The Dream Keeper

At one point in my current novel, Trent - the protagonist - illustrates a mural in chalk on the side of his school. Of course, the teachers make him hose it down, but he recreates it for a two-page spread in the book. Near the top center are the Dreadful Wind Demons. Watch out, they're dreadful.

H E   awoke in the early morn as something thundered out with the long, mourning call of a foghorn. But it was evidently organic, clearly the noise of a monster animal and not a man-made machine. It warbled near the end, like a bird. That brought to mind the previous night, and all its terrible memories. He tried to shut it out. Tried not to focus on the sheer horror of his situation. He must have fallen asleep after the big ones, the gigantic Falcons that had slain his mother, had drifted away. How stupid of him. He would need to find a safer place, today. He sat up, brushing away upsettingly large insects. He saw a two-foot, black centipede crawl up a tree. Some other, hairy spiders had fled, too. As well as at least one kind of Silverfish-like thing that was as thick as his palm. He looked around. All the trees were cycads, or at least things like them. Some were almost a hundred feet high. There were the white trees, with which he was all too familiar. ...

B L A C K    skies stretched as far as he could see. There was no horizon. There were no stars. He could look around only as far as ten feet in front of him, while he kept running. White trees like pillars seemed to hold up the blanket of moist darkness around him. Trees that spread out long, straight branches of spiky, dripping leaves. Treeswith bark dented, broken and scratched from a thousand conflicts long ended. Testimony to a thousand lives the trees had survived, to a time long forgotten. Perhaps one that should not be. He tried to walk, and the soil cracked and creaked like paper. The ferns beneath him were long and sinister, like the claws of darkness. They seeped in and out of the night as he ran as though they were trying to flee from him. Long, thick creepers and vines stretched between the awful trees and out of the water that flowed through the cracks in the Earth beneath him. Sounds like long, high-pitched echoes – almost like Whale Calls – mourn...

Here was a dark room, filled with all sorts of animals in cages – only these beasts were ones he (and Science) recognized. One cage had a Snow Leopard, another held a Water Buffalo. Yet another held four Chimpanzees. A Stellar Sea Lion was on a slab, knocked out or dead. A bulky, male Orangutan sat in the corner of its cage – also in the corner of the room. Moose, Monitor Lizards, Crocodiles, some Salamanders in vats and some others he didn’t bother to try and recognize. Indeed, the standard Menagerie seemed to be here. “Al, the creatures you saw – the modern megafauna that in-name-only ‘Scientists’ have been arrogant and cynical enough to lambast as myth and legend – were built. Constructed. Engineered, you could say.” He could not say a thing, as it happened. He could only stare. Finally, he found his voice. “Engineered?” “Yes, silly. We built them. Gene-by-Gene, like with Legos. That’s what these beasts here are all for.” She swept her hand around the room, i...