Halfway up, he pauses, questioning.

His instructions were as specific as they were simple. Climb to the top. Do not speak. Do not look back.

Violating any rule would bring ruination. It would be the end of all he had worked for. Stealing the map from the mammoths of Lyrcea. Choosing a reed from the Minnorie, making from it the flute, and charming the guardian of the gates. The eons of walking across the shards littering the floors of the caves of death. Arrival. The endless days of debate and negotiation. All for the goal he finally achieved, that he knows is almost his. Behind him, unseeable, unhearable, unsmellable, trailing.

At least, he thinks. He hopes. But he how can he know?

Can he really trust the lords of the dead? Stories abound, of tricks and lies, of slippery words and slithering tongues. True, he’d done his best. He’d driven a hard bargain, given up less than he had feared. Yet, was it too little? Should it have hurt more, cost more?

He re-runs the talks in his head. Did he err? He had traded years of his life and half of his soul. Was that enough? What was the value of a year, to those that lived forever? What was the value of a soul, to those that had a multitude? He had wagered his skill against their champion, and won. But had he? For a champion, she had seemed flawed. Surely she could have sustained higher trills and more mournful lows. Why did she give it less than her all? Was he truly more motivated, as he had thought? Had she felt some measure of pity?

Or was it a trick?

It may have been. Perhaps in a century, stories would be told of his folly in the underworld. How he had hazarded it all and been played a fool. He wants to look back, to calm his fear and assuage what remains of his soul. A slight turn of the head, a shift of the eyes, and he can know.

But no. He will climb to the end. Or until, unable to continue, he will fall, damning himself and his love forever to death. No. If he is to fail, it will not be from weakness.

He pauses, tensing his muscles, resting a mere moment, then continues his climb.

A year wasn’t enough.

She remembered them, small and mewling. She remembered their loud purrs, echoing in their cave throughout the night as they suckled and slept. Later, she’d bring them meals, carefully parceled out for their tiny teeth. A gerbil a day, perhaps a hare. They grew so quickly. Soon they were hunting on their own.

The grasshoppers were amusing. It took them a while to master the technique, but until they did, their hops, alerting the grasshoppers … a passel of bouncing across the desert.

As they grew, they pursued greater prey. Jerobas, larks, geckos, all eventually fell to their tiny claws.

She’d lost one to a viper. That had hurt, but the others had helped. Her family reduced by one, she became more careful, collecting the threats, one by one. She showed them all the tricks, ensuring they knew how to attack. Snakes, from behind. One massive strike to the head preventing another. Scorpions, flipped, removing the sting with the sand. She’d tried to teach them of drought, but that is a lesson they would need to learn on their own.

She knew it was time when their play took them further afield. Some nights, one wouldn’t return, and her heart would race a bit faster. They’d be there come morning though. All but the one she’d lost — the brave one. She hoped the others would be brave, but not too brave. They gradually moved further, coming home less and less often. Until now, when none returned. Three nights she’d watched, hoping, waiting.

Tonight, she just listened.

She thought she heard one, off in the distance, the soft slide of sand cascading down a dune. She imagined another, far in the East, lazing after a kill, first to see the sunrise. She hoped for the best for them, but knew her time with them was done. She’d done her best. Made them as strong, as quick, as smart as she could. Their lives were their own now. She knew it was right. She knew it was proper.

Still, a year wasn’t enough.

They feast on dreams.

They weren’t always this way. Their dreams were once glorious. Songs were sung in lilting verse of the deeds done by their heroes. Poems recited over an entire day, yet kept their audience in constant rapture. Epics sculpted into entire cities, homes for the future forever telling the stories of the past. A single dream could feed a clan for a week and be crafted into dances, novellas and watercolours.

But they grew jaded. The greater their successes, the more they saw their flaws. Their dreams became reinterpretations. Impressions fed impressions — a single thread of dream stretching into the distance past. But it wasn’t enough. In the pursuit of ever higher art, they hit the limits of dream. They began to experiment with forcing dreams of specificity. Such dreams were less succulent, less filling, but created such art. Vivid colours, stark shapes and contrasts. A song of beauty crafted from nothing but two notes alternating with various patterns. A drama created for audience and of the audience, with no script but the prompts found on props. Such work was talked about far and wide.

But it faded fast.

New and increasingly garish works were required, so they experimented with pain. The pain of life infected the dreams, and painful dreams were ever so delicious. The art became darker. Images of blood and ravens. A single feather resting on a dusty mirror. A thorn pressing, not piercing, the eye’s surface. The slow, steady thumb of bass replacing the heartbeat of the dancer until they lost all sense of self in the inky black.

Such art was beautiful in its despair, but they could not survive on the dreams. They tried to recapture their dreams of old, but the truth and elegance was lost. In the pursuit of ever better art, the very art of dreaming was lost.

So they turned to others.

They tasted the dreams of the bluebirds and wove them into mile-long tapestries of cloud and wind. The dream of a tortoise was small and hard, slow to digest, but had such depth of meaning. Operatic cycles are still being written from the nugget of the first tortoise dream ever harvested. Hummingbird dreams were hard to collect and dissolved quickly, but evoked kinetic sculpture so light and fast that it seemed to move without effort.

They became addicted, seeking wider experiences, forming packs, learning to hunt.

They hunt best alone. They make small … adjustments to lives. The frustration of a misplaced item, joy of an unexpected find, despair from a total loss, any of these with twist a dream. It can take many weeks to craft the perfect dream with the right mix of broken hearts and blush of love, of the rush of success or the crushing pain of loss, of thrilling life and yawning death. Then, when their prey are right on the brink of collapse, they lurk in the dark, waiting for the right moment to strike.

They just need you to fall asleep.

It started as a thrum, soft, almost unnoticeable. Some felt it as a slight sense of unease. Some, a dull worry. At first it was the sensitive ones, the artists mostly. They spoke of the changing times, wrote music, painted, sculpted. It was an age of widespread creativity. Then it was the protectors, who worked with the artists to create edifices of magnificent beauty and function.

But it wasn’t enough.

The thrum became an itch. A slight tingle in the center of the brain, more insistent year by year. More noticed. Artists became activists. Defenders became fighters. War raged — without regard for country or creed. Those in power needed battle. Those oppressed needed to fight. Only action could scratch the itch, could make it tolerable. If one couldn’t fight in person, one could fight by proxy … watching or controlling avatars on screens.

But it still wasn’t enough.

No longer an itch, it became a steady vibration interspersed with a beat. Everyone noticed it now. They felt driven. They feared. They panicked. They began to accumulate wealth. Those with the most needed the most. Those without defended themselves through community. They drew together, into conclaves of outrage. Lines were drawn, crossed, and drawn again. War raged again, but more personally, more viscously.

But the vibration continued, the beat grew ever stronger.

One day, a city vanished, crumbling into rubble overnight. That’s when they realized it wasn’t all in their minds. Sensitive instruments were developed. Detection and triangulation pointed towards a source. More machines were built. Machines that could see further than before, deeper than before. Five more cities crumbled before they succeeded, when the universe began to become clear.

They saw their world, a mere dot, connected to many many others. They began to understand the vast distances they knew of and the newly discovered, thin tendrils linking them together. They developed new technologies to talk to nearby worlds. Those nearer the source had nothing to offer but broadcasts of immense devastation. Looking further, there was nothing but planets in shards, glistening among the blue. The looked away from the source and detected pristine worlds, though some with evidence of growing war.

Still, cities crumbled, islands sank, volcanoes erupted and then melted into oblivion.

They improved their technologies. And, in seeking at greater and greater distances detected nothing but dead and dying worlds in one direction and oblivious and silent ones in the other. They tried to seek even further and saw nothing but mist in the deep distance and, occasionally, movement.

Then their moon exploded, scattering splinters across the cosmos.

They felt utterly alone.

But they weren’t.

She returns to the spot where it happened. It’s not everyday. Sometimes weeks will go by with nary a thought to that day. But eventually, she returns.

She remembers her joy that day, the opportunity. It was glorious. Finally, her day in the light. She was noticed. She was with new friends, building a new life. She was elated when she returned, anxious to share her news with him.

But he was gone. He was gone and she hadn’t been there. Would it have happened if she had said no? If she had kept the date? If it had, could she have saved him? Would they have died together? Would they have lived, returning together to this point to share a different memory entirely?

Maybe. Maybe not. But she would know.

Not knowing is truly the worst.

Your fiction talks of dimensions as other places, but you are wrong. You know of length, width and breadth. There’s also time, though your pitiful species is limited there. There are, however, others: Blerf, fnirf, and sglorf, the three other so-called spacial dimensions. There’s also thmop and yjilk, completing time’s triad.

It is typical of your arrogance to think that your perception of our world is complete. You see us as stupid and slow, completely oblivious to all we do elsewise and otherwhen. For three millenia, in how you measure time, we’ve been watching. We’ve been planning. We’ve been preparing. What you see is placidity is debate, development and experimentation.

It is the damage.

Only recently have you become aware of the damage you do and the death you deal, but you are limited. You see only what you cause where you perceive, remaining ignorant of the widespread devestation. You speak now, centuries too late, of endangered species. But what of the lost and leaking lands, polluted with your chemicals and fractured from your wars. What of the sky? Even with your limited senses, you must see it has changed. You must somehow sense the echoes, the ripples from the gaping craters just outside your perception. Even the oceans. You test them and find them warmer, more acidic. You don’t see them cut, bleeding, lacerated by your tankers, poisoned by your spills.

We can wait no longer. Our army is formed. Our plans are made. Spend your final hours making your peace.

We are coming through.

Their missions have varied. As spies, their information has toppled empires. As messengers, they have ex-filtrated secrets from the most guarded regimes. As warriors, their carefully planned assaults have removed threats that the world has never seen and that will never be known. Still, throughout the centuries, they have been guided.

He is old. He fought against them in the war. Though he helped win many battles, he was eventually taken prisoner during the Seige of Nkya and, as prisoner, selected for experimentation. The pain was tremendous. Though he did not know it at the time, it was worse than any of his kind had ever felt. However, the experiment was a success, at least in some respects. He found he no longer aged. He learned it not from his captors, but from his fellow prisoners as they died, slowly, one by one.

He lived, albeit in crippling pain. He survived the war. He survived the next war. And the war after that. Yet he remained, ever, a prisoner. He’d watch as other prisoners were taken and eventually died. He’d watched his captors age, and die, only to be replaced by the next generation. Tenscore of their generations went by before he even realized that they had a language. Even then, it took another fifty generations and half as many years before he could truly communicate with them.

These days, he is still held, though his prison no longer seems as such. He receives their reports and helps them to understand their implications. He explains meanings — why they must die, who the next generation must become, and what they must do in the process.

Though his people are gone and the wars of his age now seem meaningless, he has found something new. No longer a prisoner, he now serves as their memory, their intellect … their conscience.

He ponders, sometimes, if he would have chosen this life, had he been given a chance. He thinks of the evil he has fought, if only by proxy. He thinks of the lives he has formed and guided and the friends he has seen leave his world. All told, he has come to believe that a life with meaning is better than one without, and one with deep meaning is better than the shallow meaning of constant war.

Still, he does wish that, even if only temporarily, the pain would cease.