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It starts off simply enough. The Brute is making a routine security sweep of the Dreamers’ towers, not that anyone on Derse or Prospit would dare to threaten them. They are being and hope and doom, all in one. He’s done this a dozen times before without incident. It’s a ridiculously simple task. Six towers, six checklists, each to be filled out in triplicate and passed along to the Archagent’s office.
The Dreamers are infants, a long way from waking still. They sleep soundly. But today, one of them—a little smaller, a little rounder than the others—is fussing in her sleep, spindly little limbs drawing circles in the bed of slime as she makes plaintive mewling sounds.
He stares.
The noises don’t stop.
He unlocks the door, looms over the bed. There’s nothing illegal about looking. It’s his job. What he’s here to do, really.
But as far as he can tell, she seems intact. Got all her limbs. Normal color, for a Dreamer. Kinda ugly.
“Kinda cute,” he says. “What’s wrong, kiddo? Ya sick? Hungry?”
He stops, realizing that the Dreamers never eat. How do they live? Eating is pretty important to him.
His train of thought doesn’t get much further, because about then he notices that the crying has stopped. Problem solved. He turns to go, but as soon as he’s gotten over the threshold, she starts to whine again.
The math here is simple enough that even he can handle it.
“Yer lonely?” He crouches beside the bed this time. “Huh.”
Sitting with her in silence doesn’t seem to do much—he quickly discovers that it’s his voice that she likes.
The Brute doesn’t talk much, but now he tells her anything he can think of—his job in the palace dungeons, the pretty pawn he wants to flirt with, his boss with his scowl and his perpetual tower of paperwork, his friend, the Courtyard Droll. When he runs out of real things, he starts making up stories. Little ones at first—real anecdotes embellished a bit, given a certain stumbling linearity and a punchline at the end. Jokes. They aren’t very good, but they do the trick. Soon enough the Dreamer goes still, and when he stands to leave—guiltily recalling his neglected duties—she doesn’t stir.
He thinks about her afterward, finds himself marking little incidents that he’d like to share with her—a new trick of the Droll’s, the face the Archagent made when a new procedure was introduced to the already convoluted bureaucratic process, the time he saw the King and the Queen walking arm-in-arm. The next security sweep can’t come soon enough. The little Dreamer isn’t fussing this time, but she seems content enough to listen. He likes to think that he caught her smiling in her sleep.
Years pass. The Brute gets chattier, even outside the Dreamer’s room. One could even call him outspoken. Poker nights become a regular part of his week, with the Archagent and the Droll and the quiet Dignitary, who the Brute makes a point of drawing out when he can. Together with the Queen—always one step above, but ever-present—they become a unit, tight enough any absences are noticed, and mourned.
They all have their hobbies—Jack Noir and his piano, the Droll’s penchant for colors and explosives, the Dignitary’s habit of skimming contraband books before he locks them up. The Brute has his Dreamer.
His storytelling gets better with time. The silly little yarns evolve into a single sprawling tragic-comic-romantic epic. The jokes and anecdotes he tells his friends. The stories—the big ones, the knights and princesses and identical twins and misunderstandings—he saves for her, and only her.
Then comes a frightening period where he makes his sweep to find all of the Dreamers encased in silk cocoons, rigid and nonresponsive, even when he breaks the rules and touches one. It shouldn’t make a difference—she can’t talk back to him in any case, and the transformation is clearly normal—but, for reasons that he can’t articulate, it disturbs him. She’s growing up, getting closer to waking. And once the war starts, there won’t be any room for stories. She probably won’t even remember him.
He can’t explain it to himself, much less to her, or to his friends, but the stories change that year. The romance becomes swashbuckling adventure, the knight fighting dragons and pirates and endless armies in the name of true love while his Dreamer lies dormant.
It would have been a bad year, but Jack Noir comes to him, lugging a double bass twice his size, and tells the Brute to get learning, they’re starting a goddamn jazz band.
The Brute isn’t one to dwell on things. A little distraction is all it takes. He learns the bass, to which he brings an intense focus that surprises the rest of the group, and he tells his stories to the cocoon, and he forgets to mope. But at the end of the year, when he makes his rounds and finds that his Dreamer has changed again—the cocoon replaced by a four-limbed girl in a violet dress, a princess of Derse--he still grins like his face is going to crack.
“Hey kiddo,” he says as he sits beside the bed. “Didja miss me?”
This time he’s sure he sees her smiling.