Free The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) by John C. Wright Page A

no reason, instead of taking you home like you asked?”
    “I see what you’re getting at. You and I must be connected in some way. A shared destiny or common link; otherwise, our dreams wouldn’t touch. The Forty-Third Warden wrote a treatise on it in the Library. He talked about. . . wait a minute . . . oh, God. Maybe I can’t go home. Maybe talking to you is the closest I can get. Maybe I’m d—uh. Hey, what day is it? What month? Omigod. What year?”
    Wendy told him the date.
    Grief and shock overtook Galen’s features. “I’ve been asleep for six months . . .”
    He sat down on the bed, phosphorescent spear across his lap. Then, as slowly as a crumbling tower, he leaned forward and put his face in his hands.
    Wendy reached and patted him gently on the knee. “There, there. Don’t be sad. Worse things happen at sea. I know. My husband used to go to sea, and worse things happened. Now straighten up. Draw a deep breath. Settle down and tell me what happened to you. You went to see the First Warden, the one who’s being punished for something, in the place by the waterfalls at the edge of the world in the dream-land. Tell me in order how you got there and what you talked to him about. What’s the first thing you said after you got there?”
    “The first thing he said was that he was going to dump me into the abyss . . .”
     
    IV
     
    Galen, unnerved by the threat and trying to remember his boldness, looked Azrael de Gray in the eye, and held up his hand, to show the tiny scar in his palm. “See? I came for your message. I am here because I was summoned.You called, I remembered, I came. You have no right to threaten me. You have no cause to hate me.”
    Only silence answered him.
    An uncomfortable half-minute crept by. Galen plucked up his nerve and spoke again. “Uh . . . sir. I came because I heard the sea-bell toll. After all these years of waiting, our waiting is over.”
    Silence.
    Galen tried again: “You started our House! You set us all to waiting. We’ve done as you asked, my grandfather and great-grandfather and everyone all the way back. Doesn’t that count for something? And now everyone is in danger, everyone on Earth, and the hosts of the Darkness are marching. I came to you for help. You said you had something we needed to know. Even if you don’t care about your own family, doesn’t the whole Earth count for something?”
    He spoke with as much dignity and force as he could muster. Moments passed, with Azrael looking on with steady, cold, supercilious gaze, and Galen began to feel stupid and small.
    Azrael’s shadowy face showed no hint of softening, no flicker of compassion. Finally, he said in a quiet, icy voice, “No cause for hate, you say? Tell me, I challenge you, the names of those on Earth who recollect with praise my deeds, or even know that one such as I once lived. None has come here to offer even smallest ease of this great unceasing suffering, which, for their sakes, I endure.”
    “Well, honestly, sir, uh. . . I don’t think anyone on Earth knows who you are.” Galen, as soon as these words left his mouth, winced. He thought:
Stupid, stupid! Wrong thing to say.
    He followed lamely with, “Except me and my Grampa, of course.”
    There was another long silence, while Galen, standing uneasily on the chain, squirmed inwardly beneath the dark, majestic, dispassionate stare of the elder Waylock. The ancient being’s face was an angular mass of shadows; Galen could see little more than square cheekbones beneath a thundercloud of hair, framing twin pools of greater darkness underneath black brows,and, below, craggy lines of bitterness and sternness gathered around a hint of a scowl.
    Galen thought to himself in anxiety and surprise:
What great deeds? I thought this guy was a traitor, someone who trafficked with the enemy.
    Words came from the cage: “It was I who first brought the Silver Key out from Mommur, despite that Oberon and all his faerie knights rose up in silver