The Dream with No Dreamer is my new short story published in the excellent Seize The Press magazine.
In a dark fantasy story set trillions of years after the heat-death of the universe, a shadow is forced to journey across a dying realm to collect ingredients for an occult operation: the ritual murder of what was once a god.
He climbed cobwebbed stairs to the courtyard where the monks were gathered in their humid botanical forest to meet him; no expressions on the polished chitin masks they wore for faces, no weapons visibly strapped beneath their velvethene robes.
One asked his business here and from his cloak he removed an amulet, letting it dangle below his fist. In its ruby heart a Sefr snake moved in secret correspondence with the world, and in that dance the monk recognised the artist’s cryptographic signature. He gave the shadow a nod. When the envoy from fallen Sefreja arrived he did not usually come alone, but he came this time of year for only one thing.
With devotion unweathered by time the monks had tended to their winter gardens and souvenirs of aeons past: old books preserved in alien atmospheres, cabinets of empty crowns, a mechanical computer like an egg of etched glass. And in the warm guts of the structure—where glassy surfaces lay imperishable beneath rough and ancient stone—they kept the oldest and most significant specimen in their collection.At history’s first light its brothers were already fossils and coal. To the monks it was prelapsarian: the last living ancestor of all extant things, cut from that outermost bound which delimited all gods of all worlds; perhaps of its ragged outer edge, perhaps the stale black ocean beyond. According to local colour it had been a livestock animal. As doors within doors unfolded before him, the first thing the shadow noticed was its sulphuric reek. Then an instant of recognition.
Near a circular black lake at the centre of an edgeless room the animal shifted in its chains, unsettled by a halo of dim illumination above and the foreign light from beyond its chamber door. Feeling a psychic churn in the air, the shadow realised now what the monks had always known to be true.
The light of consciousness had burned no brighter than in this impenetrable crypt, nor would it. The most tireless of the human minds, he thought, had only aspired to embers of this natural superintelligence. And of the human minds the shadow was only an impression on a cave wall. This palsied heap, which dribbled from every semi-prolapsed orifice, was it.
And once a year, by distant decree, a Sefr emissary was allowed to ask one question.
While writing this story I listened to almost nothing but by-turns abstract, operatic, or upsetting drone metal by Sunn O))) and/or Scott Walker. While going for walks and turning this story over in my head I listened to lots of Charli XCX and Megan Thee Stallion.
Much has been made of this story’s influence from Thomas Ligotti, which I never spelled out loud before it started coming up in Seize The Press’s social media posts. I called it “The Dream with No Dreamer” because the phrase appeared to me on one of those walks and I could imagine Ligotti uttering that before Current 93 started strumming a haunted guitar in one of their fine spoken-word collaborations. But the PR-approved origin story behind this piece is that I sat down and told myself I was here to write a banger.
Having read oceans of short fiction that spent a couple thousand words leading up to a punchline that never went anywhere, I wanted to get back into writing with something that would go hard from the first couple of sentences to the last. By the time they got past the first few paragraphs, the reader could hopefully rest assured that good writing had already occurred. So this was going to be my all-killer-no-filler, algorithmically optimised two-minute Spotify single. Having seen the most vital and interesting magazine in SF/F call for more fantasy pieces fitting its no-happy-endings remit, I simply drove my beatmakers out to an undisclosed location and wrote the kind of thing focus groups showed that STP’s sickos-haha-yes audience would like to read.
Some readers have called the piece “ultimately too obscure”, some enjoying it “in an excellent ‘I don't know what's happening but I love it’ sort of way”; one reader reports they were “pleasantly surprised by the monsterfucking.”
But I’ve already let on too much. How pleasant is really is will have to be left up to the reader.