“A good stageplay without the right characters is a bad stageplay.”

-Eighteenth age Údanese master dramatist Epinoster Nine-thousand-six-hundred-thirty-centimeters

Ktsn Wdondf Daephod didn’t wake up.

The woman found herself standing on her fastlegs, in a daylight-suffused circular clearing, and somehow prevented herself from reacting at all to the sight of a strange and terrible creature at the clearing’s extreme end.

The thing had the suggestion of a seriously deformed greshna, an odd off-orange pink tint to its flesh, and only one plane of symmetry. Those swirling cloths around its body were - presumably - clothes, though they managed to be both stupendously tight in some places and so loose in others that Ktsn was amazed they didn’t fly away. Two five-digit hands flexed with sleek twitches of tendon. Two things that at least resembled eyes sat burrowed into its visage, and the way they panned over her was completely and utterly alien.

As the thing abruptly rose from its compact resting pose, on two limbs, Ktsn felt… nothing. No… not quite. She felt a thin skin of anger, the seed of something quite like fear. These were stifled, though. She realized that something was off.

She realized, with inescapable self-evidenced logic, that she was dreaming.

“Hello,” said the not-greshna. Those eyes were close to the axial plane of the face, but the mouth lay on the face’s lower half, and the neck attached at the bottom of the head. There was a raised ridge with two holes in it almost like-

Wait.

“You’re dreaming,” said the not-greshna, and its out-of-place lips were definitely making words.

Well, Gegaunli. Of course she was dreaming.

“Please don’t be alarmed,” said the thing, and Ktsn watched carefully as its full height became clear. It wasn’t large by any means, probably half her weight at maximum, but its height was close to her own if she rolled over onto her highlegs. Its sackcloth-like garb ringed it in wavering sheaves.

“I do not think I have enough free thought to be alarmed,” she told the not-greshna, rattling her claws together despite (or maybe because of) the seriousness of the dream.

“That’s for the best, I suppose,” replied the creature. It did something near its waist, or what she assumed was its waist. “Hopefully that shock will wear off soon.”

The common tongue had an uncommon accent in the thing’s employ. It leisurely settled back to the thin grass, gesturing with one hand at her. “Here, at least feel a bit comfortable, then, if you aren’t going to start panicking.”

Before she could ask what it meant, she saw a well-stuffed flock of pillows appear beside her, lumpy and thick.

Ktsn looked at the pillows. Ktsn looked at the not-greshna. Ktsn looked back at the pillows. Her tongues felt stuck together.

“Oh, of course,” said the not-greshna. “I’m sorry. You prefer something a bit more civilized.”

A long-threaded carpet sifted upward through the dirt, the grass, and the air. The pillows didn’t even have to move to place themselves on their new home.

“Now, we don’t have a lot of time here,” said the not-greshna. “So let’s use what we have wisely.”

Ktsn eyed the carpet. Her attention fixed there for several heartbeats, before cutting up to the strange creature.

“Please, sit. If anything else occurs to you - something that you’d feel would give you the comfort for good listening, name it.”

The not-greshna sounded suddenly serious.

Ktsn plonked herself down in the pillow forest and almost disappeared. Her fur got caught in the pillows’ fabric, pulling just enough to be annoying without actually being uncomfortable.

“Now. Let us begin at the end, and work backward.”

The not-greshna gestured at its own form.

“You, my dear woman, are Ktsn Wdondf Daephod. Farmer of Goskec Tktl. Educated, self-reliant, annoyed at your family for various and sundry reasons which do not bear recounting here. I know you. But you do not know me. I am…”

A closed hand moved up to the mouth, fist-shaped, and received a cough. There was one thumb on it.

Ktsn looked at the other hand. The other ONE THUMBED hand. Either the not-greshna had gotten very symmetrically mutilated or-

“... in no particular order of importance: one of a clade of creatures called ‘humans,’ the Librarian, a member of the male subset of the species, and Thomas.”

Before she could process the words, the mouth opened up once more and continued its dispensing.

“I am also particularly interested in you, a little bit bored with my position in the scattered shards of reality as of late, capable of inhabiting dreams of other thinking entities from across all sorts of esoteric borders, annoyed at my colleagues for their interfering with my interference, and a commander of great and terrible forces.”

There was another cough.

“Finally,” the voice rasped with razor-straight enunciation, “I am a Being of Old.”

Silence.

“I am sure that you now have at least as many questions as you had before we met.”

Ktsn stared at the… male human named Thomas, a Being of Old called the Librarian, who had taken an interest with the farmer woman before him and thus inhabited her dreams thanks to his command of great and terrible forces, as a direct or indirect result of annoyance at his colleagues for their interfering with his interference (and indirectly or directly the result of his boredom with his position in the scattered shards of reality as of late).

“I have questions,” she said, and shifted one of the pillows directly in front of her out of the way with one of her legs.

“Good. Unfortunately, it’s not time to answer those, just yet.”

Thomas leaned forward, and the only-sagittal-mirroring of his face and body made her feel strangely perturbed even through her fog. He got no closer than two body-lengths distant, and yet it seemed like he was suddenly right there sharing the same air she breathed.

“Tell me, Ktsn. Have you ever wanted to have adventures like those in the stories of Tdsd-Who-Writes?”

All four nostrils flared, Ktsn blinked rapidly.

“I… cannot say that I ever considered the topic.”