Bruce.
He wanted to keep his eyes closed, to let the dream play on.
Bruce. The voice, more insistent now.
His brow furrowed, the grass against his cheek prickling as he shifted. Why couldn't she understand that waking was an interruption of life as it should be?
Bruce... It wasn't going to stop.
He rolled onto his back, let his eyes flicker open onto the sunset sky hanging over him. Around the periphery of his vision, the tops of stones began to intrude. Faint colors emanated from them.
He sat up, hardly believing it. He was back in the circle, sitting on the grass, looking into the story forest he had been running through before. Somewhere in there, he had found his own little grove, the infinitesimal corner where a small collection of his own tales stood, living and breathing the deliciously perfumed air.
Bruce. The voice was getting impatient, and he turned to see where it was coming from. He had subconsciously recognized Theda's voice even before he had been fully awake, so seeing her was not a surprise. She appeared outside the circle of stones as she always did, watching him with her familiar intensity.
"What?" he asked, stretching out his limbs as best he could without getting up. "What am I doing here?" He turned toward her, and for the first time realized how much she really did look like Kerren. The image of his muse before him had been cobbled together from thoughts of Sarah when she was about the same age as her daughter was now, which just made the similarity that more apparent.
"There is something you need to do," she said. One hand was pointing at him, but the other was tucked behind her back, lost among all the slowly swirling robes that swam around her.
He sighed, and got to his feet, fully turning toward her. "No thanks," he said. "Every time I've tried to do something tonight, it's turned out horribly wrong. Those people are all going to walk away thinking I'm the worst person that ever lived."
Theda continued to speak, her mouth never opening. "Perhaps we can do something about that," she said. She produced her hidden hand, in which she grasped a large fruit. Bruce's stomach sank when he saw it, recognizing it as the one from his Qoloni-tree, the same one he had climbed and tried to retrieve, just before he fell back into the world of the Lodge. He remembered suggesting to the others that it would take the destruction of the Qoloni itself to bring it down off the tree...
"They did it?" he asked Theda. "They killed it?"
She nodded slowly. "By the means the dreaming men discovered, the means that you could not imagine in your dark days of creating it."
He winced, sensing the chastisement within her placid voice. So they had destroyed it with mirrors. "Good for them," he said. "The job is done, then."
"Not quite," Theda said. "They are still separate from their world, the one from which the whole story forest grows. You have to get them back, to reattach them, make the story whole."
He sighed. "I believe, in that world, I am currently lying on the lobby floor, bleeding out from the many holes that bastardly thing gored in me. I'm hardly in a position to..."
She extended the hand that held the fruit, pushing it fully into the circle, from between the stones she stood among. "Yes, you can," she said. "It is, after all, your story. You can't change everything, but perhaps there is something you can do. Take a look, and re-write what you can. But there is little time."
He thought it over, then stepped forward and took the fruit out of her hand. It was larger than he had seen it last, heftier, more important. Even though it had fallen from its tree, it still felt vital in its hand. Still alive, but Theda was right. There was little time.
He looked from the fruit to his muse and back, unsure of where to begin. A smile was breaking around the corners of her mouth, as if she were merely waiting for him to figure it out. He turned the ripe weight over and over in his hands, unsure of what to do with it, how to get into it. As he continued to stare, he thought he began to see beneath the skin of it, into its inner workings.
What he held was the events of the night since the avalanche, encapsulated, narratified. He could see into the minds of all those who had been carried into this bizarre journey with him. He saw their fears, their uncertainties, and saw how in their own individual ways they had taken those deficiencies and pushed through them, or converted them into actions that brought them all to this final endpoint. More importantly, he saw himself, and was horrified. In himself he saw precious little heroism, sheer cowardice, and more than a little madness. Now that he was out of that horrible Lodge, away from the paralyzing fear and paranoia, he could see it all clearly. This, he realized, was the final gift Theda was giving to him; the ability to look deeply into this story-begat-from-a-story and see if and how he could change it, perhaps alter the ending.
Could he prevent the Qoloni from being summoned at all? No, that part was integral, too near the stem that attached it to its parent story-tree to change. All the elements had already been there to bring the thing into the real world -- Bruce's and Jimmy Gough's inspiration, Benny and Harmon's knowledge of the tale, Kerren's physical presence... if Bruce had ever gone looking for a case to prove predestination, this could have been it. But at the moment he just wanted to find a new path for the story, something that made him not to be its only human villain.
Could he have stayed in his hotel room, so that when the avalanche came he could have just been obliterated, and never made it out to help and harm the rest of them? No, then they would never know what they were up against, because he wouldn't be there to tell them. He had to remind himself that he had saved Kerren before he had killed Glenda; the thought raised tears of self-hatred and frustration into his eyes, blurring the task he continued to explore in his hands. There must be something, must be something --
Could he have not stabbed Glenda? Could he change that piece? So that she would be alive, to triumphantly join in the final curtain call, and then either make the decision to stay with Dale, or go home to her family? Or had he deprived her utterly of that bittersweet decision? As he contemplated this, he could see the story paths deep inside the fruit that would change. So much of what the others had done, their determination and rage necessary to come out victorious, had stemmed from that tragedy. He couldn't change it.
He shook the fruit in rage, as if he could knock its elements loose and rearrange them by sheer force of will. Why could he not do as he had so many other times, sat down to edit, find what felt wrong in his stories and tailor them to fit his aesthetic sense? The more deeply he stared, the more he understood that he could not change any particular element he did not like, because each would have a cascading effect that would alter everything else, and the Qoloni would end up not being destroyed.
He was about to give up, to throw the terrible fruit out of the stone circle, to let it roll and rot under the infinitely stretching boughs of the story forest. Just as he felt the muscles of his arm tensing to do so, a thought came to him. And, as with any good idea while he was writing, he immediately knew it was the right one. If he ever had any kind of creative gift, it was knowing when the true solution crossed his mind. So he took the story in both hands, made his final change, and gave it back to Theda.
She peered into it, saw what he had done, and nodded. It then vanished from her hand, for this realm was no longer the one in which it belonged. She reached for him with the same hand. He stepped forward and took it, feeling the coolness of her skin, letting her lead him out of the circle of Sounding Stones, because like the tale he had just altered, he had arrived in his rightful place.
He felt the breeze as he left the circle of his Sounding Stones. He took a deep breath of its richness, and then the author and Death walked toward the dream-ocean together.
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