"It's just a little complex, Beloved. Actually, we're not here at the same time. Actually, I'm not even really here. I'm still sound asleep, and what we're all seeing right now is my Dream."
"That's not possible!" Dahlaine protested.
"Why—and how—am I here, then?" Balacenia demanded. "Your little game was very clever, Dahlaine, but it got away from you almost right at the beginning. You thought that you could step around us with your 'infant' hoax, but it started to come apart when Eleria had her first Dream. That was the one when she saw the very beginning of this world. Then, a little later in the Land of Maag she had a variety of Dream that you didn't even anticipate. She had what we call a 'warning dream,' and it was that Dream that saved Longbow and his friends from the intentions of the Maag called Kajak. You might not have been aware of what that Dream suggested to us. Dreams can be warnings as well as predictions."
"That did startle me just a bit," Dahlaine admitted. "I'd sort of believed that I might have some control over the Dreams, but the children keep slipping around me."
"Actually, it's Mother who's guiding the Dreamers. She picked up your little game, and she's doing things with it that you couldn't even imagine."
"Mother?" Dahlaine sounded startled. "We don't have a mother."
"Where did we come from, then?" Balacenia demanded.
"You'll really like her, Dahlaine," Eleria said. "She can do all kinds of fun things. She was the one who took me down under the sea so that I could pick up my pink pearl. That's what started all this, remember?"
"She's the mother of the whole universe, Dahlaine," Balacenia added, "and she's more than a little peeved with you right now. The outlanders are all right, I suppose, but Mother was—and still is—dealing with it in her own way."
"That will do, Balacenia," a melodious voice came through the open doorway. "Why don't you let me deal with this?" Then a misty sort of form that seemed to be pure light came through the open doorway. "What were you thinking of when you hired all those outlanders to come here and fight this war for you, Dahlaine?"
"You do know that we have limitations, don't you?" Dahlaine demanded. "Now that I think about it, if you're who Balacenia says you are, you're probably the one who came up with them. You may have forgotten, but we aren't permitted to kill things—even when they're attacking us. We needed armies, so we went out into the world to hire outlanders to do the killing for us."
"That particular limitation might just be a little outdated," the glowing presence conceded. "Right at first, there were very few living things here, and we didn't want to lose any of them—at least not until the populations had grown to the point that extinction was no longer a distinct possibility. When the incursions by the Creatures of the Wasteland began, I was going to take care of it myself, but before I could even start, the whole Land of Dhrall was crawling with outlanders. You've got to learn to trust me, Dahlaine."
"Longbow suggested something you might want to consider, though." Zelana stepped in. "The assorted outlanders are helping us to hold back the Creatures of the Wasteland, but Longbow seems to think that it's much more important that the more greedy outlanders come to realize that the people of the Land of Dhrall are quite capable of making life very unpleasant for any invaders. The outlanders are helping, but they're also learning. The greed of the Amarite Church down in the Trogite Empire was almost legendary, but you dealt with that in a way that advised all outlanders that an attempted invasion of our part of the world could be a ghastly mistake."
"And your blue fire in Crystal Gorge made it more obvious," Dahlaine added. "Nobody in his right mind walks into fire. Some of the more greedy outlanders might want to come back, but I don't think they will." He hesitated. "You seem to be very attached to us, for some reason," he said rather carefully.
"You are my children," the glowing form replied, "and I will protect you. You've come a long, long way, but you might want to go back a bit and have a look at where—and when—this began."
Zelana's mind suddenly reeled as memories came rushing back from so far in the distant past that there was no word for that many years. The suggestion of the hazy figure of glowing light had seemed to set off bells inside Zelana's mind.
Dahlaine's eyes suddenly went very wide as—evidently—the same memories came flooding over him.
"All in all, you did quite well, my son," Misty Lady continued. "Your notion of the Dreamers was brilliant, and it's worked almost perfectly—except that you'll have to come up with a way to persuade the Dreamers to reunite with their previous identities. Things are just a little touchy this time, however, so I want all of you children to back away and let me deal with the situation in Aracia's Domain. It's almost reached the point that she'd rather die than hand her Domain over to Enalla. We've got to get her under control, because she's getting very close to total insanity. If she crosses that line, we'll lose her, and that will lead to a disaster—not immediately, maybe—but if she's a raving lunatic when she wakes up from her sleep-cycle, the entire Land of Dhrall will be at risk—and that risk will make the invasion of the Creatures of the Wasteland look like some child's game by comparison."
Chapter Two
Zelana was certain that it was just after sunrise when the commanders of the outlander forces, led by the bleak-faced Longbow, came through the door and out onto the balcony that encircled Dahlaine's map room.
"The map seems to have changed a bit," Longbow said, looking down at the map Dahlaine had put in place after Balacenia and the strange, mist-covered figure of "Mother" had left.
Dahlaine shrugged. "We've finished here in my part of the Land of Dhrall," he explained, "so I laid out a 'lumpy map' of sister Aracia's Domain. Ordinarily, we'd have relied on Aracia for a map, but her view of tier Domain is just a bit vague, since she almost never leaves her temple."
"Being worshiped would probably take quite a bit of time," Sorgan Hook-Beak said, peering down at the well-illuminated map. "Just exactly where is this 'temple-town' that's got everybody so worked up?"
Dahlaine reached out with his hand, and a bright beam of light came from his forefinger and illuminated a spot on the representation of the east coast.
"That's a useful idea there, Lord Dahlaine," Sorgan said, "particularly when we're all standing ten feet or so above the map."