The Skrayling Tree

Prologue

The following statement was pinned to a later part of this manuscript. The editor thought it better placed here, since it purports to be at least a partial explanation of the motives of our mysterious dream travelers. Only the first part of this book is written in a different, rather idiosyncratic hand. The remaining parts of the story are mostly in the handwriting of Count Ulric von Bek. The note in his hand demanding that the manuscript not be published until after his death is authentic.

More than one school of magistic philosophy insists that our world is the creation of human yearning. By the power of our desires alone, we may bring into being whole universes, entire cosmologies, and supernatural pantheons. Many believe we dream ourselves into existence and then dream our own gods and demons, heroes and villains. Each dream, if powerful enough, can produce still another version of reality in the constantly growing organism that is the multiverse. They believe that just as we dream creatively, we also dream destructively. Some of us have the skills and courage to come and go in the dreams of others, even create our own dreams within the host dream. This was the accepted wisdom in Melnibone, where I was born.

In Melnibone we were trained to enter dreams in which we lived whole and very long lives, gaining the experience such realities brought. I had lived over two thousand years before I reached the age of twenty-

five. It was a form of longevity I would wish upon only a handful of enemies. We pay a price for a certain kind of wisdom which brings the power to manipulate the elements.

If you were lucky, as I was, you did not remember much of these dreams. You drove them from your mind with ruthless deliberation. But the experience of them remained in your blood, was never lost. It could be called upon in the creation of strong sorcery. Our nature dictates that we forget most of what we dream, but some of the adventures I experienced with my distant relative Count Ulric von Bek enabled me to record a certain history which intertwined with his. What you read now, I shall likely forget soon.

These dreams form a kind of apocrypha to my main myth. In one life I was unaware of my destiny, resisting it, hating it. In another I worked to fulfill that destiny, all too aware of my fate. But only in this dream am I wholly conscious of my destiny. And when I have left the dream, it will fade, becoming little more than a half-remembered whisper, a fleeting image. Only the power will stay with me, come what may.

Elric Sadric's son, last Emperor of Melnibone