter ÷ or perhaps sorrow ÷ it's impossible to tell.
The chamber fades, and Halkem finds himself standing before a giant mirror. A raven sits on top, cocking its head and looking at him with curiously intelligent eyes. Images begin to flicker across the surface of the mirror ÷ a black lioness standing over a bloody corpse, his brother Jaime's face looking back at him in trepidation, a windswept castle of foreign design on a cliff over a grey ocean, a gargoyle made of crimson gemstone holding a flame, Spider weeping bloody tears over a torn robe with the sign of a fist and shield sewn onto it, a forest bathed in the scarlet light of sunset, and more, until the images blur into one another. The raven flutters up, tilts a moment in an unfelt breeze, then flies into the mirror and vanishes. Everything goes dark; and Halkem awakes.
