Dream 327a

Dream 327a is the first part of the 327th entry in the dream journal of Alithera D'varrik IV.

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"[327a] I heard a bell ringing sideways and underneath me, and I gazed straight ahead into the whiteness of the sun. There was an old oxen, nearly a hundred and seventy-five years, I thought, staring at me dully on the flattened plain. I was with all my might avoiding the sight of the oxen, for I knew that it knew what I did not want to behold. At the edge of the sun I saw firstly a mountain, which turned out to be a city far away, visible to me only by the gentle refraction of the sun multiplied by a thousand times a thousand. I knew that I would never reach that city even if I walked the plain for seven thousand years.""I was climbing the red steps of the chief temple of the city in a dream. In my imagining I was stumbling up them and unable to move. When I awoke I was in my room, and my lonely daughter who was frightened in the night clutched the frame of my chamber door with an innocent daze. Her head, I could see from where I lay, was filled to the brim with nonsense rhetoric of the ancient ox. I could see the words and phrases squirming about together. They were too packed in to move freely. In a fit of rage, pure rage, I leaped at my daughter and sought violently to cut them out of her head. I stabbed a hearty stab and she screamed and the words came tumbling out along with her blood. I was certain thatI had killed her, but I hadn’t.""The king, on a strange island of greenish rocks, offered me medal of heroism, and I violently protested because I was then certain that my daughter was dead, and that I was unworthy of such an honor.""A harlot was singing a song of ruddy heroism in a dark and shady lamplit street, and hate curdled through my veins."