The Awakening
The first thing Diego Torres saw when he breathed in the sage vapour was a dense green gloom that dampened the walls of the attic and extended beyond the walls of Madrid until it devoured the sunset.
He does not yet know that he is a dream shaman. He has not yet walked the paths of The Burnt Forest, following the trail of a serial killer. So far, his visions of The City are confused with the streets of a Madrid shrouded in mist. He has not even begun to search for his brother’s killer with the complicity of the guilds. He does not know his power. He knows nothing of Oniria… nor does he care. All he wants is to hold the sage smoke in his veins.
He is sick of the Vigil, even if he does not yet know what the name means. He’s ready to leave reality behind and dive into the Dream World, though for now all he wants to do is drown the pain. The anxiety. The nausea. The memory. The madness. The white scars on his knuckles that remember better than he does what happened in that cell in the police station, when his brother’s blood splattered on his shirt and he didn’t even realise that it was his fists that had broken his nose, his skull, his life. There are too many determinants in his memories, empty, floating among his neurons in search of a name to cling to. Assassin would be a good start, my friend.
So, he inhales the second shot of sage, mixed with the familiar taste of Ducados, and lets himself go.
Madrid is barely a shadow under the black vegetation that engulfs the walls of the Plaza Mayor. Over the rubble of the city rises a tangle of burnt trees. The silence resembles the screeching of tyres at traffic lights, and neon lights flicker like nightmarish dragonflies in abandoned doorways. The locks of the Manzanares, with their floating spheres, have disappeared. No one would say that this green desolation was, before the sage, a concrete fortress capable of surviving the climatic cataclysm of 2050.
Not for a moment does it cross Diego Torres’ mind what fate the sage has reserved for the refugee camps beyond the walls. No trace of human life remains beneath the branches of this terrifying forest that tumbles from his window to the final horizon of the Dream Sphere. Only a gigantic white moon hangs in the purple sky. A trident-like constellation of fixed stars is drawn to its left, ready to skewer the monstrous satellite and fix it forever in the void.
Diego Torres gazes at the desolation beneath his feet and somehow feels at home. There is a scarlet glow in the distance. Perhaps a skyscraper or a huge antenna that glows ghostly, attracting hundreds of shadows like a magnet.
There is a web of red threads draped around the tower like a spider’s web. And, although he does not yet know what he is seeing, Diego Torres senses that there, in that tower, all wishes can be fulfilled. His own, those of all the corpses that the search for his brother’s murderer will leave in its wake, and all, absolutely all the wishes of humanity.
