The Dream did not always look the same. That was one of the first things you learned, if you were lucky enough to learn anything at all. Tonight it had chosen old growth -- the kind of forest that existed now only in places men had forgotten or decided not to bother. The trees were vast and dark, their canopies breaking the moon into pieces. Snow came down slowly, indifferent to where it landed.
The carving man sat on a fallen log that may or may not have existed in the waking world. He was working on something new. He always was.
The Man arrived the way one arrived in the Dream -- simply present where he had not been a moment before. He stood at the edge of the firelight, hands clasped behind his back, watching the work rather than the worker.
"You've been circling this conversation for three months," the carving man said without looking up. The knife moved in small, deliberate strokes. "I could feel you thinking about it from the other side of the Dream."
"I wanted to be certain."
"You're never certain. That's not the word you mean." The carving man tilted the piece toward the firelight. Whatever shape it was becoming shifted depending on the angle. "You mean you wanted to be ready."
The Man said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the trees behind them something moved -- low to the ground, there and gone. The Man's eyes tracked it without turning his head.
"There is a thread," he said at last. "It has been pulling at me. Well, not just me, but I do the most howling into the wind."
"Threads pull at you constantly."
"This one is different." He crouched beside the fire, elbows on knees. "It moves against the Shadow in ways that aren't entirely explained by what it knows about itself. Has been doing so for some time now. Quietly." He picked up a stone from the Dream-earth and turned it over in his fingers. It had the smell of cold river water. "Without asking permission."
"Many soldiers fight the Shadow."
"Many soldiers follow orders that point them at the Shadow." He set the stone down. "That's not the same thing."
The carving man was quiet for a moment. "How does it find them?"
The Man looked into the fire. "It thinks it knows."
That sat between them long enough to mean something. The knife slowed, just slightly, then resumed.
"Fragments?" the carving man asked.
"Changing ones. The kind a man explains away." The Man's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "They’ve been running on the edges of its sleep for weeks. Keeping back."
The carving man looked up. "Cautious."
"They remember." He didn't say what they remembered. He didn't need to. "That's my doing, I think."
"Not only yours."
"No. Not only mine."
The fire burned down a measure. The shape in the trees had gone still -- invisible now, only the impression of it remaining.
"Three weeks past. The Braem Wood." The Man paused. "He filed a report after. Thorough. The kind a good soldier files." He turned the stone over once in his palm. "He wrote that he'd picked up the trail just past the second ridge."
The carving man waited.
"There is no trail past the second ridge. Not in that wood. Not at night."
The carving man's knife went still.
The fire popped. The shape in the trees had not moved but felt closer.
"The Shadow doesn't yet understand what's been disrupting its movements in that part of the world," the Man continued. "It has explanations it finds satisfying. For now." His golden eyes moved to the canopy, to stars that were almost right. "It won't stay satisfied."
"Then time is a factor."
"Time," the Man said, "is always a factor."
The carving man stood and brushed wood shavings from his lap. They scattered and disappeared before reaching the ground. He held out the carving. The Man took it without looking at it, but his fingers found the shape -- four legs, a lowered head, the stillness before motion.
"There are more of us now than there were," the carving man said. "More found. More finding themselves." He pocketed his knife. "The Wheel is accelerating something."
"Or something is accelerating the Wheel."
Two old things in a forest that wasn't real, holding the weight of things that were.
"It will resist," the Man said quietly.
"The ones worth keeping always do."
The Man let the Dream carry him elsewhere. Behind him, the forest faded back into whatever the Dream kept forests for. At the treeline the low shape finally stepped into the light.
It was not alone.
**
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass. What was woven cannot be unwoven -- only continued. In an Age yet to come, or perhaps long past, a wind moved through the woods and kept going east until it found a man in a city on a tower who couldn't have said what made him turn from his watch. He stood there for a long moment, looking toward the dark.
He couldn't have said what he was looking for.
Not yet.