The Dreamwalker's Path

1/The Temple of the Lost, Sanctuary

If Emelye Hornblower were to be completely

honest, The Temple of the Lost and Forgotten was the last place that she wanted to stay the night. No one asked Emelye, though, unfortunately. No one ever wanted your opinion when you were a scrawny ten year old girl without a Ma or Pa to call your own. Of course the irony was that if she had a Ma and Pa, she wouldn’t have to sleep in the Temple to begin with! She’d have a nice home somewhere on East End where the rich merchants and the magic users all set themselves.

Yep, that’d be the good life. Just me and Ma and Pa. Maybe a baby sister so I had a friend to talk to while Ma and Pa were out doing merchanting or magicking. Whatever it is that those Eastling folks do...

She’d had a Ma and Pa not long ago. They’d been good people and they’d loved her very much, but somehow they’d gotten lost, or maybe she’d lost them herself, one could never be too sure. All she knew for certain was that they had gone together to Carter’s Street one day, and they hadn’t come back.

Emelye had waited. She took care of her mother’s bees that lived in the old brick wall in the back yard, and tidied up her father’s workspace each day so that when they came back, the yard and the workshop would be orderly. But messes didn’t accumulate quickly when there was only one person to make them, and her Ma and Pa had never been gone quite so long before; so Emelye had gotten bored, and then she got worried; and being worried, Emelye resolved that the only thing to do was to find out where her parents were and un-lost them so that they could come home.

That’s why she had headed to the Temple today. It was the first big landmark between the place she’d lived with her parents, and the Hall of the Hours where she knew that she would be able to find Time. She had been to the Temple earlier in the hope of speaking to the Historian and getting a few directions to the Hall of the Hours, but the Historian had been surrounded by a group of people, and she had not wanted to waste his time. So Emelye had carried on without directions and then got herself lost—much, she suspected, in the way that her Ma and Pa must have.

She’d wandered straight through the day, unable to find someone who looked like the trustworthy sort of person that you could take directions from. As the evening Hours began to wander their sections of Sanctuary, a bright spotlight had turned on, and she followed it with the hope that it was the Main Street Market. But, somehow, it wasn’t. Somehow, she found herself at the foot of the large, grassy hill that the Temple of the Lost and Forgotten stood upon, and she had nowhere else that she could go.

Emelye thought again of her Ma and Pa, and the workshop they’d lived in, and wished that she knew where they’d gone. Sanctuary was no place for lost parents; you never know what awful things could happen at any given moment.

Pushing thoughts of her Ma and Pa out of her head, the girl plonked up the hill, and down the stairs, toward the great archway at the entrance of the main chamber. She walked as purposefully as she could so that no one would question or stop her. It was a trick that she had learned on one of the few times that her mother had sent her to the collection of shops down the road from their home on errands: no one wanted to interrupt you if you were doing something important, and if you weren’t doing something important, more than likely you were being suspicious.

Emelye had seen what happened to some of the people who were caught being suspicious. Once, when she had been with her mother at Market, a group of large, lizard like people had been accused of acting suspicious by a blue skinned man with braids in his beard. He had caused such a ruckus with his shouts that the Hours themselves had come from their Hall and taken the suspicious lizards away. She did not know what happened to them after that, but she had no desire to end up like they did. So she kept her pace quick enough that she looked like she had a specific place to be, but not so quick that she looked like she was trying to get away from someone. She’d seen what happened to people like that, too.

When Emelye reached the bottom of the stairs, she paused to adjust the strap of her bag so that it was more comfortable. The duffle didn’t have a lot in it by way of possessions, but it was made of a heavy leather, and she had been carrying it all day.

Sighing as she eased the weight of the bag from one shoulder to the other, Emelye gave the golden archway that marked the entrance of the Temple’s main sanctuary a passing glance and trotted inside.

For a moment, the girl was in awe; the Temple’s guardian, the gangly looking guy that she knew only as the Historian, must have retired for the evening, because none of the bulbs or candles that she remembered seeing earlier that day were lit. Without the harsher light of candles and electricity, the Temple was bathed in the lustrous, silver light of the moon. The white marble and the gold had become velvet soft, and for a moment, Emelye thought she had stepped into a dream, or the shadow of another world entirely.

This was not, she thought, a change for the better. In the wishy-washy light of the moon, it was a lot harder to tell what was solid wall cast in shadow and what had some sort of thing peeking from behind a layer of reality only Time itself knew how thick. All in all, the temple was looking a heck of a lot more spooky than she remembered it looking.

Of course, that made perfect sense, didn’t it? Being full of spooks the way that it was. And if there was one thing in this life that you could count on, it was that spooks were gosh darn spooky when the lights were off.

Muttering to herself, Emelye fixed her eyes on the white marble of the floor and settled into her purposeful pace. And I hope Spooks know not to bother a body when she’s being purposeful!

The soles of her bare feet pat-patted lightly against the chilled marble as she trod further into the chamber. She cast her gaze from one side to the other systematically, keeping her eyes peeled for a cozy little alcove that she could settle down in for the evening. She would speak to the Historian the very first thing in the morning, now that she was here again, and then tomorrow it was on toward the Hall of the Hours to see Time itself—provided, of course, that the Historian actually knew the way himself, and was willing to tell her.

A sharp prickle between her shoulders made the girl pause.

Don’t be alarmed, Emmy-Leigh, she thought in a calm sort of voice that she was trying to make sound like her Ma’s, but I think a spook’s watchin’ you.

Slowly, she turned to peer over her shoulder, hoping that if there wasn’t someone staring at her in an obvious fashion, there was something—something not too creepy, preferably—that might account for the sudden feeling that some thing was getting ready to pick its teeth with her bones. Anything would do, almost. The one thing that she did NOT want to see was—

Nothing.

There was nothing there.

“Oh, bird balls.”

Giving herself a little shake, Emelye pat-patted further into the chamber, looking almost desperately for a solid wall or a corner that she could tuck herself into for the evening.

She did not find an alcove, but she did find something better: a long hallway branched off of the main chamber. There was a flickering light somewhere around a corner, a good distance down the hall, so she suspected that someone was creeping around back there.

Probably the Historian, she reasoned with herself, and if he has turned all of the lights off, he probably isn’t going to come back up this way any time soon. She could creep half-way down the hall from the corner, be well out of the line of sight of whatever spook was spooking on her, and get a good night’s rest before trying to figure out the details of her plan tomorrow.

And she was a light sleeper. If any spook or the Historian tried to sneak up on her while she was asleep, she’d hear them coming and be able to skedaddle before they got to her.

Feeling fairly satisfied with her plan of action, Emelye took a step into the hallway—and immediately retracted her foot with a small squawk.

Something squished under her toes. Something dry, soft and squishy lined the hall.

Crouching down, Emelye poked the floor with her finger, and then felt herself turn red with embarrassment. It was just carpet. Really soft, really squishy carpet, and she’d near enough died of fright because of it.

Worse, someone probably heard her loud mouth... Still crouched down at the mouth of the hallway, Emelye waited for some sign of life to break the steady reflection of the candle’s dance at the end of the hall.

After several moments of nothing happening, aside from the prickle between her shoulder blades getting more prickly, Emelye decided that the hall was safe enough, and she scampered down it.

Half way between the entrance of the hall and the corner around which the candle burned, the girl dropped her bag and crouched down on the floor. She paused just long enough to open her bag and retrieve the sawdust-stuffed kitty her Pa made her when she was a baby. Wrapping it in her arms, she pulled her knees to her chest and rested her head on the kitty’s threadbare head. He smelled like her Pa’s workshop, and like the wood that Pa worked with to patch up some of the nicer Eastling houses on East End.

A sense of longing filled Emelye, and her last thought before she drifted off was that she hoped Time knew where her Ma and Pa had gone.