Hart looked at the list of names and thought,
Padraig Augustin. The research notes were from more than a hundred years ago; why was Padraig Augustin on the list of names?
The notes weren't from more than a hundred years ago. They were from four years ago. He didn't know why he'd thought they were from...
They were from more than a hundred years ago.
There were...
There were two expeditions, Hart thought, attempting to make sense of the notes. There was the, the expedition in Scaltoth; and there was the expedition in Immortals Tongue. Padraig Augustin was part of the expedition in Immortals Tongue. Hart looked up at the map, the map of Immortals Tongue, and said quietly,
"Yeva... went to Immortals Tongue, didn't she?"
In the glass temple, Stan had said that Immortals Tongue was one of the four locations of balance. It needed to be balanced or, or the induks' power would overwhelm Scalvoris.
"Yeva... balanced Immortals Tongue?" Hart questioned.
"But if she did, why are we..." Why were they at Immortals Tongue?
They weren't.
They were the Scaltoth group, and they were at Scaltoth. Hart was exhausted, his mind was exhausted. He looked at the map on the wall, and the map was of Immortals Tongue.
But they were at Scaltoth, weren't they? They, they were. They were at Scaltoth.
But then why was there a map of Immortals Tongue on the wall?
There was a half-empty cup of coffee on one of the desks, and Hart smelled the coffee. The room hadn't smelled like coffee before, and he thought of the nosebleed, how he had bled in the basement in Melrath, bled from the mouth and nose. He thought of coffee, and he thought of dying, and he whispered,
"No."
His mind was exhausted but there shouldn't be coffee in Scaltoth, should there? There shouldn't be, so why was it here?
This was more than exhaustion, he thought.
Hart realized he didn't know what was real and what wasn't.
But he looked at the coffee, and the coffee didn't make sense in Scaltoth. And as he thought that, he realized that he didn't really smell the coffee, that it wasn't really there. He looked at the map on the wall, and the map didn't make sense; it was the map of the ruins Yeva had gone to at Immortals Tongue, he thought, the ruins that balanced Moseke and her sisters. It wasn't a map of the ruins they were in. He looked at the list of names from four years ago, and one of the names on the list,
Padraig Augustin, didn't make sense.
They didn't make sense because they were of Immortals Tongue. And the Scaltoth group was at Scaltoth.
What did Hart know was real?
He knew they were at Scaltoth. And he knew that the Scaltoth group was real. Nir'wei, Ralgar, Ralgar's translator, Woe, Yeva. He knew they were real because they had been with him before all this, before the room. Before the dream.
Ralgar was of the group; Ralgar was of Scaltoth.
Before, Ralgar had said that the expedition didn't make sense.
"What is this doing in a place like Scaltoth?" he'd said.
"This is not the work of my people."
The expedition wasn't of Scaltoth, and Hart looked at the notes a moment, not the research notes from the expedition in Immortals Tongue but the research notes from the expedition in Scaltoth, and the notes looked real to him.
But they didn't make sense to Ralgar, so Hart knew they weren't real.
Rather than look through the things from the expedition, Hart looked at the room. The room was real, he thought; it had to be. He looked at the room, and there was the doorway and there were the vines. The doorway looked real to him. The vines didn't look real.
Looking at the vines was like looking at a dream.
The vines were the only thing that didn't look real in the room, Hart realized. The things from Immortals Tongue looked real, despite not making sense for Scaltoth. The vines made sense for Scaltoth, they were jungle vines, but they were like a dream.
Hart moved to the vines and he held onto them with one hand. Holding onto the vines like holding onto Reality, he spoke to the group.
"I don't know what's real and what's not," Hart said.
"It's like we're... ?" He didn't know; he didn't know how or why they would've gotten into the dreaming world.
And they weren't in the dreaming world, were they; they were in Scaltoth.
"But even not knowing what's real and what's not, there's something... different about the vines." Looking at the vines now, holding onto them now, it was like they weren't real. Like they weren't there in his hand.
But they were.
"I think they're real?" Hart said, questioningly.
"Because... because of all the things in the room, the vines are the one thing that don't look real. It's difficult to look at them; difficult to hold onto them. The expedition notes were real to me, I was able to read the map on the wall. The coffee was real."
"But the vines aren't real to me, and so they... are?" he asked.
"Nir'wei, Ralgar," he said. The equipment was real; he knew that because, like the group, it had been with him before the room. He went through his equipment and got out a knife. Then, holding to the vines with one hand, he began to cut and saw at them.
It was difficult, because they didn't seem real. It was exhausting to look at them and hold onto them and need to remind himself that they were different from the rest of the things in the room, that though they didn't look real, they... were.
But the knife was real, it was real in his hand, and he sawed at the vines. The vines were difficult to cut, very difficult, and he said,
"I think we all need to do this." He didn't look away from the vines, not for a moment. But he said to the group, and it wasn't a thought and it wasn't a question,
"We all need to do this."
While Hart worked on the vines, he spoke. He spoke to himself and he spoke to the group, and he said what was real and what wasn't, and why. He worked through his
thoughts
, and as he worked through them he worked through the vines with the knife. He cut at the vines, and he thought of Reality cutting through dream, through surreality.
He needed the group to do this; he knew he wouldn't be able to get through the vines by himself. So he spoke to the group, and he cut and he sawed at the vines, and he asked the group to speak to him like he was speaking to them, to speak Reality so that it would be real. And he asked the group to cut through the vines.