The Icebound Clocktower and Other Noise Inspired Stories

The Daylight Dream

Beatae Memoriae, Sweep Noise, Ice World

The hushed murmurs of the other dreamers faded into an awe-filled silence as the door was opened out into the rest of the cathedral city. Great gusts of wind toss up powder-white sand from the surrounding desert, with footsteps echoing on the shiny mosaic pavement on the plaza they take a few cautious steps forward. Heads turned skyward, they crane their necks to see as much as they can. One snaps into movement and rushes for higher ground in giggling ecstasy. For her this is a strange, interesting new playground. The other, taller one spins slowly, stunned, and stops. For him, this is almost impossible to comprehend. The third and final participating dreamer walks past him. This one doesn't stare in awe, but holds a proud sway in her step and a serene, almost smug, smile on her face. This place was partly her design, and she basked in the reaction brought on by it.

The dreamers' primarily black clothes contrasted sharply with the white, mostly crystalline environment. It seems here that everything with life is one dark color or another. The gothic, lacy décor of the architecture that seemed to grow from the ground like the vined trees sprouting up to the clouds, though not nearly as high, and sprawl out underground as much as their roots. Somewhere, a bell is chiming, and there's a steady, melodic drone pulsing through the place. In the center of the plaza a fountain is spurting clear water that catches the light and dots the shade with it, but though the fountain seems to be flowing, the water in the base is frozen, with frosty fractals curling over the edge.

It is neither warm nor cold, but the sun... though it looks far stranger and is obscured by a thin veil of clouds... is bright and the wind is strong. Shadows are cast by strange, decidedly foreign black cubes floating about, sometimes bumping into things and sailing of like particularly bulky balloons. There also birds, which attack these cubes with a terrible fury, are determined to break inside. (They are hollow, finds the excitable dreamer, tapping on a small one the size of a ring box.) There are some other critters of a more feline persuasion skulking about as well, who seem to make their home in the gnarlier, decayed hollow trees that seem to get swallowed up by gaping cracks in the ground from time to time.

Inside the buildings there are countless mirrors, and there are jagged looking glasses dotting the smooth horizon as well, but those ones do not reflect the world they are set in. It's night where they are facing, and mountainous. Sometimes new, unfamiliar dreamers walk past them, or peer curiously into them, and different animals can be viewed through it as well.

The dreamworld the trio is occupying is, to the other two's surprise, not completely desert. There is an ocean, but it is frozen, but also not frozen flat. It's paused at what looks like the peak of a storm, waves as bigger than the buildings reach up from the slippery, sloping sea, sometimes completely curled in on themselves, making a tube or a tunnel. Stork-like birds dwell there, making their nests in deserted shipwrecks the ocean still holds in its clutches, pecking holes in the ice and feeding off marine life. These are especially hostile towards intruders.

Finally, back inside the building the dreamers began in, one last dreamer still lies undisturbed in her bed. Dormant, she's called, until she decides to allow the others the access necessary to join them here. Strangely though, the final dreamer has an inkling that her refusal is more a matter of 'can't' then 'won't'...