Here I am, dreaming my way into eternity, nothing but notes and words on a screen. Here we go again, trusting that this electronic scream means something, matters somehow, that for the few seconds I am typing I actually have reasons for existance. Meaningless phrases, empty words, hollow I am, but for now... here... real.

Real.

I am real.

Right now, it's a Cat I am clinging to, he's become my lifeline when I dreamwalk. He's someone I come back to. There are others, yes... others at other times, tonight it's him, tonight Torian, tonight I find his music and his rhythms invading my mind until I leap and dive and escape them in his eyes - he has deep dreaming eyes, accusing, vibrant. They match his voice.

...I'll create my own...

Here I am, once again, writing at knifepoint, the hesitant turning into desperate, slow sputter into a blistering rush of textual noise, letter after letter spilling onto the page to ease my desire to communicate.

Red Right Hand, Christiansands, Beat Me, familiar tunes but somehow they become twisted when they filter through tonight's dreamwalking. I want to show you what I see.

I want to show you where the madness takes me, on nights when everything turns darkly on the moment, on the point, spinning perfectly clean turn here we are... dark, and dark, soot-covered streets and a hundred groaning machines deep in the bowels of the ever-breathing city. There are walls so high that we can barely see the ends of them, roads so long and narrow that we fear to walk them, and always in the shadows there are skitterings, things that live on the cast-off hopes, on the dead wastes of each new life that stumbles through this town. There are factories, miles of them, burning hot and freezing cold, a thousand mouths that take in new souls, eat them up, devour them. There are the whore-houses, where the leftovers grunt and scream and beg, you can buy a girl for an hour or a day, buy her life and you can kill her. There are the Heights, high above the pollution, the noise... they could cure us all, cure the ills, but they don't and they won't, locked up in their ice-white mansions. Guards on every corner. Knives in every hand. There is dust in the food, darkness, screaming, we are all screaming, and the sun never really rises here.

I walk here. Seeing, I walk here. There are tattercloak beggers who will be dead by the time the barrow-wights come around to collect the bodies with the trash. There are childer, skeletal forms and huge bruised eyes, they make no noise and have no parents, they exist to become tomorrow's workers and whores and soulless guards. There are the Hives, the dead-stink hives where bodies are born like larvae, slaves produced, more of the drone children, spitting them out over and over. This city is filth, it is rotting from the core outward, and soon it will all fall... it is one of the last, one of the few holdouts from the Old Ways, and when it collapses it sets into motion the revolution. The Queens rise, then.

Until that happens, there is nothing but this dark smoke-filled hell, half-gnawed portions of tasteless food that everyone knows is made of the leftovers, the unwanted, recycle and reuse but even that won't save a dying world and a dying city. There is no future in the wide-eyed mutes that stalk the streets, there is no future in the high-and-mighty dreamers in their silver towers, there is no future anywhere but in the destruction of this dark hideous place. It must fall.

It must fall!

Fire everywhere, when it falls. Death after death, the Hives destroyed, and the world seeming, here, to tumble into the Abyss itself. There are screams, the huddled childer shrieking wordless protests at an uncaring ash-clogged sky as the cogs and wheels of the great machines stop, slow, spin out of control, ripping the city apart with the force of their movements and the horrid stillness and silence that follows. There is blood, washing the streets, washing the world clean. In the towers there is a silent death too, poison seeping into the silver-winged chambers, killing the pure-flesh dreamers who had forgotten the price that all gods must pay. They die, and with them dies so much that the world should have known... and so much that the world must forget, to heal.

The city falls, and the world lives on.

I wish I could show you what I see here. I wish I could show you how the flowers bloom, how the ruins become a thing of legend, gone save for strange relics sold on streetcorners, the Queens refuting them, destroying them when found, the world rebuilding, purer, better, safer. I wish I could show you how it was that they become like this, show you how wars and filth and hate lead into this, how an attempt at peace led to the worst of the disasters... show you how the Hives were created, the screaming women locked away into birthing chambers, over and over dropping babies like larvae until their bodies expired, replaced by their daughters, their granddaughters... more and more, until everything was choked to death with the foulness that I can see so clearly here...

...this is not the dream I sought... this is the dream I work against... this is the thing I would destroy...

...I will bring the city down.