The Dream of the King

He sat up too fast and nearly fell from the pallet.

The room found him in fragments: lamp nearly dead, Hanan slumped against the wall in uneasy sleep, Azaryah sprawled crookedly on one elbow, Mishael awake at once because Mishael seemed to wake not from noise but from significance.

"Danel."

He could not answer immediately.

The dream remained whole inside him with a clarity no ordinary mind should have been able to bear. Gold. Silver. Bronze. Iron. Iron mixed with clay. Stone cut without hands. Collapse. Wind. Mountain.

It was all there and would not fade.

"Danel," Mishael said again, quieter this time.

"I know it."

The words changed the room.

Hanan woke fully at once. Azaryah pushed himself upright with a hand against the floor. Mishael did not move, but Danel saw the moment the sentence landed hard enough to force his pulse upward.

"All of it?" Hanan asked.

"Yes."

"The dream too?"

"Yes."

No one spoke for several breaths after that because awe and fear had finally entered the same room and discovered they traveled well together.

Danel stood. The motion felt half chosen, half pulled. He crossed to the lamp and fed it the last reserve of oil from the small flask on the shelf. Light rose reluctantly. Enough.

"Listen carefully," he said.

He told it once and without searching for words, because the words were already there. The image. The metals. The feet mixed with iron and clay. The stone not cut by hands. The destruction. The mountain filling the whole earth.

Hanan listened with his mouth slightly open and did not seem to notice.

Azaryah's usual resistance had gone out of his posture entirely. He sat forward like a man leaning toward impact.

Mishael closed his eyes while Danel spoke, not to withdraw but to hold the sequence without distraction. When Danel finished, he opened them again and said, "Tell it once more."

Danel did.

When he finished the second time, Mishael nodded.

"It is internally ordered," he said.

Azaryah stared at him. "That is what you have to contribute?"

"At the moment, yes."

Hanan let out a sound somewhere between laughter and disbelief.

"I hate that this comforts me."

Danel waited for the System.

It did not open.

That unsettled him more than if it had burst across his sight immediately with some triumphant notation. Revelation had come. The dream was there. Dawn had not yet arrived. And still the window held itself back as if to insist, yet again, that receiving was not the same thing as responding rightly.

He turned toward the door.

"We need Ashpenaz. Or Arioch. Whoever reaches us first."

"And then?" Hanan asked.

"Then we tell the king."

"You say that as if the interpretation is obvious."

Danel looked back at him.

"It isn't. Not all of it."

That landed harder than the revelation itself.

"Then what do we actually have?" Hanan said.

Danel looked down at his own hands. They were shaking now, though they had not shaken while he spoke the dream aloud.

"Enough to stop men dying before dawn," he said. "I think."

Azaryah stood.

"That is a terrible amount of enough."

"Yes."

Mishael was already reaching for his wax tablet.

"Speak it again while I record structure," he said. "Not because the dream will leave you. Because fear changes phrasing, and phrasing will matter in that room."

Danel nodded once.

This, too, was brotherhood. One man waking with revelation. Another immediately building scaffolding around it before panic could loosen the bolts.

He spoke the dream a third time.

By the end of it, first light had begun to gather faintly at the window slit.