The Icebound Clocktower and Other Noise Inspired Stories

The Twilight Dream

Summer Night, Shortwaves, Twilight

The sound of radio static is what guides the minds of participating dreamers into this world. The eerie blue glow of the electric lights cast more shadows than anything else, and one dreamer finally sits up from their bed, walking up to the crackling speaker by the door of the dark apartment. The voice is familiar to him, if a bit garbled, and tells him to meet her at the top floor of the big office building in the center of the city as soon as he can. He wonders why she can't just come to them. The voice, still as bossy here as in reality, scolds him for asking her such a ridiculous question and hangs up.

The second daydreamer is another young boy with his face hidden under a hood, whose reaction to the voice's request is a bit more dismissive as she has had something added to his person that has been a longtime wish. He's jumped from his window, thirty stories up, and sailed off on shiny new wings into the starless violet-black sky before the voice got half a word out.

From the sky he can see the rocky, mountainous horizon and watch the two parallel moons rise in perfect sync. This place is livelier than its daylight counterpart, birds and bats soar alongside him as he launches an airborne expedition to explore the city of square black towers that break off and spread far into the sky. He bounces the strange, scratched and sometimes cracked glass bubbles that chime as they collide. Small forests and clumps of shrubbery dot the mountainside, and at a lower altitude he makes out windows looking out into a much paler landscape and strangers dressed in black (These dreamers are mostly in white.) and doors from which the bubbles are expelled... some seem to be shut, and take more force to pry open than his small physique can supply, dream or not.

The other boy had found a white lab coat and a pair of bulky goggles with a bunch of strange additions and extra orange-tinted lenses. He smiled in the mirror, his braces as oversized and idiotic-looking as ever, he thought, and stepped out into the hall.

He didn't much care for the ominous hallway with everything lit with black/ultraviolet light, but he could cope as long as nothing jumped out to scare him. Mirrors hung on each of the doors, so he would often do a double take only to see his own shocked expression staring back at him. Stepping out onto the plaza was better, more open; he could fully appreciate the place as something more besides an elaborate Halloween funhouse.

From the ground the buildings were even more impressive. Though the architecture was primarily geometric and modern, there were minor embellishes on smaller things, like around windows, doors, and on furniture. The ground was paved in bricks the same color as the mountains and skyscrapers, and there was a tree in the center. A white, tangled mess of branches covered in birds and strange black cubes. The birds cry and chatter to each other, and blast of in a pale, feathery cloud as he passes by.

He goes straight to the tallest building, and discovers that as well as being on the edge of the town it's also going to be much more difficult getting all the way to the top than he thought. Luckily, the other dreamer returns and sees him, elated when they finally recognize him and he them, and helps him reach the destination with ease. 

The co-creator of the dreamworld and the final waking dreamer is waiting to explain the nature of the place a bit further. She sits in a chair much too big for her, almost a throne on wheels, her feet propped up on the oversized desk. There's a huge window behind her and a glass door leading onto the wide, railing-less balcony. The rest of the room is covered in screens depicting every inch of the city and a damn good portion of life outside it. Though her face is mostly covered--even her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses--she seems focused on one view in particular: the dormant dreamer of this world. She's half-hoping he'd get up, that he'd changed his mind, and was joining them after all...