I woke up to the sound of some weaselly-looking vagabond that I did not know; said person began describing to me the plan in which I would open the gates of Amber at sundown so that an invading army would be able to take over.
I thought I was still sleeping, and rubbed the sand out of my eyes. When I reached for a glass of water on the nightstand and groped at a half-dozen magical knickknacks that had *not* been there when I went to sleep that night, I realized that things were very wrong. "Who sent you?" I asked, trying to get my wits about me.
"Why, General Fletcher, of course," he stammered.
Of course. Why would Fletcher be invading. Well, why *wouldn't* he be invading? It only would take a slight switch in the circumstances of the universe to put Fletcher in such a situation. I think we all realize that Fletcher is intrinsically one of the most dangerous men we've known. Cecily's confident that she could handle him, I'm sure. My tact has always been to hold my cards so close that he would never be sure enough to try me.
I thought about this for a moment before realizing that this informant was waiting for the "token" I was to give. I unwittingly picked a talisman off of a shelf and handed it to him before realizing by the man's look that this was not was expected. Not wanting suspicions to get any more out of control, I walked over to my cloak and pulled off the golden note-pin. And with that, he was gone.
* * * * *
When I finally had gotten back in touch with Cecily and the others, I found that our world had been turned upside-down. Well, just Cecily, Shen and myself. It seems as if the three of us are the only ones who have retained our knowledge of what Amber is -- everyone else here, Luke, Matthias, Merlin, even the pages seem to think that we've have our memories altered by the powerful magicians that Fletcher was employing in his armies. In this reality we'd been here much longer, things were better in Amber; we were on the way back to making this place work again.
I tried to explain our situation to them. When I was with the Harpers, they described to me the theory that for every moment in time, there was an infinite amount of other possibilities for what could be happening in that same instant. Our reality was but one thin slice of the totality of everything. When I'd made it to Amber and learned of the relationship between the Pattern and the shadows, this seemed to make more sense that ever. But is it so impossible that Amber herself is, in some greater design, just one possibility in an infinite amount of Ambers?
As much as I tried to remain calm in stressing this, they would not listen. But there were larger concerns.
As far as we could tell, there was little to no chance of being able to repel Fletcher's forces. An attempt to sue for peace with Fletcher failed. I pressed for Cecily to take the Jewel to the Pattern -- this was the only remnant of what we knew of Amber, and I hoped that it would be able to do something. However, while Cecily was able to "attune" to it, she still had no idea how to use it, nor a teacher to instruct her.
So, our options: Flee to the Shadows and try to find out what was going on or how to get back to our reality, or stay with Amber as the armies advanced. For some reason, Cecily did not want to leave, no matter how I stressed to her that we could regroup and would actually be alive and free to find out what was going on rather than be executed or chained up in the dungeon.
It ended up being pointless to argue, because it was just at the moment that Fletcher's assassins had skewered Gerda that the dream dissolved around me, and I woke up in my own sparsely-furnished room.
* * * * *
We are left with a hundred questions with no really good answers. Harmony is gone now; Shen reported that she "phased" out of existence after our collective dream had ended. What we had experienced seemed to be an attack on or a perversion of the Dream; the Dream King had been deposed. Gerda's wound from the dream followed her into reality; she would live, but her child was lost. Fletcher has no memories of the nightmare, and just as in the dream, Stark was nowhere to be found.
The question arose -- how could we prevent this from happening again? Sleeping in shifts is one thing, but if it comes upon us, I recommended that we try to find other who were aware of the changes -- just as Cecily, Shen and I did previously. We needed confident direction -- something that I said as much to to Cecily, who seemed to waver in the tough moments. We would need her to be a solid and strong for us, as regent, as she who would lead us.
I have to admit that this is yet another thing in our lives that is far out of our control and for which we have no way of have any effect on. It seems as if that's all that happens here -- something happens, outside forces act, and we have neither the people, time, resources, or knowledge to do anything about it. The more this happens, the easier it becomes to just not care anymore and just sit back to let fate pull us along.
I haven't gotten that far yet. One particular question gnaws at me -- in the false Dream, Fletcher had paid me off somehow to betray Amber.
How?
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