He reached the little alcove, wondered obliquely if anybody in the nearby rooms was going to be awakened by the ice machine if he thumbed it on. Oh well, he reasoned, if you don't spring the few extra bucks for a suite on the highest floor, that's the risk you run. Besides, he had very faintly heard a few of the fevered sounds through the walls of his room before he left, so he doubted that the people next to him were overly concerned about getting a lot of sleep anyway.
As the ice chunked out into the bucket, amid the roar of the titanic dynamo that must have been necessary to create such a wonder, he wondered if he was going to get to sleep at all that night, and whether it would matter if he did. So far this trip had yielded zero dreams that were of any use to him, anyway. Where was Theda when he needed her? He allowed himself only a few seconds to wonder if he was going to spend the rest of his life like this, always chasing after her elusive inspiration, but never having it pay off.
He wouldn't be able to face his editor at the end of the week without something to show for it, he was certain of that much. Ger had been so accommodating and so understanding of Bruce's writer's block (even if the younger man didn't quite believe such a phenomenon existed), springing for half the tab to get Bruce up here, into the uncluttered air where, supposedly, the great writer would be able to think and get back in touch with his muse. But now the only thing that comforted him amid this wonderland of snow, wooden rafter beams, and down pillows was the white noise the ice made as it filled his dented, wooden bucket.
If Bruce hadn't been trying to work in this environment, he would really be enjoying himself. As the taxi had brought him up the long, winding ride over the foothills, the uphill slopes outweighing the downhill ones until he was high above the world, he had felt the air around him grow lighter. He could hear Ger's voice in his head -- "The best thing about writers is their capacity for self-delusion" -- and up at the Deertail Lodge, he hoped, he could find the quiet and lack of distraction he needed to get back into that self-deluding frame of mind, and back into contact with Theda. The lodge's promotional material promised a place free of connectivity of every kind, where a person could untether themselves from the computers and communication that burdened them in the world down below. It had sounded like exactly what he needed.
Bruce let the bucket overflow and the trough underneath fill a little bit with the crystalline cubes, so that the next patron likely wouldn't have to run the machine to get all they needed. It wasn't that he was an inherently thoughtful person, just that he wanted to stand in the wash of aural static for a little while longer... Contrary to the propaganda, he had found no solace in this place's silence. In fact, he found the random rush and thump of the ice machine preferable to the vast, hollow wind that had blown through that last dream. It had been horrible, a wind that he could feel slicing through him, chilling his insides as it passed. He knew that he should stop his mind from recalling it in this middle-of-the-night, half-awake trance he was still in, but could not resist...
---
It had been the same ring of towering stones he always stood inside. But now they were dull and gray, draped in dying vines, whose heart-shaped leaves withered where before they had been lush, almost bursting with greenness. The landscape outside the ring had changed, too. The first time he had come, he had been able to see a sun-sparkled, magical forest outside the ring of thirteen Sounding Stones (he had always known that was what they were called, even though he had never been told). But tonight, there was hardly a world beyond at all. It was as if whatever planet he stood on had shrunk to the size of a small city. The ground curved away on all sides from where he stood, so sharply that all he could see beyond a few hundred yards was that omnipresent atmosphere that iridesced for what seemed like light-years in all directions. He was standing on a wide pedestal in the middle of a vast nothing.
The horror of it all would have been diminished if he had appeared someplace entirely different, instead of this corrupted version of a place he had never tired of visiting in his younger years. Back then, not only had the place been beautiful, *she* had been beautiful, making his breath catch every time she stepped out of the forest; without fanfare, but commanding the attention of every living thing within it, even the plants, which all seemed to wave toward her at the direction of some unfelt wind, probably the same one that made her robes flutter and swirl in slow motion, as if she were underwater.
Theda, she had told him her name was on their heady first meeting. His mind immediately noted that this was an anagram of "death", which didn't surprise him because it was his mind that had made up her name in the first place. Or so he had thought in the beginning. Now he wasn't so sure. The name might have come from Somewhere Else, just as he grew to think that the things she told him -- the stories he would later write down in waking life and be hailed as a genius for -- all came from the same Somewhere Else. There was just no way he could have been personally responsible for them all.
But night after night he had come, and night after night she had emerged to weave tales for him, speaking into his willingly receptive ears, and almost dictated for him articles, stories, possible avenues of research... an endless font of thoughts and ideas. It was like he had been asked to write a wish list of things that a writer/blogger/journalist wants but hardly ever gets in terms of inspiration, and she was sent into his dreams to tick them off for him every night of the week. She had asked nothing in return, only a receptacle for her brilliance, which he was more than willing to provide (and benefit from).
He had loved to go to sleep back then, looked forward to that drowsy feeling that told him he was about to really start getting things done, but now it had been months since Theda had come to him among the Sounding Stones, striding out of the forest like a mystical story-telling nymph. He was starting to think she might never come back, and as he did, the surroundings seemed to be more and more infected with that attitude as well. The forest was drying up, the world it stood upon folding in on itself, and he didn't know if it was he or she that was making it happen. Would he one day close his eyes on the waking world to find himself floating alone in that limitless sky, which was no color and every color all at once? And if he did, would he ever be able to wake himself up? Would he want to?
---
Maybe he had done something to offend her. He never understood why he deserved her gifts in the first place. Now he wondered over and over what could cause her to pick up stakes and -- here he shuddered to think it -- perhaps decide to grace some other writer with her brilliance. Maybe all this decay was a symptom that she had walked away, leaving their shared dreamworld to shrink and collapse on itself. Or even worse, maybe that *thing* that had appeared the last time he saw her -- whatever it had been that came riding in on that unspeakable storm -- had frightened her away for good. Regardless, two things kept him from trying to stay awake for the rest of his life, undoubtedly driving himself crazy in the process.
First, as a writer, he still needed to produce. He had known since he was a little child that his job, his place in the world, was to take ideas from his head and shape them into words for others to read, no matter what form those words took. When he was a kid, it seemed the only avenue would be to write books, but as he got older, the world expanded and more and more forms or written art were created. He tried to follow them all. His ideas, at first his own and then more and more supplanted by Theda's (which, he could somehow argue with himself even now, were his too), grew into pieces of art, reams of factual investigation, reportage on the strange corners of existence, deep rabbit-hole dives into his own psyche that left him shivering at his own unknowability, interviews with other souls that could have gone on forever if he hadn't had a deadline to meet. He didn't care what the subject was, or what form would eventually serve them best, the main thing was the words, and the idea driving those words.
Secondly -- and this was rapidly becoming the only thing he could take solace from now -- was that while his dreamworld was shrinking, the thirteen Sounding Stones were unchanged. They still stood taller than his head, thicker than his body, in their perfect, uniform ring, dark rock veined with minerals of different colors, all pointing up toward the sky. Those veins were dark now, whereas once they had pulsed with light and life, and the vines that clung to them protectively were dying, but the Stones themselves were still whole. Lately, the world had shrunk enough that those stones weren't all pointing straight up anymore. They were starting to tip back, away from each other, like the imperceptibly slow decay of a blossom cursed with an unlucky number of petals.
This was why he still overcame his fears of what he might find and lay his head on his pillow every night. The Stones persisted, and in some unknowable way that dream-logic often worked by, Bruce knew on the most fundamental level that the Stones were *him*. Even if there were eventually not be enough real estate left for them all to stand without touching, they would still exist, as would he, and that must mean something.
The clatter of ice on the floor brought him back to the real world. In his mental absence, he had filled the trough almost to its edge with a roughly pyramidal mound of cubes. A few of them were randomly bouncing over the edge and hitting the floor, making a sound reminiscent of chattering teeth. He let go of the button that kept the machine running. It rumbled to a stop... but the trembling sensation he felt in his feet continued. The ice cubes that had fallen on the floor were vibrating, skittering around as if alive.
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