"Well, yes and no," he replied. "The Dreamin’, that's like yer personal chunk of the Overmind. It's part of who you are and is really yer own mind and soul. Now, the Overmind, that's a fairy of a different tale."
Elan blinked, shaking her head slightly as she tried to comprehend his speech. She thought she'd probably understood the important bits, but he had a habit of speaking with odd phrases that she didn't know. She focused on the subject at hand, ignoring the bits she thought were just his “color,” and spoke softly. "The Dreaming is part of the Overmind...?"
"That's right, lass. Yer Dreaming is yer part, in fact. My Dreaming is my part," he replied. "It's like...our home in that realm. The place where ye are safe."
Home. Safe.
Elanthielle flinched as if struck, eyes closing as she began to count and try to block out the images that suddenly assaulted her.
Her father swinging, twisting in the breeze. Her mother's weight as her body fell against Elan's shoulder. The blood that covered her hands, covered her...
"Lass...?"
Elan shook herself and looked up through tear-blurred eyes to see Kaern looking at her with concern.
"Are ye okay, lass?" he asked.
She nodded vigorously, too vigorously probably, but he let it go and settled back to wait for her to collect herself. A few moments later she nodded. "Please...go on...tell me."
Kaern eyed her for a moment, then nodded. "The Overmind is the realm that is created when yer Dreaming connects to the Dreaming of everyone else."
"E...everyone?" she asked softly.
"Aye, lass." He nodded seriously. "Everyone."
She swallowed, trying to comprehend.
"Everyone," he said again, "everywhere. More people then ye can imagine, more than ye want to imagine."
"I didn't know," she said dully, thinking about what it meant.
"Few do," he told her. "Most people never get past the little dreams that we all have, and of those that do, the majority stay safely in the Dreamin’. The Overmind is a dangerous place, child. Yer will against the wills of everyone else that exists there, whether they even know ye exist or not. An’ not just humans, before you start thinking that."
She looked up at him, startled, wondering if the man could read her mind. She had just begun to form that very thought, and he'd cut it off before she even could finish it.
"Demons are there as well, and those that are aware of it are bad news," he told her, and then shrugged. "’Course, everyone who is aware of the dreaming would be bad news there. Ye don't want to mess with anyone who is aware of the Overmind, child...not even yourself." He chuckled at the look on her face. "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'll explain it to ye another time. For now, it's enough to know that ye should not return there until ye have mastered the Dreaming."
Elan, though, was still caught up on an earlier point.
"D...demons?" She shivered.
She'd never really feared the demons before, she realized. She had always been utterly confident in the ability of her father to protect and defend her and her mother. When that belief had been shattered, her rage had protected her from true fear, but the rage wasn't enough anymore.
Elanthielle shuddered again, feeling something she'd never known before, and only realized now because the word had been spoken out loud.
Demons.
They scared her now.
An uncontrollable thrill of terror ran through her, and Elan felt her muscles begin to shudder just before a darkness overtook her.
"Lass?" Kaern said sharply, rising to his feet as Elan began to shiver and shudder. "Lass!?"
When her eyes rolled back into her head, he rushed over to her and barely caught her before her head hit the hard ground.
"Ah, damn it, lass. What has happened to ye?" he asked tiredly.
*****
She was something of a mystery, that much he had to admit. Kaern watched as the young one slept, more or less peacefully, at last. After she'd had, as near as he could tell, a panic attack, he'd managed to get her woken up and calmed down. Not an easy task, but it was done for the moment. They'd fenced around the cause of her attack for a short while without him getting any nearer to the precise details of what caused it.
The broad strokes he could guess for himself.
She'd obviously suffered a massive beating, enough that he thought that she had probably been attacked by multiple assailants. It was a small miracle that her kidneys hadn't been damaged by the blows, but her attackers had focused much of their assault on the upper body more than anything that low.
Which means that she stood up to them, at least to start. He frowned, taking a breath. Otherwise the blows would have been more evenly distributed.
He thought that she was perhaps a good-looking child, though that was just a guess based on her eyes more than anything else. He knew that she had decent features only because her burns hadn't yet blistered when he'd found her, and now she looked quite unrecognizable from her old self, he was certain. Truthfully, she barely looked human, though that would pass in a few days, perhaps a couple weeks.
She wasn't too likely to scar either, he decided. She was young, and strong, otherwise she wouldn't have survived, and her body would have the strength of that youth. Along with the application of the gel from the cacti, her skin would probably recover completely.
In the long term, she'd be fine physically.
However, Kaern had seen too many good people lost after the battle had been won to think that her fight was over. She was terrified of something now, most probably her assailants, which, judging by her last word before blacking out, were demons. Certainly the tracks outside and around the immediate area made it quite clear that there had been demons here, and a lot of them.
What didn't make any sense was the way he'd found her.
Demons would have killed her, or worse. Probably consumed her flesh, perhaps done worse to her mind and soul.
The tracks he'd found, those few made in the packed dirt that surrounded the Redoubt, made it clear that the area had been rife with demons bred in the lower pits of the hells. Ones twisted from recent conquests, not from the higher planes. Ninth Circle most of them, if their tracks were any indication, a few perhaps from the Eighth and Seventh Circles.
Mostly still humanoid, their bodies still enduring the pain of the Long Change as they were corrupted from whatever they had been.
Which meant that they were all vicious, barely controllable, and tended toward sadistic violence whenever possible. However, they were also stupid, relatively weak, and had very little creativity.
And what had been done to Elanth had taken quite a lot of creativity.
That and remarkably accurate tool use for a demon, any demon.
In the end, there was something there that simply did not mesh, and the only person who could tell him the whole story was currently terrified of demons.
That, too, was all fine and acceptable of course. Demons were to be feared, Kaern knew that lesson quite well. Fear and respect were important things, and they were linked. Kaern also knew that humans were to be feared. He'd learned that lesson just as dearly, and found the modern arrogance and derision that existed among demon species to be insufferably stupid.
There was a reason why the Chaos Wars had lasted for millennia. Even today there were dangerous human splinter groups waging unlimited warfare against the demons that controlled this world, and others. Armed with nothing more than primitive magics, weapons, and occasional bits and pieces of technology they didn't understand.
In any case, the girl he had here obviously had run afoul of a group of demons. What they had been doing out in the wastes, he had no idea. Demons didn't much like the wastes anymore than a human would, though for different reasons.
Which, in fact, brought up the question of what this child was doing out here. She knew something about desert survival, obviously from her comments on the cacti spines he'd ground up for her, so she'd been trained for this environment.