Visions and Wraiths

Hardly an hour ago, I awoke screaming and in a cold sweat from one of my most horrific dreams since the wreckage of my father's cabinet and my subsequent arrival in New Babbage. I thought I was becoming at last inured to these phantasms. They visit every night, sure as clockwork, reliable as the beating of my heart. I have by now witnessed so many terrible possibilities and daemonic forms lurking within the bottomless vales of sleep that I believed myself benumbed. But now I fear this imagined steeling of my nerves against the "dreams" is, in truth, but the passing effects of the absinthe and laudanum.

I am alone. When I awoke, Miss Paine was nowhere in the flat. Despite my express wish not to be left alone in the night, and despite her responsibilities, she goes wandering, as is her way.
So, without the solace of her company, I will describe the dream, in some faint hope that by doing so I might rob it of at least a minute fraction of its power over me. I sit here at my desk, at the typewriter, the comforting clack of keys to keep me anchored to this room, lest my mind slip free again from the fraying tether of this world.

Within the nightmare, I wandered white halls. Walls composed of nothing more substantial that some indescribably solid manner of light. Indeed, even the floors beneath my bare feet were no more than that same dazzling white light. And the light poured through me, as well, and I bled out blinding, great gouts of it. I felt it burning me alive, seeking some treasure secreted in the furthest recess of my consciousness. Before a window looking down on a burning sea, a sea of blue fire, I fell to my knees, certain that the next instant must perforce bring to me the balm of obliteration. But this malign presence filling up my head and lungs and even the veins that had once carried only blood...this damnable thing...would not consume me. Whatever was sought yet eluded it, and even in my agonised state I understood it would not dare risk even the remotest chance of future discoveries by loosing its full fury upon me in that moment.

Father, at the last, is this what you glimpsed? Is this the same abomination that burned the eyes from your skull?

I lay there above the blue flame sea, upon my back, breathless as all the stars of Heaven whirled round above me. And though the devouring light had withdrawn for now, I knew that I was by no means alone. She stood very near me, near enough that I had only to turn my head the slightest bit to glimpse that monstrous countenance. Her eyes pulsed with crimson heat, and I understood without comprehending that she was neither living nor machine, but existed simultaneously in both states. She wore a black armor that, to my dreaming eyes, seemed oily and iridescent. But...the worst of it...she also wore my face. I have seen so many incarnations of me, I would not have imagined one more could ever hold for me any actual terror, but this one surely did. The other doppelgängers, as Miss Lightfoot named them, the most fearsome among them would have seemed but the merest wisp or whisper in the presence of this being.

She stood there above me, blotting out the sky, and in those eyes like pools of molten glass, I suddenly understood her purpose. And she smiled to see in me that cognizance.

"I will have you all," she said, speaking with a voice that was only my voice and yet also the voice of raging tempests and dying stars and the rumbling magma that flows beneath dark volcanic hills. "I am become the Collector of All Ourselves, and already have I claimed a million of the shards of us and consumed them. Slowly, piece by piece, we are growing whole again. "

I cried out then, in desperate hope that my cries might drown that voice. But there is no tumult nor pandemonium in all the universe to match even her most gentle whisper. She knelt at my side, and told me of the slaughter of entire galaxies that but one of the splinters of myself might be reabsorbed. And then for a time she grew silent, and I seemed lost in the void of that quietus, and took heart that perhaps she would lose me then and there. Ages passed, the ages of all Creation, and I lay still as Death in in that blissful, colourless, unbroken nothingness. But then she returned to me, dragging me back to those white halls and the shores of blue inferno.

"Why do you see me?" she asked. "None of the others have. All of them, they believed themselves entire. Every one of them knew nothing of the sundering of our soul. But you see me, Nareth Nishi, just as you saw them. How can this be, sister?" and seeking an answer, once again she poured the white flame into me, and. mercifully, I woke screaming in my bed.

How do I go on with these visions? Knowing what I know, how do I ever believe them only the dementia of an unhinged mind?