Wide hazel eyes fixed on the brass knocker just long enough for her fidgety fingers to grab it and give it a few swings. Her eyes started wandering again while she waited for an answer. The porch of the sunny, yellow house was small and trimmed in white. There was only a wicker chair and little round glass table on it for comfort, though both seemed worn in. The grass of the modest lawn was a vibrant green that called out a joy in life to which Angie felt herself smiling in response. The borders of the property were rimmed with flowerbeds full of dancing colors in a variety of patterns and styles. The window shutters were open and welcoming, and Angie finally felt her shoulders relax a bit. This was nothing like what she had expected when her husband had pushed the address into her hand. He had been concerned about her nightmares, and thought his great aunt would know what to do. He had said, "Everyone calls her Gran'ma 聲na, and she's very wise about spiritual matters." Angie's imagination had run rampant on her way over imagining neon palmistry signs, tarot cards, and crystal balls.

The sound of the door opening brought her attention back before her, and immediately she laughed at herself for being nervous at all. Before her was a shortish old woman with the most pleasant smile she'd ever seen beaming from her face. Her cheeks were pink in crinkled white skin, and all was haloed with soft, white waves of hair that were pulled back into a loose bun atop her head.

"Welcome, dear, welcome. You are early or I would have been waiting for you on the porch. Come on in, and let me take your coat. Muffins will be done soon, and there's already water warming for tea." Angie blinked a couple times and smiled, listening to the soft chattering voice that still rang of the old country. She responded automatically to all the requests made of her until she found herself situated in a Victorian loveseat in the drawing room. While Gran'ma 聲na bustled for a few minutes more in the kitchen, Angie drank in her surroundings. The house was not large, though it was rather old. All of the walls were light, and the sun streamed in from numerous gallery windows that opened into the gardens outside. There were leaded glass domes and other windows in the ceilings above. The floors were a warm wood that shone with a depth that only comes from decades of polishing; they were littered with woven and tasseled Victorian rugs that seemed barely worn in. The furniture was all Victorian in style, beautifully carved and softly appointed. It seemed impossibly new, for its obvious quality. The lower half of the walls were paneled. Matching moldings ran above the paneling, around doors and windows, and around the ceiling. The moldings caught Angie's eye, and she stood up to get a better look at them. The polished shine was broken by light, intricate etchings of strange symbols. There was no pattern to the symbols, though certain ones were often repeated seemingly at random.

Gran'ma 聲na walked in, carrying a laden tray just as Angie was trying to make sense of the signs in the wood. "Oh, my, I see you've found the runes. A lot of people never see them at all. You're puzzled by them, though? Oh, of course, you wouldn't know what they were. They're characters of an old language, dear." Her efficient hands moved over the tray, doling out the tea and muffins on light, painted china. "Not many can read it these days, though. They're from the old, old language. Few back home even know it anymore. I was lucky, though -- my great grandmother taught it to me young, along with a lot of the nearly forgotten arts. Come, eat up. It will do you good." She sat back, smiling as Angie found that she was actually much hungrier than she thought. "Now tell me what it is that brought you here."

Angie swallowed down some tea, and looked to Gran'ma 聲na's warm blue eyes for reassurance before finding her voice. "Well, I don't know what to make of it, myself, and my husband told me that you might be able to help me out. See, well, since I was little, I've had very vivid dreams, and about a week ago I had an especially dark one. It's been recurring ever since then whenever I go to sleep, day or night." She shuddered slightly, and Gran'ma 聲na held out a hand for her to take. Finding strength in the elderly woman's hand, Angie went on. "There was this giant stone wheel, floating in the sky, and it had lines like spokes carved into it, and things carved along its edge. Actually, they looked something like the -- runes you called them -- but not quite. They were move curvy and twisted." She looked at the wall a moment, trying to make sense of the picture in her mind. "Anyway, the wheel was spinning slowly, counterclockwise, but then it slowed and started turning the other way, faster this time. It kept stopping and changing directions, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Then I saw these --" Angie shuddered deeply "these hands coming out of the darkness on either side of the wheel. There were dark, malformed claws and fingers on the left, and lighter, less menacing ones on the right. The hands were scrabbling at the edges of the wheel, trying to turn it and stop it, but the groups on the opposite sides wanted the wheel to stop in different places. They were making the wheel turn and spin, and all around them things started crashing. The ground was shaking below, and everything was just disintegrating, except for the wheel and the warring creatures closest to the wheel." She broke off and looked imploringly up, taking a long quaff of the tea.

Gran'ma 聲na sat back, studying Angie. "You have a gift, dear. I know it must not seem like it now, but you do. This gift will tell you about imbalances in the world that are caused by spiritual forces. With attention, you will be able to decipher your dreams yourself. For now, though, I will put your mind to ease. The wheel you saw was the wheel of fortune. It is what determines the overall outlook of each cycle of time. Some cycles are more beneficial and some are more destructive, but there is a long-term balance, for it is a wheel, equally weighted with fortunes. The creatures fighting over the wheel's placement were the forces of good and evil. Both sides want the wheel to come to rest at a place that is beneficial to them. The destruction that you saw was a result of their struggle. While they are fighting over the wheel, the next cycle is being put off. That means that all fates are in a state of flux, and that becomes increasingly unstable the longer it goes on. You see, fate can't roll the future until the dice are in hand, so to speak. Those decisions that have been held off longest and have gathered up enough pressure will break through and come anyway. The outcomes of that will tend toward chaos. It's like when a dam breaks: too much pressure from the water, not being let off through the mechanisms in place will cause a hole to be pushed through. That hole punched in the structure won't be able to be fixed until the original problem of there being too much pressure is fixed. If enough major decisions are piled up, waiting for fates, they can all come crashing through, knocking the world off of its protective track of cycles, right over into a chaotic oblivion." Gran'ma 聲na's eyes were quiet and serious, holding up Angie who had gone very pale. "Drink some tea, dear. It will help. It's really not as bad as you think it is. This happens more often than you would want to know. It's never a good thing, though."

"What can be done? How can I change it? I mean, I must have had this dream for some reason, right?" Angie was trembling in the warm, sunlit room.

"Well, I don't disagree that you had the dream for a reason, but that could be as simple as the fact that it brought you here. Perhaps, though, you were meant to help in bringing this flux to an end. There is a way to do this. In your dream, if you can focus, try to add your force to the wheel, to bring in to a stop. In the long run it does not really matter where, and you won't have that much control anyway. Most of the work will be done by the creatures you saw and the weight of the wheel itself. You might be enough to tip the scale enough that the wheel can be brought to a stop."

Angie stayed up with Gran'ma 聲na until late, getting a crash course in the old arts that had been so carefully passed down by the generations before hers. When it got late, she helped to close the shutters throughout the house. It was reassuring that the house was so warm, even in the night. Gran'ma 聲na gave her a cup of tea before showing her to the guestroom. "It will help you sleep deeply. dear. You'll do just fine. Don't worry too much, or you'll grow old well before your time." Her soft, warming laugh calmed Angie's nerves a bit, and she gave a timid smile as she turned to the welcoming bed. The tea was already hazing her vision with the onset of sleep. She crawled into the bed and was out a moment after her head hit the pillow.

Her dreams had always been vivid, but never like this. She could feel the damp chill of the fog that surrounded her. She heard the struggles of the creatures before she looked down from the hilltop to see them. They were even more horrid than she had thought. Crazily twisted limbs clawed at the wheel at each side. The wheel -- she looked up -- it was huge, the top of it lost to the shroud of fog that covered everything. She was frozen a moment before she realized that the wheel was turning, and gaining speed. She ran to the middle of the wheel, and grabbed for a hold in one of the carved runes. Angie struggled for a foothold, and started pushing against the turn of the wheel. It was so heavy. She closed her eyes, losing herself in the struggle, taking a new handhold when needed, but always pushing against the direction of the turn. She cried out in frustration at the times when it seemed like the wheel would never stop. Sweat poured from her body and down into her hands, now cut up and bleeding from the rough stone of the wheel. The sting drove her on, adding new force to her mission. The wheel had to stop. Her mind repeated those words like a mantra. The wheel had to stop. The pain coaxed her deeper into the trance, working into her deepest reserves. The wheel had to stop. The wheel had to stop.

Dawn came unnoticed in Gran'ma 聲na's house, and only early in the afternoon did Angie's eyes finally open. Light filtered in through the shutters, bathing the room in a pale glow. Did it work? She found her feet and moved down the hallway, realizing slowly how warm the house was. The furnace was still working as if to ward off the chill of the night. The still-shuttered rooms on each side of the hall were as dim as hers had been. Angie's feet shuffled across the hazy, glowing floors, automatically. Her mind registered the fact that the mantle clack was ticking just slower than the actual pace of time. Had it not been wound? Why was the house still lazily sleeping? Angie rounded the corner to Gran'ma 聲na's room, pausing in the open doorway.

There were slightly wilted flowers on the bedside table next to a framed black and white photograph of a smiling, elderly man. The bedspread was intricately quilted, falling softly over Gran'ma 聲na's form, still resting with a smile on her face. The quilt wasn't moving, though, and there was no sound in the room. There was no breathing but her own. Angie fell to her knees, one hand clutching the lightly etched doorframe. Her heart pounded more entreatingly than before, filling the void where sound should have been. She numbly accepted her answer. The wheel had been stopped.


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