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>You’re led to Anna’s lab, which is a rather large and open room, one set even deeper within the Inquisitory, stacked on all sides with boxes and shelves half-bursting with academic and scientific tomes
>Half of the roof is walled off with a curtain, but the half you’re in? The doctor makes good use of her space
>Volumes of leather-bound books avalanche from tightly packed shelves onto the stone floors
>Scrolls bowed up with waxed twine — or unraveled — spread across any free space
>Vials and jars of lab materials and sterile instruments occupy the remaining realestate
>And the relics
>My God
>The relics
>This room alone is perhaps more valuable than all of Kiba
>…Well, maybe not The House of Penance, but you get the idea
>You see firestarters, survivor tags, cat eyes, heretic’s bane, roundsparks, and-
>The doctor, with a gentle hand, guides you around her messy lab, away from the shelves and cases full of holy relics from outside the walls
>”Familiar with some of those?” she giggles a little. “We employ Foxers and Zealots to help bring them in.”
>Anna guides you around her lab with unbridled enthusiasm, almost like a little girl showing off her dollhouse
>There are alchemical instruments for slicing, dissolving, melting
>Instruments for reading temperature, heart-rate, blood pressure
>Bandages and gauze and sutures and stitches
>There’s a LOT of notes about patients, too
>A lot of anatomical journals you recognize from Academy line her desks
>Oh
>She experiments on people, she says, wielding an alchemically heated scalpel like a conductor wields a wand
>”Only sometimes. When I need to.”
”Anna, can I ask a question?”
>”Not right now,” Anna says, grinning with pride. “You think I brought you here so I could just show off my lab space?”
“I- I kinda think I’m here so you can experiment on me?”
>Anna cracks a smug grin as she paces to the other side of the room, standing next to the curtain
>”Experiment is the wrong word…”
>She beckons you over
>”We prefer the term ‘collaborate.’”
“What’s behind the curtain?” you say, refusing to move
>She smirks again. “C’mon, it’s nothing you can’t handle, Anon. We need your skills in here.”
“You’re not going to hurt me, right?”
>”Well, I’m certainly not going to. You can always turn around and return to your room, you know?”
“What if I did?” you say, growing with confidence
>”I’d have to let Ed know that you’re refusing to help us, and we can go from there. Of course, your sister and uncle will be considered in your refusal as well.”
>Say no more
>You sigh and join Anna by the curtain
>You look into her earthen-green-brown eyes, rich like spring, and nod
“I’ll help.”
>Anna’s excitement is physically palpable as she threads her fingers around your exposed wrist
>”Allow me to show you…”
>With surprising force, Anna drags you under the curtain
>”…My life’s work.”
>What you think is an everflame chandelier burns proudly overhead, the lone source of light in the room.
>Closer inspection reveals it to be a type of actively moving, luminescent red fluid in a huge glass urn — one suspended from the ceiling by a heavy chain
>Still, that’s the least impressive thing in the room
>Because as Anna ducks under the curtain…
>…as you follow, hunched…
>…you see something you did not expect to find within the confines of the church
>Something with no holy business of being right before your eyes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B5c3nEaKxo&list=PL9aXlzDRA49Rmp4y6Z9Si9dS2LvmTNY7S&index=11
“Those… those are…” you start, jaw working, but unable to summon the right string of letters and consonants to voice
>”Heretics, yes!” Anna blurts, unable to contain herself any longer. She slips your hand at that. “Two ravens and a crow!”
>Three beds, all occupied by…
>Heretics
>Stark naked heretics — save for the sheet, up to their waists, or in the lone female’s case — her chest
>What the fuck?
>What the ever-loving fuck!?
>THAT’S the locus of evil!
>Right there in front of you!
>Resting peacefully, feathered chests swelling and falling with… patient… breath?
“Am I allowed to ask why there are heretics this deep inside the church?” You say as you look at Anna. “And why they haven’t been strangled in their sleep yet?”
>A grin spreads thin across her lips
>“I can only tell you what is allowed, Anon,” she says. But I will tell you what you need to know,” she says, as she grabs you by the arm again, flooding you with her nerves
>You can feel her excitement blossoming within yourself, twisting and thrashing inside of you like an animal that knows…
>If it just tried hard enough
>It could break its cage
>”Have you ever seen a Corvid up close?” She says as she tugs you over towards the beds in the way an excited child tugs a small dog on a walk
>Though you’re at least six inches taller than she is
“To be honest, no. I’ve only ever seen drawings of them in my books at Academy,” you say, unable to pry your eyes away from three sleeping birds
>They’re simply…
>Magnetizing
>There are two gargantuan ravens on the beds; practically filling the wire frames completely
>One female
>One male
>Unlike the ravens you’ve seen in books
>These ravens look… wrong?
>Their withered bodies, naked from the waist and chest up, tell the story:
>Ribs that jut outwards, quivering with gentle gulps of air
>Their once-proud arms pinned at their sides, exhausted of muscle and fat
>Like some fiendish wildfire now extinguished, their strength is all but spent
>These two are no threat, sleeping or waking
>The bird’s eyes are clamped shut, as if in a deep, deep sleep
>You look towards the end of the row of ravens
>In the far left bed is a much smaller bird, one just as dark-feathered as the other birds, but with a narrow black beak, and eyes squeezed shut
>A crow
>You know of these, too
>Nimble, intelligent — they are to ravens what foxes are to Foxers
>Greg warned you of crows
>”…crows are slipperier than wet fox shit!”
>Still, it’s curious to see one up close and personal
>Like observing an alien species for the first time since they landed on your backwater shit hole of a planet
>The crow is maybe five feet tall at his maximum; his body is wiry and lithe, a thin slip of muscle and hollow bone
>With nimble legs, and a thin, starved torso
“He’s so much smaller than the ravens. Maybe by a foot or more,” you remark, starting at the crow. “Why do these heretics look so withered?”
>”His name is Rhilla. Before we brought him here, he told me he was a scout out on the eastern plains. Now he’s here.”
“What do you mean told you, you mean this bird can speak our language?”
>The doctor smiles. “Rhilla you can speak to — or, rather, could speak to — as if he were one of us. He’s a very intelligent bird. The ravens are smart… but they have a child’s grasp on speaking or reading English.”
“I’ll be Goddamned. A bird I can talk to like a person. Feathers and all, breathing the same air you and I do. It’s hard to believe. You know in Academy they teach us that the birds are functionally unable to speak our language?”
>”Some of the things you learn in Academy training booklets aren’t always correct.”
“Great, all that lyra gone for nothing then, right?”
>A clutch of bedside nurses tend to the heretics with all the care they might give a human
>And there’s another Inquisitor, wearing robes that look a little like Anna’s, who jots the occasional note in his notebook while hovering over the birds
>”How’s this for a fun capstone to your education, then?” she says she pulls you next to her, besides the Corvid. “Very few people get to see heretics inside the walls. Even harder to see are the crows, unless you’re shooting at them.”
>”These ones, however, are far from fighting-fit. Probably couldn’t even hold a rifle right now.”
>Your eyes flicker over to the crow’s torso
>From beneath a sheen of flecking feathers, the gentle swell of his ribcage can be seen
“Yeah, I uhhh… noticed. Are they prisoners? Is that why we’re starving them?”
>Anna chuckles a little, unphased by the war crime accusation. “They are prisoners, yes, but that’s not why we can’t feed them. You see, they’re in something like a comatose state. Remember what that means from Academy? You probably do, considering what it takes to become a Foxer nowadays,” she quips off-hand
>Perhaps hoping she’s speaking to a fellow intellectual
>Sadly, she’s not
>You’re not a dunce, but you’re certainly middle of the pack test-score wise
“I… didn’t do great in my medical courses,” you say, rather shy of the fact that you’re still a bit squeamish. “I think I barely met passing…”
>“Coma: suspended in sleep; a faint interpretation of death. They don’t eat, they don’t pass waste, and they hardly stir. They just… sleep,” she says with a polite nod at the crow
“Let me guess, injury? A blow to the head and they’re out?”
>”Oh, no. No rocks or clubs to the head. These fellows are unharmed — for the most part. They’re in a chemically induced coma right now.”
>Your brow rises with confusion
“You can induce a coma?”
>The doctor then draws a small, corked glass vial from her lab coat. She holds the vial in front of your face, giddy as a child showing one of her parents a cool bug
>Bright yellow liquid sloshes in the corked glass tube, and it smells like cleaning agents
>”This, Anon, is Traumatin. It’s something my team’s Foxers discovered in and underground research facility in outside the walls. There were thousands of these little vials labeled ‘Traumatin.’”
“So you just started using medicine you found outside Purgatory? Do you know what it even DOES?”
>Anna recoils, unphased by your incredulity. Perhaps too unphased
>Echo nervously flits between your legs, his anxiety palpable like a low-heated flame held to your ankle
>”Of course we read over the notes that the old ones left behind before we started shooting up heretics with the stuff. Can’t just go around killing the lab meat, or Ed would cut my funding again. When administered at low doses, it’s a powerful pain reliever and anesthetic. But at high doses…”
>Her lips curl into a mischievous smile as she uncorks a bottle of the bright yellow fluid
>She turns to a tray on her right and draws a syringe off the table of instruments
>You really don’t like where this is going
“At too-high a dose, Traumatin is an incredibly powerful central nervous system suppressant, responsible for what you see before you…”
>She nods towards the three birds in their beds as she fills a syringe full of Traumatin
>”They’ve been like this for almost a week now, sleeping their lives away like melancholics.”
>You watch the little crow’s chest rises and falls with weak puffs of air
>Like the swinging of a pendulum you think could halt at any second
>The crow’s eyelids twitch; his frightened eyes flicker around the small prison beneath his shut eyelids
>Almost like he’s awake and listening
>Or very scared of something happening somehow
“How come they aren’t waking up?” You say, unable to pry your eyes off the very first heretics you’ve ever seen in real life. “You’re saying you can’t just douse them in cold water, put a lit cigarette under their nose? That’d wake up these heretics, right?”
>”All tried,” Anna confirms. “We also tried slapping them, yelling at them, scents, sounds, and threats… nothing works. They just lay there… only sometimes…” she trails off, looking at you with one eye
>Another, coy smile graces Anna’s features as she takes your hand with professional delicacy, the dripping syringe in her other
>You feel there’s a catch coming, based off the excitement trickling from Anna into you like an IV
>”You see, something curious happens when we get the dose just right. If you watch these birds long enough, you’ll see them move and fidget; you can hear them mumble small words in their drowse. Sometimes they cry out in pain or terror, sometimes they sob… It’s our suspicion that these birds aren’t just in a comatose state, and they’re not just sleeping,” she says as her beautiful brown-green eyes narrow you
>It dawns on you why you’re here, like a message from God above sent on wings
“You think they’re dreaming,” you say, completing the thought. “And you want me to find out?”
>”More than that, Anon. We want you to wake them up.”
>She releases her excited grasp on you and looks down at the crow on the far end of the row of beds
>”We’d like you, Anon, to find out for us how effective Traumatin is at sustaining what we call a ‘stable dream state,’” she says as she searches your brown eyes for affirmation. “And then you must wake them up, especially Rhilla.”
>What?
>Does she-
>Does she understand how hard it can be to wake a sleeping person up from within their subconscious?
>Let alone a person who is in a coma?
>You open your mouth to protest but Anna cuts you short
>”There’s another side to Traumatin that the Church has us researching, Anon. A side you need to know about should you accept.”
“Listen, are you sure I’m the right person for-”
>”Traumatin also has psychedelic properties. Samuel over there,” she notes to her comrade taking notes, “calls Traumatin ‘dream accelerant.’”
>My God, you are in over your head
>”In low doses, users report their dreams are more vivid, more stable, and they last longer.”
>“The subconscious is a vulnerable place, you know? Packed full of secrets; yet veiled in the mind’s trickery. A perfect place for a dream walker — one loyal to us. That’s a part of why a gift like yours is so important to our work here, you see. We injected these birds with high doses of Traumatin; we need you to go in and take notes on what you see. And. Wake. Him. Up.”
“Listen, I’ll be real honest with you: I can do the first part — take notes and see how ‘authentic’ the dream feels — but I can’t promise you I can wake this bird up,” you say, letting your gloved-hands fall to your side. “I never even thought about the idea that these bastards can have dreams. Are their dreams even a little like ours?”
>Her brow furrows as she takes a quick pulse check on one of the ravens
>“The ones we’ve studied in the past say they dream quite intensely; especially under the effects of Traumatin,” she says
>She turns her head up to you and sighs after a long pause
>”You were honest with me, Anon. And I appreciate your honesty. So now I’ll do you a fair turn as well. Honesty for honesty,” she says
>Uh-oh
>Nothing good ever comes from a sentence that starts like that
>”If you think these little sleep studies are just my idea, you’re dead-wrong. Part of the reason you and your family were granted clemency for now was because of the Bishop pleading with a cardinal — all on the grounds that you wake up these subjects from their dream state; patients seven, eight, and nine,” she gestures at the patients — the birds
>Shi-
>”He gave instructions to turn you over to him if you can’t or won’t do it. I don’t know what’ll happen to you after that. But what I do know is what happens here is at least partially under my control.”
>You hesitate
>”The other half is under your control,” she says with a tired sigh
>You’ve been inside the dreams of others before: fought nightmares and bullies for your sister, spent time with dad and mom when you still had ‘em; you stood on the walls and watched sunset after sunset slip beneath the jagged peaks of mountains of granite, the sky swelling with fire then cooling to red to pink in the space between heartbeats — all inside the mind of Greg
>You’ve even seen the stress-dreams of some of your colleagues at Academy by accident
>But a heretic? A Corvid? A being with a… fundamentally different mind than yours?
“I don’t suppose I get a choice?” you say, a weak, hopeful smile
>In response, Anna just smiles wider. “I can always talk to Ed-”
“Guess not,” you say as you peel your gloves off
>One nurse wheels a bed out next to the crow, which you lay down in
>”The Church will remember your service here, Anonymous,” Anna says as she turns her attention to Echo, who threads between her legs like a cat
>He knows what time it is
>”And your service fox — is he needed for… what you do?”
>You pause as your hand, sweaty from nerves and the gloves, hovers over the little crow’s feathered, alien-looking talons
“Echo usually sleeps with me,” you say, scooping him into bed with you
>The fox thrashes and fights in your grip, but eventually lays down flat against your chest
>”We’ll expect a full report when you ‘come back to us,’” she says as you settle in on top of the covers
>Anna hands you a checklist of things you need to look for in the dream:
>The emotional content of the dream — where it takes place, what the weather is like, who is in the dream
>How coherent the dream appears
>How lucid the dreamer (the birtd) is
>That sort of stuff
>”Remember, patient number seven’s name is ‘Rhilla,’” Anna reminds you. “We need you to wake him up, however that… works.”
“One more thing,” you say, just about to connect to the crow’s dream with a touch. “Will you tell me what’s going to happen to my sister and uncle after I do this?”
>”Your sister is already with Bishop Neelan. When they’re finished with questions, I can tell you more about her. Maybe even let you see her. Is that good?”
“And uncle Greg?” you say, a bolt of excitement jumping up in your chest. “Can I at least speak to him?”
>Anna’s smile turns again, and this time she doesn’t answer right away
>Her expression communicates everything you need to know about your uncle
>Something to the tune of ‘You’re not going to get anything until you dance for me.’
>A long pause stretches between the two of you before she responds
>“Just focus on what’s right here — what’s in front of you. What you can control,” she offers in a soothing voice, “It will make things better for you and your family, I promise.”
>Ah
>So that’s how it’s gonna be
>The coy secrecy
>The leverage they have over you — leverage which extends far beyond your own safety
>It’s…
>It’s not how you expected the Church to behave, but then again
>They know what you are
>What you believe you deserve
>You take the crow’s talons in your pale hand, threading your fingers between his unnatural fingers like a lattice
>True to her word, the bird doesn’t stir as you grip his hand
>Instead, he feels cold and limp in your grasp
>His talons are a tough leather skin against your pale hands
>And bump
>You feel cold all over your body, the urge to shiver surmounting your ability to get enough air
>Something feels off as the dream works its way into you
>Like a seed germinating in your soul, foul roots and tendrils spreading into your unconsonscious mind
>Your eyes flutter shut as you will yourself into the dream of the crow named Rhilla
>The world goes to black; the business and noise of the Church farther and farther away with each speeding heartbeat
>A shiver runs through you, like ice water in your veins, as the dream takes hold
>Something feels wrong right from the start
Oliver Hart
Author of Foxing, Leaves of Fall, Liquid Courage, Beating the Heat, A Red Winter, Weber’s Gambit, and many other stories. He primarily writes hmofa, but dabbles in most genres. Interests include, writing, reading, technology, and music.
Stories: Foxing, The Leaves of Fall