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serious. “They’re very real. Very real indeed.
They’re just not very common. Very, very, very rare.”
    She pulled back the covers
of the bed and pulled the bottom of her hospital robes up to reveal a cut up
her leg. It was not particularly deep, nor was it particularly serious. Some
ointment on it would stave off infection, much of it already covered in the
yellow-brown disinfectant solution.
    “The Nhyx did that, ”
Adabelle asked. “I didn’t think you were a Sturding yourself.”
    “I’m not,” she said. Not
even a little bit. They did a test and couldn’t find even the slightest hint of
Sturding powers within me. But the Nhyx attacked me, and when I was woken by
the Oen’Aerei, they showed me my leg and it was bleeding. They can’t
even explain it. They’ve never really dealt with dream incidents appearing in
this world. I mean, they have a few theories, but nothing proved. Nothing… concrete. ”
    “And now they do,” Adabelle
said. And they’ll probably take her away and study her for experiments, the
same way they use everyone.
    That might have been a
slightly over-dramatic thought, but Adabelle knew the Oen’Aerei’s history, she
knew their roots as a school for soldiers and war. She knew they no longer were
used in such a fashion, not any more. The thought of that sandstone academy
made her blood pulse harder.
     “So what did they do
once they’d gotten rid of it?”
    “Well that’s the problem,”
said Larraine. “They…err…couldn’t quite get rid of it. Because it was a
Sturding. They couldn’t just seal it away in a sphere…or rather, they should
have been able to. They just couldn’t.”
    Adabelle’s brow furrowed.
“So what did they do with it?”
    Larraine pursed her lips,
the red, puckered set straining towards her own ears.
    “Well they’ve had to leash
it.”
    “But…you can’t leash a Nhyx, can you?”
    “Well, apparently you can if
it’s a Sturding.” She shrugged, probably just as confused as Adabelle. A
Sturding was a Dreamer who could enter the Frequencies, mind and body.
What a Nhyx was doing with that ability, though, had Adabelle stumped.
    Adabelle imagined the
shadowy form, attached to a chain, struggling to break free and terrorise the
others around it. There would be no question that it would be caged and they
would search for a way to seal it away. Perhaps in a dream sphere, though the
fact that it resisted earlier was a sign that wouldn’t be particularly
effective. Perhaps they could come up with another possibility, rather than
leaving it leashed or caged.
    “What did it look like? Out
of the dream, I mean.” Adabelle was curious. If the Nhyxes took different forms
in the dream depending on who looked at them, then what form could it take when
stuck with the limitations of the real world?
    “It was a shadow,” Larraine
replied, “but not quite, either. It was like it was not only wide and long and
deep, the shadow…but like it had something else to it. Like it was…something
more. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like looking at it and seeing a
hundred million forms, and none at the same time. Like seeing a frequency I was
not meant to. Yet it also looked like a kind of demon, with jagged limbs. It
was still shadowy. Hard to make out a complete and permanent form. Do
you…understand?”
    “Not even in the slightest,”
Adabelle replied. She might have to ask some of the professors about that one.
“How did they leash it?”
    “I don’t quite understand
how they did it.” She raised her hands in gesture, twisting them around
themselves as she spoke. “They had a kind of shackle they were able to use. It
was a silver hoop of some kind, and they wrapped it around the creature’s
wrist. Three of them, for that matter. It was attached to a leash. I think a
few of them might have used their dream tendrils to contain it too. It’s not
very clear, because a lot was happening. Despite it being in the real world, it
still has ties