My head came up, thinking someone had called for my attention; but it was only the cry of the wind whistling through the casements and the distant, unattenuated mutter of voices beyond the edges of distinguishability.

Dear reader, I dreamed, and knew myself to be dreaming; the carpet upon which I trod was thick and luxurious, my feet sinking into it with every step, its warp and weft reaching for me even as I stepped upon it; the walls of the corridor in which I stood were papered richly with an ivory and silken damask, upon which were drawn, not roses, but the unlikely choice of cabbage-flowers. In the distance I could hear the rustle of voices, paper-thin and indistinct; the clatter of glassware punctuated the disjointed threads of music arising from the string quartet whose presence could not be seen, only assumed. The music crept outward, filling my ears, so subtle it was barely audible and yet so compelling it crept into my thoughts and nested there, as though it sought to carve itself a corner of my mind. In the way of dreams I could not now name you the air they played. I only know it for the sense it left me, edgy and nervous as though it were a knife's-edge danger; it took me some moments to identify the cause, the lead violin racing ahead of the other strings by half a step, leaving discord in its wake.

The realization played upon my nerves, for once I had heard the flaw I could not then un-hear it, and I set my teeth against it, turning my thoughts away from the sense that the carpet was a bog from which I could never struggle free. I made my way down the corridor, towards the open doorway lurking at its distant end; torches flared against the walls, their lambent light an uneasy flicker at the edge of my eye, as I progressed down the passageway, drawn there by the logic of the dream and the shadows that crept and lurked behind me. Beyond the door lay an intimate chamber, full of men in dark and dreary suits, women in jewel-toned dresses whose colors rose against the sea of wood-warm panels that bordered the room. As I entered, I sought to catch the eye of the nearest -- where are we? What secrets does this room purport to disclose? -- but his gaze slid over me as though I were not there, and I stood, uncertain.

A sense of mania rose within my breast, and I knew -- watching their discourse, my eyes recumbent upon forms and figures that teased at the edge of familiarity, knowing them to be no strangers but likewise knowing I could not match identity to individual -- that I must depart away from their presence, lest I be forced to wonder why they would not, could not, acknowledge me; I turned away, intending to retreat upon the route I had taken, but the door through which I had entered was no more. To its right, another, lying open in invitation, and I took it, hastily, fearing for my peace of mind if I should remain.

The room thus entered was a library, dim and shadowed, circular and many-storied, reaching for a distant glass-capped ceiling whose stars shone dimly in the night; a fire burned warmly against one wall, in front of which lay a stuffed and battered armchair, a wood-carved table, a glass of amber liquid, water-beaded and untouched, containing cubes of melting ice. Shelves stretched around the room, as far as my eye could see, and iron-spiraled staircases climbed upwards, each story's floor composed of grilled walkways through which I could see clearly despite the press of the room's darkness. I could hear the sound of heels striking floor, but nowhere could I see the person or people making those footfalls, and so it was as though the steps arose from the depths in the same manner the library's walls rose darkly above me.

I moved my eyes to the shelves around me, discovering the titles housed there to be a pleasant eclecticism, composed of all the languages I commanded and some with which I was not familiar at all; the colors and shapes of their bindings spoke of hours of pleasant study, undemanding despite its rigor, and the scents of paper and leather and dust filled my senses. As I lifted a hand to reach for a volume of Tolstoy, last seen in a dorm-room halfway across the gulf of time and country, I heard my name again, whispered against the violin's arrhythmic temptation, and again I lifted my gaze, seeking for he who had called me, for the timbre of the voice was familiar and beloved; but yet again, I found no source, and a chill came over my skin despite the warmth of the fire I stood beside.

Disquieted, I shook my head and reached again; but as my fingertips brushed the spine of the books, they crumbled away to nothing, leaving flakes of knowledge and culture clinging to my hands and to my skin. As I leaped back, unsettled by the fragments drifting to the floor, some unexamined impulse caused me to turn my head; there, I discovered that the fire had swirled away to naught but cold grey ash as well, and the room took upon a foreboding cool dankness in its absence. With the absence of firelight, the room was lit only by the half-shuttered gas lamps that desultorily punctuated the walls, and their light, blocked by shelves and cast futilely against the heights of shadow, did little to drive away the room's bleakness.

Daniel, I heard again, this time more clearly, and the voice had begun to wear a desperate overture, papered over with frustration and longing; I heard it, and knew who had called my name, though I could not see his form.

I knew that to answer that call would cut short my explorations, for he who called me had always sought to bind me to his side, and so I could not speak to answer, and yet the room's Stygian depths threatened my resolve. I turned to the fireplace, taking up the box of wooden matches that I discovered upon the mantle. Crouching before it, my hands stained by the remnants of dead volumes I could not shake free, I struck one, and it flared and died between one breath and the next.

Again, the voice called Daniel, and it became more urgent for me to cast light upon the darkness around me in hopes that I might find some comfort there; I struck another match, which fluttered and failed, and as I pulled out another, I heard the voice again -- but no, it was another, unfamiliar and arcane, hissing in my ears as a counterpoint to the fractionally mistimed music still drifting upon the air. Come, it said, brazen and seductive. Come to me.

The third match, held in my suddenly-nerveless fingers, snapped as I fumbled to strike it, and I stood on shaking knees and set the matches aside.

The shadows flickered, the feeble lamp-light swallowed by their malignant depths. I squinted against them, and as I did so, I noted the faintest of glimmers between one set of stacks and the other. It compelled me to step forward, into the deep unlighted hollow between shelves that had once cradled books and now held naught but dust. The glimmer resolved from faint spark to shimmering beacon, curiously distinct in the absence of visible light. I could not discern the light's source, and yet I could not look away, for the object it illumined held me in its spell: a lectern, upon which rested a curious tome, its cover open to reveal the frontispiece.

I could not tell you, dear reader, what language was graved upon its pages; as I drew closer, in the manner of dreams I realized I could not read its writing, merely guess at the knowledge it promised within. As I lifted one hand to turn its page, my skin shied away from its touch, which spoke of plunging a hand into an interstice to be greeted with the squirm and shiver of a host of insects and worms. I looked down, half-expecting to find that the volume had transformed itself into a cerement-adorned grave, but it was paper still, though its touch was cold and clammy with funereal air.

What knowledge I had come to be granted! I turned a page, and the markings beneath my gaze swam and wavered like the mirage at a horizon, until I blinked my eye and it resolved into a table of contents, an epigraph promising the host of human gnosis. I turned another, and I lowered my eyes and read of the time at the dawn of our history, of the figures who played out the tale we have but been able to guess. As I read, it seeméd me that the words took shape inside my mind, tangible and weighty, until they crowded out all I had been before I had come here, until I could think of naught but the words I could not read and yet knew more clearly than I had ever known anything before: of Cassilda, tall and shining, starry-crowned; of Camilla beside, her face pale and terrible in its austerity; of the King -- ah, the King! standing on the misty spires of the fog-wrapped city, lost Carcosa spread against the horizon of the Lake of Hali, Yhtill and Ytlantia rising beside, yellow and pallid --

My hand stilled as I reached the section's end, curling around the page as though to turn to the next would hold more weight than a simple scrap of paper, and again I heard the voice, frantic and frenzied: Daniel.

It was a great burden to leave the book behind me, but the call of that voice was unmistakable and I found I could not gainsay it; I stepped away from the lectern and turned my head to seek its source, but found only the remnants of the library in which I stood, all books save the one which even yet lured me naught more than dust and ashes. Dimly, I became aware that the music had vanished as I had read and the sounds of discourse from the other room had faded. The silence weighed down upon me, oppressive like summer's humid air.

Daniel, the book whispered, filling my mind with the words of Hastur who could not be King in Aldebaran, with the promise of discovering the fate of his tattered mantle, and yet I frowned, for its promise was nearly but yet not quite the promise I had come to have fulfilled, and so I stepped back again, another footfall, and suddenly it was as though a spell that had been cast upon me was broken; my eyes, falling upon the book, skittered away, and I was filled with a revulsion that rose to choke me, yet I could not look away entirely. I backed away from the volume, my eyes upon it as though it would rise up to strike me, a venomous serpent; thus proceeding, my eyes fixed upon the lectern, I made my way back to the library's door.

The room from which I had approached the library was empty, now, scattered with emptied wineglasses and the detritus of napkins and finger-foods, the suit-garbed men and the jewel-dressed women having made their retreat; in the bare room, there was naught but a single chaise, and upon it sat the man who had been calling for me.

I studied his face, seeking some clue as to his motive or his message, but his expression was carefully blank, schooled to impassivity save for the tiny core of worry writ deep in his eyes. "I thought you weren't going to come," he said, and his voice lay sharply against the siren's call of the tale of lost Carcosa like a saw-toothed hawse-edge rasping against a rope.

The spell of silence that had bound me lifted; I glanced over my shoulder, one fragment of me still yearning to discover the fate of mist-shrouded Ytlantia, but my comrade was watching me, and the weight of his regard was like unto the force which creates diamonds. "Of course I came. I'll always come when you call for me," I spoke, but as the words left my lips, I looked behind me once more and realized that my words were not the truth entire. "Eventually," I added, to be scrupulously exact.

He watched me with eyes that knew too much, but he did not stir. "It, too, calls you," he said.

I could not deny his words, for the heartbeat of come, come, come still pulsed beneath my breast; but nor could I deny that my heart yearned for his approval, for he had always been a stalwart companion and a fast comfort, and of late my thoughts had turned in a different direction with regards to his presence, which had been the reason for my withdrawal from the world we had always known together. (Come, whispered the volume; ah, the secrets that remained there, unread!) "Yes," I said, studying his face for his response to my words. "I want --"

He stood, and as he stood I fell silent, watching the long lean line of his body, its coiled strength. "I'll wait as long as I can," he said. "But I can't wait forever. You need to choose."

In that moment I knew his words for truth, in a way I had not known before, in a way I had not known in the world that lies beyond the world that is the world of dreaming. I stood before him, dazed with the magnitude of my realization, breathless with its implication, and in that moment, he reached out a hand to seize mine in his warm grip. So warm! It erased from my mind that foul remembrance of the book's fell touch, chasing it wholly from where it had imprinted upon my skin, and I staggered there, where I stood, with the realization of how close I had come to never knowing this comfort.

"Yes," I said. "Yes. I know. I do. I choose you: for now, and for the time which is to come. I choose you."

In that moment of choice, I knew that what I intended to say -- not yet capable of speaking it aloud, fearing what might hear beyond we two who stood there -- was I choose us, for that was the choice I was making: to set aside my endless unslaked and unquenchable burning thirst for knowledge, to satisfy myself with the cooler, banked embers of what could be found in that which would be available to me should I set aside my quest and walk by his side. O, to leave that behind me! Never to know the full answer to questions I had only begun to understand! Never to turn the pages of the book that lay behind me, the Book between whose covers lay answers to phantom truths I had barely begun to suspect! The pieces of that crisp sere knowledge shuffled inside my mind, calling, tempting me with their potential --

But his beloved face eased with my words, and his lips rounded with a smile; he gathered me up into his arms and pressed kisses against my fevered brow, replete with his joy and a sense of relief I could not help but envy. "I'd almost stopped hoping," he said, and in his voice, too, lurked the depths of ages, albeit with a far more human timbre. I heard love there, and safety and comfort besides, and the sweet warm touch of hearth and home. "Come away with me."

(Come, whispered the pages that lurked behind the open doorway, foul tempter of devotion; come, come away with me --)

"Yes," I said, the words falling quickly from my lips as though they could drown that beckoning; "yes, I will; go forth into the world, and I will be but a step behind, and when we awake to morning we may begin to plan our escape from the chains and promises that bind us." His brow furrowed at my words, but he nodded, slowly, bowing to the wisdom that the dreaming world was no place to discuss that which we must decide. He took a step away from me, and my body trembled and leaned as though seeking to follow his warmth; but I closed my hands into fists and forced myself to keep them at my side, lest I betray myself with that reaching, and I closed my ears against the blandishments of the voice that was not a voice. "Go," I said again. "I will follow."

He studied my face, and I could not say what thoughts passed behind that gaze; but a minute passed and then another, and finally he nodded. I closed my eyes, but a bare blink in the caesura between one breath and its fellow, and when I opened my eyes again, he was gone away, into the light of the morning's clarity.

With no other present, the room was cold and dark and empty, and I could hear my own heart pounding in my ears, the hiss and crash of my blood pounding like the surf upon the sea-shore. The song of slumbering Ytlantia sang to me, and I knew the full measure of that which I would be renouncing, and yet I counted the measure and found it a worthwhile bargain indeed, for I was going forth to all the things I had not thought I could have again. Let Hastur keep his counsel! For I was flesh and blood, not parchment upon which those stories could be limned, and though it would torment me to my end of days to leave the ending unread, I said sternly to myself that I was neither god nor monster, to require each story to come to conclusion for my eyes rather than allowing them to play out as they did and should in the depths of history. Let Hastur have his ending! It would not change the panoply of history for me to observe it, nor must I observe history's drama for me to satisfy my own!

Away, I thought; I would away, and the need to escape this place with its cajolery and blandishments rose within my breast; having made my choice, having elected the waking world rather than the seduction of the dream, I knew I must move quickly, lest I fall back into that call of that which was not to be mine. I sat on the chaise, where his beloved body had rested but moments before, its cushions still warm with his remembered heat, and placed my hand upon my brow, my eyes slipping closed.

Behind me, I could hear the sound of torches guttering, a curious wet flapping noise like cloth being shaken, or perhaps the sound did not arise from the torches at all; I could not say. In the chill of the room, its walls closing in upon me, I closed my eyes, and against the whisper yet lurking in my ears, I tried -- O, how I tried! -- to will myself to wake.

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