In his dream, Crimson Grey is dressed formally in the clothes he comissioned from Lonnegrin's special tailor. He's at a party. Everyone else nearby has formal wear, too. Women of all races (kimdiss, human, elfar, pellinese, kyben, huldra, darkling, and more: a zoo!) strut about the crowded ballroom in sheer dresses designed to drive their menfolk wild. Their men sport dress armor and carry fancy jewelled weapons that would not last a minute in battle. Crimson bears a sheath in his belt, containing the rapier-thin blade of a bleak grey hilt, well-worn.

It is a huge room, cavernous, with smoke rising to occlude the ceiling as clouds hide the sky. Crimson can see the walls far to North and South, but East and West, the room's boundaries are as hidden in pipe and cigar haze as the ceiling.

Despite the room's dimensions, there is no room for dancing. Comely waitresses in short cocktail resses and burly waiters in vests and tight shorts barely have room to move between the appreciative cliques and oblivious groups chatting away. This may be the loudest room Crimson has ever attended.

The women all wear jewelry: big rings, shiny necklaces, gemstone brooches large enough to choke a horse. Crimson is working the crowd. Over here he unhooks the clasp of a sitting woman's choker, and over there he slides the ring from a finger as he kisses a pretty hand. Presently Crimson Grey has his courtier's pouch full of "souvenirs."

"What for?" whispers a pretty soprano into his left ear. "What good are these tokens to the course of things? What kingdom will you buy? What throne will you claim with these baubles?" Crimson whirls about, but no one is near. "Follow me," says the voice in his right ear. "I can show you gemstones worthy of your notice."

Crimson turns slowly and sees a comely half elf, perhaps Missy's age, perhaps older. Her hair is dark, as black as Jil Sander's, dark as soot around her pale white face. She wears not a dress, but armor, a fine chain mail such as the high-kav elfar wear, but black to match her hair. This woman is entirely dressed in black, booted, cloaked, and gloved, making her weight hard to discern. Her rose-petal lips are exactly at the level of Crimson's eyes. She has incisors the size of toothpicks, of daggers, of swords. She has the most beautiful set of ivory fangs Crimson has ever seen.

"Follow me," she repeats, and the words strike Crimson's will like a club. Her command pulls at Crimson just like the willing powerlessness he felt when the woman from Bird Keep commanded his attention. "Follow me," she says, and Crimson's feet step towards her without conscious thought.

She takes his hand and leads him to the West. Wending their way through the crowd, Crimson and his guide are a firebrand through wax. No one stops them, least of all Crimson. In five minutes Crimson sees an exit on the Western wall.

The doors of this ballroom are wooden, banded in iron with runes and inlaid with gems, and the doors are easily as high as the tallest building in Ashertiri, taller. The doors go up, and up, and up... Crimson leans back as he passes through them, but the door tops are obscured in smoke and haze. The woman pulls his arm, and Crimson follows.

Outside the doors, Crimson assays a chamber fully as large as the ballroom, but square instead of oval. This cubic chamber is without the people or most of the haze. The outer chamber is domed by green glass, such as they had above Diaspar city, but this room has . . . a feature, a furnishing, an indoor mountain which Diaspar didn't share. In the center of this city-sized room is a white spiral, an ivory ramp, a pathway leading up to the sky, leading to a platform perhaps within a halfling's reach of the dome.

The woman with The Voice leads Crimson to the base of the spiral, a four minute walk. No other creature is seen, no other creature is heard. This woman strides as silently in her metal as Crimson walks in his silk and suede. She turns back and smiles, revealing the full width of her fangs. Crimson places his hand on the grey hilt for reassurance, and the weapon purrs, makes him feel safer.

The floor of the outer chamber is divided in half. An inlay of gold, as wide as a house, as wide as a road, leads from the base of the ramp to the left, out to the huge doors at the South exit of this chamber. Another golden swath leads from the North doors to the center of the chamber, but this second gold pathway leads to a downward spiral, leads into the basements or catacombs below you.

The woman ascends the ivory ramp, towing Crimson Grey. It is an ascent of an hour, during which the half-elf woman remains silent as she leads without turning again. During the ascent Crimson's cloudy mind can think of nothing to say.

At the top, Crimson's circus eye measures the ivory platform at sixty feet. Towards the center is a design inlaid on the ivory, comprised of troughs an inch thick and filled with various colored substances.

A star of seven points, comprised of eight perfectly straight blue lines, is the first of the patterns Crimson Grey apprehends.

Next, Crimson notes three circles intersect the star. The outermost portion of the design is a circle inlaid with the Emerald color of the dome overhead; this outer cirlce just touches the tip of each star point. The middle circle passes through each of the blue lines, somewhat closer to the center than the outer rim, and this one is inlaid with a substance that matches the gold below the spiral. The innermost circle is of a black substance. This smaller circle is as large as it can be to have none of the straight lines within, but still touches them all.

The third feature Crimson sees is a myriad of gemstones inlaid in the ivory. A hundred, or perhaps two hundred, perfectly-matched gems are scattered about this platform at the top of the world. Emerald, sapphire, opal, ruby, peridot, diamond, topaz, onyx, quartz, obsidian, lapis, malachite: everything and more than Crimson can recognize is represented here. Crouching low, Crimson notices the gems are not loose, but are also inlaid into the ivory platform. Almost all of the gems are within the outer circle. Almost all.

The woman has let go of Crimson's hand and mind. The design has him entranced in her stead. It looks like the gemstones are moving! Definitely, they are moving! The gemstones inlaid into the colored lines move along the lines, perhaps an inch in twenty heartbeats. The stones don't seem to transfer from one color line to another, but their progress slows at intersections. It's harder to notice, but some of the gems in the ivory floor are moving too. These move hardly at all, but they are changing, too, perhaps by as much as an inch per hour.

As Crimson walks about studying the inlays and the stones, his guide moves to approach the man who was occupying the platform alone when she and Crimson arrived. Studying the pattern on the disk, Crimson is barely aware of the other two until they speak.

"Lillith," the man says, holding some sort of goggles to his forehead, using both hands.

"Singer," she replies, nodding. Her gloved hands no longer are outside her cloak. She nods towards Crimson. "Meet Crimson Grey, a cousin with a penchant for collecting gemstones."

The man's grey eyes flicker to Crimson but return swiftly to this woman he named Lillith. She starts to smile at him, but in the time it takes her lips to rise from her teeth, the man Singer looks away, lowers his goggles in extreme haste, makes a gesture on his belt, and disappears.

This Singer fellow must not be pleased by Lillith's fangs, or her Voice. At this time, the woman glances towards Crimson Grey and then walks to him, smiling. Crimson Grey backs up to the edge of the platform, and looks down. It's a long way down, with no feather fall...

This would be a great time to awaken, thinks Crimson Grey, and so he does.

Crimson Grey is inside a Quaal tree. In a minute, Crimson assures himself that his only companions are Ryndall, Marcellus, Missy/Jil Sander, Mollon Nightingale, and Uscar.

In the same minute, Crimson Grey notices he is still wearing his formal outfit commissioned for Ashertiri court functions. On his belt are a courtier's pouch and a longsword's sheath. The pouch has 8 pieces of jewelry but the thin leather sheath is empty.

The non-magical clothing Crimson was wearing when he went to sleep is not to be found within the tree, although he still wears the purple underwear. All other gear Crimson was carrying or wearing when he fell asleep is found in short order, as if Crimson himself packed it away, leaving inappropriate things behind as he prepared for a courtly function.

There is a note, handwritten, among the jewelry. The note bursts into flame and is destroyed almost before Crimson Grey can read it. Written in kimdissi, the note said,

• find a daytime teacher quickly when you require training, cousin.
• don't go dancing Thresher again! Death will visit prematurely, plus, you'll piss off Finneval!
  

  -Mach

P.S. Crimson knows the name Finneval from numerous hobbit songs, fables, and plays: Cordell Finneval was an incompetent Kimdissi thief who's stories involved making stupid mistakes resulting in capture, followed by impossibly clever escapes. Finneval's sword was named "Thresher" or "Grey's Wonder" depending on the storyteller. However, the phrase "dancing thresher" is not part of any story Crimson has heard.