He dreams of T I M E.

   Time is his nursery and his foundry; the osmosis of eons which wash past the silent halls, buttresses breaking the crush of years.  They are preserved and they are made anew.  A rock tumbling in a riverbed becomes no less a thing wrought of stone when ages polish the edges away.

                                ( He shows his age. )

   And so he dreams still. Visions and fragrances of an empire which no longer exists, moving images captured like the glimpse of shadows cast, disjointed against the swell of a cavern wall.  Memories color and shape the boundaries of this living past.  A living past determined in the form of a dead world.

   Sometimes, he feels he almost pierces the yolk of the sleepers’ minds surrounding his own, bodies near but minds an infinity away, sensed but unseen, he has learned to take comfort in even this.  It is a different breed of loneliness, but he has known it for millennia.

  Now, he dreams of fire.  Of a sickness stretching across a land of the blind, the deaf, the dumb.  Stunted, earthly towers built by the scrabbling hands of an alien race, devouring maws hungry for satiation in a blink’s worth of a life.  They will not know it.  They do not know what they live without.

  He treads the edges of a new landscape in the creases of sleepers’ unremembered dreams, stepping through the Beyond into the intimacy of the impressions they left behind.

   He dreams of today. He dreams of yesterday. He dreams in the paradox of an infinite microcosm, until the sentinels wake again.