Chapter 811 — Between the Virtual and the Real
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
"Ah, those were good times... only, they're all past."
The old man shook his head, took up a cup of fine wine Yuri had handed him, tasted it tentatively, and let out a cry of wonder: "Oh, this is an incredible flavor... Naritel—"
The white-haired girl, still bent over her cake, looked up, glanced in puzzlement at the cup in the old man's hand, and only after receiving his reassuring look did she take the cup and sip cautiously.
The next second she spat all the wine out, then spat again and again: plainly, she did not like the taste at all.
"...I'm curious," Gao Yang said, suddenly breaking the silence as he watched the ever-composed old man and the strange girl. "Before we came, what were you eating—is there still food in the city?"
"We haven't eaten anything for a long time," Duvalt said with a shake of his head and a smile. "That's why Naritel is so hungry."
...
In Typhon, in the Orlandel region, night had already fallen. Countless stars lit the sky, shining down on the sparsely lamplit countryside below and on the "Throat of Orlandel" at the region's center.
In a nameless little village, a shepherd who had just fallen asleep tossed and turned in his bed, as though wrestling with an invisible dream, but soon he grew quiet, his breathing steady and low, as if the dream had been stripped from him all at once and he had sunk into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Beyond the window, a dim figure flashed past.
All was silent. In the village, where every household had put out its lights and gone to bed, two black-robed figures walked slowly down the street, bathed in starlight, from one end of the village to the other.
From beneath the hood of one black-robed figure came a young man's voice: "Dream regulation is complete in the last village. They'll sleep well tonight—no one will dream."
The figure beside him nodded, and from beneath the hood came a steady woman's voice: "Even so, we patrol all night, to keep anyone from breaking the regulation and dreaming again. His Holiness the Pope requires us to create an absolute 'dreamless vacuum' across the whole Orlandel region—and within this region, so long as even one person is still dreaming, his dream could serve as a springboard and cause an accident."
"Will a 'dream quarantine zone' like this really work?"
"Whether it works is for His Holiness and the Wanderer from Beyond to consider. Whether we do it is our business," the steady woman's voice said. "Rather than worry about that, pray tonight's operation goes smoothly—and that we never have to use what we've set up."
"True enough..." the young male priest of Eternal Sleep said, walking toward the village's outskirts under the starlight. In the quiet village the occasional rustle of wind stirred the grass, which only made the world seem all the more still.
"They say... seven hundred years ago, the dream priests were the ones who did this sort of work," the male priest said suddenly.
"Did what?"
"Walked in the night, soothed dreams that had been disturbed, healed those who had suffered trauma—just what we're doing tonight."
"That does... sound very much like it."
"I never thought I'd have a day when I'd leave the underground palace to do this sort of thing—my great-grandfather once kept a dream priest's talisman, but by my father's generation it had been destroyed," the young male priest said with a shake of his head. "They say after this business is over, we'll have a chance at new identities, to operate openly—but in exchange, we'll have to move somewhere new."
The woman walking beside him was silent for two or three seconds, then shook her head in warning: "Not outside. Don't talk about these things."
"...True enough."
The male priest seemed to smile. As he answered, he raised his head and looked past the village to the vast wasteland beyond, and to the far edge of that wasteland.